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.”

Pride and shame signal the juncture between the identity we hold out to the world, and how the world responds to our identity. Pride functions as an emotional “skin of the self,” so to speak; it signals when our identity is safe, accepted, and admired, and when we are in danger of rejection. It is our inner response to our outer appearance. Shame

“I didn’t grow up knowing about the Bobby Sox Grill or any segregated Pikeville movie theater, or Corbin,”

Mark Twain’s remark: “‘Kentucky is twenty years behind the rest of the world. So when the world ends, I want to be in Kentucky.’

Emotion is not a casual add-on to the cognitive talk of policies we think of as politics. On the contrary, politics can be the platter on which emotions are delivered. And to understand politicized emotion, we need to understand what people have gone through and care about.

But the main concern for Ruth, John, and Dr. Budgy was to get out of the way of other people’s thrown-off shame.

More Republicans than Democrats hold to the old-time Protestant ethic, however hardworking members of each party are.

this I meant provoking liberal/left critics (moment 1) so that they will move into a scold (moment 2), enabling him to claim victimhood (moment 3) and roar back (moment 4).

According to a 2023 analysis by the Cook Political Report, in 1996 KY-5 sat almost at the nation’s political center, with nearly 235 congressional districts rated as more liberal and 200 as more conservative. But by 2023, compared to all other of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, Kentucky’s 5th Congressional District had become the