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In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild went to the Deep South to study an emerging conservative identity and came away with something like a Rosetta stone for the rise of Donald Trump. She offered a psychological allegory for the right-wing worldview, which she called the deep story.

Read: The lines that divide America

The deep story went like this: You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful soulsmany poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. Its scary to look back, Hochschild writes. There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, youve waited a long time. Now youre stuck in line, because the economy isnt working. And worse than stuck, youre stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And whats this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasnt perfect, but at least it was a promise. There is order in the fact of a line. And if that order is coming apart, then so is America.

Hochschild tested this allegory with her Republican sources and heard that it struck a chord. Yes, they said, this captures how I feel. In the past few years, shes kept in touch with several of her connections from the Deep South and keenly tracked their philosophical evolution. Shes watched the locus of their anxiety move from budgets (They never talk about deficits anymore, she told me) to the entrenched and swampy political class. She also witnessed the Trumpification of everything. There used to be a Tea Party, she said. Now its all Trumpism.

If we want to understand this movement, Hochschild told me, we have to understand what happened in the past five years to the people in the line. I now see that the line metaphor in my book was only Chapter 1 of the deep story, she said. What Im seeing now is there are more chapters.

If Chapter 1 was The Line, Chapter 2 was The Arrival. When Trump appeared to the members of the broken line, Hochschild saw that he embodied the most ineffable aspects of the deep story. Trump might be a lifelong bullshitter, but one thing he has never had to bullshit is his grievance toward liberal elites and his antipathy for the groups whom Tea Party Republicans already knew they hated. He animated their distrust toward Barack Obama with his birtherism claims. He gave shape to their hatred for Hillary Clinton by leading Lock her up! chants. From his first rallies, Trumps basic message has always been I love you, and you love me, and we all hate the same people, Hochschild said.

The rest is here:
The Deep Story of Trumpism - The Atlantic