The Deep Story and What Sociologists Got Wrong About Trump Supporters

Episode 213 of Church and Main Podcast.

As I’ve become older I’m more and more certain that people are guided not as much by facts as by stories. I think one of the reasons people opposed to Donald Trump have failed to keep him from the White House again is because they think it’s about facts and lies; meaning Trump plays loose with the facts and lies. His supporters are either racist and agree with him or rubes who can’t figure out that he is lying to them. What they don’t understand is that Trump and those who voted for him are guided more by a certain story than they are by facts.

Around the time of the 2016 election, a new book came out that instantly became a book to understand why someone would vote for Donald Trump. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote the book, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The impetus for the book began five year earlier when Hochschild, a professor at University California-Berkeley realized she didn’t know any Republicans. She decided to go to southwest Louisiana to live among conservative Republicans and see what made them tick.

In a 2016 interview with Vox, she explained she could do this two ways:

“I realized there were two ways I could go about it,” she told me. “I could go in and say, ‘I’m going to find out more about the enemy. I’ll grab the facts and marshal my side.’ Or I could say, ‘You know what? There are things I just don’t know about this part of the country. And I’m going to have to open my heart to them. I’m going to have turn my alarm system off and actually listen. Listen with curiosity and interest.’”

The result was the book. She tried to figure out why people living in on of the most polluted areas of the country were so suspicious of the federal government. She was able to learn about these mostly white inhabitants of Calcasieu Parish by using a “deep story.” Hochschild described the deep story this way:

So I first tried to just listen wherever I went, really do immersion research. And after a while, I realized there’s a core here that could be told through narrative. This is what I call the deep story. It’s a story in which you lift away facts and moral judgment and just find the story that feels true.

What felt true for the inhabitants of Calcasieu Parish was that other people or groups were “cutting in line.” Hochschild explains:

So the deep story I felt operating in Louisiana was this: Think of people waiting in a long line that stretches up a hill. And at the top of that is the American dream. And the people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their best, and were waiting for something they deserved. And this line is increasingly not moving, or moving more slowly [i.e., as the economy stalls].

Then they see people cutting ahead of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public sector workers. And even an oil-drenched brown pelican getting priority. In their view, people are cutting ahead unfairly. And then in this narrative, there is Barack Obama, to the side, the line supervisor who seems to be waving these people (and the pelican) ahead. So the government seemed to be on the side of the people who were cutting in line and pushing the people in line back.

Now, there is much you could disagree with in this deep story, but the important fact is that it is the story of this people. To understand why they act the way they do, you have to understand their story.

This view gave people a deeper understanding of what would become Donald Trump’s base. These weren’t cardboard cutouts, but complicated people that allowed those of us who are on the outside to understand and maybe appreciate.

However, during the Trump era other sociologists failed to understand Trump voters with the same deep story. Sociologist Jesse Smith wrote in April 2024 about how two other sociologists, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry wrote another book about Trump voters called the Flag and the Cross. But instead of going to places where these voters reside and getting to know them, their methodology is obscured. If there is a deep story, it isn’t the deep story of the voters, but the deep story of the writers themselves. Smith notes the Flag and the Cross is confirmation bias for Trump critics:

…the purpose of The Flag and the Cross is not to provide a sober-minded, coherent scholarly account of the cause-and-effect processes linking American religion and right-wing politics. Such a project would be poorly suited to the mood of the Trump-era academy. The aim is not to enlighten the ignorant or convert the skeptic so much as to stir the heart of the believer. As Jemar Tisby urges in the foreword, this is work that must not simply be read, but “absorbed and applied.” The book acts as a denunciation of evil and a call to arms, the expression of an angry yet erudite id. It was written for a moment that calls not for analyses but declarations, a time to rise out of the armchair and into the pulpit.

I recently talked to Smith about his article for Public Discourse on why so many sociologists got Donald Trump and his voters wrong. Why did they not follow Hochschild’s method? How did political polarization influence sociologists?

In this episode of Church and Main, I chat with Jesse Smith who is a professor at Benedictine College and he talks about the impact of religion and the need for empathetic research that respects voters' lived experiences. Smith also critiques the politicization of sociological inquiry since the Trump era, advocating for a qualitative approach that fosters understanding over bias. You can listen using the Spotify link above, the YouTube link below or on your favorite podcast app.

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