Citizenship After Trump

Bradley S. Klein is a freelance journalist and landscape architecture design consultant. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Massachusetts and taught political theory and international relations for many years before pursuing an award-winning career in journalism. He has held research grants at the Free University of Berlin and the Australian National University and lectured and consulted across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He is the author of Strategic Studies and World Order (1994) and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters in political and social theory and international relations. He is the author of nine books on golf course landscapes and thousands of articles on golf, sports and culture. His blog coronavirusdiaries.net covers everyday politics and culture in the pandemic era.

Scott G. Nelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, where he teaches political theory and political economy. He received his PhD from Arizona State University. He is the author of Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of the Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics: Critical Investigations (Ashgate, 2016). He has published articles in such journals as Philosophy and Social Criticism, International Relations Theory, New Political Science, and Polity. He is currently completing a co-authored book (with Joel T. Shelton) entitled The Political Economy of Statecraft.

In Citizenship After Trump, political theorists Bradley S. Klein and Scott G. Nelson explore the meaning of community in the context of intense political polarization, the surge of far-right nationalism and deepening divisions during the coronavirus pandemic.

With both Trumpism and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic greatly testing American democracy, the authors examine the political, economic and cultural challenges that remain after the Trump Administration's exceedingly inept leadership response. They explore the promise and limits of democracy relative to long-standing traditions of American political thought. The book argues that all Americans should consider the claims of citizenship amidst the forces consolidating today around narrow conceptions of race, nation, ethnicity and religion-each of which imperils the institutions of democracy and strikes at the heart of the country's political culture. Chapters on the media, political economy, fascism and social democracy explore what Americans have gotten so wrong politically and considers what kind of vision can, in the years ahead, lead the country out of a truly dangerous impasse.

Citizenship After Trump is an invaluable and timely resource for self-critical analysis and will stimulate focused discussions about as yet unexplored regions of America's political history.