view of this scene of generalized crisis, several pressing questions emerge. What has caused this political and cultural upheaval? Does this fatigue with liberal democracy portend the emergence of populist authoritarianism as a dominant political form? Do there exist plausible alternatives to both democracy in its liberal form as well as authoritarian populism?
In the United States, this crisis was generated by the confluence of a set of mutually amplifying forces. The autopsies given in response to the rise of Trumpism have converged around two interpretative positions that offer competing analyses of its genesis.
The first interpretation posits that the recent ascendancy of authoritarian populism in the United States was driven by economic anxiety created by a series of economic convulsions and neoliberal reforms since the late 1970s. As Thomas Piketty argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the brief period of relative postwar equality—itself an aberration in the history of capitalism—has dissolved over the past forty years and given way to an era of extreme inequality.3 The dual processes of deindustrialization and globalization produced a new relation between capital and labor, deregulation led to the financialization of capitalism, and austerity measures restricted the state’s welfare functions. These overlapping economic-political transformations empowered capital, dispossessed the poor, and created a pervasive sense of insecurity among the working class in the United States. Trump appealed to these insecurities at a rhetorical level—and it appears exclusively at a rhetorical level—by promising his voters economic protection through the rejection of new trade deals (TPP) or the renegotiation of old ones (NAFTA), the restoration of economic security by bringing back jobs lost to globalization (coal and steel), and by building a wall at the US-Mexico border to protect (white) Americans from those who threaten their economic security (Mexicans/Latinxs).4 The data suggests that Trump’s populist pitch was effective at appealing to those communities most devastated by neoliberal restructuring over the past forty years. For example, where in 2016 Hillary Clinton won only 472 counties, Trump won 2,584 counties. However, while Clinton’s counties accounted for 64 percent of the aggregate share of the United States’ GDP, Trump’s counties accounted for only 36 percent of the GDP.5
The second interpretation, often offered as an alternative to “economic anxiety” as an explanation for emergent forms of authoritarian populism in the United States, points to racism as the primary motivation. Trump, of course, is not unique in his political appeal to racial resentments. Politicians employed the dog-whistle racism of the Southern strategy after the civil rights movement as a means of appealing to disaffected whites.6 Trump intensified the strategies of Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton by running an amplified dog-whistle—a virtual foghorn—campaign that assembled racial resentments around a renewed focus on “law and order” and the attendant call to imprison, expel, or eliminate those populations that pose security threats to the United States. Trump described the cause of Americans’ insecurity in racialized terms by invoking fear about Muslim, Latinx, and African-American populations and offered public policies to discipline these populations: a ban on citizens of certain countries from entering the United States (the “Muslim ban”), increased activity around mass deportations and the restriction of funding to sanctuary cities, and a renewed effort to combat “urban crime.”7 Trump’s bold appeal to racialized resentments was stunningly successful. Eighty percent of Trump’s support was white, and several studies have established a strong correlation between racial resentment toward minoritized populations and support for Trump in 2016.8
The narratives about “economic anxiety” and “racial resentment” both possess an explanatory power, but neither is convincing on its own. The loss of economic power and the loss of cultural status do not function as two separate stories, but rather as two parts of the same story in which some Americans feel that the America into which they were born is being replaced with another America.9 This explains the rhetorical power of Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” which simultaneously invokes the restoration of economic security and cultural power to white Americans. And while there is also some evidence that fatigue over the war on terror was a contributing factor in the United States, ultimately, as with European populism, economic anxiety and racial resentment serve as the primary drivers.10
In the face of this type of emergent political formation, what is to be done? Is the task of the left to defend the norms of liberal democracy and the dominant political order against its authoritarian critics? Or should the left view this crisis as an opportunity to push democracy beyond its liberal frame toward more radical futures? The center-left and center-right have argued that the best that can be done is to hold the center. A wave of analyses has been produced that suggest that the most urgent task is to uphold the norms of liberal democracy (despite its historical entanglement with predatory capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and racial and gendered hierarchies). Those who embrace this strategy argue that authoritarian populism is too dangerous a political threat to do anything other than to preserve the liberal political order.11
In his work on the rise of “authoritarian populism” under Thatcher and Reagan, Stuart Hall suggests that we draw an entirely different lesson from political crises of this sort. Not dissimilar from our situation, the late 1970s and early 1980s were a period of upheaval in which an old order was unraveling but a new political hegemony had yet to take hold. Similar to Trump, Thatcher and Reagan utilized race, immigration, and crime as “ideological conductor[s]” to generate a “conservative backlash” against the democratic socialist/New Deal political orders. They assembled a new hegemony by stitching together racialized discourses about crime and security threats, nationalism, and neoliberal assaults on the welfare state to reconstruct the political field. The response on the left was reactive and failed to develop a political vision responsive to shifting cultural and political dynamics. The left assumed that the working class would naturally see their interests reflected in the Labour platform and did little to contest the new political formation on the right or to build a new coalition in response to it. Thatcher’s observation that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour demonstrates the scope of the hegemony established by the right during this period. Clinton and Blair made the judgment that working within the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony established by Thatcher and Reagan was the only winning strategy during that time. As a result, the left was reduced to airing moralistic critiques of Thatcher (e.g., “Isn’t she a cow?”12) instead of engaging in the difficult work of comprehending the cultural and political dynamics that made her brand of authoritarian populism possible. We find a similar pattern in response to Trump in which criticism often focuses on his public persona—his impulsiveness, political incorrectness, and crude bigotry—rather than the underlying structural dynamics that make his style of authoritarian populism attractive to many Americans.
As in Hall’s time, one of the central questions in our time is whether the left will continue to react to the provocations of Trump or if it will generate a substantive analysis of the dynamics of the hegemony on the right and offer an alternative to it. This task has been taken up by a variety of thinkers on the left for whom the present political task cannot be defined exclusively by the attempt to uphold the norms of the established political order. In different ways, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Chantal Mouffe, and William Connolly maintain that the left’s embrace of centrism and its attempt to manage the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony more progressively created the conditions that led to our current political crisis.13 Accordingly, they contend that the constructive political task is to offer a radical approach to democracy that presents a real alternative to both neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony as well as the mutation of this hegemony into new forms of authoritarian populism.
Radical democracy is inclusive of a number of different theoretical and political orientations that range from deliberative (Jürgen Habermas), anarchist (Jacques Rancière), agonistic (Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau), autonomist (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), and decolonial (Enrique Dussel) to fugitive (Sheldon Wolin), feminist (Nancy Fraser), pluralist (William Connolly), and grassroots (Romand Coles and Jeffrey Stout). These diverse trajectories in radical democratic theory differ in important respects but share a common set of political commitments organized around an ethos of radicalization. The “radical” in radical democracy signifies the attempt to return democracy to its “roots” (radix) and to a politics that
