Trump’s Triumph: The Return of Political Economic Nationalism

To many, President Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 seems to be a symbol of a major shift in the way our politics is practiced. But what is the nature of that shift? It is often seen as a turn away from “globalism” and toward a nationalism based on “race … religion, national origin” more at home in nineteenth-century continental Europe than America.

Seen in the context of our own history, however, we can understand present changes as part of a different, more sophisticated, and more quintessentially American tradition of nationalism. This tradition was intimately familiar to our Founders, who took it from eighteenth-century France and Britain and made it the medium of our politics even as its importance in Western Europe declined after 1790. It was a view of the nation based not on land or tribe but on political economy: the nation is no more or less than the people who do the work and pay the taxes to the government they elect.

One version of this nationalism held that those people who form the backbone of the nation should have the main say in the country’s future. The other version argued for a country of managers in which the terms of the country were set by institutional operators distinguished by their education and expertise. From 1791 to 1932 and then again since 2015, these two different versions of political economic nationalism have been the core of our partisan contests.

For most of our history, the Americans debating across this divide would have described themselves as members of a nation, America, with two different views of the way politics should handle economic questions inside of that nation’s constitutional (or bodily) structure: government subsidies or limited government; tariffs or free trade; welfare or markets; labor or business. Recovering this language of political economic nationalism—and the historical shifts that obscured it—is both historically interesting and relevant to understanding our current moment.

The Hidden Founding Links Between Constitutionalism and Political Economy

If we return to the origins of modern Britain, America, and France from the 1750s to the 1780s, we see widespread agreement among the most influential thinkers that a nation is a political economic entity, belonging to the people who work and pay taxes, and the people who came before them who did the same. The classic statement of this understanding is the pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?” by Emmanuel Sieyes, whose publication may constitute the most clarifying and, in the long term, the most revolutionary moment of the French Revolution.

Sieyes had a specific yet sweeping rhetorical task: to delegitimize two of the three branches of the French Parliament, the “First Estate” of clergy and the “Second Estate” of nobles, before Parliament’s meeting to address France’s debt crisis. Sieyes’s goal was to clear the field at the meeting for the Third Estate, which represented the middle and working class, to have the biggest voice.

In Sieyes’s view, the other two estates were simply illegitimate. Over the years, he thought, clergy and nobles had gradually corrupted religion, heredity, and tribe to justify their right to rule over people. By redefining membership in the nation as based solely on work rather than religion, heredity, or tribe, Sieyes was ensuring the people would no longer be manipulated by unaccountable elites. Members of the Third Estate agreed; Sieyes gave them the coherent rallying cry at the meeting that led to the establishment of France’s first (short-lived) constitutional monarchy.

Sieyes’s solution for how to govern this new political, economic nation was more controversial. He favored a managerial approach: concerned about civil war, he reasoned, in the words of scholar Michael Sonenscher, that “legal systems and financial resources provide forms of conflict resolution that politics cannot.” This meant that unelected administrators should do most of the work of government. Sieyes’s view was largely shared by Alexander Hamilton. It was in Hamilton’s America that Sieyes’ approach encountered sophisticated opposition from James Madison.

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