now, while the other does so to prepare for the day of judgment against nonbelievers. These electrical charges resonate back and forth, generating a political machine much more potent than the aggregation of its parts.117
This resonance machine also includes nationalists, neoconservatives, and militarists who align with the evangelical-capitalist political assemblage to enact revenge on the nonbelievers of their respective religions: those who fail to believe in Jesus Christ (secular persons, Muslims, etc.), those who fail to believe in the sovereignty of the market (socialists, leftists, etc.), and those who resist the hegemony of American power (terrorists, dissidents, etc.).
Of course, authoritarian populism has reset the basic contours of this resonance machine by reorienting its evangelical-capitalist elements in a more overtly authoritarian and explicitly white nationalist direction. Trump’s 2016 coalition included the traditional elements of a Republican coalition, but the white working-class constituency without a college degree proved decisive in elevating him to the presidency. Just as religious conservatives (particularly, white evangelicals) served as the populist base for the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony, these same voters (Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016) as well as other disaffected white working-class voters now serve as the base for the reconfiguration of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine under Trump (an astonishing 57 percent of Trump’s overall vote in 2016 came from whites without a college degree).118 Trump’s capacity to draw overwhelming support from the evangelical Christian base is one of the most remarkable features of this assemblage insofar as Trump seems to embody the very antithesis of the commitment to moral rectitude and family values that Christian evangelicals promote.119
As noted in the introduction, Trump has assembled this constituency on the basis of economic and status anxieties. Neoliberal policy has eroded the economic fortunes of significant segments of the working class in the United States (and, more broadly, this same population throughout the Euro-Atlantic world). Branko Milanovic’s analysis of the distribution of wealth generated by globalization from 1988 to 2008 provides a clear representation of this reality. He observes that while there was relative growth among the poor in Africa and South Asia (up to 50 percent growth), the emerging middle class in China, India, and Brazil (up to 80 percent growth), and an explosion of wealth among the top 1 percent globally, the middle class in the developed world has grown a grand total of 1 percent over the past thirty years. Virtually every segment of the global population has benefited from globalization.120 Concretely, from 1935 to 1960 the average income in the United States doubled, and from 1960 to 1985 it doubled again.121 Since the 1980s income growth has been flat for the middle class, while the emerging middle class in the global South and the global 1 percent have experienced extraordinary gains. While this is a direct result of globalization (free trade policies), the situation has been amplified by other neoliberal policies: privatization and financialization (the repeal of Glass-Steagall), tax cuts, cuts to social spending, and attacks on redistribution and unionization.
At least two responses are possible to this situation. As we shall see, the response on the left is to demand a political confrontation between the working class and economic elites and to push for more extensive redistribution of wealth, greater economic protections for the working class (e.g., labor unions), and the expansion of educational opportunities for working-class constituencies. Authoritarian populism offers an alternative by advocating for economic nationalism (“America first”) and the creation of antagonisms between the white working class and workers in emerging economies (Mexico, China, etc.). Trump’s specific style of populism has transformed the rhetoric of neoliberalism by arguing that the state should use its power to serve the needs of the working class (renegotiating free-trade agreements and restoring manufacturing in the United States). During the first three years of his presidency, his signature legislative achievement was a tax reform bill that delivered a tax cut that almost exclusively benefited the top 1 percent. And while Trump has escalated trade wars with China and other countries by imposing tariffs on a variety of goods, there is little evidence that his other policy priorities have uplifted the working-class populations who have been devastated by more than forty years of deindustrialization, globalization, and neoliberal policies.
In lieu of transformative economic policies, Trump offered charged white nationalist rhetoric coupled with the promise of violence toward racialized domestic and foreign enemies. Wendy Brown observes that this is how contemporary forms of authoritarian populism function: “Right-wing and plutocratic politicians can get away with doing nothing substantive for their constituencies as long as they verbally anoint their wounds with anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-globalization rhetoric.”122 Trump’s politics are rooted in the dog-whistle racism of the Southern strategy but take form as a more overtly racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic set of attacks on vulnerable populations. This is evident in terms of the pivotal role that Trump played in amplifying the birther controversy (which raised questions about Obama’s birthplace and thereby suggested that he is “foreign” and “unfit” for the presidency); his campaign announcement in 2015 in which he proclaimed that Mexicans were rapists and criminals and as such represented a grave threat to (white) Americans; his claim that he is entitled to grab women by “the pussy”; and the deployment of white male grievance politics in response to the accusation of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh (for example, Trump proclaimed that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America” in response to the accusation of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford).
The policy objectives he offered on the campaign trail follow directly from this overt use of racism to assemble a white base of supporters, from the call to “build a wall” to enacting a “Muslim ban” to prevent citizens from seven countries in the Middle East from visiting the United States. Trump’s ethnonational, anti-immigrant, and transactional form of Christian identity politics draws the white working class, Christian evangelicals, and Southern and rural Americans into a political assemblage driven by resentment toward elites and racialized “others” and the promise of overt violence toward the proclaimed enemies of this identity. As Connolly observes of Trump, “His style is not designed first and foremost to articulate a policy agenda. It draws energy from the anger of its audience as it channels it. It draws into a collage dispersed anxieties and resentments about deindustrialization, race, border issues, immigration, working-class insecurities, trade policies, pluralizing drives, the new place of the United States in the global economy, and tacit uncertainty about the shaky place of neoliberal culture on this planet.”123 This form of politics on the right is performed at the visceral register of cultural life in which various economic, status anxieties, and resentments are assembled into a resonance machine that promises to enact retributive violence on the privileged targets of white male rage: immigrants, Muslims, persons of color in urban centers, feminists, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Again, it is important to emphasize here that while Trumpism represents a vulgar form of right-wing resentment politics, the ground was prepared for the ascendency of this politics by sustained economic disempowerment of the working class (neoliberalism), xenophobic (specifically Islamophobic) militarism (neoconservatism), the dog-whistle politics of the Southern strategy, and misogynistic assaults on women.124 For Connolly, these structural dynamics, which have been perpetuated by successive political assemblages on the right (from the evangelical-capitalist machine with Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to the authoritarian machine with Trump), represent the most grave threat to American democracy.125 He argues that the most effective means to confront the multifaceted attack on democracy from the right is to create a counter-political assemblage on the left.126 Just as the right cultivates and directs the sensibilities of neoliberals, militarists, evangelical Christians, and white nationalists toward particular political ends, the left must cultivate the sensibilities of a diverse coalition toward democratic ends. He observes, “A new movement on the democratic left, if it emerges, will be organized across religious, class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines without trying to pretend that citizens can leave their faiths entirely behind them when they enter public life.”127 Connolly imagines this assemblage as pluralist and comprised of persons from a diverse range of experiences, social locations, and commitments.128 Some might join the movement out of “desperate need” or “economic self-interest,” while others participate “because of religious or nontheistic
