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Sidney Plotkin - Veblens America: The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump

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Sidney Plotkin Veblens America: The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump
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The astonishing political rise of Donald Trump sent seasoned observers scurrying for clues and explanations. How did Trump happen? Of course no one guide will suffice, but a surprisingly helpful one, suggests Sidney Plotkin, is the early twentieth-century American radical, Thorstein Veblen. In remarkably vivid ways, Veblen understood the enduring American allure of figures such as Trump. [NP] As Plotkin shows in Veblens America, Trumps booming persona springs noisily out the country-town hucksterism that Veblen sardonically depicted, its fabulist habits fitting Trumps truthful hyperbole to a tee. But Veblen saw darker, more ominous forces in American life too--habits of barbaric violence, misogyny and xenophobia--forces that foreshadowed Trumps appeal to what Veblen called a deep sclerosis of the American soul. New Deal liberalism helped mute the strains, but economic crisis and the neoliberal response aggravated them. Donald Trumps appeal to hate made their revival unmistakable.To shape the study, Plotkin introduces readers to Veblens critical institutional theory and its application to both the American case generally and to the Trump family story in particular. With Veblen as foundation, he examines three generations of Trumps as they engage the forces of American development: Friedrich Trump, the hard-scrabble immigrant grandfather, on the make in the gold mining towns of the Pacific Northwest; Fred Trump, the father, who showed the way in using the loose rules of American housing policy to become a captain of local industry; and Donald J. Trump himself, who, having first burst onto the New York City scene as a burgeoning celebrity entrepreneur of the neoliberal era, then turned against neoliberal globalism, proclaiming himself the one and only savior of working-class America. As Plotkin shows, Trumps poisonous ascendancy exposed a barbaric malevolence that has long torn at the fabric of American democracy and its aspirations for equality.

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Veblens America
Veblens America
The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump
Sidney Plotkin
Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company wwwanthempresscom - photo 1
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
7576 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Sidney Plotkin 2018
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-872-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-872-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
For Aura
CONTENTS
This is a study that I never imagined I might write. It was certainly nowhere on my scholarly agenda. The coupling of Donald J. Trump and Thorstein Bunde Veblen did not present itself to me in any abstract way, history did. It began unexpectedly to take root in my mind in 2016. I was in the final stages of editing a collection of essays for Anthem on Veblens social theory. One of the volumes anonymous reviewers was complimentary of the authors contributions, but added a note of surprise and disappointment that little in the collection spoke to Veblens sense of the American case. Indeed notthe authors preoccupations were mainly with Veblens social theory, its methods and underpinnings, not with his observations about specific national instances. I made this point in reply and added another. In light of the suddenly strident political success of Donald Trump, I suggested that invoking Veblens thoughts on the United States might be an intriguing way both to explore the Trump phenomenon as well as to underscore Veblens continuing relevance to an understanding of the contemporary world. What I did not express in that reply was my gnawing perplexity at this disturbing shift in the tenor and thrust of American politics nor my uncertainty about how well Veblen might actually help to clarify matters. With the encouragement of Anthems Tej P. S. Sood to follow this lead, I began working anew through Veblens treatment of the American case, particularly its linkages to Veblens earliest observations about barbarism in The Theory of the Leisure Class. As I proceeded to unravel his idea of the barbaric stand in American liberalism, and to familiarize myself with Trumps life, the project became more and more imaginable and worthwhile. Readers, of course, will make their own judgments of its value. As for me, the experience of peering through Veblen to find the barbaric image of Donald Trump staring back at me proved to be among the most intellectually rewarding and harrowing of my writing life.
The resulting work is drawn from widely available, mainly journalistic sources on Trump, including the various biographies. Most of the writing was completed in January 2018. And though I have had some opportunities to update certain key developments, the main emphasis here is less on Trumps presidency than on Veblens aid in explaining the life and institutional forces that led to that presidency. My goal has not been to provide new data or evidence but to enrich understanding of Trump by showing how his lineage, behavior, values and business career are understandable within, although not necessarily exclusively, with the help of Veblens theoretical frame. The years ahead will find scholars from many fields and disciplines adding much to the academic study of Trump and Trumpism. The present work is but a first stab at making theoretical sense of Trump and what he represents. But it is just as much an attempt to highlight the power of Veblens insight into the barbaric forces at work in American development. Naturally, any errors of fact and judgment fall exclusively within my responsibility, and I offer the usual authorial apologies for any and all of these.
The time and freedom to do this work did not spontaneously appear. I want very much to express my gratitude to Vassar College and to my colleagues in the Department of Political Science for permitting me to take an early sabbatical leave in order to develop and complete this work. Without that generous contribution, this study could not have been undertaken. Special gratitude as well to Bill Scheuerman, Russ Bartley and Rick Tilman for their insightful readings and comments on early chapter drafts as well as to Anthems anonymous readers for their helpful and supportive notes. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to my wife, Aura, for her gifts of love and friendship, and for her ability to sense before I did that Donald Trumps candidacy was not to be taken lightly. Indeed, it is to her that this work is lovingly dedicated.
To avoid needless repetition, Thorstein Veblens writings are cited throughout with abbreviations. Full citations, with abbreviations in parentheses, including date of original publication, are included below:
The Theory of the Leisure Class, introduction by Robert Lekachman (New York: Penguin Books, 1979) (TLC, 1899).
The Theory of Business Enterprise, with a new introduction by Douglas Dowd (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1978) (TBE, 1904).
The Instinct of Workmanship and theStateof the Industrial Arts, with a new introduction by Murray G. Murphey (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990) (IOW, 1914).
Imperial Germany and the IndustrialRevolution, with an introduction by Joseph Dorfman (New York: Viking Press, 1954) (IG, 1915).
An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (New York: August M. Kelley, 1964) (NOP, 1917).
The Engineers and the PriceSystem, introduction by Daniel Bell (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 1983) (EPS, 1921).
The Vested Interests and the CommonMan (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964) (VICM, 1919).
The Higher Learning in America, with a new introduction by Ivar Berg (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993) (THL, 1918).
Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise inRecentTimes; The Case of America, with a new introduction by Marion J. Levy Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997) (AO, 1923).
Veblens essays and reviews appear in three collections. These are cited by title in the notes with abbreviations for the collections in which they appear:
The Place of Science inModernCivilization (New York: Capricorn Books, 1969). The Capricorn edition was entitled Veblen on Marx, Race, Science and Economics. Citations are from this edition, but are noted in the text as (PSC, 1919).
Economics in Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzrooni (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1964) (ECO, 1934).
Essays, Reviews and Reports: Previously Uncollected Writings, edited with a new introduction by Joseph Dorfman (Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973) (ERR, 1973).
In order to gain and hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.
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