CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How Trumpism Stirred Up Class Politics Again in the US

Image by Laura Seaman.

For nearly four decades, American political discourse worked assiduously to sideline the subject of class. This was not because economic inequality had somehow receded. On the contrary, it deepened dramatically. Rather, the language with which to name it grew impoverished. Structural disparities were recast as the neutral outcomes of market mechanisms, wrapped in the agreeable vocabulary of growth, competition, and aspirational mobility. The chasms remained, stark and undeniable, yet mainstream politics proceeded as though they were not open to meaningful contestation.

In that cultivated silence, speaking seriously about class came to seem almost anachronistic, even faintly embarrassing. Liberal discourse, in particular, gravitated toward questions of culture, race, and gender, matters of profound importance, to be sure, but in doing so it often nudged class analysis to the margins. Without an overarching framework capable of connecting these disparate injuries, politics fragmented into a collection of discrete grievances that never quite cohered into a lucid account of power and who bears its costs.

Then came Trump. Suddenly, class was back in the conversation, albeit in a raw and often distorted register. He did not invent the anger or the inequality, but he gave them a public voice. By positioning himself as the champion of the “forgotten,” Trumpism hauled a visceral rhetoric of “us” against “them” back to the center of American life. It sounded hostile to elites, and in its performative fury it was. Yet underneath the spectacle, it left the economic........

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