Daniel Martinez HoSang

Daniel Martinez HoSang is professor of American studies and political science at Yale University, where he also holds appointments in the Yale School of Medicine’s Section of the History of Medicine and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. HoSang’s recent work has focused on the emergence and expansion of the multiracial right in the United States and beyond. Drawing on field research at political gatherings, community organizations, and media networks, he analyzes how contemporary right-wing movements are building diverse coalitions and cultivating new forms of political belonging. Across his writing, he traces how these formations reconfigure ideas of nation, citizenship, and democracy in an era of institutional distrust and political cynicism. 

In 2024, HoSang was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. He is the founding director of the Center for Applied Research on Democracy, which produces research and strategic analysis on contemporary political change for scholars, organizers, and broader public audiences. He is a former race and democracy fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. HoSang is the author or coeditor of eight books, including the forthcoming What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right (Haymarket Books, 2027) and a forthcoming volume of essays coedited with Joseph Lowndes titled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (New York University Press, 2026). 

HoSang’s project, “The Cynical Style in American Politics,” examines how cynicism toward politics and institutions emerges from lived experiences of abandonment and structural failure rather than from rigid ideological commitments, advancing a new framework that understands cynicism as a political style shaping how people interpret the state, their opponents, and the possibilities of collective action. It also identifies local practices and initiatives, from community-based governance to collaborative public problem-solving, that can counter cynicism, mitigate polarization, and help rebuild democratic trust.

May 2026