Trump and America’s Populist Turn

Too often, commentators have been content to characterize Donald Trump’s cabinet as a collection of billionaires. The president does show a fondness for rich businessmen but to stop there is to erase important divisions among American corporate elites and ignore Trump’s critique of the global trading system, which produced his victory. Donald Trump is president…

As Donald J. Trump, a rentier capitalist, television personality, and dilettante politician, became the unlikely winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, comparisons to 1930s Germany abounded in political commentary. Adopting themes, policy positions, and rhetorical styles reminiscent of National Socialists, Trump’s ethnic nationalistic campaign promised to “Make America Great Again.” This was to be…

Regimes in their death throes, attached to and driven by no longer viable forms of institutional power and psychosocial organization, do not go quietly. To the contrary and to the horror of those who watch, and see, they relentlessly tighten their faltering grip using every dark bit of leverage those forms allow. In the process,…

Introduction First I want to explain where I am coming from. I am coming from the theory of class in the household developed by me and Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff in the book Class Struggle on the Home Front, (Palgrave 2009) based on their recreation of Marxian theory. I will present the recent revolutionary…

Alt-Right began as an online phenomenon that mushroomed into a poisonous cloud of misogynist, white nationalist, and anti-Left propaganda. Its basic thrust was aimed at collapsing democracy and human rights in the United States on behalf of economic and political elites.[1] Its voice is that of macho male gasbags polluting the public sphere with self-aggrandizing…

In 1982, the historian Alan Brinkley wondered how two demagogic figures—the Louisiana politician Huey Long and the radio priest Father Coughlin—built mass followings that terrified and confounded political elites during the Great Depression. For one thing, Brinkley explained, Long and Coughlin both possessed substantial personal charisma and skillfully used the new mass media of the…

One of the most remarkable predictions in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) is that, on its current trajectory and without a dramatic political correction, the United States will reach a point of wealth inequality that is historically unprecedented in the modern era and that nation states do not sink to asymmetries of this…

The State of the Union speech by the new president, Donald Trump, has come and gone; so too his address before the joint houses of Congress. The shock of the 2016 election is lessening, it is time to take stock. Trump’s triumph evinces the worst of what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid streak” in American…