Trump’s First World Revivalism Pits Globalization against Development

On the eve of the pandemic, Trump was arguing for a “First World Revivalism” that countered globalization. See the full argument on the Anthropology News website.

Trump’s First World Revivalism Pits Globalization against Development

Society for Economic Anthropology

Nora Haenn with Jacob Cooper, Logan Graham, Madeleine Smith, and Vanessa Way March 20, 2020

What anthropologists glean from policy makers’ statements about globalization and development can be very different from what most voters hear.

As she steered the United Kingdom through Brexit, former Prime Minister Theresa May said “talk of greater globalization…means their [British] jobs being outsourced and wages undercut.” Analysts of antiglobalization follow these sorts of pronouncements by focusing on their economic nationalism and supposed rejection of the post-World War II order.

Anthropologists might hear something different, detecting in these debates echoes of the past. It’s easy to compare today’s nationalist policies with colonialism, especially when those policies repeat colonialism’s racialized and gendered hierarchies.

US voters, however, are not steeped in colonial history. When Trump announced at the 2016 Republican convention, “Americanism, not globalism, shall be our creed,” the touchstone was the 1950s. For years, right-wing media had been lamenting the loss of an “idealized mid-twentieth century.” Internationally speaking, making America great again means repositioning the United States atop an order built around ideas of international development, a time when the United States was first among First World nations. From this standpoint, one of the shifts propelled during the Trump era is a competition between two ways of reckoning international ties: globalization versus development….

See more at on the Anthropology News website.