ABSTRACT
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States took most of the world by surprise. Since the 1970s, there have been periods of the rise (and decline) of right-wing populist movements tainted with the xenophobia and extreme nationalism in the capitalist democracies of Western Europe. This worldwide development includes authoritarian regimes in Russia, Brazil, India, the Philippines, Poland, Hungary and Turkey. What they have in common is not simply a “power grab” but one that uses xenophobic nationalism to rally segments of the population. For 150 years, there has also been a segment of the U.S. population accepting of xenophobic, even racist, ultra-nationalist populism. However, the probability of someone winning the presidency by openly espousing these same ideas seemed remote, even more so coming after the voting public’s twice acceptance of a liberal black man as president. Because Trump’s statements are sometimes odd by conventional standards, there is a tendency, common in popular political discourse, to view his behavior in psychological terms rather than in understanding the sociopolitical and economic context that has allowed these views to become normalized. All kinds of ideas are always present in different societies; the crucial question for sociologists is why certain ideas, such as white nationalism, have become more widespread. This chapter explores the changes in global and U.S. political-economic processes over the past fifty years and how they are used by xenophobic populists to expand their base, just as xenophobia is used by various capitalist economic forces to deflect and divert resistance to neoliberal capitalism’s growing crisis, resulting in a large, if unstable, alliance of diverse interests. The rise of resistance movements will also be discussed.
