Those election post-mortems that blame Democrats for not going on podcasts or hiring influencers too late, or that give Trump’s team more credit for tapping streaming media are missing the bigger picture. I want to offer a deeper point, drawing on the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild. Much of the time, we think about media consumption simply in the context of the attention economy. That is, humans have a limited amount of time in each day, and so it matters a lot what we focus our attention on. The rise of digital media destabilized the old attention economy, where just a few programs and people dominated. Now competition for attention is fierce, with influencers and other new media creators building audiences as big or bigger than the ones consuming legacy media. So, if a new format like podcasting or streaming video becomes the “place” attracting attention from sought-after demographics like right-leaning young men, it makes sense to figure out how to compete for attention there.
What’s missing from this whole conversation, though, is why the Joe Rogans of our changing media world are attracting attention in the first place. The medium is only partly the message here—new formats alone and the Trump campaign’s willingness to flood them with content are not why he won this election.
This is where Hochschild offers some very useful ideas, I think. You may have read her 2017 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, which explored why working-class residents of Louisiana were voting for Republicans who did nothing to raise their wages or protect them from polluters. In that book, Hochschild suggested that these people saw the world through a “deep story” that made emotional sense to them even as it led them to vote against their material interests. In this deep story, working-class whites (especially men) see themselves as waiting in a long line of aspirants to the American Dream, and while they wait, the line barely moving, up ahead they see people cutting the line—Blacks and women being boosted by affirmative action, immigrants and refugees being offered asylum, and Democrats waving them ahead. To make matters worse, people ahead in the line look back at these patient folks and call them names: ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobes. In the absence of any more compelling story, and offered an opportunity to strike back against the unfairness of that meta-narrative, they took it.
In her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, Hochschild builds on this concept. First, she introduces the idea that we all experience life through two equally powerful lenses. One is the material economy, which as we all know has gotten more unequal and precarious in America since the 1970s. The other is the pride economy, where she uses the word pride as “a master term, with honor, respect, and status being distinct subtypes of it.” The flip side of pride is shame, and how we manage that feeling—who we blame for it, ourselves or others—is often a key driver of political attitudes, she writes.
Of course, one’s standing in the material and pride economies are linked. As Hochschild writes, “If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate for that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and … often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
Hochschild builds on this idea by noting how differently Democrats and Republicans think about an individual’s responsibility for achieving success. Republicans are far more likely to ascribe poverty to an individual’s lack of effort compared to Democrats, who are more inclined to see larger circumstances beyond an individual’s control. This, she argues, has created a harsh and invisible “pride paradox” across America because of how different states operationalize these values:
We have divided into two economies and two cultures, one red, one blue. Red states faced both tougher economic times and the more demanding, old-school brand of individualism in which no government help, no class or racial advantage—only one’s own hard work—could account for one’s fate. Those in blue states experience better economic times through a less shame-inducing cultural lens….Republicans also have stronger faith than do Democrats in capitalism without government help or regulation—that is, raw capitalism. In the states they control, unregulated capitalism has given them a rougher ride.
When companies pull out of whole regions, as they did during the long decades of “free trade” and globalization, the people left behind—especially in red states and counties—find themselves in a pride paradox. The jobs that remain pay poorly, and breadwinners find themselves shamed again at their failure to be providers. Falling on welfare, or worse, drugs, only increases the shame. And then remember how the larger national culture depicts rural people as backward, uneducated and less worldly.
The pride paradox, Hochschild says, is what has made Donald Trump such a potent force across the country among people caught on the wrong side of it. To return to the deep story so resonant among so many who feel their shot at the American Dream is being taken unfairly by line-cutters abetted by Democrats, she adds a new layer. While Democrats and their politically-correct crowd bully the patriotic white people patiently waiting their turn for even daring to think that it’s unfair that minorities, women and immigrants are cutting the line, the line-waiters see a different bully appear who is on their side. Yes, he’s full of himself and mean, but that just makes him strong enough to push around the bad bullies. “He’s protecting you, he’s your bully,” one of Hochschild’s interviewees suggests. “So, when others criticize the second bully, you defend him not because he’s perfect but because he’s your bully.”
Trump’s fans, Hochschild argues, see him as “a master anti-shame warrior” who has figured out how to harness the pride paradox to his and his followers’ benefit. She describes a four-part de-shaming ritual that he has perfected: First, he makes a provocative public statement. Second, elites, which includes pundits, Democratic leaders and Hollywood celebrities, rebukes him. Third, Trump poses as the victim of shaming: “Look at what they are doing to me. I am good. They are bad. And this could happen to you so stand with me.” And then fourth, he “roars back” at the shamers.
With the January 6th break-in, Trump conducted the 1-2-3-4 de-shaming ritual on a grander stage. First was the break-in. Second, the public shock and indictments. Third, outrage at the shamers. And later followed an embrace of those who broke into the Capitol. Added to this was the message of bonding. ‘When they shame me, they shame you,’ and implicitly, ‘So together we should get revenge.’
It’s nice to imagine that there might be something we can do to break this cycle but in the short term I’m not optimistic. Seeing the people who have turned to Trump for relief from their lost pride as human beings caught in a bad system, rather than brainwashed idiots caught in a cult of personality, would be a helpful start. But his and his allies are promising so many new provocations, it’s hard to see how the de-shaming ritual that binds his base to him won’t keep going full blast. First Trump has to be given a chance to fail on his own.
…
Micah Sifry blogs at https://theconnector.substack.com/.