White supremacy,white counter-revolutionary politics,and the rise of Donald Trump

Abstract

To understand and contextualize Donald Trump's election as President of the United States, we must place his election in the context of a white counter-revolutionary politics that emerging from the specific geographic configurations of the US racial state. While academics and political commentators have correctly located the election of Trump in the context of white supremacy, I argue we need to coordinate our understanding of white supremacy and the electoral politics that fueled Trump's rise in the context of anti-Black racism by examining how the US racial state turns to whiteness to prevent change. Throughout the development of the United States, whiteness has long stood as a bulwark against progressive and revolutionary change so much so that when the US racial state is in economic and political crisis, bourgeoisie capitalism appeals to the white middle and working classes to address that crisis.

Keywords

Anti-Black racism white supremacy racialized capital counter-revolution electoral politics

On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump descended the gilded tower of Trump headquarters to a crowd of adoring fans. Accustomed to seeing him on his reality television show The Apprentice his appearance had all the trappings of modern, US celebrity-obsessed culture. As the escalator slowly propelled him to what many called the most improbable presidential run in US history, few could have guessed the way he was to launch his campaign. Framing his campaign as a time to “Make America Great Again,” Trump assailed the danger of illegal immigration, and the way jobs were being shipped overseas, especially to China. These populist economic appeals were overshadowed however when he declared: “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best […]They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume are good people” (D.J. Trump, 2015). While widely condemned by both Democrats and some Republicans, and as many pundits wrote off his campaign as “fringe,” in hindsight his comments revealed the nature and strategy of the campaign. Over the course of the next 18 months, he would refine his appeal and extend his racist rhetoric towards inner-city America, Muslims, and other immigrant groups, building on his Birtherism claim that President Obama was not a US citizen or eligible for the Presidency. When on 8 November 2016, his election assured, the political classes of the United States were breathless, struggling to fathom how he was able to capture the Presidency of the United States. To see his candidacy as an anomaly is to miss the broad currents that run through the US political economy and the ways race is central to the workings of American capitalism.

Specifically, I argue that we need to see Trump’s rise to political power in the context of a white counter-revolutionary politics that emerges from specific geographic configurations of the US racial state and historical trajectories of anti-Black racism. My reading of this moment connects with recent scholarship on Trump that argues his rise to prominence was fueled by an oversimplification of identity that served to distract from policies that are deleterious to working peoples the world over (Gokariksel and Smith, 2017: 639). Critically, by “centering an ideal masculine, impenetrable, normalized and heteronormative white male body” as central to the US political system (Gokariksel and Smith, 2017: 639) Trump tapped into a much longer history of white supremacy that has long stood as a conservative bulwark against progressive change or a radical reconfiguration of the US political economy. Throughout US history when the US economy is in economic and/or political crisis, bourgeoisie capitalism appeals to the white middle and working classes to forestall change (e.g. Feagin, 2012; Gilmore, 1999; Inwood, 2015; Lipsitz, 2011; Woods, 1998). By locating Trump's rise and electoral success in the more extended context of US political development this paper builds from recent scholarship on Trump (e.g. Gokariksel and Smith, 2017; Ingram, 2017; Koch, 2017; Page and Dittmer, 2016) and scholars who locate the election of Trump in the context of white supremacy (e.g. Hananoki, 2016; Harkinson, 2016; Kharakh and Primack, 2016; Posner and Neiwert, 2016; Roy, 2016).

As Page and Dittmer (2018: 208) explain, Trump grounded his campaign (and his Presidency) in a white populism that was central to motivating his voting base. Additionally, Gokariksel and Smith (2016: 79) locate:

Trump’s rhetoric and performance of white masculinity as formative of a fascist body politics that seeks to preserve white male supremacy. Trump uses the gendered, racialized body as a proxy for the nation and locates threats to the nation in non-white and non-male bodies embodying deep-seated fears of ‘white decline’ and threatened borders.

While agreeing with the broad outlines of these arguments, by placing Trump within historically situated and grounded geography that emerges from specific geographic configurations of racial capitalism and its operation in the United States I want to extend these analyses to engage with the role that whiteness has long played in US political geography. As a result, I argue that we need to understand the role a white counter-revolutionary politics plays in the US political economy. Additionally, I argue we can understand the fundamental role white supremacy plays in US electoral politics. This reading of the election has consequences for resisting Trump and the white counter-revolutionary politics that impede progressive and radical reconfigurations of the US racial state. While many groups and individuals continue to labor under a “dark cloud” (Doan, 2017) Moss and Maddresll’s recent call to remain encouraged and engaged calls us to reflect on the ways we can “forge dynamic collectives” that focus on “the relations and dialectical tensions that bind them together” (Moss and Maddresll, 2017: 619) as a political organizing strategy. Within a US context, this invariably intersects with a long history of race and racism central to US development (Bledsoe et al., 2017).

To make these arguments, I connect the US political economy to the role white working, and middle classes play in forestalling progressive change. Building from this perspective and engaging with recent scholarship in geography on Du Bois (Brand, 2018; Inwood, 2015; Wilson, 2002), I argue it is a useful perspective to understand the rise of Trump. This reading is essential in a context which has seen neoliberalism and austerity programs intensify inequities in ways that exacerbate the fears of many working whites who are “affected by falling wages, increased job insecurity, and the hollowing out of the welfare state” (Roth, 2018: 7). The rapid mobilization to resist Trump (Moss and Maddresll, 2017) calls for us to understand how this political moment came into being and why it is a response to racialized geographies that predominant in the United States. This perspective involves understanding the role that identity politics play in the material reproduction of the US political economy emerging from a sustained critique of US-style racialized capitalism.

White counter-revolutionary politics and the US racial state

Writing in 1967 in Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos, or Community Martin Luther King Jr., wrote: “America has long had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race” (68). First, the United States was founded on principles of equality and justice, but second, the United States was built through genocidal practices and enslaved labor. King engaged two themes central for anti-racist scholarship: the role of slavery in the United States and the persistence of anti-Black racism to understanding the US racial hierarchy (e.g. Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Feagin, 1991; Inwood and Bonds, 2013; Pulido, 2015; Stanley, 2016).

These insights begin with the premise that “white-on-black oppression” is not only foundational to the United States but shapes a variety of racial oppression that constitutes the racial hierarchy in the United States (Wun, 2016: 739). Critical for understanding the role of race in the United States is the way chattel slavery introduces the ownership of Black bodies as a permanent condition within the United States political economy (Woods, 1998). Woods explains:

The mass production of both romanticized versions of plantation life, and of negative African American stereotypes are defining features of the national popular culture. These traditions have been the foundations of various anti-African American alliances across race, ethnicity, class, gender, regional and national lines from the antebellum to the present. (1998: 47)

Emerging from this passage is the understanding that chattel slavery introduces a particular set of “spatialized expressions of white supremacy” through technologies and practices and which are rooted in the impulse to control and contain black people in place (Brand, 2018: 7) and which are grounded in plantation logics (McKittrick, 2011). As Clyde Woods noted in 2007 slavery and the development of the plantation is not only a pillar of capital development, but is central to the operation and development of the racial hierarchy in the United States. The central role anti-Black racism plays in the development of race and capital in the United States has implications for how we think about race and whiteness in our present context. Anti-Black racism has long been used to shore up and consolidate “European ethnic identity” but is also used to expand the “racial configurations of whiteness” (Shabazz, 2015: 15) in ways that promise advancement for those who are not black (Inwood and Bonds, 2013). A cornerstone of racism in the United States and a question that has long driven anti-racist scholarship concerns how whiteness is deployed strategically to meet periodic crises in the United States? Additionally, because plantation logics have long proffered the ownership of Black bodies as a central tenant of the US political economy when African Americans are perceived to gain civil or economic rights, those gains are often positioned by white politicians and the popular press as coming at the expense of whites. This is positioned as a threat to the existing racial order which folds back into histories of anti-Black racism (Omi and Winant, 1994).

Elkins and Pedersen argues that the “cast division” that is created between whites and subordinated populations is “built into the economy, the political system, the law, with particular economic activities and political privilege (including sometimes, rights to own land, vote or be tried according to metropolitan standards of justice) reserved for members of the settler population” (2005: 4). Furthermore, scholarship within Geography has looked at the ways these privileges are “sedimented” into a range of sociospatial practices and can be deployed strategically to meet challenges to the existing racial order (Brand, 2018; Schein, 2006). Because race is a social construction that maps onto material realities of exploitation, it is essential to focus on how white supremacy and the foundation of structural racism in the United States is a continuously unfolding set of practices of subordination and domination of racialized, gendered and sexed populations and central to these processes is the way whiteness is always and everywhere in a state of becoming (Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

As a result of this reality when the political and economic situation in the United States changes or minority populations appear to make financial or social gains, the US racial state can adjust itself to continue processes that perpetuate whites privileged position within the US nation-state (Woods, 2017). This flexibility gives the US racial state and its attendant white supremacist foundation a frustrating endurance and enables the US racial state to deal with unfolding challenges to whites privileged position (Gilmore, 1999). However, because whiteness is positioned as being under threat from “others” and whites are often positioned as vulnerable this perceived vulnerability means that when civil rights gains occur, or African American or other groups make social and political gains, these efforts invariably incur a “white backlash” due to a perception that these benefits must come at the expense of whites. As King argued in 1967:

This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward [minority groups] causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to [African Americans] and repelled by him [sic]. There has never been a solid thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. (King, 1967: 68)

King’s insights when placed within the broader context of the US racial state centers the rise of Trump. Trump was able to tap into anxieties that have long positioned whites’ privileged position as under threat. As Gokariksel and Smith note, Trump’s call to Make American Great Again “signaled an agenda that would reverse the gains women, non-whites, immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQ activists” had made over the last several decades and tied into historic geographies of race and gender (2018: 209). When Trump's rhetoric is coupled with broader economic populism, and Trump's political playbook is time-worn politics in the United States. Thus, it is essential to understand how Trump's political triumph relates to historic and sustained geography linked to the role that whiteness and specifically white supremacy plays in the United States. Trump's election is why I argue it is necessary to understand how whiteness acts as a counter-revolutionary bulwark against progressive and even radical change in the United States. To explore the reality of the US racial state, the role white supremacy plays in the US political economy, and the influence of white workers in forestalling the freedom dreams of multiple groups in the United States, I turn to WEB Du Bois and arguments that emerge in Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

Race and the US political economy

The critical insight from Black Reconstruction—one of particular contemporary significance—is the unique role that white workers played in ending the freedom aspirations of Black men and women freed from chattel slavery at the end of the US Civil War. Brand (2018) explains that a focus on Du Bois can locate “historical racial oppressions” as well as the way those practices are part of “ongoing colonial and plantation practices that foretell racial futures” (6). Additionally, Bobby Wilson (2002) notes that in engaging with Du Bois we can work through history in an effort that does “not return to the past, but [provides] a critique and an understanding of the present” (32). In other words, a focus on Du Bois provides both the historical context to understand the long trajectory of racial oppression in the United States, and also is useful for understanding how these historic practices have changed and morphed over time and through space yet remain central to our contemporary era.

David Roediger (1991) suggests that Du Bois’ work in Black Reconstruction is important for two reasons. First, Black Reconstruction is Du Bois' attempt to come to terms with the profound disappointment of the Reconstruction era, when, with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, there appeared to be a new burst of freedom in the United States (Balfour, 2003: 33). This era collapsed under the weight of “Southern Redemption” and the uniting of white workers and the plantation aristocracy with northern industrialists (Wilson, 2002; Woods, 1998, 2017). This collaboration saw the Southern plantation class regain much of their political clout lost through their defeat in the Civil War through the creation of segregation and sharecropping labor systems that re-enslaved blacks and poor whites throughout the south (Inwood, 2015; Wilson, 2002; Woods, 1998, 2017).

Second, Black Reconstruction stands in opposition to efforts at whitewashing the central role of slavery in the Civil War by countering the “Lost Cause Narrative” that predominated in the United States at that time (Bailey, 1991). The Lost Cause was a movement to valorize the South and Confederate leaders and minimize the fundamental role that slavery played in the US Civil War. In our contemporary era, white supremacists associated with alt-right politics have rallied around Confederate memorials and iconography reviving a white supremacist political movement. A recent example was seen in Charlottesville, Virginia when the local city council decided to remove a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee. Thousands of pro-white, Klan and Nazi groups rallied in opposition to the plan—highlighting that Du Bois’ work continues to be relevant. Du Bois refused to normalize the discourses around African Americans at that time by revealing the whitewashing of Civil War history as an effort supporting a broader articulation of white supremacy (see Robinson, 1983; Woods, 2017 for a more extensive discussion). We should understand Du Bois as resisting the attempts to normalize a new and resurgent white supremacy in the United States— a lesson that is important in our current context and the broader discourse to normalize Trump. As the efforts of the Lost Cause narrative took hold, Black Reconstruction provided a powerful intellectual counterpoint to emerging narratives which legitimated anti-Black racism at the time.

In our contemporary era, we can see echoes of the Lost Cause Narrative in efforts to question the legitimacy of Barack Obama's Presidency through “birtherism.” Birtherism is the claim by many on the political right that President Obama was not a US citizen because they assert he was born overseas either in Indonesia or Kenya (despite documentation of his birth in Hawaii). Based on the US Constitution, a non-US birth would disqualify him from holding the office of the President and this “birther theory” was widely floated on social media and in alt-right circles (Hughey, 2012). The discourse around birtherism connects to anti-Black racism and the perception of threatening foreignness so critical to the US racial state and has its roots in the historical context of the Lost Cause (Gokariksel and Smith, 2018). Mathew Hughey explains that essential elements of the Lost Cause narrative included delegitimizing newly empowered African American citizenry by representing African Americans as a threat to the national order, and in many cases contextualizing blackness as “foreigners” usurping US democracy (2012). This theme repeats itself in the development of US democracy and is a trope that has long been used to sway voters and exercise political power. Donald Trump initially rose to national political prominence in Republican Presidential politics by engaging in birtherism claims and attacking President Obama in ways reminiscent of past campaigns to paint African Americans as not only threats to the racial order, but as illegitimate members of United States society.

Finally, Black Reconstruction is Du Bois attempt to apply a grounded Marxism approach to understanding race and racism in the United States (Robinson, 1983). Du Bois begins his analysis from the standpoint that the exploitation of black labor is the “foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure but Northern manufacture and commerce.” He goes on to explain that this introduces a paradox into the US political consciousness where:

It became easy to say and easier to prove that these black men were not men in the sense white men were, and could never be, in the same sense, free. Their slavery was a matter of both race and social condition, but the condition was limited and determined by race. (Du Bois, 1935: 5)

As Du Bois alludes, the slave labor system cements into the US political economy a material reality and also a set of discursive constructions related to class, race, gender, and sexuality predicated on the needs of social and economic reproduction in the political economy of the nation (Gilmore, 1999; Shabazz, 2015; Woods, 1998, 2017). These insights form the basis for much of our contemporary understanding of anti-Black racism and the geographically specific ways the US racial state has developed. For example, in his 2015 book Spatializing Blackness, Rashad Shabazz argues that the color line that Du Bois talks about is constructed to recapture black labor power and to police black sexuality in ways that tie into the development of carceral power. Shabazz’s analysis opens space to understand the specific ways anti-Black racism has been made and remade in and through space and place. This reading of Du Bois places his work in a contemporary context that continues to have implications for the way we think about the operationalization of race in 21st-century US society.

There are several broad implications from Du Bois’ analysis that apply to our present socio-political situation. First, Du Bois describes how the United States not only developed—economically, politically and socially—but continues to operate through the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, through institutional reliance on white supremacy. This inculcates a range of institutions and practices in a broad framework of white supremacy, anti-Black racism and continues processes of white supremacist violence (Inwood and Bonds, 2016). One need not look far to see the specter of Jim Crow segregationist policies in contemporary efforts to restrict the access of the vote to poor and minority populations (Ollstein and Lerner, 2016); the violent suppression of Native American activists protesting the Dakota Access tar sands oil pipeline (Aisch and Lai, 2016); the growth of white supremacist hate groups (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017) as well as in restrictions aimed at travelers from the Middle-East (Hunter, 2017) and the indiscriminate and routine killing of black men and women at the hands of US security forces (Waldron and Craven, 2016).

Perhaps nothing illustrates this so readily as the rise in white supremacist hate crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported an “upsurge” in hate crimes and violence directed at minority communities during the Presidential election year (Eversley, 2016). A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) expands on the FBI’s statistics and engages with a broader understanding of this proliferation of violence. The SPLC notes that in 2016 hate crime reached a five-year high (2017). These offenses connected to the empowerment of hate groups and white supremacists in the run-up to the election. The SPLC report documents almost two dozen incidents of violence at Trump Presidential rallies where avowed white supremacists or Trump supporters attacked persons of color or others at those gatherings. The realities documented by the SPLC and the FBI are grounded in a white racialized politics that has perpetually influenced United States institutional democracy. As a result, we cannot see these as anomalous to the development of the United States. Instead, they are the kind of anti-Black racism that is part of the nation’s foundation. The pattern of white counter-revolutionary politics has repeated throughout the development of the United States. Whenever African Americans and other minority groups have achieved civil rights progress or when whites perceive their position in society as vulnerable, there has been an upsurge in white supremacist violence and opposition to the legal progress of people seen as socially suspect or material threats to the United States racial and gendered hierarchy. There is a well-documented pattern in US race relations echoing King's insights that when whites feel their privileges in US society are threatened; there is a return to white supremacy and the white supremacist foundations of the United States.

Psychological wage of whiteness

In explaining why patterns of violence and oppression related to anti-black racism are written into the United States' political economy, Du Bois introduces the idea of the “psychological wage” of whiteness (1935: 700). He explains that white workers—through the virtue of their “whiteness,” and despite being exploited in the labor market are “compensated in part by a public and psychological wage” that made up for the deprivations experienced through the capitalist economy. He goes on to explain:

They [whites] were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public [spaces and places]. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts dependent upon their votes treated them with leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (Du Bois, 1935: 700–701)

Key to understanding Du Bois’ insight is the ways whiteness is wrapped in a particular identity position that confers upon whites a set of privileges central to the place of whites in society. According to Du Bois, the psychological wage undermined working class unity, and perverted whites into believing that they must defend their position in society through an any means necessary approach that included violence, fraud and the inscription of inequality into the legal framework of the nation. The “psychological wage” helps to explain Trump’s appeal to the white working and middle classes. I argue this also places his rise into its proper geographic context. The election of Barrack Obama—the nation’s first black President—threatened the psychological benefits that come from whites’ dominant position in U.S. society. More telling is the way the perceived threat to whiteness historically has led to a wave of white supremacist violence.

A second broad implication from Du Bois’s analysis is through the creation of racialized capital in the United States. Racial capitalism explains how the US deals with periodic crises of social and economic reproduction and how these crises resolve through a re-articulation of anti-Black racism and white supremacy that reinforces or expands white Bourgeoisie capitalisms power and role in US society. Throughout the broad arc of the US political system, when the economy comes into periods of sustained crisis, whiteness often stands as the counterweight to progressive and even revolutionary change. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has documented this pattern extensively within the prison industrial complex including how the modern prison regime links to a broader crisis in late Keynesianism (Gilmore, 1999). When a crisis of reproduction happens, very rarely is it resolved through innovation, but instead, it is through “already existing social, political and economic relations” that “constitute the conditions of possibility (but not inevitability) for ways to solve major problems” (Gilmore, 1999: 174). Inwood (2015) argues that because of the malleability of race, appeals to white supremacy and broader racial relations almost always hold power to meet crises of social and economic reproduction. Even more recently, Woods (2017) book Development Drowned outlines the history of Louisiana and the way the restoration of “Bourbon Capitalism” was wrought from the uniting of white identity. Taken together and whiteness in these contexts has the material effect of shifting the focus from structural economic conditions that call into question capitalism, to a broader fear of “the other” which reinforces dominate discourses of the racial state. When the US finds itself in a period of economic and social crisis, it requires the state to “fix difference in order to maintain internal pacification” (Gilmore, 2002: 20). “[I]n good times, the state remedies exclusion by recognizing the structural nature of racism and institutionalizing means for combating its effects [the Civil Rights Act as one example].” In bad times “the ‘fix’ formalizes inequality” (Gilmore, 2002: 21). As neoliberalism has come into crisis, the bad times have reverberated from rural Appalachia through the Mid-Western deindustrialized landscape. In the wake of these economic downslides, white supremacy has emerged as a dominant force for the reorganization of capital.

The crisis of white reproduction, the rise of Trump and white counterrevolutionary politics

The psychological wage of whiteness discussed previously is vital to understanding how politicians can take advantage of anxiety in white communities to animate political responses that intersect with the realities of race and white supremacy. Central to this argument is the way crisis and surplus are two sides of the same coin. Gilmore argues, “within any system of production, the idling or surplusing of productive capacities means that the society dependent on the production cannot reproduce itself as it had in the past. Such inability is a hallmark of crisis, since reproduction, broadly conceived, is a human imperative” (Gilmore, 1999: 178). Gilmore’s definition has implications that go beyond the burgeoning crunch of late capitalism to inculcate challenges for working and middle-class whites that directly connects to the way Trump tapped into underlying realities of white supremacy to fuel his campaign (Roth, 2018). When capitalism comes into crisis in the United States, the crisis is forestalled by counterrevolutionary whiteness that acts as a bulwark against radical change to structural conditions of the US economy.

In the present moment, two reproductive imperatives came together to create conditions in which ascendant white supremacy was fundamental to Trump's election victory. The first involves a broad-based economic crisis which impacted white middle and working-class families, coupled with a recovery that concentrated wealth in fewer hands. Second, a perception pushed by the alt-right that whites in the US are in danger of becoming a “minority” within the nation-state and that the US is about to be overrun with “foreigners” which was intentionally linked to economic crises. These imperatives drove Trump’s campaign as several of his closest advisors draw from the ranks of alt-right and white supremacist groups. Thus, it is essential to see the ways the social status of whiteness was made to appear under threat at the very moment white working and middle classes were having their middle-class lifestyles challenged through a burgeoning economic crisis. Big money political players once again insisted the dominant position of whites was challenged by reusing old playbooks of white supremacy and race, long present in US politics.

The reality is that many broad changes to the US economy over the last several decades have gutted or threatened many of the jobs that working and middle-income people in the United States have relied on to secure their piece of the American Dream. It is necessary to expand beyond the narrow understanding of the Trump coalition proffered by many mainstream commentators and to examine his core constituency. In the aftermath of the election, the “Voter Study Group” analyzed Trump voters to understand the issues that drove their votes. The Voter Study Group is a research collaboration of at least 24 academics who were drawn from across the political spectrum, and their study on the election represents one of the most complete analyses of the election and Trump's core constituency (Drutman, 2017). The group found that “[v]oters who experienced increased or continued economic stress were more inclined to have become more negative about immigration and terrorism demonstrating how economic pressures coincided with cultural concerns” (Drutman, 2017). These views tended to cluster around swing voters who switched from Obama to Trump and who “tended to have negative views on the economy in general and of their financial situation. Our [Voter Study Group] analysis shows that these views helped to make these voters more open to Trump's message both on the economy and other matters” (Drutman, 2017). Also, the study found a correlation between “beliefs about black people’s ability to progress in society […] without special favors like prior immigrant groups” and strong negative associations about Muslims and illegal immigration in US society (Drutman, 2017). In addition, a more recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents that for voters who switched their support from Democrats to Republicans in the last election this switch was driven by a perceived loss of racial status and the sense that whites status as a dominant group was threatened by demographic changes to the nation (Mutz, 2018).

The Voter Study Group and the recent work in National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that the marriage of a set of economic concerns with deeply rooted perceptions about race and racism within the United States propelled Trump into the White House. Trump’s campaign exploited deeper socio-spatial relations that are rooted in anti-Black racism and the geography of the US racial state. Feagin explains that one of the keys to understanding anti-Black racism is the way many whites deny the seriousness of past discriminations or the way those histories continue to impact present realities (2000: 88). In a more extensive study, Feagin further found that a critical assertion by whites is a “romanticizing of the racist past” and nostalgia for a return to a simpler time (Feagin, 2000: 89). This, perhaps more than anything, helps to explain Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” and the way he coupled the economic precarity with appeals to the psychological wage of whiteness. To understand how this was operationalized I now turn to a discussion on broad changes to the economic structure of the US economy followed by a discussion about the perception by Trump voters that the US is about to overrun with “foreigners.”

Financialization and the crisis of white (economic) reproduction

Neoliberal economic policies have wreaked havoc on middle, and working-class people in the United States and the neoliberal crisis has increased economic anxieties (Roth, 2018). As a doctrine, neoliberalists “argue for the desirability of a society organized around self-regulating markets, and free, to the extent possible, from social and political intervention” (Glassman, 2009: 497). As policy neoliberalism often differs from its theory; implementation of neoliberal policy is uneven (Glassman, 2009). In the United States, neoliberalism policy focused on the deregulation of financial markets and the opening of borders to trade of goods and services. US Neoliberal policies exported overseas many of the factories that had long created a middle-class lifestyle for working people. Furthermore, they liberalized the financial sector triggering the release of speculative capital which fueled the largest concentration of wealth since before the Great Depression.

Saad-Filho argues that these policies created a situation in which capital had to increasingly rely on the engineering of the financial sector to deliver profits and returns (2011). As he argues, “financialization plays a pivotal role in contemporary neoliberal capitalism because it supports the trans-nationalization of production, facilitates the concentration of income and wealth, and supports the political hegemony of neoliberalism through continuing threats of capital flight” (2011: 244). This reality has been especially deleterious to blue-collar and industrial workers who now face increased competition “between individual capitals and between and within national working classes” (Saad-Filho, 2011: 244). As a result, global manufacturers could play working people off of each other and leverage huge tax and infrastructure deals with local, state and federal governments. Taken together this created a situation which concentrated wealth in fewer hands and resulted in the working and middle classes in the United States having to rely on cheap credit to finance their middle-class lifestyles. Harvey (2007) notes that the era of “speculative and predatory” practices allowed the financial system “to become one of the main centers of redistributive activity through speculation, predation, fraud and thievery” (161). Perhaps more destructive, the efforts to deregulate finance capital opened the “nation to the free flow of capital” such that it is more difficult to control or respond to a broad-based economic crisis (Beder, 2009: 19). All of this came to a head in 2007 when the US housing bubble burst and the world economy entered into a period of slow growth known in the US as the “Great Recession.”

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the US housing market rapidly expanded. Fueled by low-interest rates and relaxed lending regulation, there was a boom in US home building in the middle and late 1990s, and housing prices rose substantially during this period. From 1990 to 1995, there was an average of just over 600,000 new home starts in the US (Smith and Smith, 2006). From 1995 to 2005, this number nearly doubled as over 1.2 million new homes were built annually (Smith and Smith, 2006). This explosive housing growth was especially pronounced in the US Sunbelt as baby boomers and retirees moved to take advantage of the housing market in Arizona, California, and Florida as well as urban centers like Washington, DC which became destination hotspots for middle and upper-income homeowners. Importantly this housing boom allowed US homeowners to use their homes to finance consumer spending and credit card debt payments and ushered in a period of unbridled consumer spending. In 2005, the Federal Reserve noted in its annual report that homeowners used rising housing prices to extract $750 billion of equity from their homes and almost seventy percent of this money went to personal consumption and credit card debt (Greenspan and Kennedy, 2007). Unsurprisingly, this created an oversupply of housing and, when coupled with slowdowns in other sectors of the economy, put pressure on the housing market. In 2007, these tensions came to a head. By 2008, the Case-Shiller home pricing index had recorded the most significant price drop in the history of the index. The decline in home prices effectively wiped out billions of dollars from the US economy—and because so many consumers were using their home prices to finance their lifestyles, tens of millions of Americans found themselves underwater as the value of their homes was less than the mortgages they owed.

The challenges of the housing crisis exacerbated already precarious economic conditions in much of middle America. The Economic Policy Institute notes that while the Great Recession was terrible, its effects were concentrated on the bottom tier of the US economy. While the upper fifth of the US lost about 16% of their net worth, the bottom 80% of the population lost 25% of their net worth with those losses being especially hard on working families (Fry and Kochar, 2014). As home values plummeted many families were devastated; many have yet to recover and watched their precarious situation grow direr. The Great Recession and the housing crisis intensified economic strains that were already beginning to show through the loss of middle-class manufacturing jobs and growth of the low-wage service sector. These financial pressures created an economic crisis that exacerbated already existing racial tensions, and as has been the case previously, when brought into crisis racial capital in the United States tends to turn to white supremacy as a means of forestalling a progressive economic restructuring of the United States.

Returning to the theme of the “psychological wage of whiteness” and I argue the financial crisis is critical to seeing how Trump tapped into historic strains of white supremacy to fuel his election victory. The psychological wage of whiteness undermines class unity, and when the economic crisis hits, whites from a variety of class positions close ranks to defend their perceived privileges in society. Thus, whereas economic anxieties might be assumed to create conditions in which working and middle-income people—regardless of race—would begin to organize to protect benefits and opportunities, white bourgeoisie capital will instead use the psychological wage of whiteness to forestall those coalitions and extend their financial positions. Historically, this white race coalition undermined the position of newly freed slaves after the end of the Civil War as Du Bois discusses (1935), and ushered in an era of repressive politics and economic policies that crippled working class peoples of all races (see Shabazz, 2015; Woods, 2017). As a result, it is vital to understand Trump's appeal as grounded in historic realities of race and whiteness that have long predominated in the US. However, because Gilmore defines a crisis beyond its narrow definition and there are other ways whites perceive their privileged position within society to be under threat.

The crisis of white (biological) reproduction

According to the Census Bureau, the US is on a path to be a majority/minority nation with whites making up less than half of the total US population by 2060 (Chappell, 2015). Fears of the decline of white America have been around since colonial times, and those concerns manifest themselves in different ways. However, throughout US history, the loss of white identity has been central to the kinds of politics Trump engages. The rise of Trump and many of his senior campaign advisors with their connections to the “alt-right” illustrate how these views were central to Trump’s campaign. According to the SPLC, the Alternative Right (Alt-Right) is:

a set of far-right ideologies, groups, and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew “establishment” conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value.

Trump is firmly grounded in a long history of white supremacist politics. For example, Kellyanne Conway—Trump’s campaign manager—operated a political consulting firm that was well known for working with “certain groups that other Republicans avoided or dismissed as fringe” (Ball, 2017: 48). This includes the “Federation for American Immigration Reform” (FAIR). According to the SPLC—a non-profit that tracks hate groups in the United States—FAIR has long been a front for anti-immigrant and “pro-white” politics. Through her work for FAIR, Conway helped to develop the “missing whites theory” that posits Republican Presidential politicians John McCain and Mitt Romney had “failed to inspire white working class people” to support their political ambitions, and therefore they lost their elections (Ball, 2017: 50). The “missing whites” theory argues that Republican politicians did not need to reach out to minority voters, but instead needed to push a range of policies that spoke directly to white working and middle class sentiments and took advantage of white antipathies towards persons of color. In an article in the Atlantic magazine Steve Bannon—noted Trump advisor—was quoted as saying that “Conway’s polling [and messaging on immigration] formed the intellectual infrastructure of [Trump’s] 2016” presidential run (Ball, 2017: 48).

These connections to the alt-right were more profound than a senior campaign aide. While Donald Trump enjoyed a reputation as someone who talked “off the cuff” and was unpredictable, as the workings of his campaign and administration are uncovered, he explicitly grounded his presidential campaign in a concerted effort which appealed to whites who were aggrieved over neoliberal economic changes and a perception that whites’ privileged position in the US was shifting. In so doing Trump tapped into a contemporary understanding of the US racial state, and a backlash to the gains of African Americans and other minority populations during the US civil rights struggle. Nowhere is this discourse more prominently displayed than in the pages of the popular alt-right website Breitbart.com.

Breitbart is an alt-right online resource that was run by Trump campaign director and former senior White House councilor Steve Bannon. Breitbart has funded stories by a range of controversial conservative and Republican activists who are not given space in mainstream Republican publications. In tracing the rise of Trump and his connection to white nationalism and white supremacy, I turn to an article written by Milo Yianopoulos and Allum Bokhari entitled: “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It has become a kind of manifesto and outlines many of the core beliefs of the alt-right and the way they stand in opposition to mainstream Republican politics and politicians. In an analysis of the article by the Atlantic, numerous references to a white tribe, race and the west are noted, and the authors highlight that it is a conservative guide to a coded and well-rehearsed white supremacist reality. For example, Bokhari and Yiannopoulus write the alt-right is:

Mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritizes the interests of their own demographic [and includes a focus on] or homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions. (Bokhari and Yiannopoulus, 2016)

This paragraph is particularly instructive as it reads like a campaign guide to the Trump campaign effort. First, there is the attack on a vague and unspecified foreignness that represents a desire for homogeneity and stability. Recall from the previous section that Trump’s campaign was grounded in an “ideal masculine, impenetrable, normalized and heteronormative white male body” (Gokariksel and Smith, 2017: 639) that positioned itself in opposition to various “others.” From the opening moments of the Trump campaign, the gilded and “Presidential” decent at Trump tower, and later Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants and these comments point to a calculated effort to appeal to a particular vision of whiteness. This is backed up by the analysis from the Voter Study Group as well as the more recent study by the National Academy of Sciences and outlined earlier. Trump’s message is targeted at voters who were not only affected economically but also held beliefs about minorities and African Americans which saw those groups as threats. As a result, his attacks on Mexican immigrants and vague appeals to a kind of national solidarity not only connect closely with the views outlined by Bokhari and Yiannopoulus but could have been written by FAIR and Conway. From the earliest moments that Trump entered the Presidential contest, he focused on motivating his base of “missing whites”—those who were disaffected by the economy and who increasingly blamed a range of minorities for their precarious position.

These themes played a prominent role in much of Breitbart’s writing about the election. In yet another example Breitbart ran a series of stories about the end of the white majority in the US. Just days before the election their lead story declared: “Tim Kaine [Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate] Cheers End of White Majority in Spanish Address” (Hahn, 2016). The article detailed a speech that Kaine gave in Arizona, spoken in Spanish in which he stated that because the US will be a majority/minority nation by 2050, Latinos will have a greater degree of voting power in the US. This headline played on the fears of many right-wing pundits and Trump voters. The themes of these articles connect to a central fear that many whites have about perceived threats to their position in society that underscore understandings of the psychological wage of whites. The psychological wage of whiteness relies on numerous perceived benefits from whites’ position within the racial hierarchy, and there has long been a “fear that any change” to the racial hierarchy would show how illusory white freedom is (Roediger, 1991: 58). What Roediger is pointing to is the reality that white supremacy has rested on a shallow and fragile foundation—a reality that whites are keenly aware and as a result, many whites are willing to defend their position in society through a range of violent and political means. The stories that Breitbart posted connected to the erosion of whiteness and linked to a history and geography that posits the fragility of whites in the broader society that connects to several of Trump's key voting demographic (Drutman, 2017). When connected to other stories posted by Breitbart which headlined: “Lena Dunham Posts Video Celebrating the Extinction of White Men on Twitter” [which featured a large picture of Hilary Clinton] (Nash, 2016); “Milo: Lena Dunham Wants Extinction of White Men', While Hillary Plans to Import Isis” (Nash, 2016); “Anti-White Racism: The Hate That Dares Not Speak its Name” (Horowitz, 2016), as well as a slew of more recent stories, focused around “white oppression” it becomes clear that the Breitbart messaging was calculated to engage in broad currents of America's racial geography related to white supremacy.

The psychological wage underscores how whites receive a material benefit for their white identity. Roediger further argues that the pleasures of whiteness “could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships” that were and are a hallmark of capitalism (1991: 12). This insight connects to a longer history in the United States in which different ethnic groups could enter into whiteness to secure social and civil benefits (Ignatiev, 1995: 3). According to Du Bois, this presents myriad opportunities for white politicians and capitalists to exploit white working fears of the loss of their position by the erosion of whites' privileged position within the US racial hierarchy. Thus, Breitbart’s messaging reflect nativist and white supremacist discourses, and they are meant to drive those fears among white working-class identity. Du Bois explains that the “doctrine of inferiority” of racism was driven “primarily because of economic motives” and this development was “disastrous for modern civilization in science and religion in art and government” because it proffered that the “colored peoples of the world were so far inferior to the whites that the white world had the right to rule mankind for their own selfish interests” (1935: 39). Therefore when a Breitbart article describes a Democratic political rally in California quoting: “‘Welcome to Oaxacafornia,’ said a Oaxacan woman, referring to the impoverished region of Mexico from which many immigrants come” (Nazarian, 2016), they tap into the most base and destructive forces in the US, reinforcing narratives of white superiority and black and brown inferiority. While much of the focus has been on former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, Du Bois' insight reveals that the Trump campaign's engagement with white supremacist politics has a much more profound association.

Accordingly, it is imperative that we not view Trump as a peculiarity; instead, he is part of a broader context in which white supremacist practices suture to American politics. The rise of Trump embodies a 400-year racialized legacy of white supremacy and the workings of racialized capital. This is the embodiment of the role white counterrevolutionary politics play in the United States. The economic history of the United States is built through covert and overt appeals to white solidarity that soothes over class divisions and forestalls broader critiques of the US-based capitalist economy.

The reality is that Trump routinely played on the fears of white working class voters during the campaign. In one of the most infamous appeals made to throngs of fans at his rallies citation/date, Trump declared that this was going to be the last election when (white) voters would genuinely be able to decide the outcome because so many minority groups were coming across to the United States that it would not be possible to elect the next President should Clinton win. His message was calculated to drive home the fears of whites who were worried about the demographic transitions occurring in the United States as well as the threats to their marginalized economic position. Through his public declarations and his openly racist message, Trump has expanded the global danger of race to a range of groups that are deemed to pose a challenge to the nation.

Conclusion and significance

Writing in 1967 at the height of the white backlash towards civil rights and a short year away from his own assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr., stated the “value in pulling racism out of its obscurity and stripping it of its rationalizations lies in the confidence that it can be changed” (King, 1967: 83). He went on to argue that if we are ever going to take on racism in all of its brutality it is necessary to diagnose the “disease of racism accurately” and that the US was going to have to embark on a crusade of redemption that would entail a “humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self” (King, 1967: 83). The rise of Donald Trump and his ability engage some of the darkest currents of the US racial state call into question how far we have come from the status King outlined in 1967. To see Trump as an anomaly or an outsider who ran an improbable campaign—as many mainstream political commentators would have us believe—is a mistaken diagnosis and only obscures the central role white-counter revolutionary politics play in the US political economy. Throughout the development of the United States' political economy, whiteness has stalled modest progressive and even radical change; as Du Bois worked through in Black Reconstruction, whiteness is central to understanding the workings of US-style capitalism. Robinson (1983: 194) writes that when entering a period of extended crisis, “the ruling classes” in the United States turn to “legal and illegal violence, election corruption, and a renewed emphasis on white supremacy” as the antidote to economic ills. To give an accurate diagnosis on Trump's election, we should focus on the long history of white resentment and fear over a demographic collapse. The changes to the political economy wrought through neoliberalism should be at the center of efforts to understanding Trump’s election, and the unwavering backing from white supporters.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved this manuscript. I am also indebted to Sarah Eichler Inwood, Lorraine Dowler, and Anne Bonds who all read and commented on different versions of this paper. Errors are mine and mine alone.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Joshua Inwood is an associate professor of Geography and a senior research associate at the Rock Ethics Institute. He is a cultural and political geographer whose work explores questions of race and identity in the US.

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