ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways that whiteness and paternalism work to categorize labor in the 21st-century United States. The entry point for this discussion is the rise of Trumpism, which we understand as a post-civil rights era form of right-wing corporate authoritarianism explicitly rooted in white nationalism. We analyze the race, gender, and class politics of Trumpism, with a particular focus on the interpretive processes that its proponents use as they confront political challenges, work to consolidate and expand their movement, and elaborate an economic vision for the country. Drawing on ethnographic evidence we collected in the far-right blogosphere, we argue that Trump’s economic project was an effort to intervene in the racial and gendered capitalist system to form a petit-bourgeois (not working-class) patriarchal white nation that right-wing racists see as imperiled by the advent of post-civil rights era liberal policies such as multiculturalism, affirmative action, and liberal immigration policies. Their politics represents not just a reactionary critique of neoliberal America, with its attendant racial and gender logics and its “flexible” labor regime. It is also an effort to advance a new form of white supremacist, paternalistic capitalism via new authoritarian politics. This new politics attempts to revalue “middle-class” labor by shoring up its white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal foundations.
