11. September 2025. Arlie Russell Hochschild: An Emotions Lens on the Rise of the Right

To help advance our thinking about the rise of the right, I suggest
to conceptualize a tool kit of emotion-management practices, the
effect of which is to evoke and suppress feelings of a pre-disposed
population. Most important in this tool kit is a resonant master
story which evokes the feelings of a leader’s base and establishes
rules governing how much of what feeling to direct at whom. In the
US, Trump has strongly appealed to downwardly mobile, blue-collar
white Americans whose loss of well-paid jobs, community and intact
families have led many to feel in him relief from fear and shame
and enjoy the elation of being chosen winners. He pictures the
world as a place of brutal Hobbesian struggle of winners against
losers, us against them. In this Manichean splitting, “we” are
rightful winners, strong, socially attached and loveable, while
people considered “them” are weak, hostile and deserving of
disdain. Guided by this narrative, Trump poses himself as the
powerful director of the nation’s emotional traffic. Taken as a
whole, such practices effectively manage the evocation and
suppression of feeling so as to legitimate his regime and to offer
himself as a model to other right- wing leaders around the world.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, ist emeritierte Professorin an der
University of California, Berkeley. Sie gilt als eine der
bedeutendsten Soziologinnen der Gegenwart, ihr vielgelobtes Buch
Fremd in ihrem Land. Eine Geschichte der amerikanischen Rechten
stand auf der Shortlist für den National Book Award 2016. Ihr Buch
Geraubter Stolz. Verlust, Scham und der Aufstieg der Rechten (Aus
dem Englischen von Ulrike Bischoff) wird im September in der
Hamburger Edition, dem Verlag des Hamburger Instituts für
Sozialforschung, erscheinen. Begrüßung: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Knöbl,
Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung Grußwort: Senatorin Maryam
Blumenthal, Senatorin für Wissenschaft, Forschung und
Gleichstellung der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg Laudatio: Prof.
Dr. Sighard Neckel, Soziologe, Universität Hamburg,
DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe »Zukünfte der Nachhaltigkeit«. Die
Kultur des emotionalen Kapitalismus. Einleitung. In: Arlie Russell
Hochschild: Das gekaufte Herz. Die Kommerzialisierung der Gefühle.
Erweiterte Neuausgabe, Frankfurt/New York 2006: Campus.