Explaining Trump, Emotionally

ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD is an eighty four year old sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley who, rather then retiring, continues her reaearch into and writing about the part which emotions,rather than reason and intellect, play in people's behavior,especially in the public arena, and especially, in her recent book, in voting for presidential candidates in the United States. A fascinating lecturer and excellent writer, she is the author of several such best selling monograpshs, and her latest: "Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right", joins a long line of attempts by people, which seems to include nearly all of us, attempting to answer by asking the question of the ages: precisely why and how in hell did we the American people elect a career criminal and reprobate, one Donald J. Trump, to the highest office in the land, not once, but twice, as if the first Trump experience were not sufficient to deter us from making the same mistake twice? She begins by asserting that both sides, the left and the right, are in denial about one thing of their choosing. Fair enough. By writing off Trump supporters as mereley stupid, wicked, racist, and poorly educated, anti - Trumpers deny that MAGA folk have a very real and to them very valid reason for their support of a New york City billionaire as the self proclaimed champion of the common man, of the forgotten man. Again, fair enough. Although it can be argued that there is plenty of room in the Trump explanation tent for all theories, great and small, it cannot be denied that there is more in Denmark than merely the rotten eggs Democrats seem to see smeared across MAGA call caps. And, abviously, white blue collar America has long been and still is looking for something, whatever it is, that they seem to think the progressive socialist Democrats have promised to provide them, but haven't. What the Republicans seem to be denying is that Trump is a criminal reprobate, which, one must admit, is a rather large white elephant, so to speak. For this book Dr. Hochschild spent time in appalachia, ground zero of white blue collar anger, in a Kentucky coal county, in the second poorest county in the country, where coal has dried up, and unemployment and crystal meth infest the wooded hills and hollers like maggots on a pile of cow dung. Proud people, with once stable middle class incomes and families, reduced to poverty and shame, at the loss of their livelihoods and self respect. So along comes Trump, blowing hot, exhorting us to "bring back coal". Sounds mighty fine to country and small town folks who care not a whit about climate change, but simply want their jobs and houses back. All well and good, but what the author fails to address is, notwithstanding the fact that all this grievance and anger is quite legit, is how they, or anyone else, can possibly believe that a pathological liar with big city money bags and weird overdone hair can possibly help or has any interest in actually helping them, which he most assuredly, demonstrably does not. But they don't care about that; the blatant immorality, criminality, and verbal idiocy. What they care about is simply that Trump is "different" than the rest of them, and that he talks straight to them, in simplistic terms, using one syllable words they can understand. And, he seems as angry and confused as they are. And, well, who else is there? Well, there is Bernie Sanders, there is taxing the billionaires, there is reistributing the wealth, but, the problem with that is that all that has a name which Trump can easily use to deflate it all, and that word is the one word in the English language other than "landlord" which sends good capitalistic freedom lovin' Christian country folk into paroxysms of whiskey rage. That one word is the one word which big city corporate billionaires have managed to equate sucessfully with the devil himself; socialism.