The Joe Walker Podcast - Despair And Indignation Among The American White Working Class - Arlie Hochschild

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Arlie Hochschild is one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th and 21st centuries.Show notesSelected links Follow Arlie: Website Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Hochschild Power, Politics, and People, by C. Wright Mills 'Ayn Rand and Modern Politics', article by David Sloan Wilson Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case & Angus Deaton Topics discussed Arlie's childhood spread across the world. 5:08 How did C. Wright Mills influence Arlie? 8:34 Was sociology an easy career decision for Arlie? 11:20 When did Arlie decide she needed to write Strangers In Their Own Land? 12:54 Why is the Tea Party strongest in the southern states? 16:47 Why does the Tea Party love the atheist Ayn Rand? 25:14 What are 'deep stories'? 34:55 Taking the right's needs seriously. 42:07 Trump's power as an orator. 55:04 If the liberal elite failed to understand the white working class, how did a real estate magnate from Manhattan grock them so quickly? 1:03:10 Trump won 10.1 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. What does that say about America today? 1:04:57 How can we learn to be more empathetic? 1:06:45 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Swagman and Swagettes, welcome back to the show. At the beginning of last episode with Tyler Cowen, I asked for your vote in the Australian Podcast Awards. Well, at number 19, the Jolly Swagman podcast scraped into the top 20 podcasts in Australia as rated by listeners. Thank you so much for supporting the show. It seems that enough people share our peculiar combination of interests.

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While Trump's presidency may be coming to a close, Trumpism needs to be reckoned with. And who better to help us understand it than our guest for this episode, Ali Hochschild. Ali is the preeminent sociologist of her generation and is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th and 21st centuries. I was first introduced to Ali's work through former guest of the show, David Tuckett, who has drawn on her notion of the deep story. That is, a feels-as-if story, stripped of all facts and told in the language of symbols, that helps us to make sense of the world and our place in it. We all have our deep

stories, but in this episode, Ali helps me understand the deep story on the American right. Now Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Ali founded the field of emotional sociology, and her work focuses on the powerful role that emotion plays in social and political life. In 2011, alarmed by America's growing polarization, Ali decided that she needed to break out of her liberal elite bubble in Berkeley

and find an equal and opposite bubble. She traveled to Louisiana in the deep South, where she spent the next five years meeting, befriending, and ultimately coming to understand Tea Party supporters. These experiences and interviews became the basis of her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which was published just before the 2016 election. Strangers was a finalist for the National Book Award and is a must-read. Many on the right say that you need to read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy to understand the rise of Trump. I humbly submit that you should read both Vance and Hochschild. This conversation was recorded on

Sunday the 22nd of November. I really enjoyed it. I could have spoken with Ali for hours. We discuss her journey to the Deep South, what she learned, and how to make sense of America's alarming divisions. I've given this episode a rather clunky title, Despair and Indignation in the American White Working Class, but it's a deliberate rephrasing of the subtitle of Ali's book, Anger and Mourning on the American Right. For reasons I hope you'll come to understand in the episode, I think it represents both a more factually and emotionally accurate summary of the crisis that led to Trump. A crisis that the left can no longer afford to ignore.

Without much further ado, please enjoy this conversation with the great Ali Hochschild. Ali Hochschild, welcome to the show. Well, thank you. Delighted to be here. Ali, I really admire you and I think your insights are so important in this current moment. So I've been looking forward to this conversation, and I'd like to begin by talking about you. Ali, your father was a Foreign Service officer, which meant you spent much of your early years living around the world. Can you tell me about that experience and any particular memories that jut out?

Yes. You know, I think I remember at age 12 being plonked out of what seemed to me at the time a and it was the middle of the calm scene. It's very, very hot. I didn't speak the language. I didn't know anyone. My parents put me in a Scottish Presbyterian boarding school, which was the only school in the country that spoke English. And my classmates came from every country in the world. I stood out as having funny Oxford shoes and, you know, American dress. I was a head taller than everybody. It was a very long school day, an hour and a half

playground, Hebrew on the playground. I was so unhappy, so displaced, just like a plant pulled up. And I just felt odd and friendless. And I remember coming back to my mother and she said, well, how was school today, dear, in this chipper voice? And I was just wordless, just weeping. Oh, it was awful. Very strict kind of Scottish teachers. Oh, forbidding. And she then said, well, dear, I'm really sorry.

But if it doesn't work out after three weeks, we'll send you back to grandma and grandpa. And then I thought, oh, God, I've got to adjust to this thing. And it was both the most painful and the best thing that ever happened. I think it's very important for me to have been the oddball, to have not fit in. And two years later, when we went back to the US, I didn't fit in there either. You know, I wasn't American anymore. And when we all went off, so it was the experience of developing a third eye, that the eye of the stranger. And when you kind of relax into it, it's the best thing in the world, because then you're looking at the world through an almost with a detached ego like you're not on the line you're just watching from from the top of the wall and it's really interesting what's going on down there in life so when I meet other sociologists or other writers, I see the same things happen to them in different ways.

This was just my way that it happened to me. In your first year at graduate school in sociology at UC Berkeley, you picked up a copy of C. Wright Mills' 1937 collection of essays, Power, Politics and People. How did you find this book and how did it influence you? I found it at a bookstore and I took it home and just read the first few pages and I thought, he's speaking in plain English. He's speaking with quiet political passion. This guy cares about the

world. He isn't just studying it. He isn't stuck at the top of the wall, just detached and watching. He wants to make it a better world. And I just loved it. I just thought, oh, let me read everything he's written and see who else he has read and been influenced by it back up to see if they influence me in the same way. He was engaged so that the things he wanted, trained his curiosity on mattered you know and I thought okay this is this is the kind of person I'd like to grow up to be I didn't find that in the sociology department at UC Berkeley at the time I there were very many other expectations, and certainly for a woman at that time. But I stuck with him, and also with Irving Goffman he was also engaged in a critique of the society that he observed, but it wasn't a political critique, it was a cultural critique. He looked at all the indignities that go on, for example, at a mental hospital, or for people who have some kind of stigma. And I loved his identification with the underdog and how much he could see that was hurtful that went on, kind of a micro political lens on the world. So I just felt invited into a way of using my curiosity

for a larger moral purpose from those two. You're so curious and so observant, you seem cut out to be a sociologist. Was it an easy career decision for you? Oh, very easy. Our son once said, Mom, I can't think of anything else that fits you that well or that you would do. you know so but I do remember being you know I remember graduating from college I went to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania it's a Quaker school very academic you know rigorous but there was a kind of a spirit of, well, it's not enough to be smart.

You really should figure out why you're doing what you're doing and see if you can leave the world a better place than you found it. And I'm not a Quaker myself, but that spirit rubbed off very much. much and uh so so yes this i when i graduated i felt well maybe i could be a social welfare worker maybe i could work in the peace corps uh but maybe sociology so it kind of got like that yeah i love art too yeah when i was 16, I thought I would go into agriculture. So I don't know. I bounced around a little more than it shows. Yeah. So Strangers in Their Own Land.

When did you decide you needed to write this book? Take me back to that moment and what your thought process was. Well, I was sitting in my office on the fourth floor of Barrows Hall in Berkeley, California, where I had long taught sociology. And it was 2011. And I was reading the paper and reading article after article about the rise of the Tea Party, which at the time was a very powerful and rapidly growing movement in the United States that basically turned its fire on the federal government itself. There should be a giant cut down of the federal government. It had too many welfare programs. And let's get rid of Social Security. Let's get rid of food stamps. Let's get rid of head start programs in schools.

One thing after another, and I was just appalled. I thought, oh my goodness, so many books I've written in the last chapter call for the government to bring around child care, state-of-the-art child care, or parental leave, neither of which we have in this country at the federal level to this day. But I thought, okay, now that most parents, most children grow up in homes where all the adults work. So if that's true, let's get really serious about freeing some more worker time to be home with kids for a period of time, or let's get fantastic child care. I was really focused on that issue, but saw the government as playing

one important role and being a solution. I'd written a number of books, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, Global Woman, all of which ended with a call for government activism. And so here was a movement trying to shoot all that down, where the government wasn't a solution, it was a problem. And I thought, man, I'm going to go through this life and disappear from it without any solution that I'd been calling for. What is this movement? Who are they? How could this make sense to them? How different are they from me? So, because I was used to living in foreign lands, I thought, well, where are they? Well, they, I, you know, I was born in the north, and the tea party was strongest in the South.

And I thought, okay, the South. Where in the South? Well, how about the super South? And that would be either Louisiana or Mississippi. And I chose Louisiana because I knew one person. So that was what got me going. And then I made the leap to go to where the Tea Party was the strongest. And one survey actually found that half of Louisiana citizens agreed with the tenets of the Tea Party.

So I thought, okay, I'm in the right place. Let me settle in and see what I can find out. And why is the Tea Party strongest in the South? Why do whites in the Dixie states tend to be freedom-loving government minimalists? That is a question that, before it got states, the states with the most disrupted families, highest divorce rate, most single moms, the lowest achievement scores from school, worst health, worst health care, lowest life expectancy, most pollution, all those problems. Those states are also the states that receive more money from the federal government in aid than they give to it in tax dollars and revile the federal government. That is the red state paradox.

If you've got these problems, wouldn't you welcome help with them? And Louisiana turned out to be an exaggerated version of this red state paradox. It was the second poorest state in the whole country. 40% of the state budget came from the federal government, and they have all those troubling rates. A highest pollution among the highest in the country and a life expectancy

that's five years shorter than that in Connecticut for example so that the question just got deeper before I could make my way to an answer. And then I got my way to the answer by asking people. And who are the people I asked? Well, I joined the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana. I asked if I could come. And to everyone, I just said, look, I'm the oddball. I come from out of state. I'm not a member of the Tea Party. I come from a very progressive town and state, Berkeley, California. But I'm really worried about the divide in the country, at which point they would shake their heads, yeah, they were worried too. And I'd like to come to know you. And they would say, yes, well, people like you don't understand us. You look down on us.

You think we're ignorant and racist and rednecks. So I said, well, help set the record straight. That's why I'm here. I want to really get it from your point of view. So they were very helpful and took me around. And I would ask, where were you born? Could I see the hospital? Where did you go to school? Could I see, you know, what row you were in? Can we go to church together? Where are your kin buried?

And then they would say, well, come on fishing with me. Come meet my brother-in-law. So it went for five years. And always this question was in the back of my mind. And I would ask them, how come you're so down on the government when it looks to me like you would want some help from the government. And they took that red state paradox and they kind of said, well, yeah. They threw it away. They said, well, we're embarrassed. It was even a joke. Oh, well, bottom again in education. You know, the Cajuns, that's a group of originally French Catholic,

many of whom settled in Louisiana, and they're very conservative, and they had a self-deprecating sense of humor. Oh, there we are, bottom again, you know, second to the bottom. And as if it were, if they could joke about it, it would be less painful. Anyway, they kind of threw that away and said, that's not really what's going on for us. We don't want more government help with our problems.

We're here in the South, and we don't like the finger-wagging North, which they saw the government as, you know, telling us once again how wrong we are. And so there was some, you know, hesitance, prejudice, bad experience that they associated with federal government as Southerners. But I don't think that was it. Certainly Donald Trump is a Northerner. And they were later everyone I interviewed to embrace Donald Trump. So there was the prejudice against the North, and then there was a sense that states and governments don't do what we pay them to do.

There was a great deal of cynicism about that. And I came to understand why. In Louisiana, it's an oil state. It's a bought state. In fact, the big CEOs of the petrochemical industries do buy or are themselves the legislators in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And they very much shape the government.

So, for example, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality that's supposed to keep the citizens safe from dioxin and other contaminants in public waters don't keep the citizens safe. As one person said, oh, they give out permits to pollute like candy. So people felt cynical and thought of the federal government as just a bigger, badder version of state government. So they had a real point there, I felt. I could get that. I really could get that. But then beyond that, there was a third and final peel the onion kind of explanation for the red state paradox. I felt that you'd have to put in the form of a deep story. Now, what's a deep story? I'm going to stop you there, Ali. I want to come to this notion of a deep story, but I just wanted

to take a step back and kind of pick apart a few aspects of your journey into the Deep South first. So that five years you spent there from 2011 to 2016, I assume that wasn't a continuous five years and you were still based in Berkeley but making periodic trips down to the South? About 20, 20 trips. And some of them I took a nephew with me, I took my son with me twice, took my husband. So these were actually family journeys. And after the book came out, I went back, gave the book out, put on dinner for the people that had helped me and some I dedicated the book to. And then they started to visit me in Berkeley. So we got a little corridor going. That's nice.

It's going still. Yeah. And to prepare for your journey, very interestingly to me at least, you reread Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Why was that? Well, I didn't know who I was and to try and really climb into the sensibility of people that I knew I would differ from. And I knew I would differ from Ayn Rand, that this was the kind of a self that seemed to elbow others aside and give such primacy to one's own will. I couldn't relate to that, so I thought, well, let me try and relate to that. I mean, let's give it a go, you know.

So it was a way of kind of preparing myself to unwrap myself from the speeches I gave myself about more help for child care, for parental leave, all the policies I'd been pushing, and kind of say, okay, what if I thought we all are on our own? You know, you've just got to do it yourself. The worst thing is to be lazy and unaggressive, unassertive, that Jesus was a wimp?

You know, how would it, what kind of, how would it feel to feel that, so afraid of what one took to be weakness? I've just tried to melt into that so that I could not miss what I was hearing. The other puzzling thing about the Tea Party's embrace of Ayn Rand is that it doesn't seem to square with the Tea Party's predominant Christianity. Obviously, Rand was an atheist, and the book is about rugged individualism and sort of caricatured as being that way. Can I suggest a resolution to this paradox? So my friend or pen pal David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist, was analyzing fundamentalist religious texts a number of years ago, and he was trying to categorize different words that referred to either altruism or selfishness. And he

divided the words up along two dimensions. One dimension was whether something was harmful or beneficial to others, and the other dimension was whether something was harmful or beneficial to others. And the other dimension was whether something was harmful or beneficial to oneself. So then there were four different categories. Something could be win-win in which it benefits you and others. Something could be lose-lose in which it is detrimental to you and others. Something could be win-lose in which it benefits you at the expense of others. And something could be lose-win in which you sacrifice something for the benefit of others. And curiously, what he found was that most of the language or almost all of the language in these fundamentalist religious texts relating to selfishness and altruism fell into either the win-win category or the lose-lose category.

And then he was analysing Ayn Rand and found the same thing. So all of the language about morality in Ayn Rand's texts is either win-win or lose-lose. And I think, in fact, in her other, you know, her philosophical contribution, The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand herself states explicitly that there are no conflicts of interest among rational men. obliviousness to trade-offs and everything could be distilled into these acts which were either great for everyone or wrong for everyone so life was about this linear sort of march towards glory and away from ruin um i'm not sure if that resolves the paradox but it's certainly worth considering i found that very interesting. In southern Louisiana, they were anything but selfish. They were enormously kind and did things that were not in their own self-interest on a routine basis. who lived now as adults not far from where they had been born and where they would die. They were not leavers. They were stayers. And most of them were churchgoers, and they had strong community, and they did for community.

I would go and visit one friend, for example, and I heard a rattle in the back of the car. She's laid up and not able to. So I'm going to bring them to her. And then we stopped and she said, oh, in the back of the car, here are some styrofoam plates and cups. Oh, I'm doing a fundraiser for our boys in Afghanistan. These are 17-year-old American soldiers, never been away from home, and I have some one-touch pillows that we're sending to Afghanistan. What are they? Well, when the boy lays his head on the pillow, he knows God is protecting him. So if this doesn't fit Ayn Rand, that as I understood her, you know, Ms. Selfish Me, Me, Me. No, these people were very generous. And I once had a conversation, oh, this is another part of my method, is to sort of ask them to help me think out the question. So I'm not just asking them what's true for them, I'm asking them, well, help me understand, you know, this.

And at one point, I said to this very woman, look, I think you empathize with other people as much as I do. You know, I think you're a kind person, but I think we have different empathy maps. That is, I think you empathize with people who are of the same group and the same religion and the same locale. And you're very kind to them. Same racial group. But I think, you know, my kindness, no more than yours, is more spread out. It's more according to need, as I see it. And I don't have to know the person that I'm trying to help. And she said, oh, no, that's not true. She was a member of the Pentecostal church, and she took me to her church and looked right there on the corkboard,

look at all the little African children in their Sunday best. Their Pentecostals are right there in Nigeria. And I said to her, right, but aren't they on the corkboard there in your church there in Lake Charles, Louisiana, because you want them to be Pentecostals like you? And she said well you got me there she's wonderful i just love talking with her um yeah so anyway it all the question sprawls out from your uh your philosopher friends for box plus plus minus minus it's I think I I can come to grips with it better by thinking about what the rules one's ideology put forward that lead you to empathize and care about another person. And these were very caring people, but they were following very different empathy rules.

So let's come to the notion of a deep story. What is a deep story? Well, it is the feeling that you have about a salient situation that's really up front and central. And you take facts out of the deep story. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. It's just the distillation of feeling you have about a salient situation that can be told as in a dream through a metaphor. And the metaphor for, I should say, we all have deep stories. No one of us doesn't. But the right wing deep story, as I came to think of it, is that you're waiting in line, a long line that hasn't moved in decades. And your feet are forward. It's like a pilgrimage. The top of the mountain is the American dream. And you're facing it.

You feel you've worked hard. You're played by the rules. You don't begrudge anyone. You just want to move forward to that prize. And then in another moment, the right-wing deep stories, you see line cutters, people cutting ahead of you, unfairly, as you understand,

through affirmative action. That would be African Americans who finally were being given access to jobs that had always been reserved for whites and women who had, were finally given access to jobs that had always been reserved for men. And then there are public sector workers working to save animals, environmentalists. And people would say to me, oh, these environmentalists, they worship animals more than people.

They thought of them as literally animists. Also, cutting a head in line. Another moment of the right-wing deep story, there is a leader, President Barack Obama, who seems to be waving to the line cutters. Oh, he's a line cutter too. It was the idea. And people would then say, how did Barack Obama's mother, she was a single mom, how could she afford a very expensive education at Columbia or Harvard? Something rigged, something fishy, line cutting.

And then in another moment of the right wing deep story, there's someone ahead of you in line who comes from a coastal city, is highly educated, and they turn around and they look at you and they say, you ill-educated, stupid, backward, prejudiced, homophobic, sexist, fat, Louisianan, you know, you're redneck. And then that's the snap, the insult of that, the sting

the liberal elite kind of disparaging you the hard working pipe fitter in petrochemical company that makes the line waiter feel like a stranger in his own land and

unrepresented by the government. And then in the last moment of the right-wing deep story, Donald Trump comes along and says, so you're a stranger in your own land, but come with me. I will give you your land back and get rid of the line cutters, get rid of environmentalism, get rid of equity goals, and bring you back to the 1950s so you can be safe as white middle-class men. And so I think I then took this

deep story and went back to the people I'd come to know and said, look, I've got this story. What do you think? May I just tell you what? And some people said, oh, I live your story. One guy said, oh, that's your narrative. It describes life every day. And some said, no, you got it wrong. You forgot that the people who are waiting in line are paying taxes for the people that are cutting in line, especially the immigrants and undocumented workers and refugees. We're paying for them. And then some people said, yes, actually, only I end your story differently. We just secede.

We get our own government. Again, this is the South. So that's the cultural picture underlying the red state paradox. And it's underneath it. If we back up, I came to realize that the people I had come to know over those five years were what I would call the elite of the left behind. They were not the abject poor, and they were those who found themselves in a declining sector. Globalization had created winners and losers. This was the losing sector, but they had done actually pretty well within that losing sector. That's who they were.

And they were looking anxiously at a story of what they felt to be demographic loss, cultural loss, economic loss, religious loss. They felt smaller and dwarfed in every one of those ways. And so they were eager for someone who promised to lead them to the promised land. That would be Donald Trump. Wow. In talking about the deep story on the right, I think it's careful not to suggest that it's all somehow kind of fictional or not valid. And I'm

by no means suggesting that that's what you think, Ali. But I do want to just for a moment kind of pause and take stock of the situation among the white American working class and take their concerns very seriously. Because from my perspective as sort of a foreigner looking in and reading some of the literature, it seems not so much that these people have been waiting on the outskirts of hope for the American dream as much as they've just been languishing in purgatory. And you're, I'm sure, familiar with the great work done by the Princeton economists, the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, who've discovered the deaths of despair. So at this point now, 150,000 people in the white working class, people without college degrees, are dying deaths of despair every year. And deaths of despair refers to suicide, drug overdose, and then diseases related to the

overconsumption of alcohol. So, you know, deaths of a spiritual crisis. And somewhere around the year 2000, Americans between the ages of white Americans between 45 and 54, their average life expectancy was no longer increasing. In fact, it was actually declining. And that's a pattern seen almost nowhere else on the earth. To now, at this point, conditional on education, white misery is greater than black misery, which is consistent with a lot of Robert Putnam's work as well, that education has become a bigger variable than race. And so you have these deaths of despair, you have mortality rates increasing, you have the fact that for unskilled and manufacturing workers, real wages have been stagnating and declining since the 1970s. And that causes, you know, the problem with that, it's not so much or not only

money, but it's the dignity and the structure and the culture and ritual that comes with holding a job. And, you know, as well, particularly for men, if you don't have a job, you're not good marriage material. If you don't have a stable and consistent family, that's also a huge loss of dignity. And that is sort of what generates these deaths of despair, which echoes, as you know, Ali, Emile Durkheim's account of suicide, which is that suicide happens when a society fails to provide some of its members with a framework within which they can live dignified and meaningful lives. And so we have this real crisis among the white working class. when they, you know, argued for globalisation, turn around and look at these people and point their fingers

and say, you racist, you sexist, you homophobe. And at that point it's just like, no, fuck you. That's right, that's right. Donald Trump, he was a wrecking ball, but he was their wrecking ball. Yes, that's right. This was a mutiny by people who'd been abandoned. the blue-collar class has been on the skids and that these diseases of despair are kind of the human cost of that. I've done a book review in the New York Times book review of that book, very positive. I think it's a fantastic book.

So here's the thing. There are real problems. The Democratic Party did not address the problems of the losers of globalization from the 70s on, and that's on the DEMs now. At the same time, one is wrong to blame blacks for this, or women top, let's say, 500 colleges, has not increased in the last 30 years. And actually, family wealth has declined because blacks put their money into housing. In 2008, the housing market crashed, and that hit blacks a lot harder than it hit whites. So wrong to blame this on blacks. Right to look at offshoring and automation. And right to look at the new education divide.

But here's the paradox. If you look at what Donald Trump has done in three and a half years, has he helped the blue collar man who is in the crisis you've just described? No, he has not. Has coal come back? No. Has large-scale industry come back? No. Has diversification of new kinds of things? No more than under Obama. And with education, is he helping blue-collar men get those BAs? Not at all. He cut the Department of Education by 10%. He's abolished Pew grants to students that are specifically designed for blue-collar students. So he's actually building a wall where it shouldn't be between trapped blue-collar men and the solutions they so much seek. So it's a giant paradox that while culturally he's captured their story, economically he's making it worse. Their water isn't any cleaner, their schools aren't any better, and jobs aren't any cleaner. Their schools aren't any better. And jobs aren't any closer. What they do have is somebody to blame, immigrants, blacks, and women. I think it's unethical at the level of the individual to blame immigrants, blacks and women. But if I was putting on my policymaker hat, I would be a bit realistic about it and just say, well, this kind of zero sum and negative sum thinking, while it's wrong, it emerges in a context of stagnation where the overall pie is no longer growing for a certain portion of society and so people are starting

to fight over the scraps. And so I would focus much more on how do we increase real wages for this portion of society. Right. I think that's right. But I would do it in two kinds of ways. One, I would alter gender culture and realize that a lot of the declining jobs have been guy jobs and blue-collar jobs, dangerous jobs, you know, steel, heavy industry,

the kinds of jobs you find in Detroit, Cincinnati, that now have gone to Chinese blue-collar workers or Mexican blue-collar workers or to robots. Okay, so that leaves what jobs are growing tend to be women's jobs, quote, around women's. So maybe we need to alter the conception of being a librarian, being a medical, being a nurse, being a medical administrator. And actually, just yesterday, I was looking at the statistics of the proportion of men in getting degrees in those three things, library science, medical administration, nursing. Actually, shockingly, in the United States from 1990s to today,

proportion of men getting those degrees has gone down, hasn't even just stayed steady. So what's going on with that? Why isn't that opening up? Are women not letting them in? the men? Has it gotten defined as a woman's thing? We know perfectly well that jobs get feminized and masculinized all the time. Meanwhile, women are making a beeline for men's jobs, which of course earn more, but the proportion of women doctors has gone from 5% to 51%. That's 1990. Same with law. So I think we have to look at that and open out a lot of jobs. For example, I'm doing field work now in Appalachia, which is the heartland of this diseases of despair you mentioned. And a lot of guys are working in alcohol recovery programs. Extraordinary work that they are doing that is hugely satisfying to them.

And they're doing brilliantly. So there are jobs that we need to open out, not just look at the old economy. Donald Trump is having us look backwards. We need to look forward to the new kinds of jobs that are needed and for which there's training. I had a very sad story that one man told me. He came from a very blue-collar background. He's from eastern Kentucky. He's a recovering alcoholic, now got his B.A., but he tells the story of his first year trying to get a degree.

And his mother and father had told him, you know, stop talking. Don't talk at the dinner table, in the car. Don't talk in the car. He wasn't used to expressing himself. Brilliant guy. Every Sunday, I'm now, I Zoom with him. And he is, but he got to this junior college. He went and sat in this chemistry class. There were no advisors. He didn't expect there to be

advisors, and there were none. There were no sections where I could talk to a teaching assistant. The professor had no office hours. He flunked out in the first semester and took it as a personal flaw on his part. Oh, I was too stupid. Well, no, it was the school that flunked. Why wasn't there someone to greet him we need to open that door, open it wide, open it with emotional brilliance and invitation so that they can climb that wall into the kinds of jobs and dignity they need and deserve. As you were putting the finishing touches on strangers, Donald Trump was striding onto the stage. And I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about Trump. So with apologies to anyone in the audience who's a Trump supporter,

I consider Trump a man who is uniquely and comprehensively unfit for the office of the President of the United States of America. But against that context, there was a way in which he was a more effective orator than Barack Obama, if you define oratory more broadly than just the use of sort of fancy-soring rhetoric. And I think he was more effective in three ways. The first was he was a master at seeding memes and frames and narratives, like the kind of epithets that he would apply to people very devastatingly, Pocahontas, Crazy Bernie, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, the fake news, and then just kind of repeat them until they sunk into the public consciousness. These were all very devastating critiques. Secondly, I think he was very good at

drawing the crowd's attention to itself. So at rallies, he would always say, you know, look how big this crowd is today, folks, which sort of shows he understands the power of social proof. But finally, and most importantly, he really connects with certain segments of America at an emotional level. And almost every rally of his I've watched, at some point he does his own sort of two minutes of hate where he points to the fake news media at the back and calls them out, like, look at them there, the fake news, and everyone sort of boos. And it really creates, you know, what Durkheim called the collective effervescence. But there's another thing that he does in terms of connecting with people at an emotional level, and that is he explodes a set of what you call feeling rules. I think there are kind of, we see in Donald Trump today,

both a pragmatic strategy to try, as we speak, to overturn the voter's choice for our next president, Joe Biden. He is now trying to invalidate the election. And so his strategy is saying, okay, the people have voted for Donald Trump, but if they did, in the states they voted for me, no, those were honest votes. In the states where they voted for my opponent, no, those are fake votes and a nefarious plot. So if it's for me, it's honest. If it's not for me, it's dishonest. And if it's dishonest, his next strategy is to say, I'm going to disregard the voters

and go after the electoral college representatives and see if I can cause trouble there with my lawsuits and get them to misrepresent the voters and vote for me instead. This is a frightening strategy, I think, in that it's challenging the electoral process, which all the lawsuits are being turned away because, in fact, there is no voter fraud that's been turned up so far. Anyway, that's a strategy. Very frightening to me. He will not concede as every other American president from American history has. And Nixon and 60 and Republicans and Democrats, that's how we do it. That's the American way. So that's his strategy at the moment.

But he has, that's his practical strategy. But I think there's also an emotional, I don't know if I would call it strategy, but appeal to the people that I've been coming to know, both in the South and now in Appalachia. He has two appeals. On the one hand, he's aspirational. He's a billionaire, wouldn't we? For all these people stuck in line, wouldn't it be great to move ahead in line, get to the top of the mountain? And in addition, here's the paradox. He presents himself as suffering he presents himself as suffering presents himself as struggling

against the Democratic Party against the mainstream media against foreign countries against the deep state against potential conspiracies he's struggling. He's suffering. And he's saying to people, oh, I'm suffering for you.

And you can't relate to me. I'm suffering. So yes, I'm privileged. Yes, I'm successful. But oh, how I'm facing adversity. And people relate to him both ways. Oh, as a success story and as long-suffering person.

And actually, the more the left kind of pokes at Donald Trump, the more his base says, oh, there they go again, you know, making it hard for our defender, our guy. Yeah. promoting are identify with me and come into the dark hole in which I live, in which there are many enemies and you're either friend or enemy. I mean, he is a deeply polarizing figure. He's asking you to, if you don't vote for him, you are his enemy.

And if you work for him, he'll fire you if you don't obey his will. And he's, you know, during the pandemic, he criticized Democratic states and not Republican states. You know, when California had a big fire, you know, oh, well, that's just a Democratic state, so I'm not sure they really deserve federal aid. I mean, he's politicizing so many things. So the feeling rule is you do that too, you know. Deepen the divide.

It's we're in war, so you have to choose. So I think this is very unfortunate. And we need to do everything at every level of government, you know, national, state, community level. I'd love to see high school exchange programs. We need to undo that and heal this nation. De-trump it. D-Trumpet. D-Trumpet, yeah, that would be welcome relief. There is one remaining puzzle, Ali, which is if most of the liberal elite failed to understand the emotional needs of the white working class, and indeed it took you five years and 4,690 pages

of transcripts to gain a good understanding of the deep story on the right. Then how did a real estate magnate from New York City, who I'm told doesn't even read, grok the deep story so easily? I think he relates to it because I think he had a very harsh father. This is speculation on my part. I think he probably wasn't a good student. You know, I don't think the written word, if his dyslexia or something was trouble, he was sent off to boarding school young.

So I think he has struggled with shame and with discouragement and come out the fighter. And people can relate to that. So that's, I think he comes by it honestly. He knows about struggle. The problem is, and it's good that he knows about struggle. We should all know about struggle. We all have had our struggles, I think, many of us. And it's good that it's helped him relate to people

who've had different kinds of struggles than he. But his solutions, both emotional and structural, are more of a problem than an answer. Trump won about 10.1 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. What does that tell you about the country today? It means that there was mobilization of votes on both sides because the whole country has now become hypervigilant about our political fate. And it's hard to know what period of history to compare it

to. I would say the 1920s, 19 to 21 under Woodrow Wilson, there was this kind of ferment and anti-immigrant feeling. And then it was, you know, against, it was also race riots, but riots against immigrants. And so I think it's not the first time that we've been in this much trouble. I would think of the 1960s as a time when there was also a lot of turmoil. But everyone, I think, wanted to get to the polls to say what they thought the answer to the turmoil is. So his

base was mobilized, but so too was the liberal progressive base. There were just more people voting. Ali, you talk about scaling empathy walls, and indeed that's what you did in that five-year period in which you spent time in the Deep South. How can we be more empathetic? And do we need a new word in the English language which captures this idea of spending time in another person's shoes? I like empathy, well, for a word. But you know, we have to think of it both structurally and personally. And that's how C. Wright Mills might look at it. Structurally, it used to be that the labor movement was the middleman between the Democratic Party and the working class.

But there almost is no more labor movement. That with offshoring in the 70s, companies undercut the labor movement, and it hasn't recovered from that. And we used to have a compulsory draft, which put people from different regions and different social classes together to mix and match. And we don't have that either. So we need another structural mixer, And so that's structurally. I was just talking to a member of a farming group that wants to get good healthy food to food deserts in the city, and this can be a way of getting rural people, who generally feel looked down on by city people, you know, that could be a way of getting people together.

And there are a lot of other ways, too. Actually, the last time last year that I went down to Louisiana, there was a young man from Yale who wanted to meet the people that I'd come to know and who later has put together something called the American Exchange Project. It now has 30 different high schools, some in the north, some in the south, some on coasts, some inland. And they meet on Google chat. They form different groups and they make friends and they arrange three-week visits to each other in different regions. And in fact, there's a group now, after Lake Charles, Louisiana, was hit by three tropical storms after another, a group of students in the north wanted to go down and help rebuild the town. That's the kind of thing we need to scale up onto a national level. Need to do that with universities and other places of work and churches as well.

Ali Hochschild, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. Very nice to talk to you, Jo. Thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. Very nice to talk to you, Jo. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For links and notes to everything we discussed, you will find those on my website, josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com.

If you are enjoying the show, I would love a rating and a review. It does help us reach the hard-to-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com. If you are enjoying the show, I would love a rating and a review. It does help us reach the hard to reach guests. So please rate and review the Jolly Swagman podcast. That would mean a lot. The Jolly Swagman podcast is engineered by Lawrence Moorfield. Our very thirsty and parched video editor is Alf Eddy. I'm your host, Joe Walker.

Until next week, thank you for listening. Ciao.