ABSTRACT
Many observers treat "Trumpism" as a pathology of US politics, unrelated to the ideologies of the political mainstream and at odds with the attitudes of the American people. But a closer look at elite discourse and mass attitudes paints a very difference picture. Americans pride themselves on being democrats. For many, democracy is part of America, and some even believe it is unique to democracy. This might explain the limited academic and political attention for the radical right in the US. The idea that radical right politics was a pathology of Western democracies was elaborated in more detail by two German social scientists, Erwin Scheuch and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, who were both strongly influenced by the American scholarship on the radical right. Simply stated, nativism is a xenophobic form of nationalism, incorporating the idea that countries should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group and that nonnative elements are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-states.
