Abstract
Summarizing the findings of his multi-layered comparative study on the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, Kumkar shows how these protest mobilizations can be interpreted as symptoms of the deep structural crisis of US class society and especially of its petty bourgeoisie. Their interpretation therefore helps to understand other recent political events, such as the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016: Kumkar contradicts those that identified the members of the ‘white working class’ as the core supporters of Trump and points out that they have instead to be sought in the older cohorts of the classical petty bourgeoisie, whose habitually patterned lived experience of the Great Recession, as it was reconstructed throughout the book, resonated strongly with Trump’s campaign slogans.
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Notes
- 1.
A video recording of the people’s gong in April 2012 can be found at: OccupySteve (2012).
- 2.
This discrepancy becomes even starker if we consider that his voters disproportionately came from the Midwest and the South, where median incomes tend to be much lower than in states on the West- and Upper East Coast.
- 3.
https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/videos/10159158074630725/ (Accessed November 4, 2017).
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Kumkar, N.C. (2018). Conclusion and Outlook. In: The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73688-4_8
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