Forthcoming in Educational Philosophy and Theory is a collection of reviews of Timothy W. Luke’s recent book The Travails of Trumpification, published by Telos Press Publishing. Excerpts from the reviews appear below, and the full set of reviews can be read here (subscription required). Save 20% on the paperback edition of The Travails of Trumpification by purchasing it in our online store and using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.
Nancy Love:
As he traces Trump’s rise to power, Luke zeroes in on crucial issues in contemporary politics, such as environmental nationalism, Covid-19 policies, gun control, immigration law, Black Lives Matter and police brutality, ‘Stop the Steal’ and the January 6 insurrection. Taken together, Luke’s reflections constitute a fascinating ‘history of the present’ that attempts to define the ongoing phenomenon of ‘trumpification.’ . . .
Most important, Luke’s essays show that citizens and scholars, politicians and pundits, who would grapple with trumpification need to recognise its complexity, fluidity, and multiplicity. From essay to essay, ‘the Trump Zone’ begins to resemble the kaleidoscopic reflections of a disco ball—perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Trump’s politics. Luke identifies these crucial features of trumpification: the combination of rural, poor, white, and underemployed constituents with a well-funded ‘expertocracy’; the diversity of so-called single-issue voters, such as the gun lobby, and their continued presence in a ‘silent majority’ increasingly marginalised by corporate power; and the Constitutional revisionism evident in ‘reimagining corporations as persons, money as speech, wealth as rights, ideology as image, parties as syndicates, and government as spectacle’. Together these features reveal the slipperiness (my term) of the ‘normal’ in politics today and the challenges that face those committed to sustaining political decorum, legal order, and constitutional patriotism.
Sandy Schram:
Timothy Luke’s new book is an excellent collection of short chapters providing snapshots of the wild politics that Donald Trump has sprung on the American political scene. American politics has indeed gone off the rails. It has been so from when Trump first started to run for the presidency in 2015 to now, as he still tries to cling to power as the ostensible leader of the Republican Party, even after he lost his bid for re-election in 2020, while yet still denying he lost. . . .
Luke ties all the reported episodes together, deftly assessing the wreckage by using critical theory and social commentary about today’s mediated politics. With such analytical tools being put to work with surgical skill, Luke is able to raise profound questions about whether American politics can ever recover. He leaves open the question about a fraught future, including whether aspirations for an inclusive multi-racial democracy will survive in the near term and beyond.
Ernie Yanarella:
In a work that combines the civic responsibilities of a public intellectual and the knowledge of a contemporary political theorist, Timothy Luke explores the political and socio-cultural travails accompanying the Trumpian takeover of the Republican party and further de-democratisation of America.
Running through this penetrating critical analysis from cover to cover are two lingering questions: why has Donald Trump and the MAGA nation all but assimilated the country’s white working class—what one would think should be a natural constituency of the twentieth- and twenty-first century Democratic Party? Why has the Democratic party failed to hold this element of the New Deal coalition and thwarted the trumpification of the nation?
“Unfortunately for Trumpism, the obsession with Trump himself has obscured the real problem at stake in the realignment of American politics.”
Trumpism does include, at this point, a largely incoherent critique of managerial bureaucracy captured in the phrase “new class vs populist.” But the key to clarifying this issue may be the extent to which this supposed/assumed “new class” hegemony is more aspiratlonal than actual.
This “new class,” appears to presently consist of numerous and competing power networks, especially on the Federal level. But on the margins (on Rumble and Substack for example) are growing and increasingly diverse groupings of potentially difficult to co-opt sentiments of potential intellectual and cultural innovation.
Telos populist democrats could have an important role to play in supporting this emerging, but largely still undefined, cultural/ political framework.