Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to the US presidency challenges conventional understandings of American politics, yet he is distinctively American. His biography and family lineage reflect American traditions such as real estate hucksterism and buccaneering salesmanship. But Trump’s pugnacity also reflects the shadow of other darker American traditions of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, patterns that formed what Thorstein Veblen called a “sclerosis of the American soul.” Using Veblen’s theory of American development to explore the nation’s curious fusion of barbarism and liberal democracy, Veblen’s America taps the rich vein of the sociologist’s early twentieth-century insights to shed light on the Trump phenomenon that has overwhelmed and threatened early twenty-first-century American democracy.
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).
1. Donald Trump through Veblen’s Looking Glass; 2. Evolution, Institutions and Barbarism; 3. The American Plan; 4. Trumpean Ancestors, Exploitative Legacies; 5. Building for the Leisure Class; 6. Picturesque Accomplishments; 7. Candidate Trump and the Politics of Rage; 8. Limits of Barbarian Governance; Index.