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the curse of totalitarianism and
DEMOCRACY IN EXILE
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
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YOUR
COMMENTSWith his white supremacist ideology and racist
contempt for Muslims on full display, President Trump has issued
an executive order banning all Syrians and people from seven
predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States.
In doing so, he has not only made visible, and without apology,
his embrace of the frenzied lawlessness of authoritarianism,
he has also put into place an additional series of repressive
policies for the creation of what might be called a democracy
in exile.
In
response to the religious ban targeting Muslims and Syrian refugees
escaping a devastating war, carnage, and state violence, thousands
of people across the country have mobilized with great speed
and energy to reject not just a possibly unconstitutional ban,
but also what this and other regressive policies herald as a
possible model for the future. Many writers have focused on
the massive disruption this shoot-from-the hip piece of legislation
has and will produce for students, visa holders, and those entering
the United States after finishing a long vetting process.
As
an editorial in the Washington Post pointed out, Trump’s
immigration order is “breathtaking in scope and inflammatory
in tone. Moreover, it lacks logic and speaks to “the president’s
callousness and indifference to history, to America’s
deepest lessons about its own values.” Given that it was
issued on Holocaust Remembrance day points not only to Trump’s
moral callousness, if not outright ignorance, but also to the
power of chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, a white-supremacist
and anti-Semite, who played a key role in drafting it.
Not
only will this immigration order further threaten the security
of the United States given its demagogic design and rhetoric
of exclusion by serving as a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists,
it also legitimates a form of state sponsored racial and religious
cleansing. Chicago Cardinal Blasé Cupich, hardly a radical,
was right in stating that the design and implementation of the
order was “rushed, chaotic, cruel, and oblivious”
to the demands and actualities of national security, but that
it had “ushered in a dark moment in U.S. history.”
Dark, indeed, because the impetus behind the ruling signals
not only a society that has stopped questioning itself, but
also points to its immersion into a mode of totalitarianism
in which a form of social engineering is once again being constructed
around an assault on religious and racial identities. What we
are witnessing under Trump and his chief ideologues is a purification
ritual motivated by xenophobia and the attempt to create a white
public sphere free of those who do not share the ideology of
white Christian extremists.
Trump’s
immigration order is meant to carve out a space for the dictates
of white supremacists, a space in which those considered flawed—racially
and religiously defective- will be subject to terminal exclusion
and exile. This war on 'the other' is part of a larger obsession
which combines a purification ritual with the heightened, if
not hysterical, demands of the national security state. Under
Trump’s regime of hatred, the cruelty and misery of massive
exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism merges with
a spectacle of exclusion and a politics of disposability that
echoes those totalitarian regimes of the 1930s that gave birth
to the unimaginable horrors and intolerable acts of mass violence.
Racial cleansing based on generalized notions of identity echo
the sordid principles of earlier policies of extermination that
we saw in the past. This is not to suggests that Trump’s
immigration policies have risen to that standard of violence
as much as to suggest that it contains elements of a past totalitarianism
that “heralds as a possible model for the future.”
What I am arguing is that this form of radical exclusion based
on the denigration of Islam as a closed and timeless culture
marks a terrifying entry into a political experience that suggest
that older elements of totalitarianism are crystallizing into
new forms.
Democracy,
at least as an ideal, may be under siege, but the forces of
resistance are mobilizing around a kind of wakefulness in which
civic courage and the ethical imagination are being realized
through mass demonstrations in which individuals are putting
their bodies on the line, refusing Trump’s machinery of
racist exclusion and white supremacy. Airports are being occupied,
people are demonstrating in the streets of major cities, and
liberal and progressive politicians are speaking out against
the emerging neo-fascism. Democracy may be in exile but the
spirit that animates it is far from defeated.
The
metaphor of a democracy in exile provides a rhetorical space
where a kind of double consciousness can be cultivated that
points beyond the structures of domination and repression to
what the poet Claudia Rankine calls a new understanding of community,
politics, and engaged, collective resistance in which a radical
notion of the social contract is revived as a kind of burning
resistance in which individuals and groups allow themselves
to be flawed together in solidarity with their brothers and
sisters who are being marked as flawed because of their religion,
race, and country of origins. She writes:
You
want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with
others you’re constantly waiting to see that they recognize
that you’re a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat
and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live—you
will live together. The truce is that. You forgive all of
these moments because you’re constantly waiting for
the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another
person. As another first person. There’s a letting go
that comes with it. I don’t know about forgiving, but
it’s an “I’m still here.” And it’s
not just because I have nowhere else to go. It’s because
I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility
of another way of being. Let’s make other kinds of mistakes;
let’s be flawed differently.
To
be “flawed differently” works against the poisonous
legacies and totalizing totalitarian strictures of racial purity
that are still with us, and rejects the toxic reach of a government
dominated by morally repulsive authoritarians with their legions
of conservative lawyers, think tanks, pundits, and intellectual
thugs. Being “flawed differently” means we bleed
into each other, flawed in our rejection of certainty, and racial
cleansing. Flawed differently we revel in our diversity, united
by a never ending search for a just society. As such we join
in solidarity and opposition in our differences mediated by
a respect for the common good. But also share in our resistance
to a demagogue and his coterie of reactionaries who harbor a
rapacious desire for concentrating power in the hands of a financial
elite and the economic, political, and religious fundamentalists
who slavishly beg for recognition and the crumbs of power. Being
“flawed differently” means mobilizing against the
suffocating circles of certainty that define the ideologies,
world views, and policies that are driving the new authoritarianism,
expressed so clearly by chief White House strategist, Steve
Bannon, who unapologetically and with an echo of Nazi Brownshirt
bravado, told the press to shut up and be quiet. Being “flawed
differently” provides a rhetorical signpost for creating
new democratic public spheres, noisy conversations, and alternative
spaces informed by compassion and a respect for the other.
Now
is the time to refuse to normalize one of the most dangerous
governments ever to emerge in the United States, and to talk
back, occupy the streets, push back, and never forget that today
it might be Muslims who are under attack but tomorrow the authoritarian
fanatics will come for the dissenting journalists, intellectuals,
and for anyone else who falls under the ever expanding category
and rubric of the dangerous 'other.' Fear and terror are totalizing
in Trump’s appropriation of these tools and aim to be
all-embracing. Under such circumstances, a fierce and courageous
resistance is the only option, that is, a necessity forged with
an unshakable militancy for economic, political, and social
justice. This must be a form of collective resistance that is
not episodic but systemic, ongoing, loud, noisy, educative,
and disruptive. The words of Frederick Douglass ring especially
true under the reign of Trump: “If there is no struggle,
there is no progress . . . This struggle may be a moral one;
or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical;
but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will.”
There is no choice but to stop this machinery of death from
functioning and it has to be brought to an end in every space,
landscape, and institution in which it tries to shut down the
foundations of fragile democracy. Reason and thoughtfulness
have to awake from the narcotizing effects produced by a culture
of spectacles, consumerism, militarism, and the celebration
of unchecked self-interests. The body of democracy is fragile
and the wounds now being inflicted upon it are alarming. What
might it mean, then, to imagine a landscape of resistance in
which the metaphor of democracy in exile inspires and energizes
young people, educators, workers, artists, and others to engage
in political and pedagogical forms of resistance that is disruptive,
transformative, and emancipatory? What might it mean to create
multiple protective spaces of resistance that would allow us
to think critically, ask troubling questions, take risks, transgress
established norms and fill the spaces of everyday life with
ongoing acts of non-violent resistance? What might it mean to
create entire cities defined as sanctuaries for a democracy
in exile? What might it take to create modes of coordinated
resistance that challenge this new and terrifying horizon of
authoritarianism that has overshadowed the ideals of a radical
democracy?
Under
such circumstances, it is crucial to confront such dark times
with a fierce insurgency fueled by the capacity to imagine a
more just and democratic future, one that can only emerge through
a powerful and uncompromising collective struggle. As Hannah
Arendt once predicted, totalitarianism’s curse is upon
us once again and it has emerged in forms unique to the tyranny
of the times in which we live. Trump has brought the terrors
of the past into full view, feeding off the fears, uncertainties,
and narratives that make so called 'others' superfluous. Under
such circumstances, not only does politics get emptied out of
any viable meaning, but the vanishing of democracy is matched
by the disappearance of those considered disposable. In the
face of this all-encompassing zone of ethical and social abandonment
and the acceleration of a machinery of civil and social death,
the American public must create a new language for politics,
resistance, and hope. This must be a language that refuses to
normalize the present and challenges the racialized war culture
that Trump is legitimating.
A democracy
in exile is not a prescription or rationale for cynicism, nor
is it a retreat from one’s role as an informed and engaged
citizen. On the contrary, it is a space of energized hope where
the realities of neo-fascism along with its racist, morally
obscene, and politically death-dealing practices can be revealed,
analyzed, challenged, and destroyed. The United States now occupies
an historical moment in which there will be overwhelming acceleration
of violence, oppression, lawlessness, and corruption. These
are truly frightening times that must be confronted if a radical
democratic future is not to be cancelled out.
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