In response, both strategically and Ideologically, the Clinton campaign followed decades of liberal wisdom. Running to the political center, they courted independents and moderate Republicans who opposed a vulgar, chauvinistic, and “un-presidential” candidate. Rather than contest this faux-populism with support for substantive ideals, they ran a campaign against their “deplorable” opponents. They offered a fair-minded and sober “campaign against bigotry” that emphasized a need for “love and kindness” in an already great America. Empirically, this strategy is confirmed in the content of their political advertising, 76% of which contained character attacks and only 9% of which contained reference to jobs, social welfare, and/or the economy. The fact that the ‘economy’ and ‘jobs’ were among the most important issue(s), if not the most important, in the 2016 election – a lingering effect of the Great Recession – lends considerable weight to the hypothesis that economic anxiety significantly impacted vote choice. (Clinton ran to the right of Trump on economic issues.) Combined with the clear import of identity politics, there is considerable evidence that America is has entered another populist phase, one with visible (white) nationalist characteristics, and a somewhat unusual authoritarian bent. The Midwestern swing states, on which the presidential election once again hinged in 2016, reveals populism’s impact. In short, the decades-long collapse of manufacturing and an influx of Latino immigration in Midwestern “Rust Belt” states appears to have had a statistically significant impact on the rejection of Clinton. At the heart of this were working- and middle- class white voters in the five rust belt states won by Trump – Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin: therein, the Republican candidate picked up 450,000 (or, 4.9 percent) more ‘white voters’ and 335,000 (or, 10.6 percent) more ‘working class voters’ than in 2012 and the Democratic candidate picked up 950,000 (or, 13 percent) fewer (including 770,000
of being subjected to economic structures that actually are ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, and alienating, which actually can destroy an individual’s livelihood in mere seconds, and which, with the increasing centralization of power and capital in fewer corporate industries, actually do engage in conspiracy. The difference between this such experience and political paranoia seems quite negligible. Polarization The second qualification moves into the territory of the constant of political polarization. In analyzing both historical and contemporary manifestations of the paranoid style, we must acknowledge a legitimate fear. That fear of having another culture impose itself – its values and practices, its cultural conceptions of ‘freedom,’ the ‘good,’ the ‘right,’ etc. – upon your own life. Grasping the legitimacy of this fear is difficult because it requires dispelling a deeply held “national” myth. To wit, the idea that there exists some single, unified “American” nation and/or political culture – a single community of persons united by a common culture, history, and practices – is entirely fallacious. The United States of America is not, nor has it ever been, a nation; it is, and has always been, a ‘Republic of nations.’ Paranoia is the result of an all too real political struggle between rival nations, each intent upon wielding Federal power in pursuit of cultural independence, if not cultural hegemony. In this context, political polarization is not the “rule” to an “exception” of inter-party cooperation or inter-nation unity, it is geo-cultural structure upon which concrete battles take place. Only subsequently, in an ad-hoc manner, is a single, “national” character fashioned and re-fashioned. Each of the eleven “American Nations” identified by historian Woodard has a unique genealogical origin in one or more particular European culture(s). Thereafter, each nation developed from a particular political culture, in unique natural environments given to different social structures, different material conditions of existence and relations of economic production.