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analysis of the distribution of wealth generated by globalization from 1988 to 2008 provides a clear representation of this reality. He observes that while there was relative growth among the poor in Africa and South Asia (up to 50 percent growth), the emerging middle class in China, India, and Brazil (up to 80 percent growth), and an explosion of wealth among the top 1 percent globally, the middle class in the developed world has grown a grand total of 1 percent over the past thirty years. Virtually every segment of the global population has benefited from globalization.120 Concretely, from 1935 to 1960 the average income in the United States doubled, and from 1960 to 1985 it doubled again.121 Since the 1980s income growth has been flat for the middle class, while the emerging middle class in the global South and the global 1 percent have experienced extraordinary gains. While this is a direct result of globalization (free trade policies), the situation has been amplified by other neoliberal policies: privatization and financialization (the repeal of Glass-Steagall), tax cuts, cuts to social spending, and attacks on redistribution and unionization.

      At least two responses are possible to this situation. As we shall see, the response on the left is to demand a political confrontation between the working class and economic elites and to push for more extensive redistribution of wealth, greater economic protections for the working class (e.g., labor unions), and the expansion of educational opportunities for working-class constituencies. Authoritarian populism offers an alternative by advocating for economic nationalism (“America first”) and the creation of antagonisms between the white working class and workers in emerging economies (Mexico, China, etc.). Trump’s specific style of populism has transformed the rhetoric of neoliberalism by arguing that the state should use its power to serve the needs of the working class (renegotiating free-trade agreements and restoring manufacturing in the United States). During the first three years of his presidency, his signature legislative achievement was a tax reform bill that delivered a tax cut that almost exclusively benefited the top 1 percent. And while Trump has escalated trade wars with China and other countries by imposing tariffs on a variety of goods, there is little evidence that his other policy priorities have uplifted the working-class populations who have been devastated by more than forty years of deindustrialization, globalization, and neoliberal policies.

In lieu of transformative economic policies, Trump offered charged white nationalist rhetoric coupled with the promise of violence toward racialized domestic and foreign enemies. Wendy Brown observes that this is how contemporary forms of authoritarian populism function: “Right-wing and plutocratic politicians can get away with doing nothing substantive for their constituencies as long as they verbally anoint their wounds with anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-globalization rhetoric.”122 Trump’s politics are rooted in the dog-whistle racism of the Southern strategy but take form as a more overtly racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic set of attacks on vulnerable populations. This is evident in terms of the pivotal role that Trump played in amplifying the birther controversy (which raised questions about Obama’s birthplace and thereby suggested that he is “foreign” and “unfit” for the presidency); his campaign announcement in 2015 in which he proclaimed that Mexicans were rapists and criminals and as such represented a grave threat to (white) Americans; his claim that he is entitled to grab women by “the pussy”; and the deployment of white male grievance politics in response to the accusation of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh (for example, Trump proclaimed that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America” in response to the accusation of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford).

The policy objectives he offered on the campaign trail follow directly from this overt use of racism to assemble a white base of supporters, from the call to “build a wall” to enacting a “Muslim ban” to prevent citizens from seven countries in the Middle East from visiting the United States. Trump’s ethnonational, anti-immigrant, and transactional form of Christian identity politics draws the white working class, Christian evangelicals, and Southern and rural Americans into a political assemblage driven by resentment toward elites and racialized “others” and the promise of overt violence toward the proclaimed enemies of this identity. As Connolly observes of Trump, “His style is not designed first and foremost to articulate a policy agenda. It draws energy from the anger of its audience as it channels it. It draws into a collage dispersed anxieties and resentments about deindustrialization, race, border issues, immigration, working-class insecurities, trade policies, pluralizing drives, the new place of the United States in the global economy, and tacit uncertainty about the shaky place of neoliberal culture on this planet.”123 This form of politics on the right is performed at the visceral register of cultural life in which various economic, status anxieties, and resentments are assembled into a resonance machine that promises to enact retributive violence on the privileged targets of white male rage: immigrants, Muslims, persons of color in urban centers, feminists, and the LGBTQ+ community.

Again, it is important to emphasize here that while Trumpism represents a vulgar form of right-wing resentment politics, the ground was prepared for the ascendency of this politics by sustained economic disempowerment of the working class (neoliberalism), xenophobic (specifically Islamophobic) militarism (neoconservatism), the dog-whistle politics of the Southern strategy, and misogynistic assaults on women.124 For Connolly, these structural dynamics, which have been perpetuated by successive political assemblages on the right (from the evangelical-capitalist machine with Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to the authoritarian machine with Trump), represent the most grave threat to American democracy.125 He argues that the most effective means to confront the multifaceted attack on democracy from the right is to create a counter-political assemblage on the left.126 Just as the right cultivates and directs the sensibilities of neoliberals, militarists, evangelical Christians, and white nationalists toward particular political ends, the left must cultivate the sensibilities of a diverse coalition toward democratic ends. He observes, “A new movement on the democratic left, if it emerges, will be organized across religious, class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines without trying to pretend that citizens can leave their faiths entirely behind them when they enter public life.”127 Connolly imagines this assemblage as pluralist and comprised of persons from a diverse range of experiences, social locations, and commitments.128 Some might join the movement out of “desperate need” or “economic self-interest,” while others participate “because of religious or nontheistic ethical commitments that inspire them to extend beyond their constituency needs, interests, and identities.”129 Each component of the assemblage would contest the dominant political alliances and institutional structures that oppose the values of inclusion, egalitarianism, and rule by the people. Although this opposition would emerge from different subject positions, Connolly maintains that it is necessary for this pluralism to coalesce into a larger assemblage. He argues, “Hegemony thus can be resisted by a variety of tactics; but it can be overcome only if it is countered by an opposing coalition establishing a degree of hegemony through alternative articulations of identity, interests, freedom, equality, and the human relation to the earth.”130 The history of the left in the twentieth century offers a cautionary tale about the failure of various identity groups—labor, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights advocates, anticapitalists, LGBTQ advocates, antiwar activists—to form an organized bloc of power.

Connolly specifically highlights the need for the left to attract a significant segment of the white working class away from the right’s new authoritarianism. Where both the right and the left have failed to offer economic policies that ameliorate the social suffering of this population, the right has appealed to the cultural and religious sensibilities of this constituency in order to draw it into the assemblage on the right.131 Some members of this constituency have embraced the authoritarianism of the populism on the right and, in all likelihood, cannot be convinced to join other political assemblages. Others in this constituency could abandon the populist turn on the right if they come to see that Trump has not delivered on his economic agenda and if they hear from other political blocs that speak convincingly to their grievances.132 Connolly concludes that “a social democratic agenda is now an essential preliminary to any more transformative practices because the Left can go nowhere until the pluralizing Left and the working class have been drawn closer together. Had such programs been actively pursued earlier there would have been no turn to the radical right by a large section of the white working class.”133 As with other thinkers on the left (Stuart Hall, Chantal Mouffe, Nancy Fraser,

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