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. In the Revolutionary Era, it was the resentment of elites in Britain that presumed to tell the colonists, who they viewed as subjects, not citizens, that they were subject to taxes and domination of Great Britain. These colonists refused to be treated as “slaves” and revolted. 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, per se, evil and would not be allowed to spread into the west. To these “fanatics” who sought power over the Southern Christian way of life, as Lincoln said, “war came.” 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 were White and superior to all Blacks. As Dr. King said in his Selma speech, the food of racism was fed to him when his stomach cried out due to his poverty.

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 through the 1970s. 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 asserted free trade and moved the factory jobs of the forgotten man overseas.

The Forgotten Man and White Populist Resentment: Power, Politics, and Narrative Dominance in the Trump Era traces how the Republican Party, beginning with the 1948 revolt of Southern Democrats under Strom Thurmond, adopted White populist resentment and transitioned the White non-college educated flyover voter into the Republican Party under George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon. This book examines 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.

Author Biography

Arthur H. Garrison is a professor of criminal justice at Kutztown University. He holds a doctorate in law and policy from Northeastern University. Dr. Garrison’s research and publications include American political history, criminal justice history, race and policing, constitutional law, legal history, and criminal justice policymaking. He has also published research on the nature of Christianity and the foundations of Christianity in American and Western legal history.