American Populism, American Personhood

Current American populism—an endogenous product of liberal capitalism—functions less as an interruption of liberal democracy than as the political form through which its contradictions are expressed. Starting from that premise, this essay traces how citizens, rendered economically superfluous and politically abstracted, reach for meaning through affective grievance—grievance that populism captures, reroutes, and converts into allegiance. By placing C.B. Macpherson’s critique of possessive individualism in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s analysis of moral incapacitation, A.N. Whitehead’s insights on simplified ideals, and Kant’s republican account of public right, this essay reconstructs the mechanisms by which structural dispossession is transformed into cultural antagonism. Through political-theoretical argument augmented with empirical illustrations, this essay provocatively demonstrates that American populism’s emotional economy reinforces the very structure it claims to resist and why any democratic renewal ought to begin with a reconstruction of personhood itself.