Rural white MAGA support rests on a false line-cutting narrative

Evidence

White Christian nationalism is a “deep story” about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it should be. We borrow the “deep story” idea from sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. In her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land, she recounts the lessons she learned during the five years she spent talking with white working-class Americans in the oil-refining regions of rural Louisiana. Their “deep story” goes something like this: people like them have been standing in line, waiting patiently for their chance at the American dream. But up ahead, they see people cutting in line—immigrants and minorities and other people who haven’t paid their dues. What’s worse, they see politicians helping the line-cutters, liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So, they vote for conservative politicians who (they believe) will send those people to the back of the line where they belong. The unstated (and incorrect) assumption is that “white people were here first.” — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross, 33

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Hochschild’s ‘deep story’ concept as the analytic frame for the whole book.
• XREF: connects to: Ideological identity, not ignorance, drives whites’ wrong history answers — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 116