A Left of Liberal Interpretation of Trump's ‘Big’ Win, Part One: Neoliberalism

11 Pages Posted: 17 May 2017 Last revised: 17 Nov 2017

Date Written: May 16, 2017

Abstract

The question of interpreting Donald Trump’s election, in liberal discourse, is mainly “how can he have won, given that he is racist and sexist?” The answer of many of my friends is that he won because his racism and sexism appealed to a shockingly large part of the electorate, confirming that “our whole society is sexist and racist.” According to the liberal conception, this is particularly true of the non-college part of the electorate, which had more “traditional” (racist and sexist) values and less cognitive ability to figure out that he was going to screw them. If they were not racist and sexist, they would have rejected him outright, no matter how much they didn’t like Hillary. I think class, race and sex were key to everything, but in a different way than in that account.

Keywords: Elections, Federalism, Neoliberalism, Globalization, Ghetto, Unstable Equilibrium

JEL Classification: P16, P25

Suggested Citation

Kennedy, Duncan, A Left of Liberal Interpretation of Trump's ‘Big’ Win, Part One: Neoliberalism (May 16, 2017). 1 Nev. L. J. Forum 98 (2017), Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 17-32, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2969180

Duncan Kennedy (Contact Author)

Harvard Law School ( email )

1575 Massachusetts
L333
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
617-495-4619 (Phone)

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