HUGH GUSTERSON

George Washington University

From Brexit to Trump:

A B S T R A C T opulism is a little like pornography in Supreme Court Justice

P
Brexit and Donald Trump’s election victory are Potter Stewart’s famous characterization: it’s hard to define, but
symptoms of a new nationalist populism in western one knows it when one sees it. According to historian Michael
Europe and the United States. This political and Kazin (2016) this “contested and ambiguous concept” com-
ideological movement has arisen in reaction to bines elements of “a creed, a style, a political strategy, [and] a
reconfigurations of power, wealth, and identity that marketing ploy.” However one defines it, recent years have seen an up-
are endemic to global neoliberalism. In the United surge, in Europe and the United States, of assorted varieties of what I call
States, however, the media’s dominant “blue-collar here nationalist populism. This is the same broad phenomenon that Stuart
narrative” about Trump’s victory simplifies the Hall (1980) and Nicolette Makovicky (2013) call “authoritarian populism,”
relationship between neoliberalism and nationalist Salih Can Aciksoz and Umut Yıldırım (2016) call “right-wing populisms,”
populism by ignoring the role of the petty Gillian Evans (2017) calls “cultural nationalism,” Ana Carolina Balthazar
bourgeoisie and the wealthy in Trump’s coalition. An (2017) calls “nostalgic nationalism,” Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks
anthropology of Trump requires ethnographies of (2006) call “neo-nationalisms,” and Douglas Holmes (2016) calls “Fascism
communities largely shunned by anthropologists as 2.” Nationalist populism is quite different from the leftist populism of, say,
well as reflexivity about the unintended role of US senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who refuses
universities in producing support for Trump. to scapegoat immigrants and favors income redistribution and deeper gov-
[neoliberalism, political parties, identity politics, ernment intervention in the economy. In addition to Donald Trump’s vic-
class, race, Donald Trump, Brexit] tory in the 2016 US election, manifestations of the upsurge in nationalist
populism include the British vote in the June 2016 referendum in favor of
a “Brexit” from the European Union; the December 2016 vote in the Italian
referendum to reject constitutional reform and, with it, to effectively oust
a solidly pro-EU government; the 2015 election of a populist authoritarian
government in Poland that is attacking the courts and the press while un-
dermining the teaching of evolution and climate science in public schools;
the consolidation of power by the government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary,
a government that has weakened the courts and the press while attack-
ing immigrants, Jews, gays, and European bureaucrats; and the unprece-
dented popularity in France of Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National
Front party in the run-up to the country’s presidential election of 2017.
There are important structural variations between the economic cir-
cumstances, ethnic landscapes, demographic coalitions, and political plat-
forms undergirding the rise of nationalist populism in these different
countries. To give just one example, in the United Kingdom the wealthy
were more likely to vote against Brexit than their US counterparts were
to vote against Trump, and xenophobia there focused more on legal im-
migrants than in the United States (Martin 2016). Nevertheless, there are

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 209–214, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2017 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12469
American Ethnologist  Volume 44 Number 2 May 2017

family resemblances between the agendas and styles of di- west, from its traditional home in the Democratic Party.
verse nationalist populist movements: a hostility toward In this respect, the media inadvertently reproduce the dis-
(at least some) immigrants and ethnic others, especially course of Trump, who likes to present himself as a cham-
Muslims (Evans 2012; Makovicky 2013; Shoshan 2016); a pion of the working class, a sort of blue-collar billionaire
claim to speak for working people, whose interests are no (Cooper 2016). Now that Trump is president, this lingering
longer well represented by traditional parties of the Left narrative frame will make it easier for him to take measures
(Evans 2017; Gingrich and Banks 2006; Jansen 2016; Kalb that shift wealth to the oligarchic elite without being seen
2009; Walley 2017b); an insistence that established govern- to do so. Although white working-class swing voters were
ment institutions have become corrupt or unresponsive to indeed important in giving Trump his narrow victories in
ordinary people (Balthazar 2017; Knight 2009; Koch 2016, such Rust Belt states as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsyl-
2017; Mikus 2016; Mollona 2009; Smith 2012); an attack on vania, the mainstream media’s narrative distorts and over-
transnational organizations such as the European Union, simplifies, even inverts, the larger story. As Christine Walley
NATO, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organiza- points out,
tion (Eriksen 2016; Shore 2016); a disparagement of cos-
mopolitan elites; and a call for a return to (an invented) While Trump made a strong bid for votes in industrial
“tradition” (Knight 2017). and postindustrial areas through promises to renego-
The anthropological analysis of such movements, more tiate trade deals and bring back manufacturing jobs,
developed in Europe than in the United States, is still em- exit polls from the primaries showed that those who
bryonic. But anthropologists take as a truism that nation- voted for him earned each year an average $72,000,
alist populist movements should be understood as a reac- well above the US median yearly income of $56,000.
tion to a neoliberal political and economic order that has (2017a, 232)
been taking shape since the early 1970s and has acceler-
ated with the end of the Cold War and the development of In other words, instead of representing Trump as the cham-
digital communication technologies. (Media commentary pion of US workers, the media would have been just as
eschews the term neoliberalism but, similarly, frames the accurate in portraying him as the candidate of wealthier
rise of populism as a response to “globalization.”) The char- Americans: after all, he won the majority of votes among
acteristics of this new neoliberal order include the hyper- those earning over $50,000 a year (Henley 2016). Instead,
financialization of the economy, with its attendant increase the blue-collar trope makes the billionaire in the red base-
in the political and economic power of the banking sec- ball cap a man of the people.
tor; the intensification of global trade, which has made lo- Clearly, the relationship between US neoliberalism and
cal communities vulnerable to shifts in commodity prices, Trump’s victory demands a more complex understanding
exchange rates, and labor competition in other countries; than the media’s dominant “blue-collar narrative.” This nar-
the offshoring of investment and production facilities in rative obscures the importance to the Trump coalition of
pursuit of increased profits; the rise of the Internet econ- alignments not based on class: for example, Trump lost
omy and digital capitalism, together with the enrichment of every racial group but whites; he lost the young but won
a new class of knowledge workers in information technol- majorities among those over 45 years old (Castillo 2016);
ogy, biotechnology, and consulting; massive transnational and, vociferously opposing abortion, he won 81 percent of
movements of economic migrants dislocated by the fluid- the white evangelical vote, which Faye Ginsburg (2017) ar-
ity of the new capitalism as well as refugees from a succes- gues “may have provided his electoral tipping point.” The
sion of wars in the Middle East and northeast Africa; the blue-collar narrative also obscures the centrality of other
emergence of forms of capitalism that are deeply imbri- social classes in the Trump coalition, as well as the fact
cated with a regulatory state that has bureaucratized daily that many members of the white working class supported
life while enriching lobbyists and lawyers; and levels of so- Sanders in the primaries and Hillary Clinton in the presi-
cial and economic inequality not seen in the West since the dential election. And, in its singular focus on job losses as
early 20th century.1 an animating grievance, the blue-collar narrative gives an
impoverished account of the dynamics of nationalist pop-
ulism and its larger relationship to neoliberalism. A fuller
The blue-collar narrative
account of those dynamics—constructed here on the basis
One should be skeptical of explanations that reduce of work by the historian and commentator Thomas Frank
Trump’s electoral victory to a single cause (Butler 2017). and the journalist George Packer—demands a discomfiting
Nonetheless, mainstream media in the United States have reflexivity that undermines academics’ preferred view from
put disproportionate weight on a single narrative thread: nowhere and puts us instead inside the story, where we be-
the role of free trade and factory closings in alienating a come, against our wishes, part of the circuitry that enabled
postindustrial white working class, especially in the Mid- Trump’s victory.

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Neoliberalism has indeed ravaged the working class in culture—are seen by those outside the gates as alien citadels
the old industrial centers of the United States: manufac- of class superiority and elitist prejudice toward those who
turing employment has fallen from a high of 19.6 million work with their hands. Indeed, even as universities seek to
jobs in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2016, and in 2016, manu- performatively erase prejudice, they can, perversely, func-
facturing employment fell by a further 62,000 jobs even as tion as engines of a liberal illiberalism that is complicit in
1.8 million new jobs were created in the economic recovery creating new social schisms. This became clear to me re-
(Rattner 2016). Under neoliberalism, postindustrial work- cently when, at the end of a class in which I taught Christine
ers have seen their living standards decline precipitously. As Walley’s (2013) ethnography of the deindustrialized white
Naomi Klein (2016) notes, “They have lost jobs. They have working class in Chicago, one graduate student announced
lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that to the class, “I don’t like these people. They’re racists and
used to make these losses less frightening. They see a fu- sexists who make their wives stay home, and I don’t want
ture for their kids even worse than their precarious present.” to read about them.” This is an example of what Makovicky
Packer (2016) observes that (2013, 79) refers to as “domestic orientalism” and “liberal
othering of the working class” in contemporary ethnogra-
“working class” . . . once suggested productivity and phy. As Keir Martin observes, this condescension toward
sturdiness. Now it means downwardly mobile, poor, working-class whites “smacks of the kind of pillorying of al-
even pathological. A significant part of the W.W.C. legedly ‘irrational’ beliefs that anthropologists would be the
[white working class] has succumbed to the ills
first to challenge in most contexts” (2016, 494).
that used to be associated with the black urban
In this environment, as Frank (2016a) describes, the
“underclass”: intergenerational poverty, welfare, debt,
bankruptcy, out-of-wedlock births, trash entertain- cosmopolitan elites who dominate banking, media, infor-
ment, addiction, jail, social distrust, political cynicism, mation technology, and technoscience have made a politi-
bad health, unhappiness, early death. cal home in the Democratic Party, which they have helped
to remake into an organ of social liberalism but increas-
But if we are to fully understand the political realign- ing economic conservatism. In the absence of campaign-
ment of segments of the postindustrial white working class finance reform, politicians of both parties need alliances
in the 2016 US election, it is important to locate it analyti- with wealthy donors to get elected. Thus, since the 1980s,
cally in the wider context of the entire US neoliberal assem- the Democratic Party has backed away from its New Deal
blage, which extends far beyond the offshoring of skilled alliance with (declining) labor unions, embraced the dereg-
factory jobs. For example, even as the white working class ulatory policies sought by major donors, built a donor al-
is engulfed by a claustrophobic sense of being trapped in liance with the titans of the “knowledge economy” and the
decaying local communities, a vibrantly fluid transnational professionals who work for them, and created a new pro-
and cosmopolitan urban lifeworld has evolved, buoyed by gressive politics that deemphasizes blue-collar economic
the expanding economies of international finance, infor- issues in favor of pluralistic identity politics. Under Tony
mation technology, biomedicine, and social media. These Blair, Britain’s Labour Party executed the same maneuver
expanding economic sectors, and the universities that feed (Driver and Martell 2006; Evans 2012, 2017; Knight 2017).
them with knowledge workers, are the locus of a glam- Mocking the Democratic Party as “the party of Martha’s
orous, socially liberal culture of transnational cosmopoli- Vineyard,” Frank (2016b) argues that the university-
tanism, conspicuous consumption, metrosexual broad- educated professionals at its heart see social and economic
mindedness, and affirmative action—or what Jonathan hierarchy not in terms of class politics but meritocracy:
Rosa and Yarimar Bonilla (2017) call “inclusion-oriented
and body-based diversity projects.” As Richard Rorty ob- To the liberal class, every big economic problem is
served almost two decades ago, these cosmopolitan elites really an education problem, a failure by the losers to
have “no more sense of community with any workers learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone
anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year knows you’ll need in the society of the future. Take in-
1900” (1999, 87). The disdain that such elites feel for equality. The real problem, many liberals believe, is that
the white working class is perfectly captured in Hillary not enough poor people get a chance to go to college
Clinton’s leaked characterization (to a group of affluent and join the professional-managerial elite. . . . If poor
donors) of much of this community as a “basket of de- people want to stop being poor, poor people must go
plorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenopho- to college. (Frank 2016a, 34–35)
bic, Islamophobic—you name it” (Blake 2016). Those of us
who teach in universities must grapple with the fact, em- In the same vein, Packer (2016) observes that Clintonism
phasized in Katherine Cramer’s (2016) study of the Wis- embodies “a secular brand of Calvinism, with the state of
consin Tea Party, that our institutions—which we often inward grace revealed outwardly by an Ivy League degree,
see as the vanguard of a liberal pluralistic 21st-century Silicon Valley stock options, and a White House invitation.”

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Confronted with a world of declining economic op- alongside the frankly prejudiced people who enjoyed
portunity and a Democratic Party whose blue-collar bona watching Trump break the discursive taboos around race
fides had frayed, many white working-class voters aban- and gender in US political campaigns, many voters who
doned their ancestral allegiance to the Democratic Party are capable of voting for a black man in one election and
in 2016, often defying their union bosses in the process, a white racist in the next. This is not to say that these voters
and voted for the Republican, Donald Trump. But although are free of racial prejudice or have a strong critique of white
media accounts have fetishized these working-class swing privilege but that, at the level of voting at least, their racial
voters, turning them into the ultimate icons of Trumpism, preference is not a foregone conclusion. Writing at a mo-
they were just one component of a much larger coalition. ment when Americans have astonished and moved me by
Particularly overlooked in media framings is the petty showing up en masse at airports to cheer arriving Syrians
bourgeoisie. If one reads media accounts of Trump rallies and Iranians, I think it is clear that the post-civil-rights ne-
carefully, one often finds quotes from small-business oliberal force field has morphed the politics of race in ways
owners, accountants, and pharmacists, but they are buried we are only beginning to understand.
in the prose rather than headlined. Yet such people formed
the backbone of the Tea Party movement that presaged
Conclusion: Anthropology and the future of the
Trump’s rise (Cramer 2016; Skocpol and Williamson 2012;
Trump coalition
Westermeyer 2016). Like their class counterparts in the
United Kingdom who voted solidly for Brexit, the people of Trump knitted together an improbable coalition: the ma-
this class are deeply alienated from distant bureaucracies jority of US voters who earn more than $50,000 a year and a
(Brussels, London, and Washington) and ever-expanding huge majority of voters with no college education. In 1996,
regulatory regimes, and they are particularly disposed to Democrats won the latter demographic by one percentage
believe that their tax dollars go to undeserving welfare point; in 2012 they lost it by 26 points and in 2016 by 39
cases. They tend to be intensely patriotic, resentful of the points (Henley 2016). As I have sought to suggest, educa-
educated cosmopolitans above them, and intensely fearful tional capital becomes a key element of social stratification
of slipping into the working class below them (Ehrenreich in the move from an industrial economy to a neoliberal
1990; Sampson 2016). They are little studied by anthropol- knowledge economy. Those who lack educational capital
ogists, and if we want to understand nationalist populism, are gravely disadvantaged in the new economic dispensa-
that is a problem. tion, and they are acutely aware of being condescended
It is clear that race and hostility to immigrants played to by those who have a university education. Their sense
a role in working-class and petty bourgeois support for of grievance makes them tinder for nationalist populist
Trump, which some have characterized as a “whitelash” movements.
(Ryan 2016). A cursory look at any photograph of a Trump But will the Trump coalition prove stable over the long
rally shows a paucity of nonwhite faces and, according to run? On the one hand, there is a strong argument that the
exit-poll data, Trump won 58 percent of the white vote Trump coalition will fall apart when it becomes clear that
but only 21 percent of the nonwhite vote (Henley 2016). the government cannot satisfy the demands of both pluto-
But the role of race and its intersectional relationship with crats and the workers whose wealth they are expropriating
class in an electoral moment marked by extreme volatility and that, in any case, Trump’s victory was a “black swan”
calls for analytic care and subtlety. To begin with, as Wal- event (Taleb 2007) brought about by a highly improbable
ley (2017b) points out, the local configuration of racial pol- concatenation of circumstances: a weak Democratic candi-
itics was different in the southern and midwestern states date, Russian hacking, a rogue FBI director, and Republican
that Trump carried, and it is noteworthy that the few social voter-repression efforts (Berman 2016), to name a few.
scientists who have conducted fieldwork with Tea Party or On the other hand, writing about the European situa-
Brexit supporters tend, more than analyses from a distance, tion, Douglas Holmes (2016, 2) says, “I am now convinced
to downplay allegations of racism (Cramer 2016; Eriksen that a self-sustaining extremism is in place and it is be-
2016; Evans 2012; Koch 2016; Skocpol and Williamson 2012; ing replicated across Europe.” One could imagine a similar
Westermeyer 2016). Such analysts argue that the white argument for the United States that foregrounds feedback
working class, rather than expressing some primordial loops between neoliberalism and nationalist populism. One
racism, began “to learn, in the multicultural climate, how feedback loop might look like this: university-educated cos-
to be ethnic too” (Evans 2017). Trump won 200 coun- mopolitans react to nationalist populists with condescen-
ties that had previously voted for Obama, and polls sug- sion, which drives the latter deeper into populism, which
gested that 12 percent of Trump supporters approved increases the cosmopolitans’ disdain for them.
of Barack Obama (Confessore and Cohn 2016; Hartigan Surely this crisis in democratic politics in western
2017; Uhrmacher 2016). Clearly, while Trump’s campaign Europe and the United States calls for a reorientation
had strong racial and anti-immigrant themes, there are, and extension of anthropological work. Trump’s victory

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confronts US anthropology with an incompleteness in the Castillo, Walbert. 2016. “How We Voted—by Age, Education, Race
project of repatriated anthropology. While anthropologists and Sexual Orientation.” USA Today, November 9. Accessed
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financial traders at one end of the social scale and crack Confessore, Nicholas, and Nate Cohn. 2016. “Donald Trump’s
dealers and immigrant communities at the other, we have Victory Was Built on Unique Coalition of White Voters.”
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trump-voters.html?_r=0.
have we produced ethnographies of the political parties.
Cooper, Matthew. 2016. “How Donald Trump Courted White
We prefer Occupy. If we are to contribute to the analysis Americans to Victory.” Newsweek, November 9. Accessed Jan-
of current menacing trends, and to help find a way to re- uary 28, 2017. http://www.newsweek.com/2016/11/18/donald-
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sciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago:
skills of reflexivity, relativism, and humane critique that our
University of Chicago Press.
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Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1990. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Mid-
Note
dle Class. New York: HarperCollins.
Acknowledgments. Three anonymous reviewers, Allison Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2016. “Clashing Scales of Brexit.” Social
Macfarlane, and Angelique Haugerud improved this article im- Anthropology 24 (4): 488–89.
measurably with their detailed comments. Thanks also to Niko Evans, Gillian. 2012. “‘The Aboriginal People of England’: The Cul-
Besnier, Jeanette Edwards, and Shanti Parikh for the invitation to ture of Class Politics in Contemporary Britain.” Focaal, no. 62
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1. The literature on neoliberalism is enormous. For general ac- ———. 2017. “Brexit Britain: Why We Are All Postindustrial Now.”
counts of its political economy, see Castells 2009; Ganti 2014; American Ethnologist 44 (2): 215–19.
Hacker 2008; Harvey 2007; Piketty 2014. Baumann 2006 probes the Frank, Thomas. 2016a. Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to
ontology of neoliberalism. More Foucauldian interpretations are the Party of the People? New York: Metropolitan Books.
provided by Brown 2003 and Ong 2006. There are many ethno- ———. 2016b. “The Republicans and Democrats Failed Blue-
graphic depictions of neoliberal society, including the following: Collar America: The Left Behind Are Now Having Their Say.”
Allison 2013; Gusterson and Besteman 2010; Ho 2009; Newman Guardian (London), November 6. Accessed February 6, 2017.
1993. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/
republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america.
Ganti, Tejaswini. 2014. “Neoliberalism.” Annual Review of Anthro-
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