What Drives Trump Supporters?: Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild on Anger & Mourning of the Right

Author of the book "Strangers in Their Own Land"  

Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
 It has just been nominated —for an American Book Award. 

What Drives Trump Supporters?: Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild on Anger & Mourning of the Right.

Interview:
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/28/what_drives_trump_supporters_sociologist_arlie


She is professor at UC Berkeley:
https://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschild

from her website:

Arlie R. Hochschild

PROFESSOR EMERITA

CURRICULUM VITAE

Curriculum Vitae

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Family, market culture, global patterns of care work, social psychology with a recent focus on the relationship between culture, politics and emotion.

ahochsch@berkeley.edu

My most recent research focuses on the rise of the American right–the topic of my latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, September 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. Based on intensive interviews of Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana, conducted over the last five years and focusing on emotions, I try to scale an “empathy wall” to learn how to see, think and feel as they do. What, I ask, do members of the Tea Party–or anyone else–want to feel about the nation and its leaders? I trace this desire to what I call their “deep story”–a feels-as-if story of their difficult struggle for the American Dream. Hidden beneath the right-wing hostility to almost all government intervention, I argue, lies an anguishing loss of honor, alienation and engagement in a hidden social class war. (See The Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Boston Globe.)

In other writing–such as my 2012 The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times–I explore the shifting boundary between market and intimate life and methods by which individuals manage that boundary to keep personal life feeling personal. (See the excerpt in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, "The Outsourced Self"). My 2013 So How's The Family and Other Essays is a sampler, you might say, of an applied sociology of emotion. It includes essays on emotional labor–when do we enjoy doing it and when not?–empathy, personal strategies for handling life in a time bind, and the global traffic in care workers. See the 2013 book review in the London Times Higher Education Supplement, ("So How's the Family: and Other Essays").

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 corporate culture of workaholism (The Time Bind), Filipina nannies who've left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman). My work is available in 16 languages.

For activities, honors and awards, please see my curriculum vita (link above). For a brief introduction to my basic approach, please see the Spring 2008 issue of Contexts. For recent interviews, see the International Sociological Association's Global Dialogue, "Emotional Labor Around the World" or The Swarthmore Bulletin, "A Playful Spirit". For recent book reviews see New York Times Book Review, Nov 17, 2017 (Review of Jessica Bruder's Nomadland); The Washington Post, April 20, 2017 (Review of Amy Goldstein's Janesville); and The Washington Post, August 18, 2017 (Review of Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal). For a recent essay, please see "The Ecstatic Edge of Politics: Sociology and Donald Trump," Contemporary Sociology, Vol 45, Issue 6, pp. 683-689 (October 18, 2016).

For recent Op-Eds, please see:

"Donald Trump Loves Conspiracy Theories. So Do His Supporters," Washington Post (November 7, 2016), "Donald Trump, 'The Apprentice,' and Secular Rapture," Boston Globe (September 6, 2017); “Redefine the Flag” in “Fix This Democracy – Now,” The Washington Post (October 26, 2017); "Trump Has Divided the Country. Some Americans Are Trying to Bring Us Back Together." Time Magazine, on-line (January 19, 2018); "Robots are the Ultimate Job Stealers. Blame Them, Not Immigrants." The Guardian (February 14, 2018); "To Fix American Democracy, The Left Should Commit to These Four Steps," The Guardian (February 17, 2018); "More Republicans Than You Think Support Action on Climate Change," The New York Times (December 29, 2018); and "Think Republicans are Disconnected From Reality? It's Even Worse Among Liberals," The Guardian (July 21, 2019).