This essay will primarily focus on the 2016 US election, including its ideological, socioec-onomic and political circumstances. Evidently, this context relates to numerous ‘political disconnects,’ phenomena which are all too obvious in contemporary American culture and society. In this respect, the narrow victory of a TV celebrity, businessman, and right-wing nationalist, who now serves as the 45th President of the United States, can be seen as an apt expression of the ideological divisions by which American culture and politics have been marked for quite some time. Perhaps, then, liberal commentators and intellec-tuals should not have been all that surprised about the election’s outcome. For although former President Barack Obama was successful in getting reelected in 2012, his eight years in office also saw the rise of the Tea Party movement and a Republican Party which has increasingly drifted to the right. While this essay is certainly concerned with such po-litical divisions – divisions, that is, which separate ‘blue states’ from ‘red states,’ Demo-crats from Republicans, liberals from conservatives, and the so-called left from the new right – I prefer to concentrate on a different (but perhaps equally challenging) type of disconnect. What I mean is the disconnect between today’s left (or, more precisely, what I have termed the ‘cultural left’) and large segments of the American working and lower middle class. Here, regarding the 2016 election, I will analyze the Clinton campaign’s cu-rious inability to effectively articulate issues like class injustice and socioeconomic ine-quality. While this may seem to be mostly an ‘American’ issue, I am convinced that the class problem and the question of inequality go well beyond the US context and are in many ways related to the general upsurge of the new right, a phenomenon which can be observed in numerous European countries as well.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:21112 |
| Date | 17 April 2018 |
| Creators | Schleusener, Simon |
| Publisher | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-210868, qucosa:21086 |
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