Veblen's America

A study of the political rise of Donald Trump through Thorstein Veblen’s theory of barbaric legacies in American development.

The astonishing political rise of Donald Trump sent seasoned observers scurrying for clues and explanations. How did Trump happen? Of course no one guide will suffice, but a surprisingly helpful one, suggests Sidney Plotkin, is the early twentieth-century American radical, Thorstein Veblen. In remarkably vivid ways, Veblen understood the enduring American allure of figures such as Trump.

As Plotkin shows in "Veblen's America," Trump's booming persona springs noisily out the country-town hucksterism that Veblen sardonically depicted, its fabulist habits fitting Trump's "truthful hyperbole" to a tee. But Veblen saw darker, more ominous forces in American life too--habits of barbaric violence, misogyny and xenophobia--forces that foreshadowed Trump's appeal to what Veblen called a deep "sclerosis of the American soul." New Deal liberalism helped mute the strains, but economic crisis and the neoliberal response aggravated them. Donald Trump's appeal to hate made their revival unmistakable.

About the Author

Sidney Plotkin is professor of political science on the Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair of Social Sciences, Vassar College, USA, where he teaches courses in American politics, political economy, power and political theory. Plotkin has written numerous articles and is the author of Keep Out: The Struggle for Land Use Control (1987), co-author of Private Interest, Public Spending (1994) and The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen (2011) and editor of The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (2017).