The wound of whiteness: Conceptualizing economic convergence as Trauma in the 2016 United States Presidential Election

Abstract

Political commentators on the right of the political spectrum and the mainstream left assert that Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election was due to poor white male voters left behind by globalization because his opponent abandoned them by prioritizing identity, meaning race and gender, politics. I argue instead that White masculinist identity politics constructed legal gains domestically by minorities and women and economic gains internationally by emerging economies, particularly in East Asia, as trauma. The economic position that generated the rage that carried Donald Trump to the White House was not economic divergence from the wealthiest one percenters but economic convergence between Whites and other racialized groups. Building on Freudian trauma theory, Judith Herman's seminal clinical research on repeat trauma and James Gilligan's research on masculinity, I construct a framework for understanding political trauma in the election. Referencing statistical data from exit polls, recent reassessments and textual analysis, I argue that White men and women vis-à-vis racial minorities, construct the erosion of the normative social compact and consequent loss of racial privilege as trauma because it entails submission to humiliation and loss of status, experienced as a position of gendered subjectivity.