Trump's sudden, strange appeal took most political observers by surprise (it broke their necks, frankly), but not Bart Bonikowski. The NYU professor of politics and sociology has been looking at the global rise of populism for over a decade, along with the ideologies and forms of nationalism that help to explain why it's got us all in its grasp at the moment. We talk about the common causes of this weird kind of politics, the most dangerous outcomes it might lead us to, and what the antidotes might be.

Readings:

* “Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment” (British Journal of Sociology, 2017)Clarifies distinctions among populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism and shows that spikes in radical‑right support come from framing strategies resonating with folks experiencing national status threats pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+1cifar.ca+1 sociology.berkeley.edu.

* “Varieties of American Popular Nationalism” (with Paul DiMaggio, AJS, 2016)Identified four distinct nationalist mindsets—disengaged, civic, ardent, restrictive—and mapped their prevalence russellsage.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4.

* “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’” (with Feinstein & Bock, AJS, 2021)Shows how Republicans and Democrats increasingly diverge in their definitions of America—Republicans leaning exclusionary, Democrats inclusive journals.uchicago.edu+2en.wikipedia.org+2cifar.ca+2.

* “Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020)” (2022)Uses neural language modeling to track ideological trends across historic campaigns cifar.ca+1journals.sagepub.com+1 en.wikipedia.org+6pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+6papers.ssrn.com+6.

* “Trump’s Populism…” (2019 chapter in When Democracy Trumps Populism)Dissects the nationalist rhetoric in Trump’s campaigns and situates it within broader democratic patterns nyuscholars.nyu.edu.

Get full access to The Rip Current by Jacob Ward at theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe