An insightful, troubling look at political resentments in the forgotten heartland.
Wounded feelings give way to nationalist, supremacist politics in Hochschild’s “what went wrong with Appalachia” autopsy.
Appalachia was once a region of union labor activism, progressive social programs, and an openness to working with people from other countries. Most of the region went for Roosevelt—and Carter, and Clinton. But then, sociologist Hochschild writes, something changed: the mines closed down, the small towns died, many of the remaining residents turned to self-medication, and suddenly Appalachia was Trump country. Hochschild traces this turn in part to what she calls the “pride paradox,” by which the satisfaction in hard work well done is replaced by existential despair over losing usefulness and meaning. “People devised various ways to respond: turn shame inward, project shame outward, or find a creative solution to the paradox,” she writes. The middle proposition turns out to have been the most widespread: people in the region, and by extension people in overlooked rural enclaves across the country, now blame others—immigrants, liberals, urban elites—for their woes. This manifests in racism and fascist displays: Hochschild’s opening set piece is a pre-Charlottesville march of white supremacist radicals in a little Kentucky town seething with resentment at being seen by the world as disposable yokels. The real perpetrators, the extractivist multinationals and big pharma moguls, go unquestioned, while Trumpism triumphs because in a psychologically wounded community such as Pikeville, Kentucky, as one counselor notes, “That guy’s selling white nationalism as a quick fix to make a guy who’s down on himself feel like he’s strong and going places.” Hochschild counsels a wide-ranging solution that could use more specific grounding, but that points to a useful direction, involving rebuilding rural America “both by revising the American Dream and by equalizing access to it.”
An insightful, troubling look at political resentments in the forgotten heartland.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781620976463
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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