Our findings illustrate how far-right groups have used new technologies to generate an unprecedented amount of popular support and to attempt to influence the political mainstream.Take rural America as an example. We examine the dynamics of the relationship between these groups from 2013 until 2017, drawing upon data from social media, newspapers, and other online sources, and focusing on interactions between elites and rank-and-file supporters. The movement appeared marginal in the press but it dominated social media, using this presence to support to the party. Independence Party, the Eurosceptic political party that spearheaded the Brexit campaign. We present a case study of the relationship between Britain First, a far-right anti-Muslim social movement, and the U.K. Social movement scholars have recently turned their attention to the interactions between political parties and social movements, but little is known about how social media have im-pacted these relationships, despite widespread adoption of these technologies. To cite this article: Aurelien Mondon & Aaron Winter (2018): Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States, Identities, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2018.1552440 To link to this article: We show that the construction of the votes as (white) working class revolts, and representing the 'people' and/or 'demos', is based on a partial reading of electoral data, misrepresents the votes, stigmatises the working class, and supports an ideological purpose which maintains the racial, political and economic status quo. Moreover, it delegitimised Black, Minority Ethnic and immigrant experiences and interests, including working class ones. We argue that such constructions made race central, obscured the class make-up, allowed for the re-assertion of white identity as a legitimate political category and legitimised, mainstreamed and normalised racism and the far right. This article examines the populist racialisation of the working class as white and ‘left behind’, and representative of the ‘people’ or ‘demos’, in the campaigns and commentaries. The election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote were widely hailed as examples of (white) working class revolts. Finally, an interest-oriented Global Brit-ain about to face diplomatic overstretching and economic difficulties is suggested to have turned into a more precarious defender of the rules-based international order. Trump's election is argued to bring about a more protectionist trade environment while facilitating the prospect of a UK-US trade deal, which however compels the British government to uneasy balancing acts. The analysis especially elucidates the dubious feasibility of compensating 'hard Brexit' with free-trade agreements around the world, and the pitfalls of extrication from the EU as regards common foreign policy, data-sharing and sanctions policy. This article discusses how the 'Global Britain' strategy may play out in two broad international domains – trade and security – to elaborate on implications for the international order. In 2016, the Brexit-Trump watershed resulted in two consecutive shocks for British foreign policy, which under the May governments has been rearticulated around the goal to forge 'Global Britain'. In the process the analysis provides a multilayered contribution toward understanding how these normcore plutocrats in gold elevators have achieved and extended their power. That Trump and friends are not on a ladder but in an express lift symbolizes the attempted velocity of this phase of corporate meritocracy. Asking how a depiction of glittering luxury can be presented as populist revolt, it discusses how elites draw on discourses of meritocracy, of ' traveling up the social ladder ' to validate their actions. Analyzing the symbolic and material contexts of these two images, it considers the physical context of the lift within Trump Tower the tangled web of relationships uniting the men in the lift and the photograph's later life as a social media meme. The article provides a cultural and political analysis of the plutocrats who are playing at being ordinary ' winners, ' or what it calls normcore plutocrats. It analyzes two notorious photos of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage-one on their own, and one alongside Arron Banks, Gerry Gunster, Andy Wigmore, and Raheem Kassam-standing in a gold-plated elevator after Trump had won the US election. This article is coming out soon in the journal Cultural Politics (2019, Duke).

Plutocracy trump