Escalating economic inequalities in the United States, and consequently across the globe, can readily be traced to that nation's 1980s adoption and international promulgation of neoliberal economics. Concertedly undermining the power of trade unions to maintain worker incomes whilst exporting manufacturing industry abroad and slashing health, education and welfare budgets, neoliberalism promised a ‘trickledown’ of wealth to the poorest in order to justify massive cuts in corporation taxation and taxes levied on the very richest. Leaving swathes of the United States a postindustrial ‘rustbelt’, neoliberalism thus dispossessed generations of the core precepts of national ideology: the equality of all Americans under a democratic system of governance, opportunity for social and economic advancement, and judicial impartiality for all.

In the light of this it is entirely unsurprising that neoliberal economics has significantly impacted discourses of national identity in the United States and consequently mass culture's fictive representation and exploration of what it now means, in a global neoliberal context, to call oneself an American. Those cultural products that adopt the conventions of the gothic mode to engage creatively with the contemporary status quo are particularly pertinent in this respect, a new form of Neoliberal Gothic having emerged that is explicit in its exploration of the human cost of post-industrialisation, governmental abnegation of responsibility for national welfare, and the fragmentation and polarisation of society by ethnic group, class and region. This chapter will explore, therefore, a number of Neoliberal Gothic texts of the Trump presidency: American Horror Story: Cult (2017) and The Handmaid's Tale (2016–), both television series, and the films Us (2019) and the Purge franchise (2013–18).