With slightly more than a month until Election Day, the polls show that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are basically tied. Political scientists, historians, and other experts are describing the 2024 presidential election as one of the closest in modern American history. For those outside of the so-called MAGAverse, Trump’s popularity, even after more than eight years, remains a riddle. Unfortunately, the future of American democracy may be decided by their inability to break the Trump Code. The mainstream news media’s failure to decipher Trumpism has repeatedly led them to normalize the wantonly corrupt ex-president’s extremely malignant behavior.

In her new book “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” leading sociologist and author Arlie Hochschild has taken on the task of trying to explain Trump’s powerful appeal for and power over “white working class” voters and other downwardly mobile Americans. She argues that Trump speaks to their grievances, pain, rage, and feelings of lost pride, manhood, purpose and honor.

Ultimately, as Hochschild explains in this conversation, to defeat Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement will require that the country’s responsible political leaders, news media, and other elites and influentials become “emotionally bilingual” so that they can better hear and understand how and why a large swath of the public is economically alienated, angry, and feeling left behind from the American Dream and the good life.

Arlie Hochschild is a Professor Emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to “Stolen Pride,” she is the author of many books including “Strangers in Their Own Land,” “The Managed Heart,” and “The Second Shift.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length:

The forty or so days until the election are going to feel very slow and very fast at the same time. It is all so disorienting and maddening. How are you feeling? How are you making sense of it?

I am focused on the election. I am caught between anxiety and concern because the election is too close right now. Harris and Trump are neck and neck and in recent polls, Trump leads by a bit in the battleground states. In the last 100 years there has not been an election as important as the one between Trump and Harris. If we take Trump at his word, he's talking about changing the Constitution and making himself a dictator. As a country we are not as alarmed as we should be by Trump's threats, because he has so flagrantly broken so many rules of politics and life. The scary thing is that we’ve become used to it.

Many on the Democratic side are still baffled by Trump’s enormous appeal. That’s a big problem too because we really need to know what we’re up against. We need to break the code that Trump is speaking as the leader to his followers. People outside of the MAGA movement all too often throw up their hands and say Trump is nuts and his followers are duped. But when we leave matters there, we’re not looking at what’s dangerous about Trump and his movement. Once we really tune into what Trump is saying and get why his MAGA devotees are so loyal to him then we can come to understand what is happening. This will not make any non-Trumper more relaxed, but it will help us see the danger in what’s happening and better gauge what to do about it.

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Once we tune into what Trump is saying — i.e., become emotionally “bilingual” — we can get why he has gained MAGA loyalists among the 42% of non-BA-holding whites, and even an increasing proportion of Black and Latino men — and why the Dems have lost them. Why are poor Appalachians – whose parents and grandparents were FDR Democrats — I wondered, voting 80% for Donald Trump?

I am a product of and a proud member of the Black working class. That background and growing up with white working class people have given me great insight into Trump and his appeal that many of my colleagues from more upper class, if not rich white, backgrounds lack.

Your working-class background gives you access to an important mode of communication — one that many if not most journalists and reporters do not yet have. One of the reasons I wrote “Stolen Pride” is to help us all become bilingual by understanding the language and logic of Trump and his appeal. You can take what Donald Trump says literally, and by doing so miss what is being said........

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