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: Suggested Citation