Wednesday 16th September 2020
Speaker: Prof Inderjeet Parmar, CityUoL
Title: “Presidents Trump and Obama in the Making of America’s
Perfect But Terrible Storm”
Summary: Trump’s ‘America First’
populism, a thinly-veiled appeal to a ‘beleaguered’ white nationalism and
identity, slammed the cosmopolitan elitism of career politicians who supposedly
cared more about Paris than Pittsburgh. That message galvanised a
large white voting bloc across classes, a significant percentage of
Latinos, some left-wing opponents of military interventions and NATO, and,
significantly, depressed turnout among African-Americans. It wasn’t enough to
win Trump the popular vote but won him sufficient electoral college votes.
The person and policies of the first African-American
president, however, wittingly and unwittingly, created the legitimacy
crisis conditions for the rise of the Trump presidency. And Trump’s
electoral strategy played upon both whites’ anxieties of an eventual
‘majority-minority’ nation, a critique of the Clinton-Obama Democratic party
establishment that had done nothing or little for African-Americans and working
people in general, who had sold out American jobs to immigrants, or outsourced
them to China, and waged ‘endless wars’ across the world as the world’s
policeman.
