The Forgotten Man and White Populist Resentment

American political history has a rhythm and a progression. Part of that progression is White populist anger and resentment. The Forgotten Man and White Populist Resentment: Power, Politics, and Narrative Dominance in the Trump Era traces how this White populism rose to dominate the Republican Party primary base, how the populist campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump, and how he maintains narrative dominance over both parties and American political discourse.

Elites in Britain were the focus of resentment in the Revolutionary Era, as they presumed to tell the colonists that they were subject to taxes and domination of Great Britain. By the 1850s, populist resentment was transferred to the national government because it told the freedom‑loving, individual liberty‑defending, slave‑owning South that slavery was evil and would not be allowed to spread into the west. Both before and after suffering defeat, the poor White Southern male was told that he was equal with the elites of the Southern slave aristocracy because both are White and superior to all Blacks.

This resentment found a new iteration when the national government, using the power of the courts and the army, ended a century of Jim Crow forcing the White voters in Congressman Jim Jordan’s flyover country to live with Blacks as equals under the law. In 1969, Newsweek famously depicted the “Forgotten American” in this new social‑engineered America and the resentment of the imposed change in the cultural society the White voter was required to live in by the late 1960s. These voters resented that the America they now lived in was not the one they grew up in. The loss of “their” America was attributed to the federal government being controlled by social elites in Washington D.C. as well as Wall Street elites who in the 1990s asserted free trade and moved the factory jobs of the forgotten man overseas.

Presenting a clear and accessible narrative around the development of white populism and its resentment that shapes the narratives and rhetoric of the Trump era, this book is crucial for understanding the domestic and foreign policy initiatives of “America First” and “Make America Great Again.”