I the People (Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique) by Johnson Paul Elliott

Author:Johnson, Paul Elliott [Johnson, Paul Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817393809
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

6

Donald Trump, White Masculinity, and the Challenge to Populism

INTRODUCTION

Whether launching his campaign, Tweeting, giving stump speeches, or debating other GOP presidential candidates, Donald Trump’s rhetoric when running for president of the United States in 2016 can be characterized as gratuitously offensive. Mexicans were mostly rapists; former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly could not be trusted because “she has blood coming out of her whatever”; Republican Senator John McCain was a loser because he was captured and tortured by North Vietnamese forces; there should be a “shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement threatened to “rape” America. 1 Trump’s comments did not derail his candidacy; he emerged victorious against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even a video leaked in October 2016 in which Trump bragged about nonconsensually grabbing women “by the pussy” could stop his ascent. His eventual electoral victory was a cold reminder that, in the United States, many people can tolerate, even admire, someone’s capacity to treat others like objects. 2 Trump promised to “make America great again” by defining national excellence in opposition to humiliation, violation, and abjection.

Trump’s populist subjects feel sovereign by imagining that their feelings of injury and self-definition are one and the same, an emotional condition political theorist Elizabeth Anker calls “felt powerlessness.” Subjects of felt powerlessness oscillate between feeling subjugated and empowered to sustain sublime intensities that fuel their imagination of themselves as both subject and object. 3 Abject figures like the criminal immigrant are a dual-use resource through which members of Trump’s constituency briefly confront the possibility of their own abjection, react in disgust to reconstitute their own false idea of humanity through the ritualistic objectification of these figures, and then identify with Trump’s promises of domination in an attempt to manage the threat of being humiliated and injured. The subjects locked into this feedback loop become accustomed to a process of self-definition premised on their individual identity as the start and end of their political and social capacities. As a result, felt powerlessness cuts through objective socioeconomic positionality, enabling a well-off owner of a local car dealership to imagine they share a marginal kinship with an unemployed steelworker or put-upon member of the gig economy by virtue of their joint political exclusion.

By promising to fight for an abused “people,” Trump both played into a gladiatorial style central to US conservatism and worked within a broader history of conservative suspicions of consensus politics. 4 He constructed his opponents as part of a broad and powerful political assemblage with several parts. The first of these is the allegedly feminized political system, found both in Trump’s claims that then-President Barack Obama was soft on immigration and terrorism and in his critiques charging that Hillary Clinton’s 2009–2013 term as secretary of state had weakened the nation, emblematized by the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi in 2012 that killed US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. 5 Trump regularly attacked the media to figure them as the second vector of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.