The deep story behind ‘red state rage’
After Donald Trump won election as president in November, many pundits, pollsters, and political scientists pinned his surprise victory on the Democratic Party’s failure to anticipate the “red state rage” that drove rural white, working-class voters to the polls on his behalf in record numbers. In an era with greater technological connectivity and access to information than ever, how could such a seismic political uprising go virtually unrecognized by half the country? Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the intersection of politics, culture, and emotion, has long focused on such rural voters. To get out of her “coastal elite” cocoon and scale what she calls the “empathy wall” between liberals and conservatives, Hochschild spent five years living on and off in southwestern Louisiana, interviewing dozens of grassroots conservatives to understand better how they see, think, and feel about the world. With political division as the...