Donald Trump and American Hegemony

초록

Despite all the controversies over his temperament and heretical positions against the orthodoxies of American democracy and global leadership, Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and reality TV show host, has captured the Republican nomination. This paper tries to explain Trump’s rise through a historical and political economy perspective. It identifies and puts Trump campaign’s three strands - White America’s racism/nativism, America First’s economic nationalism/isolationism, and Trump First’s megalomaniac, anti-establishment campaign – into a historical cycle of American hegemony. It examines 1) how the first cycle of America’s expansion and rise to global hegemony, or the ‘special century’ of 1870-1970 had institutionalized White America’s economic prosperity and political power through the New Deal embedded liberalism along with restricted immigration; 2) how the pathologies of neoliberal globalization since the 1970s or American hegemony 2.0, against the historical backdrop of the immigration reforms and civil rights acts of the 1960s, have decimated the American middle class, nurturing America First’s economic nationalism and White America’s resentments; and 3) how the financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent racialization of the Obama administration’s policies have aggravated America First’s economic plights and White America’s resentments, and led to a political meltdown that has allowed Trump First’s onslaught against the establishment.

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