After a few days of emotions running wild—some feeling like shattered glass and others bubbling with joy—the time has come to pull oneself together and look for sound analyses to understand what happened and why. The point is that there was really no need to search… The reasons for Trump’s victory are well known, especially to the ES/PE community members and readers. Clicking on the Neoliberalism tag on this blog will provide a long list of articles, posts, and excerpts that explain one aspect or another of the results of the recent US elections. Clicking on tags such as Inequality and Class will add more very important answers. Since the ES/PE community was established, our academic and policy-oriented engagement with these topics has been unceasing. Does this fact comfort the one who needs to be comforted? On the contrary, is it annoying? It depends… In any case, the socio-political knowledge to understand economic realities is so extensive and insightful. What to do with it — whether to build on it or bury one’s head in a MSNBC broadcast — is another matter.
Below, you will find several compelling posts written on this blog specifically about Trump and his becoming, and other relevant entries that offer broader and revealing perspectives. These informative and thought-provoking texts deliver, as economic sociology and political economy should, institutional and structural analyses. However, I will conclude this brief reflection on a slightly different note by recalling a remark made by Gilles Deleuze to Michel Foucault in their 1972 conversation: “We cannot shut out the scream of Wilhelm Reich: the masses were not deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a fascist regime!”

— “The victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control“. A striking excerpt from Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece The Great Transformation where he brilliantly discusses the rise of Fascism and Market Economy

— Trump as Messiah (by Ivan Light; built upon ideas developed more fully in his book Entrepreneurs and Capitalism Since Luther: Rediscovering the Moral Economy )

— How Neoliberalism Prepared the Way for Donald Trump (by Zygmunt Bauman)

— Social Media, Authoritarian Capitalism, and Donald Trump (by Christian Fuchs)

— Folk economics, economic sociology, and Trump’s campaign (on Richard Swedberg’s “Folk Economics and its Role in Trump’s Presidential Campaign”)

— It is identity, stupid! Nationalism, trade, and the populist rage (by Vinícius Rodrigues Vieira)

— Nietzsche on Danger in Wealth and Pretense

— The Rise of the Capital-state and Neo-nationalism: a Neo-Polanyian Perspective (by Oleksandr Svitych)

— Back to the Future: Authoritarian Neoliberal Regime versus Democratic Social State (rereading Ralph Miliband’s classic The State in Capitalist Society)

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