Abstract
Donald Trump’s election has forced a collective re-evaluation of who the “ordinary citizen” or “forgotten man or woman” is. Level of education distinguished Trump voters from Clinton voters. In spring 2016, Trump exuberantly shouted, “I love the poorly educated!” The ordinary citizens who voted for Trump did not care about his well-documented outrageous statements. This chapter asks what made Donald Trump so attractive to the constituency of the “poorly educated”? Using a method of bricolage—the assemblage of diverse facts, slogans, and visual images that dominated the electoral campaign—I develop an interpretation of Trump’s victory that is cultural and also speaks to profound structural changes that began in the United States in the 1970s. The evidence for this chapter comes from over 50 hours of watching Donald Trump on television—during the debates, the primary season, and the election; the Republican convention and a series of speeches during the campaign season; as well as popular culture from the 1970s through the present.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Ted Perlmutter for his assistance on matters large and small as well as for his substantive insights. Ruth Milkman and Trevor Pinch provided important references. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith invited me to present this chapter at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, where I benefitted from two hours of probing commentary.
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Berezin, M. (2019). On the Construction Sites of History: Where Did Donald Trump Come From?. In: Mast, J.L., Alexander, J.C. (eds) Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95945-0_6
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