Post-Fordist Affect and the U.S. Working Class: Politics After America is Gone

Donald Trump attracted working class support for his shocking capture of the U.S. Presidency by promising to Make America Great Again.

In this presentation, I examine the affectual registers and intensities, constructed from the nostalgic longing for post-War labor prosperity (1946-1973) that structured the delivery and reception of this message. How did the lingering vision of labor market security, devastated by successive neoliberal regimes, and by finance capital, inhibit sections of the U.S. working class, and labor union leadership, from adjusting to the changing conditions of globalized capital? How did the changes in labor market structures “unmoor” the political coalitions that held tenuous influence in the Post-Fordist period (1973-2008)? In analyzing three instances of labor union activism in the post-Great Recession economy (2009-2016) in the American Midwest, the presentation explores the erosion of working class political power and its impact on the very nature and direction of the U.S. state.