Why did it take so long? Trump-Bannonism in a global conjunctural frame

Abstract

This is a revised and extended version of my keynote lecture to the Vega Symposium on Resurgent Nationalisms and Populist Politics in the Neoliberal Age, held at the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, in April 2018. It is part of a Special Issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B that also includes my Introduction, and articles by Manu Goswami, Tova Höjdestrand and Kanishka Goonewardena, based on their contributions to the Symposium. In this essay I bring South Africa, India and the United States into the same global frame to comprehend the rise of exclusionary nationalisms and right-wing populist politics in relation to neoliberal forms of capitalism and modalities of rule. Rather than pre-given bounded national units or separate ‘cases', I regard them as related yet historically specific nodes in globally interconnected historical geographies, and focus as well on new forms of U.S. imperialism since the 1980s. This global frame enables new and different questions. Instead of asking what explains Trumpism (or Trump-Bannonism), the question rather is why did it take so long for a demagogic figure like Trump to ascend to power, given the long histories of racism and right-wing Christian nationalism in the United States; the ravages of neoliberal forms of capitalism; and abandonment of the working class by the Democratic Party? To engage this question, I combine my earlier work on relational comparison with Antonio Gramsci’s method of conjunctural analysis.

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