CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE TRUMP GOVERNMENT: IMPRESSIONS OF AN ANTAGONISM

The aim of this article is to capture the atmosphere of civil rights advocacy in the United States during the first year of Donald Trump’s rule, in order to verify the conceptions and types of mobilization of law supported by different political and social forces. To do so, the survey analyzed a total of one thousand materials extracted from two major newspapers in the country: The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The analysis covered daily news, editorials, open editorials, readers’ letters, interviews, cultural critiques, special sections, and even obituaries. The results obtained showed strong political polarization. On the one hand, progressives have united around expected civil rights conceptions, embracing the need for social and identity politics. Politically isolated, they were unable to move forward with propositional policies of expansion or creation of new rights, just trying to deny or oppose Trump’s policies. And on the other hand, conservatives and classical liberals came together in a kind of “legal engineering,” marrying the classic liberal discourse with conservative rights-based policies and conceptions, updating in a rather retrograde way the civil rights meanings.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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