“Americans today are vastly better off than they were 50 years ago. After adjusting for inflation, household incomes have risen by about 50 percent—more than double what raw census data suggest. Unemployment remains near historic lows. Over the past three decades, the private service sector has created about 40.5 million net new jobs, many in high-wage, high-skill fields like health care, finance, and professional services.
Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output has surged. It’s now at its all-time high but with fewer workers thanks to stunning productivity gains. As economist David Autor notes, the so-called hollowing out of the middle class involves many workers moving up into higher-skill, higher-paying occupations.
None of this means that the labor-force detachment problem should be ignored. It does mean that the story is more complicated than Trump’s “China stole our jobs” narrative suggests.”
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“The deeper problem exposed by the China shock wasn’t trade—it was America’s fading economic dynamism. In past generations, when industries declined, workers moved. They retrained. They found new opportunities. Today, many displaced workers simply stay put even as jobs emerge elsewhere.
Government policy plays an enormous role. Over time, policymakers have built a dense thicket of regulations and disincentives that trap people where they are and discourage adaptation.
Restrictive zoning and land-use legislations have sent housing costs in high-wage cities through the roof, pricing out workers who would otherwise migrate toward opportunity. Economists estimate that even modest housing deregulation would allow more Americans to live and work where their skills are most valued.
Another culprit is occupational licensing. Today, nearly one-third of U.S. workers must obtain some kind of government license to do their jobs, up from just 5 percent in the 1950s. These barriers disproportionately affect low-income workers and create huge hurdles to interstate mobility, effectively locking people into stagnant local economies.
Then there’s Social Security Disability Insurance. Reforms in the 1980s expanded eligibility with broader, more subjective criteria. Today, many prime-age men outside the labor force report being disabled even as overall health has improved and physically demanding jobs have declined. The effect is less labor-force reentry—and, thus, worse long-term prospects—for workers on the margin.”
Private equity have purchased nursing homes, sold their assets like their facilities, then leased these facilities from who they sold them to, they pocket the cash from the sale, buy more properties, then use market power to drive down expenses, then use the profits to get the nursing homes to take a loan and pocket that cash, the nursing home is strained by all these burdens, but who cares when private equity already made money. Such activity may have caused 20,000 premature deaths over 12 years as service quality is cut.
“The short-lived pandemic-era child tax credit expansion cut child poverty by more than a third. And the bolstered social safety net from Covid relief bills nearly halved child poverty in a single year — the sharpest drop on record. Once those programs expired, however, the child poverty rate bounced right back.”
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“Homeowners are told that their homes are the key to building wealth, so they reasonably want their property values to keep rising. For renters, on the other hand, any increase in housing costs is a loss. So while renters might want lawmakers to make room for more housing, homeowners often resist any change that could make their home prices stagnate.”
“In 2020, three political scientists studied how location and income affected white voters’ voting decisions. They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones.
But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your dollar can buy more in Biloxi than Boston — the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.
Put those two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poorer parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life there.
So what does this mean for how we understand the Trump-era right? It cuts through the seemingly interminable debate about Trump’s appeal to “left behind” voters and helps us understand the actual complexity of the right’s appeals to region and class in the United States. America’s divisions are rooted in less income inequality per se than is widely appreciated, and often tied to divisions inside of communities and social groups.
In Stolen Pride, Hochschild locates the heart of Trump’s appeal to rural voters in emotions of pride and shame — including pride in their region’s traditions and shame in what it’s become in an era of declining coal jobs and rising drug addiction.
For Roger Ford, a KY-5 entrepreneur and Republican activist who serves as Hochschild’s exemplar of Trump’s “locally rich” base, Trump helps resolve those emotions by offering someone to blame. Ford may not be suffering personally, but his region is — and Trump’s rage at liberal coastal elites helps him locate a villain outside of his own community.
“He based his deepest sense of pride, it seemed, on his role of defender of his imperiled rural homeland from which so much had been lost — or, as it could feel, ‘stolen,’” she writes.
Ford’s comments to Hochschild shift seamlessly between economic and cultural grievances. In discussing his opposition to transgender rights, he situates it as the latest in a long line of dislocations that people in his region faced.
“With all we’re coping with here, we’re having a hard enough time,” he tells Hochschild. “Then you make it fashionable to choose your gender? Where are we going?”
This comment might make it seem as if economic concerns are somehow prior to cultural ones, and people like Ford are angry at transgender people because of economic deprivation in coal country. But high-quality research tells a different, more complicated story.
In 2022, scholars Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley examined the political consequences of what they call “rural consciousness” for politics. They divide this consciousness into three component parts: “a feeling that ruralites are underrepresented in decision-making (‘Representation’) and that their way of life is disrespected (‘Way of Life’) — both symbolic concerns — and a more materialistic concern that rural areas receive less resources (‘Resources’).”
When they tried to use these different “subdimensions” of rural consciousness to predict Trump support among rural voters, they found something interesting. People who saw the plight of ruralities in cultural and political terms were most likely to support Trump, while those primarily concerned about rural poverty were, if anything, less likely to support him than their neighbors.
Taken together, these findings suggest that the story isn’t simply that economic deprivation breeds cultural resentment. Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas tend to be angry that their regions don’t set the social terms of American life: that they don’t control the halls of power and that, as a consequence, both political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re comfortable with. Economic decline surely exacerbates this sense of alienation, but it isn’t at the heart of it.”