Teaching political behavior in the age of Trump

The first two questions that must be addressed in writing about teaching political behavior in the era of Trump are what do we mean by political behavior and what do we mean by the era of Trump. Although political behavior in its full sense encompasses a very broad subject, in this intervention, I focus primarily on the electoral behavior of ordinary citizens. As for “the era of Trump,” my position is that rise of Trump, along with the Brexit vote, and the rise of European populism are very much of a piece—a modern democratic phenomenon rather than a specifically American one. Rather than requiring a fundamentally new approach in how we think about voters, however, they are all the heightened result of things that have been true for a long time, perhaps catalyzed, but not fundamentally caused, by current events. Moreover, these are things that used to be at the core of our teaching and research about electoral behavior, but have largely fallen off the agenda—and need to be brought back to a central position. This contribution is organized under three major headings: (1) how the content of what we teach about political/electoral behavior might be adjusted in the age of Trump; (2) how teaching about politics more generally might be changed in the age of Trump; (3) and the implications of what we are teaching for democracy, and for our role as both critics of, and propagandists for, liberal democracy.