![]() Some populist grievances remain directed at the plutocracy, especially Wall Street. The Tea Party movement, for one, was organizationally prepared and financed by plutocratic agencies and personalities, faking a grassroots movement, although there was a fertile field for many grievances and resentments/hatreds which Trump exploited. Now election campaigns are, more than ever, flooded by many hundreds of millions from mostly unidentified sources. After persistent efforts, present-day plutocracy strengthened its reign in 2010 by virtue of the Supreme Court decision in favor of Citizens United. Plutocracy aims at curtailing state intervention and therefore also at controlling the electoral process. The plutocratic dimension has indeed reached again a high historical point, not seen since the prominence of the super-rich in the Gilded Age. There the populist dimension encompasses age-old hostility to taxation on every level, and to the federal government’s role in serving collective national needs, as well as an ingrained racism and misogyny. In my view, transcending the category of Trumpism is another category, useful for comparison but exemplified first of all in the U.S.: populist plutocracy. The result does not constitute a stable constellation, as far as presidential elections are concerned. The difference in outcome depended on a relatively small number of votes and a fortuitous constellation of factors. Many voters in this broad group voted for Obama twice before turning on Hillary Clinton, the victim of decades-old vilification by Republicans. Much of present-day commentary, including Streeck’s theory of Trumpism, has focused attention on the diffuse role in 2016 of the ill-defined white blue-collar working class in the partially de-industrialized Midwest. In spite of a pattern of unpredictable sudden urges, he cannot be a personal ruler. And now he cannot escape the constraints of a Republican-controlled Congress, however divided it may be in itself. It is a crucial difference from European forms of Trumpism that Trump was, after all, the candidate of one of the two traditional parties. During the first hundred days, Trump has been so much an enabler of old Republican demands that he appeared to some in the media as a good Republican. Ironically, Trump’s election as a self-declared outsider has given the Republicans a mostly unexpected opportunity to realize much of their agenda on the federal level they have already made great advances/strides on the state level, controlling the majority of governorships and state legislatures. But from the outset liberal reformism has encountered uncompromising Republican opposition, which reached another high point during the Obama presidency. Real progress has been made in race and gender relations, which Trump’s boorish behavior and the dog whistles of White supremacists cannot reverse. But since the Great Depression the federal welfare state has been advancing, with stops and goes, encompassing not only welfare for people but for the environment. The last hundred years, since World War I, have seen a great expansion of federal powers, which has had both liberal and illiberal effects and consequences. But these have been real historical strides, which Streeck might not dispute outside his construction, which strikes an apocalyptic tone. are relatively discounted and left out of the historical equation. ![]() Thus, in his typology, the advances of liberal democracy in the U.S. Everything disintegrates, from state-administered capitalism and neoliberalism, in practice and theory, to the woes of the center-left. and western Europe in a uni-dimensional direction, with an almost deterministic dynamic. Streeck’s framework of Trumpism tends to perceive the U.S. But no framework, however inclusive, can ever master the fluidity of historical dynamics. Between them, the historical specificity of a case can be identified, the ultimate aim of historical analysis. He perceives the United States as a polity of status groups, in which “the working class lost its sense of identification with the country as a whole.” But in Weberian analysis, one type or two contrasting ones-as in the old, misleading juxtaposition of bureaucracy and charisma-is insufficient it requires a battery of types, here of different kinds of domination and capitalism. Streeck draws on Marx’s political analysis of Bonapartism as a form of personal rule and on Max Weber’s distinction of class and status groups. As a type, it enables and serves comparisons of similar phenomena. Trumpism appears as a subcategory of populism. ![]() Trumpers are the leaders and Trumpists the followers, as they have emerged in recent years in several countries. Wolfgang Streeck offers a new conceptualization of political phenomena under the heading of Trump and the Trumpists. ![]()
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