Veblens America

Donald Trumps astonishing rise to the US presidency challenges conventional understandings of American politics, yet he is distinctively American. His biography and family lineage reflect American traditions such as real estate hucksterism and buccaneering salesmanship. But Trumps pugnacity also reflects the shadow of other darker American traditions of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, patterns that formed what Thorstein Veblen called a sclerosis of the American soul. Using Veblens theory of American development to explore the nations curious fusion of barbarism and liberal democracy, Veblens America taps the rich vein of the sociologists early twentieth-century insights to shed light on the Trump phenomenon that has overwhelmed and threatened early twenty-first-century American democracy.