Sociology Department Colloquium: Arlie Hochschild

In this talk, Professor Hochschild reports on five years of field work among white, Louisiana-born Tea Party supporters and Trump voters.  She begins with the “red state paradox:” why do citizens of the second poorest state, for whom  44 percent of the state budget derives from the federal government, so revile the federal government? Taking off her own moral “alarm system” in order to scale an “empathy wall,” as she calls it, Hochschild describes why such a paradox seems insignificant  in the eyes of her respondents. Looming larger in their minds is what she called the right-wing “deep story” – a metaphor-driven story, stripped of facts and judgment, a story that feels true. Hochschild relates the deep story to distrust of the federal government and embrace of a free market.    Beliefs on the left are underlain by a different deep story, she argues, a thesis which poses the question how we converse and find common ground across different deep stories.  In the end, she offers her views on ways forward in the era of Donald Trump.