Holland, J orcid.org/0000-0003-4883-332X and Fermor, B (2021) The discursive hegemony of Trump’s Jacksonian populism: Race, class, and gender in constructions and contestations of US national identity, 2016–2018. Politics, 41 (1). pp. 64-79. ISSN 0263-3957
Abstract
Contributing to burgeoning studies of populism, this article conceptualises and contextualises Trump’s language as ‘Jacksonian populism’. We explore how this style of populist discourse influenced political debates before and after Trump’s election. Ours is the first article to analyse opposition and media responses to Trump’s construction of ‘real America’ as that of a Jacksonian, White, and male working class. To do so, the article analyses 1165 texts, from the government, opposition, newspapers, television coverage, and social media. In addition to locating Trump’s reification of a mythologised White working class within a broader Jacksonian tradition, we find that the Democratic opposition and mainstream media initially reproduced this construction, furthering Trump’s cause. Even where discursive challenges were subsequently developed, they often served to reproduce a distinct – and hitherto unspoken for – White (male) working-class America. In short, early resistance actively reinforced Trump’s discursive hegemony, which centred on reclaiming the primacy of working, White America in the national identity.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Discourse, populism, race, Trump, working class |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 29 May 2020 14:22 |
Last Modified: | 15 Jul 2021 13:44 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0263395720936867 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:161314 |