Populist Rage and American Illiberalism

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie argues that contemporary authoritarian politics in the United States flows from three currents in American history: The first is a longstanding structural weakness in American liberal institutions, which Donald Trump has exploited to his advantage. The second current is deindustrialization and the erosion of US working-class power since the 1970s. This unraveling has led not just to staggering levels of wage stagnation and economic inequality, but also to the resurgence of an old theme in American populism: the nostalgic rage to reclaim lost glories of a “golden age.” These illiberal trends, deeply embedded in the American past, have converged in the twenty-first century with a third current—the volatile global churn caused by a faltering neoliberalism and a new order yet to be born. In this talk, Cowie explains how these currents combined to bring about the recent transformation of the American political landscape.