Democracy

Against Apartheid Pedagogy in the Age of White Supremacy

Noticias

By; Henry Giroux

The toxic thrust of white supremacy runs through American culture like an electric current. Jim Crow is back without apology suffocating American society in a wave of voter suppression laws, the elevation of racist discourse to the centers of power, and the ongoing attempt by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy that makes important social issues that challenge the racial and economic status quo disappear. The cult of manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Matters of justice, ethics, equality, and historical memory now vanish from the classrooms of public and higher education and from powerful cultural apparatuses and social media platforms that have become the new teaching machines.

In the current era of white supremacy, the most obvious version of apartheid pedagogy, is present in attempts by Republican Party politicians to rewrite the narrative regarding who counts as an American. This whitening of collective identity is largely reproduced by right-wing attacks on diversity and race sensitivity training, critical race programs in government, and social justice and racial issues in the schools. These bogus assaults are all too familiar and include widespread and coordinated ideological and pedagogical attacks against both historical memory and critical forms of education.

The fight to censor critical, truth telling versions of American history and the current persistence of systemic racism is part of a larger conservative project to prevent teachers, students, journalists, and others from speaking openly about crucial social issues that undermine a viable democracy. Such attacks are increasingly waged by conservative foundations, anti-public intellectuals, politicians, and media outlets. These include right-wing think tanks such as Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell, right-wing politicians such as Mitch McConnell, and far-right media outlets such as City Journal, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and Fox News. The threat of teaching children about the history and systemic nature of racism appears particularly dangerous to Fox News, which since June 5, 2020 has posited “critical race theory” as a threat in over 150 different broadcasts.[1] What is shared by all of these individuals and cultural apparatuses is the claim that critical race theory and other “anti-racist” programs constitute forms of indoctrination that threatens to undermine the alleged foundations of Western Civilization.

The nature of this moral panic is evident in the fact that 15 state legislatures across the country have introduced bills to prevent or limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in American society. In doing so, they are making a claim for what one Texas legislator called “traditional history,” which allegedly should focus on “ideas that make the country great.”[2] Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, is more forthright in revealing the underlying ideological craze behind censoring any talk by teachers and students about race in Idaho public schools. She has introduced a taskforce to protect young people from what she calls, with no pun intended, “the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism.”[3]

Such attacks are about more than censorship and racial cleansing. They make the political more pedagogical in that they use education and the power of persuasion as weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history of racism and white supremacy. In doing so, they attempt to undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.”[4] The current attacks on critical race theory, if not critical thinking itself, are but one instance of the rise of apartheid pedagogy. This is a pedagogy in which education is used in the service of dominant power in order to both normalize racism, class inequities, and economic inequality while safeguarding the interests of those who benefit from such inequities the most. In pursuit of such a project, they impose a pedagogy of oppression, complacency, and mindless discipline. They ignore or downplay matters of injustice and the common good, and rarely embrace notions of community as part of a pedagogy that engages pressing social, economic and civic problems. Instead of an education of civic practice that enriches the public imagination, they endorse all the elements of indoctrination central to formalizing and updating a mode of fascist politics.

The conservative wrath waged against critical race theory is not only about white ignorance being a form of bliss but is also central to a struggle over power—the power of the moral and political imagination. White ignorance is crucial to upholding the poison of white supremacy. Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance–a manufactured ignorance that attempts to whitewash history and rewrite the narrative of American exceptionalism as it might have been framed in the 1920s and 30s when members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan shaped the policies of some school boards. Apartheid pedagogy uses education as a disimagination machine to convince students and others that racism does not exist, that teaching about racial justice is a form of indoctrination, and that understanding history is more an exercise in blind reverence than critical analysis. Apartheid pedagogy aims to reproduce current systems of racism rather than end them. Organizations such as No Left Turn in Education not only oppose teaching about racism in schools, but also comprehensive sex education, and teaching children about climate change, which they view as forms of indoctrination. Without irony, they label themselves an organization of “patriotic Americans who believe that a fair and just society can only be achieved when malleable young minds are free from indoctrination that suppresses their independent thought.”[5] This is the power of ignorance in the service of civic death and a flight from ethical and social responsibility. Kati Holloway, citing the NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, succinctly sums up the elements of white ignorance. She writes:

“White ignorance,” according to NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, is an “inverted epistemology,” a deep dedication to and investment in non-knowing that explains white supremacy’s highly curatorial (and often oppositional) approach to memory, history and the truth. While white ignorance is related to the anti-intellectualism that defines the white Republican brand, it should be regarded as yet more specific. According to Mills, white ignorance demands a purposeful misunderstanding of reality—both present and historical—and then treats that fictitious worldview as the singular, de-politicized, unbiased, “objective” truth. “One has to learn to see the world wrongly,” under the terms of white ignorance, Mills writes, “but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority.”[6]

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reports that right-wing legislators have taken up the cause to ban critical race theory from not only public schools but also higher education. She highlights the case of Boise State University, which has banned dozens of classes dealing with diversity. She notes that soon afterwards, “the Idaho State Senate voted to cut $409,000 from the school’s budget, an amount meant to reflect what Boise State spends on social justice programs.”[7] Such attacks are happening across the United States and are not only meant to curtail teaching about racism, sexism, and other controversial issues in the schools, but also to impose strict restrictions on what non-tenured assistant professors can teach and to what degree they can be pushed to accept being both deskilled and giving up control over the conditions of their labor.

In an egregious example of an attack on free speech and tenure itself, the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina denied a tenure position to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones because of her work on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 project, “which examined the legacy of slavery in America.”[8] The failure to provide tenure to Hannah-Jones, who is also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” and an inductee into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame, is a blatant act of racism and a gross violation of academic freedom. Let’s be clear. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the North Carolina Board of Trustees because she brings to the university a critical concern with racism that clashes with the strident political conservatism of the board. It is also another example of a racist backlash by conservatives who wish to deny that racism even exists in the United States, never mind that it should even by acknowledged in the classrooms of public and higher education.

This is a form of “patriotic education” being put in place by a resurgence of those who support Jim Crow power relations and want to impose pedagogies of repression on students in the classroom. This type of retribution is part of a longstanding politics of fear, censorship and academic repression that has been waged by conservatives since the student revolts of the 1960s.[9] It is also part of the ongoing corporatization of the university in which business models now define how the university is governed, faculty are reduced to part-time workers, and students are viewed as customers and consumers.[10]

Equally important, Hannah-Jones’ case is an updated and blatant attack on the ability and power of faculty rather than Boards of Trustees to make decisions regarding both faculty hiring and the crucial question who decides how tenure is handled in a university.[11] Keith E. Whittington and Sean Wilentz are right in stating that the Board’s actions to deny Hannah-Jones a tenured professorship are about more than a singular violation of faculty rights, academic freedom, and an attack on associated discourses relating to critical race theory. They write:

For the Board of Trustees to interfere unilaterally on blatantly political grounds is an attack on the integrity of the very institution it oversees. The perception and reality of political intervention in matters of faculty hiring will do lasting damage to the reputation of higher education in North Carolina — and will embolden boards across the country similarly to interfere with academic operations of the universities that they oversee.[12]

Holding critical ideas has become a liability in the contemporary neoliberal university. Also at risk here is the relationship between critical thinking, civic values, and historical remembrance in the current attempts to suppress not just voting rights but also dangerous memories, especially regarding the attack on Critical Race Theory. David Theo Goldberg has brilliantly outlined how the war on Critical Race Theory and other anti-racist programs is designed largely to eliminate the legacy and persistent effects of systemic racial injustice and its underlying structural, ideological, and pedagogical fundamentals and components. This is apartheid pedagogy with a vengeance. As Goldberg writes:

First, the coordinated conservative attack on CRT is largely meant to distract from the right’s own paucity of ideas. The strategy is to create a straw house to set aflame in order to draw attention away from not just its incapacity but its outright refusal to address issues of cumulative, especially racial, injustice…. Second, the conservative attack on CRT tries to rewrite history in its effort to neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and interpersonal prejudice. … On this view, the structures of society bear no responsibility, only individuals. Racial inequities today are …not the living legacy of centuries of racialized systems…. Third, race has always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around. They know all too well how to use it to stoke white resentment while distracting from the depredations of conservative policies for all but the wealthy.[13]

The public imagination is now in crisis. Radical uncertainty has turned lethal. In the current historical moment, tyranny, fear, and hatred have become defining modes of governance and education. Right-wing politicians bolstered by the power of corporate controlled media now construct ways of thinking and feeling that prey on the anxieties of the isolated, disenfranchised, and powerless. This is a form of apartheid pedagogy engineered to substitute disillusionment and incoherence for a sense of comforting ignorance, the thrill of hyper-masculinity, and the security that comes with the militarized unity of the accommodating masses waging a war on democracy. The public imagination is formed through habits of daily life, but only for the better when such experiences are filtered through the ideals and promises of a democracy. This is no longer true. Under neoliberal fascism, the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite has ensured that any notion of change regarding equality and justice is now tainted, if not destroyed, as a result of what Theodor Adorno called a retreat into apocalyptic bombast marked by “an organized flight of ideas.”[14]

Violence in the United States has become a form of domestic terrorism; it is omnipresent and works through complex systems of symbolic and institutional control. It extends from the prison and school to the normalizing efforts of cultural apparatus that saturate an image-based culture. Violence registers itself in repressive policies, police brutality, and in an ongoing process of exclusion and disposability. It is also present in the weaponization of ideas and the institutions that produce them through forms of apartheid pedagogy. Fear now comes in the form of both armed police and repressive modes of education. As the famed artist Isaac Cordal observes, “We live in societies….that use fear in order to make people submissive….Fear bends us [and makes us]vulnerable to its desires….Our societies have been built on violence, and that heritage, that colonial hangover which is capitalism today still remains.”[15] Under gangster capitalism’s system of power, the poverty of the civic and political imagination is taking its last breath.

Authoritarian societies do more than censor and subvert the truth, they also shape collective consciousness and punish those who engage in dangerous thinking.[16] For instance, the current plague of white supremacy fueling neoliberal fascism is rooted not only in structural and economic forms of domination, but also intellectual and pedagogical forces, making clear that education is central to politics. It also points to the urgency of understanding that white supremacy is first and foremost a struggle over agency, assigned meanings, and identity—over what lives count and whose don’t. This is a politics and pedagogy that often leaves few historical traces in a culture of immediacy and manufactured ignorance.

The emergent and expanding presence of white supremacy and fascist politics disappear easily in a culture dominated by the endless images of spectacularized violence that fill screen culture with mass shootings, police violence, and racist attacks on Blacks and Asian Americans in the post-Trump era. Disconnected and decontextualized such images vanish in an image-based culture of shock, entertainment, and organized forgetting. When critical ideas come to the surface, right-wing politicians and pundits attack dissidents as un-American and the oppositional press as “an enemy of the American people.” They also attempt to impose a totalitarian notion of “patriotic education” on public schools and higher education and censor academics who criticize systemic abuses.[17]

As is well known, former President Trump, waged a relentless attack on the media and in ways too similar to ignore echoed written and spoken sentiments that Hitler used in his rise to power.[18] In this instance, culture, increasingly shaped by an apartheid pedagogy, has turned oppressive and must be addressed as a site of struggle while working in tandem with the development of an ongoing massive resistance movement. This suggests the need for a more comprehensive understanding of politics and the power of the educational force of the culture. Such connections necessitate closer attention be given to the educational and cultural power of a neoliberal corporate elite who use their mainstream and social media platforms to shape pedagogically the collective consciousness of a nation in the discourse and relations of hate, bigotry, ignorance, and conformity.

America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves, along with a systemic critical analysis of the new political formations that mark this period. Part of this challenge is to create a new language and mass social movement to address and construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing systems of racist violence and economic oppression. The beginning of such a political and pedagogical strategy can be found in the Black Lives Matter movement and its alignment with other movements fighting against authoritarianism. The Black Lives Matter movement teaches us “that eradicating racial oppression ultimately requires struggle against oppression in all of its forms…[especially] restructuring America’s economic system.”[19] This is especially important as those groups marginalized by class, race, ethnicity, and religion have become aware of how much in this new era of fascist politics they have lost control over the economic, political, pedagogical, and social conditions that bear down on their lives. Visions have become dystopian, devolving into a sense of being left out, abandoned, and subject to increasing systems of terror and violence. These issues can no longer be viewed as individual problems but as manifestations of a broader failure of politics. Moreover, what is needed is not a series of stopgap reforms limited to particular institutions or groups, but a radical restructuring of the entirety of U.S. society.

The call for a socialist democracy demands the creation of visions, ideals, institutions, social relations, and pedagogies of resistance that enable the public to imagine a life beyond a social order in which racial, class, gender, and other forms of violence produce endless assaults on the environment, systemic police violence, a culture of ignorance and cruelty. Such challenges must also address the assault on the public and civic imagination, mediated through the elevation of war, militarization, violent masculinity, and the politics of disposability to the highest levels of power. Capitalism is a death driven machine that that infantilizes, exploits, and devalues human life and the planet itself. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing, along with the informed citizens without which there is no democracy.

Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness, capable of both recognizing the scorched earth policies of neoliberal capitalism, and the twisted ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot take place without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.[20] Niko Block gets it right in arguing for a “radical recasting of the leftist imagination,” in which the concrete needs of people are addressed and elevated to the forefront of public discussion in order to confront and get ahead of the crises of our times. He writes:

the crises of the twenty-first century call for a radical recasting of the leftist imagination. This process involves building bridges between the real and the imaginary, so that the path to achieving political goals is plain to see. Accordingly, the articulation of leftist goals must resonate with people in concrete ways, so that it becomes obvious how the achievement of those goals would improve their day-to-day lives. The left, in this sense, must appeal to people’s existing identities and not condescend the general public as victims of “false consciousness.” All this means building movements of continual improvement and refusing to ask already-vulnerable people for short-term losses on the abstract promise of long-term gains. This project also demands that we understand precisely why right-wing ideology retains a popular appeal in so many spaces.[21]

A pedagogy of resistance must be on the side of hope and civic courage in order to fight against a paralyzing indifference, grave social injustices, and mind deadening attacks on the public imagination. At stake here is the struggle for a new world based on the notion that capitalism and democracy are not the same, and that we need to understand the world, how we think about it and how it functions, in order to change it. In the spirt of Martin Luther King, Jr’s call for a more comprehensive view of oppression and political struggle, it is crucial to address his call to radically interrelate and restructure consciousness, values, and society itself. In this instance, King and other theorists, such as Saskia Sassen, call for a language that ideological ruptures and changes the nature of the debate. This suggests more than simply a rhetorical challenge to the economic conditions that fuel neoliberal capitalism. There is also the need to move beyond abstract notions of structural violence and identify and connect the visceral elements of violence that bear down on and “constrain agency through the hard surfaces of [everyday] life.”[22]

We live in an era in which the distinction between the truth and misinformation is under attack. Ignorance has become a virtue, and education has become a tool of repression that elevates self-interest and privatization to central organizing principles of both economics and politics. The socio-historical conditions that enable racism, systemic inequality, anti-intellectualism, mass incarceration, the war on youth, poverty, state violence, and domestic terrorism must be remembered in the fight against that which now parades as ideologically normal. Historical memory and the demands of moral witnessing must become part of a deep grammar of political and pedagogical resistance in the fight against neoliberal capitalism and other forms of authoritarianism.

A pedagogy of resistance necessitates a language that connects the problems of systemic racism, poverty, militarism, mass incarceration, and other injustices as part of a totalizing structural, pedagogical, and ideological set of condition endemic to capitalism in its updated merging of neoliberalism and fascist politics. Audre Lorde was right in her insistence that “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

We don’t need master narratives, but we do need a recognition that politics can only be grasped as part of a social totality, a struggle rooted in overlapping differences that bleed into each other. We need relational narratives that bring together different struggles for emancipation and social equality.

Central to any viable notion of pedagogical resistance is the courage to think about what kind of world we want—what kind of future we want to build for our children. These are questions that can only be addressed when we address politics and capitalism as part of a general crisis of democracy. This challenge demands the willingness to develop an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a call to action, one willing to dismantle the present structure of neoliberal capitalism. Chantal Mouffe is correct in arguing that “before being able to radicalize democracy, it is first necessary to recover it,” which means first rejecting the commonsense assumptions that capitalism and democracy are synonymous.[23]

Clearly, such a project cannot combat poverty, militarism, the threat of nuclear war, ecological devastation, economic inequality, and racism by leaving capitalism’s system of power in place. Nor can resistance be successful if it limits itself to the terrain of critique, criticism, and the undoing of specific oppressive systems of representation. Pedagogies of resistance can teach people to say no, become civically literate, and create the conditions for individuals to develop a critical political consciousness. The challenge here is to make the political more pedagogical. This suggests analyzing how the forces of gangster capitalism impact consciousness, shape agency, and normalize the internalization of oppression. Such a project suggest a politics willing to transcend the fragmentation and politicized sectarianism all too characteristic of left politics in order to embrace a Gramscian notion of “solidarity in a wider sense.”[24] There is ample evidence of such solidarity in the policies advocated by the progressive Black Lives Matter protest, the call for green socialism, movements for health as a global right, growing resistance against police violence, emerging ecological movements such as the youth-based Sunrise movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, the massive ongoing strikes waged by students and teachers against the defunding and corporatizing of public education, and the call for resistance from women across the globe fighting for reproductive rights.

What must be resisted at all costs, is an “apartheid pedagogy,” rooted in the notion that a particular mode of oppression, and those who bear its weight, offers political guarantees.[25] Identifying different modes of oppression is important, but it is only the first step in moving from addressing the history and existing mechanisms that produce such trauma to developing and embracing a politics that unites different identities, individuals, and social movements under the larger banner of democratic socialism. This is a politics that refuses the easy appeals of ideological silos which “limits access to the world of ideas and contracts the range of tools available to would-be activists.”[26]

The only language provided by neoliberalism is the all-encompassing discourse of the market and the false rhetoric of unencumbered individualism, making it difficult for individuals to translate private issues into broader systemic considerations. Mark Fisher was right in claiming that capitalist realism not only attempts to normalize the notion that there is not only no alternative to capitalism, but also makes it “impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” [27] This is a formula for losing hope because it insists that that the world cannot change. It also has the hollow ring of slow death.

The urgency of the historical moment demands new visions of social change, an inspired and energized sense of social hope, and the necessity for diverse social movements to unite under the collective struggle for democratic socialism. The debilitating political pessimism of neoliberal gangster capitalism must be challenged as a starting point for believing that rather than being exhausted, the future along with history is open and now is the time to act. It is time to make possible what has for too long been declared as impossible.

Notes.

1) Adam Harris, “The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession,” The Atlantic (May 7, 2021). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/gops-critical-race-theory-fixation-explained/618828/ ↑

2) Kate McGee, “Texas’ Divisive Bill Limiting How Students Learn About Current Events And Historic Racism Passed By Senate,” Texas Public Radio (May 23, 2021). Online: https://www.tpr.org/education/2021-05-23/texas-divisive-bill-limiting-how-students-learn-about-current-events-and-historic-racism-passed-by-senate ↑

3) Julie Carrie Wong, “The fight to whitewash US history: ‘A drop of poison is all you need’,” The Guardian (May 25, 2021). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/critical-race-theory-us-history-1619-project ↑

4) George Sanchez and Beth English, “OAH Statement on White House Conference on American History,” Organization of American History (September 2020). Online: https://www.oah.org/insights/posts/2020/september/oah-statement-on-white-house-conference-on-american-history/#:~:text=History%20is%20not%20and%20cannot%20be%20simply%20celebratory.&text=The%20history%20we%20teach%20must,slavery%2C%20exploitation%2C%20and%20exclusion. ↑

5) Editorial, “Mission goals and objectives,” No Left Turn in Education, (2021). Online: https://noleftturn.us/ ↑

6) Kali Holloway, “White Ignorance Is Bliss—and Power,” Yahoo! News (May 24, 2021). Online: https://news.yahoo.com/white-ignorance-bliss-power-080232025.html ↑

7) Michelle Goldberg, “The Social Justice Purge at Idaho College,” New York Times. (March 26, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/opinion/free-speech-idaho.html ↑

8) Katie Robertson, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Denied Tenure at University of North Carolina,” New York Times (May 19, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/business/media/nikole-hannah-jones-unc.html ↑

9) Michelle Goldberg, “The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness,” New York Times. (February 26, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html ↑

10) Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2020). ↑

11) Silke-Marie Weineck, “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 20, 2021). Online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-tenure-denial-of-nikole-hannah-jones-is-craven-and-dangerous ↑

12) Keith E. Whittington and Sean Wilentz, “We Have Criticized Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her Tenure Denial Is a Travesty,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 24, 2021). Online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-have-criticized-nikole-hannah-jones-her-tenure-denial-is-a-travesty?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2377858_nl_Afternoon-Update_date_20210524&cid=pm&source=ams&sourceId=11167 ↑

13) David Theo Goldberg, “The War on Critical Race Theory,” Boston Review (May 7, 2021). Online: http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory ↑

14) Volker Weiss, “afterword,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (London: Polity, 2020), p. 61. ↑

15) Brad Evans and Isaac Cordal, “Histories of Violence: Look Closer at the World, There You Will See,” Los Angeles Review of Books,” December 28, 2020). Online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-look-closer-at-the-world-there-you-will-see/ ↑

16) Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015). ↑

17) Charlotte Klein, “Mitch McConnell: Don’t Teach Our Kids That America Is Racist,” Vanity Fair (May 4, 2021). Online: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/mitch-mcconnell-dont-teach-our-kids-that-america-is-racist; Michael Crowley, “Trump Calls for ‘Patriotic Education’ to Defend American History From the Left,” New York Times (September 17, 2020). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/trump-patriotic-education.html ↑

18) Editorial, “Trump’s crusade against the media is a chilling echo of Hitler’s rise,” Las Vegas Sun (August 14, 2017). Online: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/aug/14/trumps-crusade-against-the-media-is-a-chilling-ech/; for a larger examination of this issue, see Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). ↑

19) Lacino Hamilton, “This is going to Hurt,” The New Inquiry (April 11, 2017). Online: https://thenewinquiry.com/this-is-going-to-hurt/ ↑

20) See Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block, eds Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left–Recasting Leftist Imagination (Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2020). ↑

21) Nico Block, “Augmenting the Left: Challenging the Right, Reimagining Transformation,” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 31, 2020). Online: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/augmenting-the-left-challenging-the-right-reimagining-transformation/ ↑

22) David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012), p. 105 ↑

23) Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism, [London: Verso, 2018], p. 37. ↑

24) Institute for Critical Social Analysis, “A Window of Opportunity for Leftist Politics?” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 3, 2020). Online: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/window-of-opportunity-for-leftist-politics/ ↑

25) I have taken the notion of “apartheid pedagogy” from Adam Shatz, “Palestinianism” London Review of Books (43:9 (May 6, 2021), p. 28. Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/adam-shatz/palestinianism ↑

26) Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,” Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response ↑

27) Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), p. 2. I would be useful on this issue to read the brilliant Stanley Aronowitz, especially The Death and rebirth of American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996), ↑

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2018), and the American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury), and Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021):His website is www. henryagiroux.com.

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Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis and the Challenge to Higher Education

Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

The march across the University of Virginia campus in the summer of 2017 by a thousand or more white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other right-wing extremists offered a glimpse of the growing danger of authoritarian movements both in the United States and across the globe, signalling a danger that mimics the increasingly forgotten horrors of the 1930s. The image of hundreds of fascist thugs chanting anti-Semitic, racist, and white nationalist slogans such as “Heil Trump” and later attacking peaceful anti-racist counter-demonstrators makes clear that radical right-wing groups which historically have been on the margins of American society are now more comfortable in public with their nihilistic and dangerous politics. They appear especially emboldened to come out of the shadows because elements of their neo-fascist ideology have found a comfortable if not supportive place at the highest levels of the Trump administration, especially in the initial and telling presence of Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller, all of whom embrace elements of the nefarious racist ideology that was on full display in Charlottesville.

As is well-known, Trump has not only supported the presence and backing of white nationalists and white supremacists, but he has refused to denounce their Nazi slogans and violence in strong political and ethical terms, suggesting his own complicity with such movements. It should surprise no one that David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, told reporters in the midst of the events that the Unite the Right followers were “going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump…to take our country back.” Nor should it surprise anyone that Trump initially refused to condemn the fascist groups behind the horrifying, shocking images and violence that took place in Charlottesville. His silence made elements of the far-right quite happy. For instance, The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, issued the following statement: “Refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”

It appears that the presence of Nazi and Confederate flags along with the horrendous history of millions lost to the Holocaust and slavery, lynchings, church bombings, and the assassination of Black leaders such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. did little to move Trump to a serious understanding or repudiation of the poisonous historical forces that surfaced in Charlottesville. The demonstration held in Charlottesville by militarized torch-bearing groups of Nazi sympathizers, Ku Klux Klan members, and white nationalist represents a historical moment that capture some of the elements of a past that led to some of the worse crimes in human history. At the risk of falling prey to historical amnesia, the crucial lesson to be learned is that the ideology, values, and institutions of a liberal democracy are once again under assault by those who no longer believe in equality, justice, and democracy. As the historian Timothy Snyder has observed, it is crucial to remember that the success of authoritarian regimes in Germany and other places succeeded, in part, because they were not stopped in the early stages of their development.

The events in Charlottesville provide a glimpse of authoritarianism on the rise and speak to the dark clouds that appear to be ushering in a new and dangerous historical moment both in the United States and across the globe. While it is problematic to assume that an American-style totalitarianism will soon become the norm in the United States, it is not unrealistic to recognize that the possibility for a return to authoritarianism is no longer the stuff of fantasy or hysterical paranoia, especially since its core elements of hatred, exclusion, racism, and white supremacy have been incorporated into both the highest levels of state power and throughout the mainstream right-wing media. The horrors of the past are real and the fears they produce about the present are the necessary work of both historical memory and the power of civic courage and moral responsibility.

The authoritarian drama unfolding across the United States has many registers and includes the use of state violence against immigrants, right-wing populist violence against mosques and synagogues, and attacks on Muslims, young blacks, and others who do not fit into the vile script of white nationalism. The violence in Charlottesville is but one register of a larger mirror of domestic terrorism and home-grown fascism that is growing in the United States. Trump’s irresponsible response to the violence in Charlottesville should surprise no one given the long history of racism in the Republican Party that extends from Nixon’s Southern strategy and George W. Bush’s treatment of the Black victims of Hurricane Katrina to the current party’s efforts at voter suppression. Like many of his fellow Republican extremist, Trump embraces this long legacy of white supremacy, though he elevates it to a new level of visibility in his refusal to expunge its most naked expressions and his open support for its values and policies.

How else to explain his administration’s announcement that it would no longer “investigate white nationalists, who have been responsible for a large share of violent hate crimes in the Unites States.” How else to explain Trump’s willingness to lift restrictions imposed by the Obama administration to provide local police departments with military surplus equipment such as armed vehicles, bulletproof vests, and grenade launchers. Clearly, such actions accelerate Trump’s law and order agenda, escalate racial tensions in cities that are often treated like combat zones, and reinforce a warrior mentality among polices officers. More telling is Trump’s presidential pardon of Joe Arpaio, the notorious White supremacist and disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Not only did Arpaio engage in racial profiling, despite being ordered by the court to decease, he also had a notorious reputation for abusing prisoners in his Tent City, which he once called “a concentration camp.” These inmates were, among other practices, subjected to blistering heat, forced to work on chain gangs, wear pink underwear, and dress in demeaning striped uniforms.

There is more at work here than Trump’s endorsement of white nationalism; there is also the sending of a clear message of support for a culture of violence that gives meaning to acts of domestic terrorism. Moreover, there is a clear contempt for the rule of law, and an endorsement not just for racist ideology but also for institutional racism and the primacy of the racially-based incarceration state. There is also the chilling implication that Trump would be willing to pardon those who might be found guilty in any upcoming investigations involving Trump and his administration. Trump’s law-and-order regime represents a form of domestic terrorism because it is a policy of state violence designed to intimidate, threaten, harm, and instil fear in a particular community. Pardoning Arpaio, Trump signals to his right-wing extremist base and fellow politicians that he justifies state enacted violence against immigrants, especially Latinos. In addition, Trump’s language of fear and violence emboldens right-wing extremists and gives them the green light to support legislation and ideologies that are profoundly reactionary. For instance, this is evident in attempts on the part of 20 states to criminalize dissent, overtly decry the benefits of higher education, and state without apology that Republicans would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it.

The events in Charlottesville raise serious questions about the role of higher education in a democracy. What role if not responsibility do universities have in the face of wide spread legitimized violence? What role does education have at a time when rigorous knowledge is replaced by opinions, the truth is equated with fake news, self-interest replaces the social good, and language operates in the service of violence? Surely, institutions of higher education cannot limit their role to training in at a time when democracy is under assault all over the globe. What does it mean for institutions of higher education to define themselves as a public good, a protective space for the promotion of democratic ideals, the social imagination, values, and the imperatives of critically engaged citizenship? As Jon Dixon observes, what does mean to view and take responsibility for developing education as “a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion: a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing, to understand what it means to assume responsibility”?

Surely, with the ongoing attack on civic literacy, truth, historical memory, and justice it becomes all the more imperative for colleges and universities to educate students to do more than learn work based skills. What might it mean to educate them to become intelligent, compassionate, critically engaged citizens fully aware of the fact that without informed citizens there is no democracy? There is much more at stake here than protecting and opening the boundaries of free speech; there is the more crucial imperative of deepening and expanding the formative cultures and public spheres that make a democracy possible.

We live in an age in which there is emerging a relentless attack on the truth, honesty, and the ethical imagination. Under such circumstances, there is a need for educators to reclaim the discourse of democracy and to expand the parameters of civic literacy and courage by once teaching students to think critically, embrace civic courage, develop a historical consciousness, hold on to shared responsibilities rather than shared fares, think historically and comprehensively, translate private issues into larger social problems, and learn how to think differently in order to act responsibly. Education is central to politics and such pedagogical practices raise the bar regarding what counts as education in a democracy, especially in societies that appear increasingly amnesiac—that is, countries where forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only wilfully practiced but celebrated. All of which becomes all the more threatening at a time when a country such as the United States has tipped over into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. How else to explain the present historical moment with its collapse of civic culture and the future it cancels out? Democracy is always the outcomes of ongoing struggles to preserve its ideals, values, and practices. When democracy is taken for granted, justice dies, social responsibility becomes a burden, and the seeds of authoritarianism flourish.

We may be in the midst of dark times, but history is open and resistance is no longer an option but a necessity. Educators have a particular responsibility to address this growing assault on democracy. Any other option is an act of complicity and a negation of what it means for education to matter in an alleged democratic society.

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Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis and the Challenge to Higher Education

 

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Trump and the Politics of Nihilism

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

Ignorance is a terrible wound when it is self-inflicted, but it becomes a dangerous plague when the active refusal to know combines with power. President Trump’s lies, lack of credibility, woefully deficient knowledge of the world, and unbridled narcissism have suggested for some time that he lacks the intelligence, judgment and capacity for critical thought necessary to occupy the presidency of the United States. But when coupled with his childish temperament, his volatile impetuousness and his Manichaean conception of a world—a reductionist binary that only views the world in term of friends and enemies, loyalists and traitors—his ignorance translates into a confrontational style that puts lives, if not the entire planet, at risk.

Trump’s seemingly frozen and dangerous fundamentalism, paired with his damaged ethical sensibility, suggests that we are dealing with a form of nihilistic politics in which the relationship between the search for truth and justice on the one hand and moral responsibility and civic courage on the other has disappeared. For the past few decades, as historian Richard Hofstadter and others have reminded us, politics has been disconnected not only from reason but also from any viable notion of meaning and civic literacy. Government now runs on willful ignorance as the planet heats up, pollution increases and people die. Evidence is detached from argument. Science is a subspecies of “fake news,” and alternative facts are as important as the truth. Violence becomes both the catalyst and the result of the purposeful effort to empty language of any meaning. Under such circumstances, Trump gives credence to the notion that lying is now a central feature of leadership and should be normalized, and this serves as an enabling force for violence.

For Trump, words no longer bind. Moreover, his revolting masculinity now stands in for dialogue and his lack of an ethical imagination. Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of democracy and has put into play a culture and mode of politics that kill empathy, revel in cruelty and fear and mutilate democratic ideals. Trump’s worldview is shaped by Fox News and daily flattering and sycophantic news clips, compiled by his staff, that boost his deranged need for emotional validation.

All of this relieves him of the need to think and empathize with others. He inhabits a privatized and self-indulgent world in which tweets are perfectly suited to colonizing public space and attention with his temper tantrums, ill-timed provocations, and incendiary vocabulary. His call for loyalty is shorthand for developing a following of stooges who offer him a false and egregiously grotesque sense of community—one defined by a laughable display of ignorance and a willingness to eliminate any vestige of human dignity.

Anyone who communicates intelligently is now part of the “fake news” world that Trump has invented. Language is now forced into the service of violence. Impetuousness and erratic judgment have become central to Trump’s leadership, one that is as ill-informed as it is unstable. Trump has ushered in a kind of anti-politics and mode of governance in which any vestige of informed judgment and thought is banished as soon as it appears. His rigid, warlike mentality has created an atmosphere in the United States in which dialogue is viewed as a weakness and compromise understood as personal failing.

As Hofstadter argued more than 50 years ago, fundamentalist thinking is predicated on an anti-intellectualism and the refusal to engage other points of view. The “other” is not confronted as someone worthy of respect but as an enemy, a threatening presence that must be utterly vanquished—and in Trump’s case, humiliated and then destroyed.

Philosopher Michel Foucault elucidated the idea that fundamentalists do not confront the other as “a partner in the search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. … There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one’s killer instinct as possible.”

Trump is missing a necessity in his fundamentalist toolbox: self-reflection coupled with informed judgment. He lacks the ability to think critically about the inevitable limitations of his own arguments, and he is not held morally accountable to the social costs of harboring racist ideologies and pushing policies that serve to deepen racist exclusions, mobilize fear and legitimize a growing government apparatus of punishment and imprisonment. What connects the moral bankruptcy of right-wing ideologues such as Trump and his acolytes—who embrace violent imagery to mobilize their followers with the mindset of religious and political extremists—is that they share a deep romanticization of violence that is valorized by old and new fundamentalisms.

The current crisis with North Korea represents not only the possibility of a nuclear war triggered by the irrational outburst of an unhinged leader, but also a death-dealing blow to the welfare state, young people, immigrants, Muslims and others deemed dangerous and therefore “disposable.”

Trump has replaced politics with the theater and poison of nihilism. His politics combines spectacle with vengeance, violence and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s impetuous and badly informed comments about North Korea represent more than a rash, thoughtless outburst. Rather, they contribute to rising tensions and the increased possibility of a major military conflict. Trump’s dangerous rhetoric is symptomatic of the death of historical consciousness, public memory, critical thinking and political agency itself at the highest levels of governance. Under such circumstances, politics degenerates into dogma coupled with a game-show mentality symptomatic of a perpetual form of political theater that has morphed into a new kind of mass mediated barbarism. This is how democracy ends, with a bang and a whimper.

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Trump and the Politics of Nihilism

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Trump’s Neo-Nazis and the Rise of Illiberal Democracy

Henry Giroux

By Henry A. Giroux

The recent «Unite the Right» march by a couple of hundred white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists across the University of Virginia campus offered a glimpse of the growing danger of authoritarian movements both in the United States and across the globe, reeking of the 1930s. The image of hundreds of fascist bullies chanting anti-Semitic, racist and white nationalist slogans, such as «Heil Trump,» and later attacking peaceful anti-racist counter-demonstrators makes clear that the radical right-wing groups that have been on the margins of American society are now more comfortable in public with their nihilistic and dangerous politics.

They appear especially emboldened to come out of the shadows because elements of their neo-fascist ideology have found a comfortable if not supportive place at the highest levels of the Trump administration, especially in the presence of Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, who espouse elements of the nefarious racist ideology that was on full display in Charlottesville. As is well known, Trump has embraced the presence and backing of white nationalists and white supremacists while refusing to denounce their Nazi slogans and violence in strong political and ethical terms, suggesting his own complicity with such movements.

It should surprise no one that David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, told reporters on Saturday that the Unite the Right followers were «going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump … to take our country back.» Nor should it surprise anyone that Trump initially refused to condemn the fascist groups behind the horrifying, shocking images and violence that took place in Charlottesville.

Trump’s silence made elements of the far right quite happy. For instance, the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, issued the following statement: «Refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.»

It appears that the presence of Nazi and Confederate flags, along with the horrible history of millions lost to the Holocaust and slavery, lynchings, church bombings, and the assassination of Black leaders, such as Medgar Evans and Martin Luther King Jr., did little to move Trump to a serious understanding or repudiation of the poisonous historical forces that surfaced in Charlottesville. As New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb observes, this was a telling moment. He writes:

When [Trump] did speak about the crisis, he denounced bigotry and violence «on many sides,» in a statement that was bizarrely punctuated by references to efforts to reform trade relationships and better conditions for veterans. We have seen a great number of false equivalencies in the past two years, and the most recent Presidential election was defined by them. Yet it remains striking to hear Trump imply that Nazis and the interracial group of demonstrators who gathered to oppose them were, in essence, equally wrong.

While Trump finally gave way to overwhelming pressure on Monday and delivered a speech in which he asserted that «racism is evil» and described the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists as «repugnant,» by Tuesday he had already reverted to his initial assertion of «blame on both sides,» equating neo-Nazis with anti-racist counter-protesters (whom he labelled as the «alt-left») and speaking of «very fine people» among the crowd of right-wing extremists who chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans on Friday night.

The authoritarian drama unfolding across the United States has many registers and includes state violence against immigrants, right-wing populist violence against mosques and synagogues, and attacks on Muslims, Black people and others who do not fit into the vile script of white nationalism. The violence in Charlottesville is but one register of a larger mirror of domestic terrorism and home-grown fascism that is growing in the United States.

Such demonstrations represent a historical moment that capture some of the elements of a past that led to some of the worse crimes in human history. At the risk of falling prey to historical amnesia, the crucial lesson to be learned is that the ideology, values and institutions of a liberal democracy are once again under assault by those who no longer believe in equality, justice and democracy. As the historian Timothy Snyder has observed, it is crucial to remember that the success of authoritarian regimes in Germany and other places succeeded, in part, because they were not stopped in the early stages of their development.

The growing call for illiberal democracies (code for authoritarian regimes) first begins with the popularization and normalization of hate and bigotry, which we have witnessed under the Trump regime, and then morphs into right-wing groups developing their own militias, organs of violence and paramilitary forces.

Charlottesville provides a glimpse of authoritarianism on the rise and speaks to the dark clouds that appear to be ushering in a new and dangerous historical moment. While it is problematic to assume that a US-style totalitarianism will soon become the norm in the United States, it is not unrealistic to recognize that the possibility for a return to authoritarianism is no longer the stuff of fantasy or paranoia, especially since its core elements of hatred, exclusion, racism and white supremacy have been incorporated into both the highest levels of state power and the mainstream right-wing media. The horrors of the past are real, and the fears they produce about the present are the necessary work of both historical memory and the power of civic courage and moral responsibility.

Liberal Democracy Is Losing Its Grip

In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist philosopher, observed that one measure of a time of crisis is «that the great masses … become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.»

While Gramsci was characterizing a different historical period, his words are as relevant today as they were when written in the 1930s. All over the globe, liberal democracy is losing its grip on the public imagination and in the midst of this loss a toxic form of illiberal democracy is taking its place. As institutions that once provided public visions and proactive spaces are stripped of their authority and decay under the scourge of casino capitalism, the foundation is being set for the rise of new modes of authoritarianism. What they all share is both a hatred for democracy and a willingness to feed off the anger and rage of those who have suffered under punishing austerity measures imposed by global capitalism. At a time in which the growing problems of inequality, terrorism, war, state violence, immigration, precarity, mass poverty and the elimination of the welfare state have accelerated, stable democracies have been shattered.

In the midst of a massive global attack on the welfare state and social provisions fueled by neoliberal policies, the social contract central to liberal democracies has been shredded and with it any viable notion of solidarity, economic justice and the common good. Progress has been turned into its opposite and registers more inequality, suffering and violence. The older language of collective rights has given way to the discourse of individual rights, and the vocabulary of collaboration and compassion has been uprooted by a discourse of radical individualism and a harsh, survival-of-the fittest ethos. «Freedom» has morphed into a synonym for unbridled self-interest and a rationale for abdicating any sense of moral and political responsibility. Under global neoliberalism, the future is viewed as more of a curse than a blessing and has lost its value as what Zygmunt Bauman calls «the safest and most promising location for investing [one’s] hopes.» In contrast, as Bauman observes in his contribution to The Great Regression, the future has now become a repository for projecting our most dreaded anxieties. He writes that such fears and apprehensions are now driven by a number of elements that have come to characterize neoliberal societies:

the growing scarcity of jobs, of falling incomes reducing our and our children’s life chances, of the yet greater frailty of our social positions and the temporality of our life achievements, of the increasingly widening gap between the tools, resources and skills at our disposal and the momentousness of the challenges facing us. Above all, we feel our control over our own lives slipping from our hands, reducing us to the status of pawns moved to and fro in a chess game played by unknown players indifferent to our needs, if not downright hostile and cruel, and all too ready to sacrifice us in pursuit of their own objectives. Not so long ago associated with more comfort and less inconvenience, what the thought of the future tends nowadays to bring to mind most often is the gruesome menace of being identified or classified as inept and unfit for the task, denied value and dignity, and for that reason marginalized, excluded and outcast.

The dream of the democracy has turned into a nightmare as more and more people are considered expendable and subject to the whims of a market that reduces them to the status of merely surviving rather than getting ahead. The failure of neoliberalism’s promise of social mobility, equal opportunity, employment and privatized dream worlds gave way to regressive taxation, off shoring, deindustrialization, the slashing of social provisions, the dismantling of public services and the rise of right-wing populism. Desperation, isolation and a sense of abandonment coupled with the collapse of democratic institutions and public spheres have produced a new collective fatalism all over the globe.

Growing Support for Authoritarianism

The increasing failure of global neoliberalism has produced the conditions in which more and more people are inclined to express support for authoritarian alternatives that reproduce the power of right-wing populist nationalists and favor the interest of white majorities who advocate a return of barricades and borders rather than eliminating the systemic conditions of economic, cultural and social domination. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, spoke for many when he proclaimed that societies founded on liberal principles will not be able to compete successfully in a global market and that there is no reason for democracies to be liberal in order to be successful. According to Orbán, the state is not defined by democratic values, but by its economic and cultural interests, interests that fall on the side of a growing number of far-right regimes. He writes:

The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead…. We are searching for (and we are doing our best to find, ways of parting with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them) the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.

This worldwide rejection of liberal democracy is fuelled by a landscape of massive instability, inequality, fear and insecurity driven by a counterrevolutionary global capitalism of permanent change that, in the words of Pankaj Mishra, can neither «fulfil its own promise of general prosperity [or conceal] its contempt for the democratic principle of equality.» In the place of failed states and broken economies, there has been a retreat into promises offered by the rise of the security state, racial cleansing, economic nationalism, xenophobia and a call for the suppression of dissent and a growing emphasis on law and order. Heinrich Geiselberger has called this «the great regression,» an apt metaphor for the growing collapse of public discourse, values and democratic institutions and public spheres. As is well documented, the toxic effects of neoliberalism cannot be separated from diverse counterrevolutionary and right-wing populist forces that have contributed to the resurgence of authoritarianism across the globe.

The political crises and earthquakes shaking the foundations of liberal democracy reveal more than the pent-up collective energies of despair, rage and insecurity. They also speak to the growing mechanisms of exclusion and ideologies of racist contempt that have returned with a vengeance all over Europe and in the United States. Dressed up in the discourse of a ruthless hyper-capitalism, the crises haunting liberal democracies across the globe have provided fodder for right-wing demagogues to promote nationalistic policies. In so doing, they denounce democratic values in the name of a popular will that both resents what the political establishment has done to them and is comfortable with political leaders who are xenophobic, authoritarian and patriarchal. Accompanying the rise of authoritarian states in Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary, Egypt, the Philippines and the United States, among others, there is also the growing presence of right-wing political formations in France, Greece, Italy and a number of other countries.

Rising Bigotry and Nationalism

Politics has become more personal, wrapping itself in the narrow embrace of cultural nationalism and racial, religious and ethnic bigotry. Historic calls for democratization that marked the post-war period have given rise, in part, to a collective anxiety and apprehension fuelled by a despair and anger deeply tied to a form of casino capitalism that camouflaged its underlying modes of oppression and politics of disposability in the seductive yet failed discourses of freedom and justice, both of which were defined in strictly economic and market terms. Stoked by fear and a resentment toward those considered a threat to white nationalist ideologies, the retreat from the imposed death-dealing effects of neoliberalism parading as democracy gave rise to the awkward return of the repressive ideologies of ethno-nationalism, the stifling of dissent and exaltation of state violence as a mode of governance.

For instance, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey there has been a return to the traditions and grandeur of an Ottoman past. In India, the right-wing ideologue, Narendra Modi, has resurrected the ideology of Hindu nationalism. In a similar vein, President Trump has fuelled a culture of fear, racism and demonization as part of his efforts to resuscitate a culture of white Christian nationalism has reproduced in the first part of his presidency his own brand of political illiberalism. As Paul Mason points out:

If we analyse Trump through his actions, rather than his garbled words, it is political illiberalism that has won out during the first seven months of his presidency. When a judge blocked his Muslim immigration ban, he attacked the judiciary’s constitutional role. When the press revealed malfeasance, he labelled them «enemies of the American people». When James Comey refused Trump’s appeals for «loyalty,» he was sacked.

White resentment and white nationalism have come to symbolize Trump’s politics, beginning with his egregious and false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and taking shape in his appointment of white nationalists, such as Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, to the highest levels of government — an issue I have discussed in detail in my forthcoming book American Nightmare: The Challenge of American Authoritarianism (City Lights Press, 2018). Such measures have bolstered his credibility with white militias, neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups. Carol Anderson correctly states that «The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration.»

Arjun Appadurai argues that what Trump and similar authoritarian leaders have in common is a hatred of democracy because it stands in the way of their monomaniacal efforts to seize political power. In his contribution to The Great Regression anthology, he writes:

The leaders hate democracy because it is an obstacle to their monomaniacal pursuit of power. The followers are victims of democracy fatigue who see electoral politics as the best way to exit democracy itself. This hatred and this exhaustion find their natural common ground in the space of cultural sovereignty, enacted in scripts of racial victory for resentful majorities, national ethnic purity and global resurgence through the promises of soft power. This common cultural ground inevitably hides the deep contradictions between the neoliberal economic policies and well-documented crony capitalism of most of these authoritarian leaders and the genuine economic suffering and anxiety of the bulk of their mass followings. It is also the terrain of a new politics of exclusion, whose targets are either migrants or internal ethnic minorities or both.

It is against this wider historical and social context marked by a mounting embrace of illiberal democracy that the authoritarian populism of Donald Trump and other demagogues can be both interrogated and challenged, especially when the political interests that bear part responsibility for producing what Mike Lofgren has described as a «neoliberal economics turned punitive and illiberal» now claim to be the only force capable of resisting Trump’s authoritarianism. It is also against this worldwide embrace of illiberal democracy that a debate must begin over rethinking politics outside of the discourse of capitalism.

Failures of the Politics of Resentment

Trump’s appearance on the political landscape is part of a much broader politics of resentment, one that denies the theoretical and political tools to assess the conditions for free-floating anger and despair in the first place. Put differently, the political crisis signalled by the US morphing into a form of authoritarianism has not been matched by a crisis of ideas. That is, the issue of how everyday problems and hardships are connected to wider economic and political structures is left unanswered for most Americans. Instead, the politics of resentment has become part of a threefold failed project of politics. First, the politics of resentment has been appropriated by Republican extremists to serve as part of a politics of authoritarianism. Second, resentment politics has produced highly restricted forms of resistance on the part of many liberals whose focus is on Trump the man rather than on the economic conditions and ideological movements that produced him. Third, the expressions of resentment and the authoritarian politics they produced have become a new form of entertainment through which the corporate-controlled media generates an endless stream of what might be called tabloid politics in which the political realm dissolves into a lurid pornography of aesthetics. As one expression of such a politics, news cycles fill up their time slots and papers by devoting endless amounts of commentary to Trump’s tweets, all the while legitimating the notion that the pathology of authoritarian governance is primarily about the spectacle of performance. What the corporate media miss is that Trump’s tweets are meant to produce a politics of fatigue and theatrics that serve as code for his right-wing followers in an expanding counterrevolution that embraces the values of a Second Gilded Age.

The growing tide of demagoguery in the United States and across the globe must begin with the changing nature of neoliberal ideology and its transformation from a free-market utopia to a normalized dystopian reality. At stake here is the need for a post-neoliberal narrative in which democratic ideals can no longer be defended under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The rise of illiberal democracy is based on the premise that democracy should not be defended because it cannot be realized under neoliberal regimes. The bold new authoritarian strategy emerging out of this cold recognition is not to dispense with neoliberalism but with democracy itself.

No longer able to hide the massive misery, inequality and hardship that the «free market» has produced across the globe, the new authoritarians no longer praise the laws of an unfettered market fundamentalism. Instead, they rely on a politics of distraction, such as an appeal to cultural nationalism and the longing for the re-establishment of a mythic past. Trump has appropriated this politics of distraction, giving it a unique configuration, one that reinforces the domination of neoliberal elites while making invisible the underlying structures of predatory economic and political power that have consolidated further still under his administration. Of course, this is not meant to confuse elements of his popular racist, fascistic and white nationalist base. Rather, it is meant to distract those politicians, pundits and anti-public intellectuals who have no interest in fighting for progressive change and who prefer the theater associated with Trump’s tweets rather than engaging in a serious debate about the bankruptcy of the neoliberal system. This diversion has been successful in delaying the debate about how the crisis of democracy is largely connected to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, militarism and the emergence of an authoritarianism in support of an illiberal democracy.

While demagogues across Europe and other parts of the globe maintain control through the outright suppression of dissent and the dismantling of civil liberties [Turkey, China, Russia and Egypt], Trump has taken a different route. Trump’s policies benefit not only the financial master class but also the established neoliberal politicians and intellectuals who still champion globalization, assuming the role of his most serious opposition while posturing as the vanguard of resistance against his accelerating authoritarianism. Trump inverts the rules of ideology by denying its very premises, thus introducing a form of depoliticization and manufactured ignorance that eliminates the affective and educational foundations for a liberal democracy.

Trump’s endless lies, impetuous outbursts and regressive policies — such as stepping up deportations of undocumented immigrants, rolling back affirmative action and banning transgender troops from serving in the military — are largely engineered to satisfy his shrinking base of support. But there is more at work here than simply creating subterfuge for political ends or for justifying such deceitfulness as part of a militaristic and reactionary strategy of making politics an extension of the art of war. The latter has become an industry and it has a long history in US politics. Trump’s mendacity should be viewed as part of a staged politics of distraction that provides cover for the brutal neoliberal policies that he both ruthlessly supports and egregiously symbolizes. After all, it was largely the debris of neoliberal policies that brought Trump to power, a wreckage he relentlessly exploited.

Certainly, it is obvious that Trump is a racist, xenophobe and egregious sexist. But most of all, he is emblematic of a ruthless corporate, self-serving, greedy elite who will do anything to consolidate their class and financial power. His theatrical antics and spectacularized politics represent crude entertainment for his base and rising profit margins for the mainstream media; they also signal the need to divert attention away from the ideological, economic, political and structural forces that have laid the groundwork for the appeal of illiberal democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the United States. The latter is especially true for those Trump supporters who are more independent politically, who are not driven by white supremacist imperatives and who are sympathetic to the call of anti-establishment politicians.

What Trump, or at least Steve Bannon, is well aware of is that the struggle over power is not only about the struggle over language and beliefs, but also about the destruction of those intellectual and institutional elements that enable the capacity for informed judgment and the ability to hold onto any belief with a sense of commitment and integrity. Hence, his ongoing attempts to destroy critical media, public education and those democratic public spheres that provide the protective spaces of education in the broadest sense of the term. What is disturbing about this endorsement of mass illiteracy and political ignorance is that it is not just about accusing the critical media of producing fake news, it is also about creating support among his 35 million followers for supporting unconstitutional legislation designed to silence the so-called liberal press for inaccurate reporting. For instance, The Economist reported that «When YouGov asked whether courts should be allowed to ‘shut down news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased and inaccurate’, 45% of Republicans were in favour, compared with 20% who opposed the measure. More than half thought it acceptable to fine an offending news outlet (and 40% thought it would not violate the First Amendment to do so).»

Trump’s authoritarianism is as much about the crisis of democracy as it is about the crisis of casino capitalism, clearly exemplified by the emergence of right- and left-wing populist movements that are angry and bitter over what the conservative and liberal elites and their political and economic systems have done to them. No longer able to employ the mythical elements of neoliberalism in light of the growing attack of progressive activists on the financial ruling classes and a mounting criticism of what many believe is a failed state — an attack that cuts across ideological boundaries — the Republican disciples of neoliberalism have dispensed with ideology and now rely on a raw politics bent on voter suppression, gerrymandering, mass incarceration, defunding of public goods and other tactics to eliminate any vestige of a liberal democracy.

Trump’s diversions make it difficult for the public to uphold or even define the standards that sustain the rule of law, democratic governance and the value of educational institutions committed to individual freedom, civil liberties, justice and human rights. Trump’s lies do more than distract and pollute the space of a shared potential reality — they empty language of any substantive meaning and in doing so serve to erase the power and value of historical consciousness and the critical formative cultures that produce both informed agents and individual and collective acts of resistance. Trump’s presidency stands for the abandonment of ideology or what I will call a pedagogical politics of persuasion in which ideas become weapons and educational tools to shape consciousness, desires and identities. This is not to deny that Trump is afraid of ideas or the willingness to embrace them when it serves his political ends as much as to suggest that his deepest concern is with preventing people from developing the capacity to think critically in the first place and to act on informed critiques of power. This in part explains his obsession with a notion of loyalty that has little to do with a commitment to justice or the common good as much as it is a cover for unquestioned obedience to him.

Rites of «Purification» in the Wake of Neoliberal Corporate Sovereignty

What we are witnessing in the rise of illiberal democracies across the globe is a rite of political, racial and social purification that appeals to an imagined lost dominance on the part of individual nation states in the wake of neoliberalism’s corporate sovereignty. What is left out of this narrative by Trump and other authoritarian leaders is that modern states no longer control their economies, which are now in the hands of a global financial elite and authoritarian populists. Power is now financial, mobile and global, managed by a free-floating elite at liberty to pursue its own interests and targets. Fiscal and monetary policies are no longer in the hands of the nation states, residing in the hands of international financial institutions, such as the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, which exist beyond national accountability. As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis have argued in their book Moral Blindness, the nation state remains the repository of a politics «squeezed and robbed of all or nearly all of its power, muscles and teeth,» reduced to serving the dictates of global capital and expanding its role as a punishing state. As the protective functions of the state are targeted, the foundations of existential security and solidarity are eroded, giving rise to a Hobbesian world where no room exists for care and compassion, only callousness and indifference, cruelty and suffering.

Arjun Appadurai, in his discussion of «democracy fatigue,» captures the hollowing out of the nation state, describing the return to cultural purification and ethno-nationalism as a means to stifle dissent and to avoid addressing the underlying causes responsible for economic sovereignty being replaced by ethno-nationalism and cultural sovereignty. He writes:

This, then, is what the leaders of the new authoritarian populisms have in common: the recognition that none of them can truly control their national economies, which are hostages to foreign investors, global agreements, transnational finance, mobile labour and capital in general. All of them promise national cultural purification as a route to global political power. All of them are friendly to neoliberal capitalism, with their own versions of how to make it work for India, Turkey, the United States or Russia. All of them seek to translate soft power into hard power. And none of them has any reserva­tions about repressing minorities and dissidents, stifling free speech or using the law to throttle their opponents…. Thus populist authoritarian leaders and demagogues are to be found everywhere across the old continent, and they too operate with the same mix of neoliberalism, cultural chauvin­ism, anti-immigrant anger and majoritarian rage.

In Trump’s world, there is no need to rely heavily on ideology because there are no standards, no firm ground on which matters of persuasion and belief root themselves. Instead, ideas, reason, evidence and truth collapse in a sea of misrepresentations, engineered stupidity and diversions, all of which are designed, as Hannah Arendt once argued, to prepare the ground for a form of totalitarianism rooted in contempt for critical thought, if not the very act of thinking. The foundation for authoritarianism, she wrote, lies in a kind of mass thoughtlessness in which a citizenry «is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also its capacity to think and to judge.» Manufactured ignorance and the slide into authoritarianism has become a staple of American life, but it cannot be reduced to the scourge of economic structures.

Cultural politics and the educational force of the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media are a potent force for ignorance and depoliticization in the United States. The blight of celebrity culture, an engineered culture of fear that activates a hatred of others, the destruction of public education and the corporatization of higher education, the rise of the surveillance state and the war on terrorism all contribute to a collective paranoia that produces social isolation, a heightened sense of rootlessness, the privatization of everything and the conflation of citizenship with a dreary ethos of consumerism.

Under neoliberalism, too many people are trapped in their own private orbits, unable to address the systemic conditions that destroy the ties that connect them to others while reproducing the conditions in which the body is uprooted from any sense of community and the existential need for belonging. As George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and other prominent intellectuals have predicted, such isolation kills the imagination and finds symbolic compensation in the ideological appeals of authoritarian leaders who promise communities organized around hate, violence and exclusion. All of this amounts to a swindle of fulfillment and a rejection of liberal democracy.

Trump has dispensed with the fiction of democracy because he believes that in the interest of power both people and the planet are disposable, excess to be plundered and discarded. As part of an effort to normalize this pathology, he systematically employs a politics of diversion to prevent the public from addressing the underlying neoliberal forces and conditions that sold democracy to the bankers, hedge fund managers and other surrogates of finance. Under Trump, democracy is not being thinned out, it is being replaced by a regime that is hostile to its existence while fighting to maintain the economic conditions that have allowed the United States to slide into authoritarianism.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41617-neo-nazis-in-charlottesville-and-the-rise-of-illiberal-democracy

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A New American Revolution: Can We Break Out of Our Nation’s Culture of Cruelty?

Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

Fighting back against the right’s politics of exclusion can be a path toward rebuilding American democracy

The health care reform bills proposed by Republicans in the House and Senate have generated heated discussions across a vast ideological and political spectrum. On the right, senators such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have endorsed a new level of cruelty — one that has a long history among the radical right — by arguing that the current Senate bill does not cut enough social services and provisions for the poor, children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups and needs to be even more friendly to corporate interests by providing massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Among right-wing pundits, the message is similar. For instance, Fox News commentator Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, in a discussion about the Senate bill, stated without apparent irony that rising public concerns over the suffering, misery and death that would result from this policy bordered on “hysteria” since “we are all going to die anyway.” Montgomery’s ignorance about the relationship between access to health care and lower mortality rates is about more than ignorance. It is about a culture of cruelty that is buttressed by a moral coma.

On the other side of the ideological and political divide, liberals such as Robert Reich have rightly stated that the bill is not only cruel and inhumane, it is essentially a tax reform bill for the 1 percent and a boondoggle that benefits the vampire-like insurance companies. Others, such as Laila Lalami of The Nation, have reasoned that what we are witnessing with such policies is another example of political contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable on the part of right-wing politicians and pundits. These arguments are only partly right and do not go far enough in their criticisms of the new political dynamics and mode of authoritarianism that have overtaken the United States. Put more bluntly, they suffer from limited political horizons.

What we do know about both the proposed Republican Party federal budget and health care policies, in whatever form, is that they will lay waste to crucial elements of the social contract while causing huge amounts of suffering and misery. For instance, the Senate bill will lead to massive reductions in Medicaid spending. Medicaid covers 20 percent of all Americans or 15 million people, along with 49 percent of all births, 60 percent of all children with disabilities and 64 percent of all nursing home residents, many of whom may be left homeless without this support.

Under this bill, 22 million people will lose their health insurance coverage, to accompany massive cuts proposed to food-stamp programs that benefit at least 43 million people. The Senate health care bill allows insurance companies to charge more money from the most vulnerable. It cuts maternity care and phases out coverage for emergency services. Moreover, as Lalami points out, “this bill includes nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts, about half of which will flow to those who make more than $1 million per year.” The latter figure is significant when measured against the fact that Medicaid would see a $772 billion cut in the next 10 years.

It gets worse. The Senate bill will drastically decrease social services and health care in rural America, and one clear consequence will be rising mortality rates. In addition, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has estimated that if health insurance is taken away from 22 million people, “it raises … death rates by between 3 and 29 percent. And the math on that is that if you take health insurance away from 22 million people, about 29,000 of them will die every year, annually, as a result.”

Leftists and other progressives need a new language to understand the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and the inhumane and cruel policies it is producing. I want to argue that the discourse of single issues, whether aimed at regressive tax cuts, police violence or environmental destruction, is not enough. Nor is the traditional Marxist discourse of exploitation and accumulation by dispossession adequate for understanding the current historical conjuncture.

The problem is not merely one of exploitation but one of exclusion. This politics of exclusion, Slavoj Žižek argues, “is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but … about not allowing some people to participate in public life.” People are not simply prevented from participating in public life through tactics such as voter suppression. It is worse than that. Many groups now suffer from a crisis of agency and depoliticization because they are overburdened by the struggle to survive. Time is a disaster for them, especially in a society that suffers from what Dr. Stephen Grosz has called a “catastrophe of indifference.” The ghost of a savage capitalism haunts the health care debate and American politics in general.

What does health care, or justice itself, mean in a country dominated by corporations, the military and the ruling 1 percent? The health care crisis makes clear that the current problem of hyper-capitalism is not only about stealing resources or an intensification of the exploitation of labor, but also about a politics of exclusion and the propagation of forms of social and literal death, through what the late Zygmunt Bauman described as “the most conspicuous cases of social polarization, of deepening inequality, and of rising volumes of human poverty, misery and humiliation.”

A culture of myopia now propels single-issue analyses detached from broader issues. The current state of progressive politics has collapsed into ideological silos, and feeds “a deeper terror — of helplessness, to which uncertainty is but a contributing factor,” as Bauman puts it, which all too often is transformed into a depoliticizing cynicism or a misdirected anger fed by a Trump-like politics of rage and fear. The fear of disposability has created a new ecology of insecurity and despair that murders dreams, squelches any sense of an alternative future and depoliticizes people. Under such circumstances, the habits of oligarchy and authoritarianism become normalized.

Traditional liberal and progressive discourses about our current political quagmire are not wrong. They are simply incomplete, and they do not grasp a major shift that has taken place in the United States since the late 1970s. That shift is organized around what Bauman, Stanley Aronowitz, Saskia Sassen and Brad Evans have called a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are considered disposable, refuse, excess and consigned to fend for themselves.

Evidence of such expulsions and social homelessness, whether referring to poor African-Americans, Mexican immigrants, Muslims or Syrian refugees, constitute a new and accelerated level of oppression under casino capitalism. Moreover, buttressed by a hyper-market-driven appeal to a radical individualism, a distrust of all social bonds, a survival-of-the-fittest ethic and a willingness to separate economic activity from social costs, neoliberal policies are now enacted in which public services are underfunded, bad schools become the norm, health care as a social provision is abandoned, child care is viewed as an individual responsibility and social assistance is viewed with disdain. Evil now appears not merely in the overt oppression of the state but as a widespread refusal on the part of many Americans to react to the suffering of others, which is all too often viewed as self-inflicted.

Under this new regime of massive cruelty and disappearance, the social state is hollowed out and the punishing state becomes the primary template or model for addressing social problems. Appeals to character as a way to explain the suffering and immiseration many people experience are now supplemented by the protocols of the security state and a culture of fear.

The ethical imagination and moral evaluation are viewed by the new authoritarians in power as objects of contempt, making it easier for the Trump administration to accelerate the dynamics and reach of the punishing state. Everyday behaviors such as jaywalking, panhandling, “walking while black” or violating a dress code in school are increasingly criminalized. Schools have become feeders into the criminal-prison-industrial complex for many young people, especially youth of color. State terrorism rains down with greater intensity on immigrants and minorities of color, religion and class. The official state message is to catch, punish and imprison excess populations — to treat them as criminals rather than lives to be saved.

The “carceral state” and a culture of fear have become the foundational elements that drive the new politics of authoritarianism and disposability. What the new health bill proposal makes clear is that the net of expulsions is widening under what could be called an accelerated politics of disposability. In the absence of a social contract and a massive shift in wealth and power to the upper 1 percent, vast elements of the population are now subject to a kind of zombie politics in which the status of the living dead is conferred upon them.

One important example is the massive indifference, if not cruelty, exhibited by the Trump administration to the opioid crisis that is ravaging more and more communities throughout the United States. The New York Times has reported that more than 59,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, the largest year-over-year increase ever recorded. The Senate health care proposal cuts funds for programs meant to address this epidemic. The end result is that more people will die and more will be forced to live as if they were the walking dead.

A politics of disposability thrives on distractions — the perpetual game show of American politics — as well as what might be called a politics of disappearance. That is, a politics enforced daily in the mainstream media, which functions as a “disimagination machine,” and renders invisible deindustrialized communities, decaying schools, neighborhoods that resemble slums in the developing world, millions of incarcerated people of color and elderly people locked in understaffed nursing homes.

We live in an age that Brad Evans and I have called an age of multiple expulsions, suggesting that once something is expelled it becomes invisible. In the current age of disposability, the systemic edges of authoritarianism have moved to the center of politics, just as politics is now an extension of state violence. Moreover, in the age of disposability, what was once considered extreme and unfortunate has now become normalized, whether we are talking about policies that actually kill people or that strip away the humanity and dignity of millions.

Disposability is not new in American history, but its more extreme predatory formations are back in new forms. Moreover, what is unique about the contemporary politics of disposability is how it has become official policy, normalized in the discourse of the market, democracy, freedom and a right-wing contempt for human life, if not the planet itself. The moral and social sanctions for greed and avarice that emerged during the Reagan presidency now proliferate unapologetically, if not with glee.

Cruelty is now hardened into a new language in which the unimaginable has become domesticated and “lives with a weight and a sense of importance unmatched in modern times,” in the words of Peter Bacon Hales. With the rise of the new authoritarianism dressed up in the language of freedom and choice, the state no longer feels obligated to provide a safety net or any measures to prevent human suffering, hardship and death.

Freedom in this limited ideological sense generally means freedom from government interference, which translates into a call for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of the marketplace. This right-wing reduction of freedom to a limited notion of personal liberty is perfectly suited to mobilizing a notion of personal injury largely based on the fear of others. What it does not do is expand the notion of fear from the personal to the social, thus ignoring a broader notion: Freedom from want, misery and poverty. This is a damaged notion of freedom divorced from social and economic rights.

Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of addressing how class, power, exclusion, austerity, racism and inequality are part of a more comprehensive politics of disposability in America, one that makes possible what Robert Jay Lifton once called a “death-saturated age.” This suggests the need for a new political language capable of analyzing how this new dystopian politics of exclusion is buttressed by the values of a harsh form of casino capitalism that both legitimates and contributes to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the traditional working and middle classes, and also by a wide range of groups now considered redundant — young people, poor people of color, immigrants, refugees, religious minorities, the elderly and others.

We are not simply talking about a politics that removes the protective shell of the state from daily life, but a new form of politics that creates a window on our current authoritarian dystopia. The discourse and politics of disposability offers new challenges in addressing and challenging the underlying causes of poverty, class domination, environmental destruction and a resurgent racism — not as a call for reform but as a project of radical reconstruction aimed at the creation of a new political and economic social order.

Such a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power, making clear that in the current historical moment the battleground of ideas is as crucial as the battle over resources, institutions and power. What is crucial to remember is that casino capitalism or global neoliberalism has created, in Naomi Klein’s terms, “armies of locked out people whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘backward,’ whose basic needs are unmet.”

This more expansive level of global repression and intensification of state violence negates and exposes the compromising discourse of liberalism, while reproducing new levels of systemic violence. Effective struggle against such repression would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering all workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, a politics dedicated to providing decent education, housing and health care to all residents of the United States. The discourse of disposability points to another register of expulsion — one with a more progressive valence. In this case, it means refusing to equate capitalism with democracy and struggling to create a mass movement that embraces a radical democratic future.

Source:

A New American Revolution: Can We Break Out of Our Nation’s Culture of Cruelty?

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Thinking Dangerously: The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times

Henry Giroux

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

What happens to democracy when the president of the United States labels critical media outlets as «enemies of the people» and disparages the search for truth with the blanket term «fake news»? What happens to democracy when individuals and groups are demonized on the basis of their religion? What happens to a society when critical thinking becomes an object of contempt? What happens to a social order ruled by an economics of contempt that blames the poor for their condition and subjects them to a culture of shaming? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and becomes indifferent to the use of language deployed in the service of a panicked rage — language that stokes anger but ignores issues that matter? What happens to a social order when it treats millions of undocumented immigrants as disposable, potential terrorists and «criminals»? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of its society are violence and ignorance?

What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal and as a reality.

In the present moment, it becomes particularly important for educators and concerned citizens all over the world to protect and enlarge the critical formative educational cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible. Alternative newspapers, progressive media, screen culture, online media and other educational sites and spaces in which public pedagogies are produced constitute the political and educational elements of a vibrant, critical formative culture within a wide range of public spheres. Critical formative cultures are crucial in producing the knowledge, values, social relations and visions that help nurture and sustain the possibility to think critically, engage in political dissent, organize collectively and inhabit public spaces in which alternative and critical theories can be developed.

At the core of thinking dangerously is the recognition that education is central to politics and that a democracy cannot survive without informed citizens.

Authoritarian societies do more than censor; they punish those who engage in what might be called dangerous thinking. At the core of thinking dangerously is the recognition that education is central to politics and that a democracy cannot survive without informed citizens. Critical and dangerous thinking is the precondition for nurturing the ethical imagination that enables engaged citizens to learn how to govern rather than be governed. Thinking with courage is fundamental to a notion of civic literacy that views knowledge as central to the pursuit of economic and political justice. Such thinking incorporates a set of values that enables a polity to deal critically with the use and effects of power, particularly through a developed sense of compassion for others and the planet. Thinking dangerously is the basis for a formative and educational culture of questioning that takes seriously how imagination is key to the practice of freedom. Thinking dangerously is not only the cornerstone of critical agency and engaged citizenship, it’s also the foundation for a working democracy.

Education and the Struggle for Liberation

Any viable attempt at developing a democratic politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy as central to politics itself. Education is also vital to the creation of individuals capable of becoming critical social agents willing to struggle against injustices and develop the institutions that are crucial to the functioning of a substantive democracy. One way to begin such a project is to address the meaning and role of higher education (and education in general) as part of the broader struggle for freedom.

The reach of education extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses, such as the mainstream media, alternative screen cultures and the expanding digital screen culture. Far more than a teaching method, education is a moral and political practice actively involved not only in the production of knowledge, skills and values but also in the construction of identities, modes of identification, and forms of individual and social agency. Accordingly, education is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives.

Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using the educational system to reproduce a culture of privatization, deregulation and commercialization while waging an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, higher education, unions, reproductive rights and civil liberties. All the while, these forces are undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.

This grim reality was described by Axel Honneth in his book Pathologies of Reason as a «failed sociality» characteristic of an increasing number of societies in which democracy is waning — a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice: a practice that can act directly upon the conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary.

As Chandra Mohanty points out:

At its most ambitious, [critical] pedagogy is an attempt to get students to think critically about their place in relation to the knowledge they gain and to transform their world view fundamentally by taking the politics of knowledge seriously. It is a pedagogy that attempts to link knowledge, social responsibility, and collective struggle. And it does so by emphasizing the risks that education involves, the struggles for institutional change, and the strategies for challenging forms of domination and by creating more equitable and just public spheres within and outside of educational institutions.

At its core, critical pedagogy raises issues of how education might be understood as a moral and political practice, and not simply a technical one. At stake here is the issue of meaning and purpose in which educators put into place the pedagogical conditions for creating a public sphere of citizens who are able to exercise power over their own lives. Critical pedagogy is organized around the struggle over agency, values and social relations within diverse contexts, resources and histories. Its aim is producing students who can think critically, be considerate of others, take risks, think dangerously and imagine a future that extends and deepens what it means to be an engaged citizen capable of living in a substantive democracy.

What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? This is a particularly important issue at a time when higher education is being defunded and students are being punished with huge tuition hikes and financial debts, while being subjected to a pedagogy of repression that has taken hold under the banner of reactionary and oppressive educational reforms pushed by right-wing billionaires and hedge fund managers. Addressing education as a democratic public sphere is also crucial as a theoretical tool and political resource for fighting against neoliberal modes of governance that have reduced faculty all over the United States to adjuncts and part-time workers with few or no benefits. These workers bear the brunt of a labor process that is as exploitative as it is disempowering.

Educators Need a New Language for the Current Era

Given the crisis of education, agency and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts of a world in which an unprecedented convergence of resources — financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological — is increasingly used to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be self-reflective and directive without being dogmatic, and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about what Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham describe as «that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.» At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied.

In part, this suggests developing educational practices that not only inspire and energize people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies under the global tyranny of casino capitalism. Such a vision demands that we imagine a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and the elevation of war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes and the bearer of an audit culture (a culture characterized by a call to be objective and an unbridled emphasis on empiricism). Audit cultures support conservative educational policies driven by market values and an unreflective immersion in the crude rationality of a data-obsessed market-driven society; as such, they are at odds with any viable notion of a democratically inspired education and critical pedagogy. In addition, viewing public and higher education as democratic public spheres necessitates rejecting the notion that they should be reduced to sites for training students for the workforce — a reductive vision now being imposed on public education by high-tech companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Google, which want to encourage what they call the entrepreneurial mission of education, which is code for collapsing education into training.

Education can all too easily become a form of symbolic and intellectual violence that assaults rather than educates. Examples of such violence can be seen in the forms of an audit culture and empirically-driven teaching that dominates higher education. These educational projects amount to pedagogies of repression and serve primarily to numb the mind and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. These are pedagogies that are largely disciplinary and have little regard for contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding what it means for students to be critically engaged agents. Of course, the ongoing corporatization of the university is driven by modes of assessment that often undercut teacher autonomy and treat knowledge as a commodity and students as customers, imposing brutalizing structures of governance on higher education. Under such circumstances, education defaults on its democratic obligations and becomes a tool of control and powerlessness, thereby deadening the imagination.

The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of an emerging authoritarianism worldwide is to create those public spaces for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them not only to be well-informed and knowledgeable across a number of traditions and disciplines, but also to be able to invest in the reality of a substantive democracy. In this context, students learn to recognize anti-democratic forms of power. They also learn to fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities.

Education in this sense speaks to the recognition that any pedagogical practice presupposes some notion of the future, prioritizes some forms of identification over others and values some modes of knowing over others. (Think about how business schools are held in high esteem while schools of education are often disparaged.) Moreover, such an education does not offer guarantees. Instead, it recognizes that its own policies, ideology and values are grounded in particular modes of authority, values and ethical principles that must be constantly debated for the ways in which they both open up and close down democratic relations, values and identities.

The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education and pedagogy do not exist outside of ideology, values and politics. Ethics, when it comes to education, demand an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a «politics of possibility» through a continual critical engagement with texts, images, events and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into pedagogical practices both within and outside of the classroom. Education is never innocent: It is always implicated in relations of power and specific visions of the present and future. This suggests the need for educators to rethink the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to each educational encounter. It also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and politically accountable and self-reflective for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Education in this sense is not an antidote to politics, nor is it a nostalgic yearning for a better time or for some «inconceivably alternative future.» Instead, it is what Terry Eagleton describes in his book The Idea of Culture as an «attempt to find a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the present which are potentially able to transform it.»

One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, faculty and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people to be critical agents and engaged citizens.

Reviving the Social Imagination

Educators, students and others concerned about the fate of higher education need to mount a spirited attack against the managerial takeover of the university that began in the late 1970s with the emergence of a market-driven ideology, what can be called neoliberalism, which argues that market principles should govern not just the economy but all of social life, including education. Central to such a recognition is the need to struggle against a university system developed around the reduction in faculty and student power, the replacement of a culture of cooperation and collegiality with a shark-like culture of competition, the rise of an audit culture that has produced a very limited notion of regulation and evaluation, and the narrow and harmful view that students are clients and colleges «should operate more like private firms than public institutions, with an onus on income generation,» as Australian scholar Richard Hill puts it in his Arena article «Against the Neoliberal University.» In addition, there is an urgent need for guarantees of full-time employment and protections for faculty while viewing knowledge as a public asset and the university as a public good.

In any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement. Educators need to produce a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a public good.

With these issues in mind, let me conclude by pointing to six further considerations for change.

First, there is a need for what can be called a revival of the social imagination and the defense of the public good, especially in regard to higher education, in order to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic impulses. This revival would be part of a larger project to, as Stanley Aronowitz writes in Tikkun, «reinvent democracy in the wake of the evidence that, at the national level, there is no democracy — if by ‘democracy’ we mean effective popular participation in the crucial decisions affecting the community.» One step in this direction would be for young people, intellectuals, scholars and others to go on the offensive against what Gene R. Nichol has described as the conservative-led campaign «to end higher education’s democratizing influence on the nation.» Higher education should be harnessed neither to the demands of the warfare state nor to the instrumental needs of corporations. Clearly, in any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement. Educators need to produce a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a public good and the classroom as a site of engaged inquiry and critical thinking, a site that makes a claim on the radical imagination and builds a sense of civic courage. At the same time, the discourse on defining higher education as a democratic public sphere would provide the platform for moving on to the larger issue of developing a social movement in defense of public goods.

Second, I believe that educators need to consider defining pedagogy, if not education itself, as central to producing those democratic public spheres that foster an informed citizenry. Pedagogically, this points to modes of teaching and learning capable of enacting and sustaining a culture of questioning, and enabling the advancement of what Kristen Case calls «moments of classroom grace.» Moments of grace in this context are understood as moments that enable a classroom to become a place to think critically, ask troubling questions and take risks, even though that may mean transgressing established norms and bureaucratic procedures.

Pedagogies of classroom grace should provide the conditions for students and others to reflect critically on commonsense understandings of the world and begin to question their own sense of agency, relationships to others, and relationships to the larger world. This can be linked to broader pedagogical imperatives that ask why we have wars, massive inequality, and a surveillance state. There is also the issue of how everything has become commodified, along with the withering of a politics of translation that prevents the collapse of the public into the private. This is not merely a methodical consideration but also a moral and political practice because it presupposes the development of critically engaged students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom and democracy matter.

Such pedagogical practices are rich with possibilities for understanding the classroom as a space that ruptures, engages, unsettles and inspires. Education as democratic public space cannot exist under modes of governance dominated by a business model, especially one that subjects faculty to a Walmart model of labor relations designed «to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility,» as Noam Chomsky writes. In the US, over 70 percent of faculty occupy nontenured and part-time positions, many without benefits and with salaries so low that they qualify for food stamps. Faculty need to be given more security, full-time jobs, autonomy and the support they need to function as professionals. While many other countries do not emulate this model of faculty servility, it is part of a neoliberal legacy that is increasingly gaining traction across the globe.

Third, educators need to develop a comprehensive educational program that would include teaching students how to live in a world marked by multiple overlapping modes of literacy extending from print to visual culture and screen cultures. What is crucial to recognize here is that it is not enough to teach students to be able to interrogate critically screen culture and other forms of aural, video and visual representation. They must also learn how to be cultural producers. This suggests developing alternative public spheres, such as online journals, television shows, newspapers, zines and any other platform in which different modes of representation can be developed. Such tasks can be done by mobilizing the technological resources and platforms that many students are already familiar with.

Teaching cultural production also means working with one foot in existing cultural apparatuses in order to promote unorthodox ideas and views that would challenge the affective and ideological spaces produced by the financial elite who control the commanding institutions of public pedagogy in North America. What is often lost by many educators and progressives is that popular culture is a powerful form of education for many young people, and yet it is rarely addressed as a serious source of knowledge. As Stanley Aronowitz has observed in his book Against Schooling, «theorists and researchers need to link their knowledge of popular culture, and culture in the anthropological sense — that is, everyday life, with the politics of education.»

Fourth, academics, students, community activists, young people and parents must engage in an ongoing struggle for the right of students to be given a free formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values, and for young people to have a say in the shaping of their education and what it means to expand and deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. College and university education, if taken seriously as a public good, should be virtually tuition-free, at least for the poor, and utterly affordable for everyone else. This is not a radical demand; countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland and Brazil already provide this service for young people.

Accessibility to higher education is especially crucial at a time when young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. They often lack jobs, a decent education, hope and any semblance of a future better than the one their parents inherited. Facing what Richard Sennett calls the «specter of uselessness,» they are a reminder of how finance capital has abandoned any viable vision of the future, including one that would support future generations. This is a mode of politics and capital that eats its own children and throws their fate to the vagaries of the market. The ecology of finance capital only believes in short-term investments because they provide quick returns. Under such circumstances, young people who need long-term investments are considered a liability.

Fifth, educators need to enable students to develop a comprehensive vision of society that extends beyond single issues. It is only through an understanding of the wider relations and connections of power that young people and others can overcome uninformed practice, isolated struggles, and modes of singular politics that become insular and self-sabotaging. In short, moving beyond a single-issue orientation means developing modes of analyses that connect the dots historically and relationally. It also means developing a more comprehensive vision of politics and change. The key here is the notion of translation — that is, the need to translate private troubles into broader public issues.

Sixth, another serious challenge facing educators who believe that colleges and universities should function as democratic public spheres is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility, or what I have called a discourse of educated hope. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Critique is crucial to break the hold of commonsense assumptions that legitimate a wide range of injustices. But critique is not enough. Without a simultaneous discourse of hope, it can lead to an immobilizing despair or, even worse, a pernicious cynicism. Reason, justice and change cannot blossom without hope. Hope speaks to imagining a life beyond capitalism, and combines a realistic sense of limits with a lofty vision of demanding the impossible. Educated hope taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present. I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of hope, but to a notion of informed hope that faces the concrete obstacles and realities of domination but continues the ongoing task of what Andrew Benjamin describes as «holding the present open and thus unfinished.»

The discourse of possibility looks for productive solutions and is crucial in defending those public spheres in which civic values, public scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic courage. Democracy should encourage, even require, a way of thinking critically about education — one that connects equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.

History is open. It is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

My friend, the late Howard Zinn, rightly insisted that hope is the willingness «to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.» To add to this eloquent plea, I would say that history is open. It is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if as educators we want to imagine and fight for alternative futures and horizons of possibility.

HENRY A. GIROUX

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016) and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017). He is also a contributing editor to a number of journals, including Tikkun, the Journal of Wild Culture and Ragazine. Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41058-thinking-dangerously-the-role-of-higher-education-in-authoritarian-times

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