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Other People's Race Problem !"#$ %&' & ( )"% | !"## $%&'()&'* Other People’s Race Problem Trumpism and the Collapse of the Liberal Racial Consensus in the United States ommon wisdom tells us that the rise of Trumpism in the United States is a backlash against liberal centrists’ globalist cosmopolitan dreams. CThese centrists were, as the story goes, part of a meritocratic global order of elite citizens, a small rich homogeneous caste, disconnected from their own nationals and nonnationals alike because of their elite educational and social backgrounds, their super!cial investment in multicultural open- ness (for elites only), and their disdain for the small- minded provincialism of those who were “le" behind” by neoliberal globalization. And it is this excess of technocratic elitism and closed- minded cosmopolitanism that has spurred the wave of ethnonationalist populism in the United States and across the globe. Di#erent versions of this story abound. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, advocated a retooled globalism that is more e#ective at “sharing” its bene!ts (Lagarde $%&'). Tony Blaire and Hilary Clinton have admi(ed begrudgingly some of the limitations of centrist Third Way politics in their a(empts to out)ank and discredit the social democratic factions in the Labor and Democratic Parties (Glasser $%&*). And Dalibor Rohac, a conservative writer from the American Enterprise Institute, calls for more cosmopolitanism, not nationalism, as an antidote to elitist globalization (Rohac $%&'). As with much common wisdom, there is just enough truth in this story to make it very misleading. It is easy to agree with the part about globalism’s technocratic elitism; this is, a"er all, a point made by the global justice and alt globalization movements, by Occupy Wall Street and by Bernie Sanders. But Donald Trump did not ride the global wave of popular protest to power; nor is his political popularity explainable exclusively in terms of his admi(edly de" manipulation of widely held anti- establishment political sentiments felt in the a"ermath of the late $%%%s global economic meltdown. Many politi- cians have tried to ride that wave of political disa#ection, but they failed to Maskovsky_ALL_1pp.indd 167 10/14/19 10:03 AM &'. | !"## $%&'()&'* Line & capture popular or electoral support. The issue that is ignored or glossed over Line $ in many popular accounts of the globalist versus nationalist debate is race. For Line + Trump’s brutal political e#ectiveness can only be explained, I think, in terms Line , of his white nationalist appeal, and in terms of the failure of liberal cosmop- Line - olites and economic nationalists to o#er a compelling racial project of their Line ' own as an alternative. Line * In this essay, I want to argue for the centrality of racialized subjects in the Line . making of Trump- era politics, and for the speci!c understanding of Trumpism Line / as a form of white nationalist politics that has sha(ered the liberal racial con- Line &% sensus of the post – civil rights era. To insist on the centrality of race may seem Line && unnecessary and even gratuitous as we contend with the increasingly explicit Line &$ xenophobic and racist language that Trump and his supporters use. But my Line &+ point here is not merely that Trump is a racist (he is, and this was well estab- Line &, lished long before his presidential run). In the following pages, I hope to show Line &- that an important reason for the e#ectiveness of Trump’s political project is Line &' the way that it prioritizes white community resentments and grievances as the Line &* political foundation for elaborating popular disa#ection, nationalism, gender Line &. politics, and class politics. This articulation, to use Stuart Hall’s term (Hall et Line &/ al., $%&+ [&/*.]; Hall &/.', &/.*, &/./; see also Clarke $%&,), does a great deal of Line $% political work. By displacing neoconservative color blindness and neoliberal Line $& multiculturalism, the dominant racial projects of the liberal centrist political Line $$ establishment, the politics of white resentment and grievance have energized Line $+ disgruntled fractions of the white middle and working classes, accelerated the Line $, authoritarian turn in US politics and governance, and unse(led long- standing Line $- liberal centrist political orthodoxies around race, class, and gender.01 Line $' This essay proceeds in three parts. First, I explain brie)y the history of the Line $* rise of Trumpism, which, I emphasize, must be understood as a form of white Line $. nationalism that is resonant with, but ultimately di#erent from, white nation- Line $/ alism in past eras of US history. I then locate Trumpism as a political problem- Line +% atic in the current conjuncture. I end with a brief discussion of a key political Line +& impasse that has emerged alongside white nationalism: the propensity by cos- Line +$ mopolites and economic nationalists to see racism as someone else’s problem Line+ + and to therefore ignore the importance of antiracist projects to the develop- Line +, ment of an e#ective popular politics in the United States. Taken together, Line+ - these parts form the basis for a conjunctural analysis of the rise of Trumpism Line+ ' in the United States in the twenty- !rst century. Conjunctural analysis (Clarke Line +* $%&,) helps make connections between di#erent kinds of racial politics and Maskovsky_ALL_1pp.indd 168 10/14/19 10:03 AM Trumpism and the Collapse of US Liberal Racial Consensus | &'/ the multiplicity of political forces, projects, and desires that circulate in US politics and culture in the present.02 Trumpism as the New White Nationalism Trump’s political rise must be a(ributed !rst and foremost to the resurfacing of white nationalism in the post – civil rights era. Prevailing popular wisdom tends to treat white nationalism’s recent rise as an outgrowth of a generalized white male youth crisis rooted in the absence of fathers in white working- class households (Farrell and Gray $%&.; Kimmel $%&.; Picciolini $%&.; for a review of the literature, see Hochschild $%&.). Or it is viewed as an expression of mounting class resentments by increasingly precarious fractions of the dein- dustrialized working and middle classes (Fraser $%&/). The !rst explanation resonates very strongly with more than a century of scholarship on the cri- sis of the black family, though the political implications of these resonances could not be more di#erent (Frazier &/+/). The second resonates with Kalb and Halmai’s ($%&&) “return of the repressed” argument by charting the rise of a “reactionary politics of recognition” (Fraser $%&/) in the context of the collapse of the political center, in both its progressive (neoliberal) and reac- tionary (neoconservative) forms. This la(er argument takes us far in under- standing the US case, about which I will say more below. Yet it is essential as well to make clear the extent to which race politics shaped this political outcome. The majority of white college- educated men, white non- college- educated men, and white non- college- educated women voted for Trump; in the category of white voters, it was only white college- educated women who did not vote mostly for Trump (Scha#ner et al. $%&.). These data contradict the simplistic — and ultimately inaccurate — story, promoted popularly and politically in the immediate a"ermath of the election, that Trump was voted in by the disgruntled, downwardly mobile fractions of the white working classes. This is only true so far as the election was “determined” by votes by a small part of the electorate, mostly in the Midwest, who had voted in the past election for Obama but who voted, in $%&', for Trump. But voting data more broadly a3rms the political e#ectiveness of Trump’s strategy to run his campaign within the broad currents of white nationalism. Acknowledging the role that race played in the $%&' election, and in US politics more generally, also has the additional advantage of taking race at least as seriously as Trump and white nationalists do themselves. Maskovsky_ALL_1pp.indd 169 10/14/19 10:03 AM &*% | !"## $%&'()&'* Line & How should we characterize the new white nationalism that has resurfaced Line $ in the Trump era, and to what extent does it unse(le post – civil rights era race Line + politics? Today, white nationalism is not a uni!ed movement. It is a diverse set Line , of political, social, and cultural projects, programs, organizations, and activi- Line - ties. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that there are approximately Line ' &%% white nationalist groups operating in the United States today (the number Line * of groups has )uctuated between /- and &,' since $%%+) (SPLC $%&*). Under Line . the banner of white nationalism are what the Southern Poverty Law Center Line / would call “extremist” groups that elaborate explicit racist ideologies rooted Line &% in long- standing ideas about white biological or cultural superiority and that Line && seek to transform the United States into a white ethnostate through violent Line &$ means. Some representatives from groups such as these were at the “Unite the Line &+ Right” rally in Charlo(esville, Virginia, in August $%&*. Groups that make ex- Line &, plicit claims about white superiority remain on the fringe politically, however. Line &- But other groups have moved to the mainstream. The media- savvy alt- right, Line &' for example, is careful to emphasize white racial grievances and resentments Line &* and the need for white community restoration over overt arguments for racial Line &. superiority. With this tactic, its leaders have found new audiences for their Line &/ xenophobic and racist political projects, and its growth accounts in large mea- Line $% sure for white nationalism’s popular appeal in the twenty- !rst- century United Line $& States (Bjork- James and Maskovsky $%&*). Line $$ White nationalism’s resurgence has unse(led both neoconservatism and Line $+ neoliberalism, the two competing forms of liberal centrist cosmopolitanism, Line $, which elaborate di#erent and antagonistic racial projects even as they share a Line $- commitment to many classic liberal values and to globalist dreams of one sort Line $' or another.
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