A Vote for Health: SPH Reads Strangers in Their Own Land

In a follow-up to her 2016 book on the rise of the right (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right), Arlie Hochschild’s most recent book—Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press, September 10, 2024)—takes her readers to Pike County, Kentucky. There, in the nation’s whitest and second poorest congressional district, she finds residents facing a perfect storm. Coal jobs had gone and a deadly drug crisis had arrived. And in 2017, a white nationalist march was coming to town—a rehearsal, as it turned out, for the deadly Unite the Right march soon to take place in Charlottesville, Virginia. Once at the political center of the country, the district voted 80% for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. In this book, Hochschild asks why this big shift took place. For a full answer, she offers the reader a lens on the relationship between politics, shame, and pride.

In other writing—such as her 2012 The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times—she interviewed child and eldercare workers, internet-dating assistants, wedding planners, even a “wantologist.” Her 2013 So How’s the Family and Other Essays is a collection which includes essays on emotional labor—when do we enjoy it and when not?—empathy, personal strategies for handling life in a time bind, and the global traffic in care workers.

Earlier work has been based on field work among older residents of a low income housing project (The Unexpected Community), flight attendants and bill collectors who perform “emotional labor” (The Managed Heart), working parents struggling to divide housework and childcare (The Second Shift), corporate employees dealing with a culture of workaholism (The Time Bind), and Filipina nannies who’ve left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman). Her work is available in 16 languages.