Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

the sacrificial renouncer of his own chance to achieve that dream.

one study, Democrats were asked how many Republicans earn $250,000 a year or more, and answered 38 percent. It’s actually 2 percent. Republicans were asked what proportion of Democrats believe “most police are bad people” and answered 50 percent. It’s actually 15 percent.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “Kentucky’s incarceration rates stand out internationally” at 930 per 100,000 people, compared to 664 in the United States as a whole, 129 in the United Kingdom, and 104 in Canada.

Helena Norberg-Hodge noted in her study of Asian rural cultures under pressure to modernize, it is young males who most exhibit the strains of this trend.

way to blot out real or imagined shame is to enhance what feels like a depleted fund of racial pride.

Such boys grow up to feel, Kimmel argues, like “failed men.” They can then fill in the blank space where “good man” or “successful man” might be with the idea of “killer.” As the historian George Mosse observed of German male extremists in the 1930s: “Battle was part of their very being. They carried war in their blood.”

What happens when—in the absence of real solutions to real problems—feelings of loss and shame become the “ore” for which politicians prospect?

the poor are nearly as likely as the rich to believe that one is individually responsible for one’s economic fate.

by the latest estimate, 16 percent of Pike County adults hold bachelor’s degrees.