The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need

The popular claim chat Trump's election signified resurgent white supremacy is not only wrong but it's dangerous. It grants more power to the fascist right than it deserves. Different voters and constituencies supported Trump for different reasons, not ail of them rational. His "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan worked in multiple registers. On one level, his rhetoric gave comfort to nativist fears of undocumented immigration, terrorism and outsourcing of U.S. jobs, and stoked the racist anxieties of some whites, fearful of the well-publicized demographic "browning" of America. On another and perhaps deeper level. Trump's rhetoric, like that of Reagan's "Morning in America" a generation earlier, promised a return to the affluent society of the Post World War 11 era. In this regard, Trump's campaign was iconoclastic, promising to staunch the bleeding of job loss and capital flight produced by bi-partisan international free trade agreements. His "put America first" protectionist sentiment had a visceral appeal among some voters, but such rhetoric oversimplified the relations between international trade and domestic job growth, and while singling out specific firms as scapegoats, he absolved the investor class as a whole as responsible for decisions about production technology and restructuring that have downsized American manufacturing.