Trump’s victory is seen by many as a conservative “restoration”, but we cannot ignore that Trump has long been at odds with most of the first term team, and has been ostracized by both parties’ establishment in the past four years, with numerous unresolved judicial cases on his shoulders.
In fact, the conservative camp has been in a state of internal disintegration for a long time in the past four years, whether it is the disputes at McKinsey or the filth during the primaries. Trump, who is not just conservative, is a popular “idol” re elected by the Republican Party and MAGA in compromise and reorganization. This election also saw him directly sent back to the White House by centrists and swing states.
Obviously, the narrative facing Americans and even the world may not be Trump’s “restoration” or the return of conservatives, but a new political narrative. Let’s call this narrative traumatic nostalgia for now.
Nostalgia is often considered in critical theory as an act of collective memory reconstruction and the construction of virtual historical texts. In this perspective, the past and present history are broken, no longer a precursor to contemporary history, but a perfect slice of historical “memory”. When people generally feel that the decline of the present world needs to be repaired, nostalgia for perfect slices will occupy people’s minds, calling for a return to that ‘golden age’.
Wansi’s’ The Lament of the Countryside People ‘is a typical example of’ traumatic nostalgia ‘. In the eyes of those with a sociological perspective and knowledge of American history and society, the quality of Vance’s book may not be as good as “Strangers in the Homeland” of the same genre, and after reading it, one does not feel that Vance has much empathy for the “rural people” in the book, but rather has a taste of the American Dream. The popularity of this book is not unrelated to the support of Peter Thiel, the protagonist of Wanskine.
However, after the 21-24 Democratic cycle, regardless of the quality and value orientation of this book itself, it did become a carrier of traumatic nostalgia for all ‘rural people’. This group belongs to the group abandoned by the myth of late American modernity and progressivism, with a deep sense of loss and collective resentment.
A collective nostalgia trend always has many selective memories. For example, Woody Allen parodied the selective memory of the so-called “golden age” in the literary world in “Midnight in Paris”. The traumatic nostalgia of rural people is similar in terms of selective memory, but the underlying logic is not entirely the same. Intellectuals’ pursuit of nostalgia is to find legitimacy in their criticism of reality or the establishment machine. The nostalgia of “rural people” comes more from the fusion of the sense of unease, deprivation, and powerlessness of existence, becoming “strangers to their homeland”, which is also the source of “sad songs”.
When this deeply rooted collective emotion encounters the anti establishment public politics that has become mainstream in the United States since Obama, intense confrontation and conflict are inevitable. The entire modern anti establishment politics usually relies on the bourgeois class of new media and new citizen spaces. Compared to the “local class” of “rural people”, they belong to the “global class”. In the discourse space dominated by the latter, male politics, traditional trends, white culture, American values and their accompanying value system are deconstructed and criticized in the discourse shaping movement, gradually becoming the opposite of a new progressive new policy.
In this process, the traditional democratic party building system and the centrist “male dominated” – or male, white, middle and high educated classes – often choose to intentionally or unintentionally compromise and give way in this discourse order, as well as adopt negative identification (substantially distorting and diluting the subjectivity of women and other new policy groups in the recognition of value consensus, becoming respectable empathizers and persuaders).
So, the “rural people” were surprised to find that the traditional society had transformed into a de facto peace between the “male dominated” and the new political groups in the new century, and the “rural people” had become the worst clowns of this bourgeois aesthetic experience, discourse narrative, and political criticism. This is also the reason why Wan Si’s previous statement about “raising cats without children” caused strong reactions from both sides.
In the past, research on general nostalgic culture focused on the social structural changes brought about by the rapid changes in the process of modernity. Now, by observing the “rural people”, we can go further, and nostalgia is no longer just the political imagination of the backward in the process of modernity.
In fact, the political network formed by discourse instigation, media shaping, and citizen action in late modern public life, regardless of stance, conservative or progressive, rural or global class, is essentially a political imagination. However, the ultimate way of realization has become a representative rupture of citizen politics vs. institutional machinery, square politics vs. traditional order, or electoral politics due to differences in the institutional systems of various countries.
The political action triggered by the traumatic nostalgia of the “rural people” group originated from the intertwined fission of political anti establishment process and conservative politics. They followed the paranoid and persecuted imagination of conservative politics towards their homeland, but they also did not accept the neoconservative concept of negative freedom and localized politics that had dominated the Republican mainstream for the past thirty years. So Trump, who is not on the same side as neoconservatism, became their savior in their eyes.
Selective memory is very evident in this. Vance probably doesn’t want to remember that in fact, neoconservatism became mainstream to solve the stagflation crisis caused by competition with the Soviet Union around the 1970s, and financialization was also aimed at solving the stagflation problem. Even earlier, it could not be stopped when the United States entered the Cold War. The great achievements of neoliberalism and the process of capital globalization since the 1980s are just the result of various appeals. It is essentially impossible to investigate how many ‘rural people’ consciously or unconsciously recognized this process and personally shattered the ‘golden age’ back then.
Logically speaking, it’s not that a group of Wall Street financial tycoons, Silicon Valley elites, and LGBT people have made our society like this, and as long as we drive them away, everything will get better. Instead, the continuous maintenance of economic hegemony by the United States has led people back then to make certain choices, giving birth to financial tycoons, Silicon Valley elites, and a global class.
It can be said that the actions of today’s “rural people” are a cultural process of retaliatory emotions and collective memory reconstruction. However, the marginalization of the local community, the decline of manufacturing and industrial workers, the reduction of political survival space, the withering of traditional industries, the impact of Silicon Valley’s technological feudalism and New Deal cultural politics on the “rural people” are indeed real and profound. Disputes such as “gender politics”, “identity politics”, “New Progressive New Deal”, “cultural intermediaries biased towards the urban class”, “values and lifestyle struggles” are only superficial, and fundamentally, in the era of transnational capitalism in the United States, the “rural people” were first thrown out of the economic structure.
In the process of the decline of hegemony afterwards, not only the “rural people”, but more and more people were thrown out. Then Trump appeared, telling people that the essence of the problem was “our manufacturing industry was taken away”, and people began to miss the “golden age” that was difficult to say how long it existed (after all, Japan and Germany’s industries began to impact the United States as soon as they recovered).
So Trump became the best idol for “rural people” to maintain stability in a fragmented world. He convinced people that there really was a “golden age” where MAGA could be achieved by going back in time. He pointed out the “essence” of the problem and the “direction” of the struggle. The emergence of Trump is a traumatic nostalgia for the “rural people” and a political nostalgia for the existing class status quo in the United States. This is also the reason why swing states and middle of the road voters have become silent and MAGA like after experiencing the so-called “Biden MMT boom”, because the Democratic Party has only made people feel further and further away from what they are nostalgic about over the past four years.
After Trump took office for the first time eight years ago, I discussed the “representative fracture” phenomenon in the United States behind the election in Mr. Trump’s 18th Misty Moon. This time, we need to further analyze the difference between the two terms of office. We need to focus on three clues: the compromise between Trump and the conservative establishment, the defense mechanism against globalization in the context of America’s decline, and the relative changes in America’s class structure.
Trump appeared in his first term as a complete rebel against both the Republican and Democratic establishment, as well as an outsider who entered the political arena. His momentum is not only a slowly growing branch of the “representative rupture” in the United States, but also comes from the hollowing out of the democratic party’s institutional faction by the youth activism and social democratic sentiment within the Democratic Party.
Amidst the wave of the 18 Misty Moon movement, Trump was sent into the White House and maintained a fragile balance of terror with his aides and Republican establishment throughout his tenure. However, in the past four years, the Republican establishment has been plagued by a shortage of candidates and a demographic and cultural shaping movement, which has gradually eroded its underlying values and organizational structure. While dealing with the long-term judicial harassment of the Democratic Party, Trump seized this opportunity and reached some form of compromise with the Republican establishment, especially the young faction. In the end, it even evolved into a situation where it was not the Republican Party that tolerated “Trump”, but rather Trump swallowed up the Republican establishment and became its only public representative.
From the fact that the swing states are all red in this election, it can be seen that Trump is not only an idol raised by the populist action community MAGA, but also a symbiotic entity that has been re integrated and rebuilt from the bottom that has already fallen into extreme decline and decadence.
Secondly, the overall context of the decline of the United States is accompanied by many changes in global mechanisms, including but not limited to supply chain security and the impact of national political groups on existing globalization rules, the impact of economic reciprocity dominated by regional powers on Western style political values and alliance politics, the emergence of new geopolitics, and the decline of American intervention capabilities. Most importantly, the reflexive contradictions in the globalization structure dominated by transnational capitalism have emerged.
Macroscopically speaking, traditional transnational capitalism’s “colonial” construction of policy orientation, economic structure, and cultural orientation in emerging market countries through capital, technological advantages, and product scarcity, as well as the capital proliferation model through the acquisition of cheap human resources, energy, and other factor allocation, have gradually been reversed by the increasingly powerful independent development capabilities of emerging markets.
Traditional allies of the United States, such as Germany, heavily rely on Russia for energy, human resources, market space, and even the entire supply chain system. This has led to German companies not only being unable to adapt to China’s supply chain system, but also unable to prevent domestic substitution driven by industrial policies. They are also unable to adapt to the supply chain transfer costs brought about by international political disputes between emerging and established powers.
So in the eyes of the United States, which once dominated the globalization order, the alliance system maintained by a large amount of diplomatic costs and military expenditures in politics is not only scheming, but also difficult to form substantial synergy. Economically, the real industries are moving out, hollowing out the manufacturing employment structure and the “industrial worker myth” that the domestic structure of the United States relies on for survival, and high-value industries are also facing new challenges.
Between the gentrification of urban and suburban areas in society, the Burchianization of cultural spaces, the discretization of the urban class, and the organizational structure of traditional communities and families, the two systems are isolated and intertwined, creating a confrontational tension (such as voting by gender and age within families during elections). Culturally, ‘rural people’ have begun to become ‘strangers’ and have become value villains in public political narratives.
From a national perspective, the rise of isolationism and nativist narratives promoted by Trump stems from a proactive defense mechanism of some federal political order, while the birth of MAGA and the anger of rural people come from the local revenge formed by the merger of this proactive defense mechanism and nostalgia.
Finally, regarding the relative changes in the class structure of the United States. The development of transnational capitalism has brought about a globalized citizen class and social structure in world cities or regional international centers,
Their lifestyle is shaped by the aesthetic taste of “dignity” instilled by the media of consumerism,
Cultural orientation refers to the complex texts and symbolic symbols brought about by the emerging media of globalization,
Lifestyle comes from identity provided by Internet media ecology,
Political positions and public agendas are integrated into California’s ideological neo liberal New Deal, which is intertwined by the Internet media and cross regional political action groups (NGOs, etc.). The social interaction network began to separate from traditional communities and families, forming an independent bourgeois community.
Local social classes may not necessarily be born from the same red neck as American narratives, but they are mostly rooted in local social relationships, customs, value networks, traditional social structures, and power orders that have grown into local groups. For over thirty years, not only in the United States, but also in various regions, there have been conflicts and contradictions between global and local classes. Let’s temporarily refer to the local class as “rural people” in Vance.
The nostalgia of ‘rural people’ is essentially a product of the persecuted response to this conflict and the coordinated decline of substantive discourse power. It is a cultural trauma that arises from this political nostalgia and collective memory reconstruction. In this trauma, collective memory is shattered by a global narrative and needs to be restored in an imagined ‘home’ – a retrospective imagination of the ‘peak period’ of the 1980s and 1990s in America.
The imagined ‘peak period’ has been usurped by the deep government of the United States and conquered by external enemies. So the political slogan needed is’re secure ‘sexual politics, and Trump has become facing these multiple cracks, shouting’ fix everything in America ‘, which has both continuity and subtle contradictions with the previous’ make America great again’.
So we see that in the comparison between these two US elections, the mechanism of representative rupture or social group polarization has long existed, but today, eight years later, we cannot simply say that the United States and even the world have returned to the conservative cycle.
The reconstruction and evolution of globalization itself, as well as the various changes brought about by the process of self contradiction and self repair, have led countries and the United States, which was once a leader of globalization, to enter a period of growth of nativist narratives together. Calling this trend the ‘resurgence of conservatism’ is nothing but the arrogance of progressives.
Indeed, like the “traumatic nostalgia” mentioned in this article, Americans are neither accurate in their nostalgic memories of the heyday nor truly understand or unwilling to admit the reasons for their decline. But looking at the world, each region actually has its own need for “traumatic nostalgia”, whether these nostalgia are real, embellished, or even false. In the past, they were obscured by hegemonic order and globalization discourse. Now, under the turn of the United States, the growth of nativist narratives in various regions is inevitable.
The impact of Trump’s second week on us is not limited to the effects of his tariff policies and withdrawal diplomacy after taking office, or the political behavior brought about by the ecological changes in the United States. The deeper significance lies in the fact that although globalization is still a historical trend, its structure, form, and mechanism have slowly begun to undergo profound changes. Understanding, grasping, and adapting to these changes is crucial for our country, which has been deeply affected by globalization over the past few decades.
We may see the wonderful combination of localism and global cultural space, the subtle tension between regionalism politics and the coordination system of major powers, and the symbiotic state between new geopolitics and the reconstruction of global supply chain configuration. How to seize the new round of historical opportunities is just beginning.
