Kevin Thompson, a police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio, a town on the West Virginia border, was driving along St. Clair Avenue on September 7th when he noticed a Ford Explorer veering between the road and the shoulder. Thompson followed. Up ahead, a school bus was discharging students, and the driver of the Explorer seemed slow to notice this; he had to brake sharply, and then he started drifting into oncoming traffic, before coming to a stop. Thompson parked his car and walked over. Both the driver, a forty-seven-year-old man named James Acord, and his passenger, a fifty-year-old woman named Rhonda Pasek, looked as if they were high. Thompson wrote in his police report, “I noticed his head was bobbing back and forth and his speech was almost unintelligible.” Acord tried to put the car in gear to drive away; Thompson had to turn off the ignition and take away the keys. Eventually, both Acord and Pasek passed out. In police photographs of the scene, Acord’s mouth is open and his chin is up in the air; Pasek is slumped over to her left. What made the photographs go viral, what made them part of the iconography of the opiate epidemic, was the presence in the back seat of an alert four-year-old boy.

News organizations, in circulating the images, blurred out the boy’s face. But the city of East Liverpool did not, on its Facebook page, and you can see the boy, who turned out to be Pasek’s grandson, clearly. He is blond, with blue eyes and ears that stick out slightly, and he is wearing a blue T-shirt with dinosaurs on it. I have a four-year-old daughter, and she has what looks to be the same car seat; despite all the dysfunction around him, some care was taken with the boy. In the photos, the boy is looking directly at the camera and his expression is calm and evaluative. He is trying to figure out what is going on.

These are moralizing photographs; maybe all police photographs are. There was a choice to use the photo, taken from the passenger side of the car, that showed the slumped grandmother’s bra strap sliding off her shoulder. There was a choice to place the boy in the center of the frame. There was a choice, most of all, by the police and by civilians, to circulate and recirculate the images of this traffic stop, rather than those of many others. A line of commentary is embedded in each of these choices: that the adults in the car, in their selfishness and irresponsibility, have imposed burdens on everyone else. Thompson ended his report by noting that the boy had been transferred to the custody of social services. It is the same line of exasperation and condescension that motivated the opposition to welfare, except that everyone in these photos is white.

One confusing aspect of Donald Trump’s campaign has been the fact that conservatives are so animated by a message of law and order at a time when national crime rates are lower than they have been in decades. But this must owe something to the experience of the conservative heartland, where, at least in part because of the chaos of the opioid epidemic, laws and social order are much more pressing concerns. As heroin and prescription-drug abuse has spread through small towns, their citizens have at times shown an empathy for the addicts that did not much surface when the addicts were black; at other times, they have simply cracked down. Earlier this month, the Times, using numbers from the National Corrections Reporting Program, found that a swath of white, conservative, rural territory, extending through Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Indiana, sent the highest proportion of their citizens to prison. Either the addicts are seen as victims of larger forces or as creatures of moral decay. What is unresolved, in these places, is who is to blame.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has just published a book, “Strangers in their Own Land,” that tries to understand the emotional roots of the Tea Party movement and the Trump phenomenon. To do this, Hoschshild spent much of the past five years in rural parts of southern Louisiana, where the population is mostly white, poor, and, by national standards, badly educated. Hochschild noticed that Tea Party enthusiasts and traditional conservatives gave her accounts of American society that boiled down to a single “deep story.” This story was that America, which was once characterized by hard work, was now characterized by cheating; the image that Hochschild chose was that of people cutting in line. For Hochschild’s subjects, the line-cutters were African-Americans, promoted by affirmative action, she writes, but also “women, immigrants, refugees, public-sector workers—where will it end? Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you don’t control or agree with.” President Obama, in this vision, was the man controlling the line, waving the line-cutters ahead—“their president, not your president.” Hochschild shared this analogy in e-mails to the plumbers and insurance brokers she had met. “I live your analogy,” one wrote back. “It’s my story,” another said. A third wrote, “You’ve read my mind.”

Hochschild developed a particular interest in why people who had suffered so much from deregulation were working so hard for politicians who wanted more of it. The energy and plastics companies that employed many of them were turning southern Louisiana into a gigantic chemical dump. Hochschild spent time with a plumber who had emptied toxic waste into a river, only to suffer years of guilt and regret, and with fishermen who coped with pollution by studying which fish flushed out the chemicals quickly and might still be O.K. to eat. She met local environmentalists, village ideologues who holed up in remote cabins, measuring the quality of the water—but they were often Tea Party supporters, too. Leaving the cabin of two environmental activists, Hochschild noticed a bundle of lawn signs for the local Tea Party congressional candidate, awaiting distribution.

At a Tea Party focus group on Lake Charles, Hochschild met a woman named Jackie Tabor. “Pollution is the price we pay for capitalism,” Tabor, the wife of a contractor, told her. While proudly showing Hochschild her subdivision house, Tabor explained that she had grown up poor in Chicago. She relied on welfare as a child and was briefly homeless. Tabor had a strong sense of the fragility of her own position. “This could all vanish tomorrow!” she said, gesturing around her living room. Tabor wanted clean air and water, Hochschild writes. But she also felt that she benefitted from things staying as they were. “Sometimes you had to do without what you wanted,” Hochschild writes, from Tabor’s point of view. “You accommodated.”

At the same focus group, Hochschild met an insurance saleswoman named Sharon Galicia, who moves the sociologist closer to the Trump phenomenon. Galicia had spent some years working as the management agent for a trailer park, and the lives of her mostly white renters there, Hochschild writes, “appalled and unnerved her.” Some of them had “matter-of-factly admitted lying to get food stamps,” Galicia told Hochschild. Hochschild also spoke to a woman named Janice Areno, who said that she knew construction workers who quit their jobs “so they can draw unemployment to hunt in season.” This evidence of social decline had complicated how Galicia and Areno saw their communities. The failings of their neighbors had become more obvious to them.