The nasty parties. Nigel Farage speaks at a rally for Donald Trump in August, 2016. Gerald Herbert AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved. Do we understand Trump’s rise to power yet? In order to explain his surprising victory in the 2016 elections, experts on the left attribute much analytical weight to feelings of resentment among working class Americans. This resentment would emerge as a consequence of many Americans’ deteriorating socio-economic position in times of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’. The people, so the story goes, have grown so dissatisfied with the American establishment that they were driven into the arms of a man who, for all his defects, managed to present himself as a Washington outsider and the saviour of the American dream.
On this account, popular resentment is the main explanation for right-wing populism. In response, social scientists have fired up their regression machines in order to calculate the correlation between socioeconomic variables and Trumpist sympathies. This approach is not necessarily wrong, as the precarious socio-economic position of many Americans undoubtedly plays a role in their voting behaviour. However, the problem is that it glosses over the main paradox of the recent US elections: Trump represents the very characteristics that supposedly gave rise to the feelings of popular resentment in the first place.
Trump’s paradox
This is especially clear in two cases. First, when Trump says he is going to make America great again, experts claim this resonates with people’s resentment because it promises to turn back the clock on economic globalisation and the outsourcing of Ameri- can jobs. At the same time, however, Trump symbolises these problems as no other: the owner of an international business empire, Trump is well-known to move his production lines overseas to save costs. We have all seen the pictures of Trump merchandise with a ‘made in China’ label. We have all seen the pictures of Trump merchandise with a ‘made in China’ label.
