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driving his neoliberal fascism
TRUMP'S RACIST LANGUAGE
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. He was recently named one of
the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate
on education.
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YOUR
COMMENTSThe ruthless ideologies and policies of a
fascist past are with us once again, and the warning signs can
be seen in the emergence of the normalizing discourses of pollution
and disposability. As a central element of neoliberalism, the
discourse of disposability signals a society in which certain
people are viewed as throwaways. Meanwhile the discourse of
pollution suggests a mode of dehumanization that enables policies
in which people are relegated outside the boundaries of justice
and become the driving force for policies of terminal exclusion.
These terms represent a merging of neoliberalism and fascist
politics.
The
utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy
and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are
disappearing in the United States. The viciousness of the Trump
administration and the cruelty imposed by neoliberalism mutually
inform each other. Trump’s policies range from stripping
food stamps and health care from poor children and caging immigrant
children in some god-forsaken prison in Texas to allowing thousands
of Puerto Ricans to live for more than a year without electricity,
safe water and decent shelter. Such policies are matched by
an ongoing, if not relentless, discourse of dehumanization and
objectification aimed at those considered disposable.
The
deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural
production and becomes visceral in its ongoing production of
domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of
people of color and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not
only has it become more gratuitous, random and in some cases
trivialized through the monotony of repetition, it also has
become the official doctrine of the Trump administration in
shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence
has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in
its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism
and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations
and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalized
in a new political formation that I have called neoliberal fascism.
This new historical conjuncture emerges through a fusion of
discredited eugenicist discourses (e.g., Trump’s notion
that you have to be born with the right genes) and a rebooted
melange of mythic notions of meritocracy (objective measures
of individual quality), scientific racism (pseudo-science that
supports racial hierarchies), Horatio Alger fables (anyone can
work hard and become rich and successful), and a sheer contempt
for the “losers” who are viewed as alien to a white
public sphere supported by Trump and his minions.
The
dual logics of pollution and disposability have become central
to a punishing state that both legitimates the denigration of
human life and too often unleashes state violence upon immigrants,
people of color, poor people, and anyone else considered a threat
to the belief that the public sphere is exclusively for whites.
Under the Trump administration, the discourse of pollution is
increasingly visible when applied to undocumented immigrants
or those marginalized by ethnicity and race, who those in power
place in the same categories as contaminants and toxins. At
the same time, those individuals considered disposable often
meet a more violent end. This is clearly visible in the ongoing
criminalization of immigrant children on the southern border
who are forcibly separated from their parents and deposited
in child migrant detention centers largely run by for-profit
businesses that are making close to a billion dollars in profits.
Some children have died while in these internment centres. The
logic of disposability also fuels throughout the United States
the modelling of public schools after armed camps, and the targeting
of poor Black and Brown youth as objects of control and harassment
by the criminal justice system, particularly though the expansion
of the school-to-prison pipeline.
Obsessed
with race, Donald Trump has weaponized and racialized the culture
wars by using racially charged language to legitimate white
supremacist ideologies and pit his supporters against protesting
Black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants, dark-skinned
immigrants, and other people of color whom he routinely insults
and punishes through race-based policies. Trump has claimed
that “laziness is a trait in blacks,” according
to one of his former employees, and he has called for “a
total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Meanwhile he stated in December 2015 that a judge hearing a
case about Trump University was “biased” because
of the judge’s Mexican heritage.” These comments
are a small sampling of Trump’s racist remarks.
Racism
runs deep not only in Trump’s base but also in a Republican
Party that as Paul Krugman points out engages in extreme gerrymandering,
voter suppression, voter purges, “deliberate restriction
of minority access to the polls” and the ongoing subversion
of state legislatures. Frank Rich has gone further and argued,
“The Republican Party has proudly and uninhibitedly come
out of the closet as the standard-bearer for white supremacy
in the Trump era.” George Packer adds to this signalling
the emerging fascist politics that now engulfs the Republican
Party. He argues that simply smug ideological fundamentalists
and political purists such as Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly,
Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich no longer define the Republican
Party. He writes that the GOP has become “more grotesque
than ever:”
.
. . conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility
toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The
new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal,
demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving
complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial
corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these
regimes.
What
we are witnessing at the current moment is not only the emergence
of dangerous, illiberal, anti-democratic ideologies that mimic
the legacy of white nationalism but also the resurgence of a
powerful affective and educational culture nurtured by false
promises, anger, feelings of repulsion, hatred and the spectacularization
of violence. What is alarming about this culture of intolerance,
bigotry and violence is its alignment with the Nazi obsession
with notions of cultural and biological pollution and their
systemic efforts to purge society of those deemed contaminated.
This language is not unlike Trump’s characterization of
asylum seekers as vermin who will bring “large-scale crime
and disease” to the United States.
UNMASKING
LANGUAGE OF DISPOSABILITY AND POLLUTION
Rather
than being a historical relic of a horrible past, the language
of pollution and disposability has remerged under the Trump
administration to an unusual extent. This is a language rooted
in what Thomas Mann once called “the archaic shudder,”
one that opens the door to the rhetoric of racial purity, social
cleansing and the glorification of violence. This merging of
white nationalism and policies aimed at racial cleansing are
buttressed by the cruel architecture of neoliberalism, which
creates landscapes of unabashed misery, violence and terror.
Neoliberalism offers little hope for economic and social justice
while claiming ironically that it is not only a moral beacon
and force for the good but also perniciously that there is no
realistic alternative to it.
This
toxic ideology is further solidified in the assumption that
the connective social bonds that make a democracy possible should
be viewed with disdain and replaced with a notion of individualism
in which all problems and the means to address them should be
placed solely at the feet of individuals. Under such circumstances,
fear and economic anxiety produced by massive inequality, the
dismantling of the welfare state, precarious employment, eroding
white privilege, demographic changes and the collapse of the
social contract are redirected to those human beings considered
“losers,” “outsiders” and “excess.”
The
merging of neoliberalism and elements of a fascist playbook
are now anchored firmly in the language of disposability and
pollution. This rhetoric is part of a representational crisis
marked by the increasing attraction of and growth of architectures
of meaning and proliferating digital platforms and cultural
apparatuses engaged in the production of modes of desire, identifications
and values that fuel right-wing extremists and an apocalyptic
populism. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a
new era of politics and way of thinking about place, community,
rootlessness and identity. The once dominant narratives about
critical agency, truth, justice and democracy are collapsing.
Fascist terror is no longer fixed in the past or ephemeral to
the 21st century. Under the Trump administration, malice, lies
and unrelenting cruelty have become official policy and fraught
with dangerous risks. Fascist politics avoids reason, maligns
the truth and appeals to a pathological nationalism. In doing
so it creates a mythic past that either denigrates or excludes
those considered at odds with its notions of white supremacy
and racial purity. What emerges is a celebration of the brutality
of 1930s, which becomes a signpost for imagining a present under
what Trump’s nostalgically codes in the slogans “America
First” and “Make America Great Again.” Culture
now becomes integral to a politics deeply rooted in an anti-democratic
ethos.
Under
neoliberalism, a new political formation has developed in which
a racialist worldview merges with the economic dictates of a
poisonous form of casino capitalism. Echoes of the past can
be heard in Trump’s and his associates’ repeated
use of a language boiling over with terms such as “vermin,”
“animals,” “stupid” and “losers,”
to name only a few of the toxic expressions crucial to a politics
of social cleansing, racial purity and violent forms of exclusion.
The current language of disposability and pollution carries
with it powerful affective overtones that “transform the
noble concept of a common humanity into a disdainful sneer,”
as Richard A. Etlin points out in his introduction to Art,
Culture, and Media Under The Third Reich.
The
language of pollution is used to treat some groups as not simply
inferior but also as a threat to the body politic, and is closely
aligned with the language of camps and extermination. More than
an ostentatious display of power on the part of the Trump administration,
the language of pollution and disposability functions as a performative
language designed to dramatize and re-enact national identity,
one that defines itself in white nationalist assumptions. Assigned
to the dumping ground of social and political abandonment, those
individuals or families considered noxious and superfluous are
now associated with a rootlessness that bears a close resemblance
to the Nazi notion of blood and soil. Looking back at the Nazi
era, the dangers of the language of disposability and pollution
become terrifying given how they were deployed in the interest
of unimaginable horrors. Etlin provides a glimpse of the logic
and effects of the discourse of pollution and its morphing into
policies of disposability and eradication. He writes:
From
propaganda posters to problems in mathematics textbooks
for schoolchildren, Germans were repeatedly asked, once the
Nazis had come to power, to ponder the economic costs of maintaining
the lives of the handicapped and mentally ill.Forced sterilization
of people considered “hereditarily ill” had been
decreed in July 1933; compulsory abortions, in 1935. The legalized
secret killing of [physically and cognitively disabled] children
began in 1939, as did plans for the murder of Germany’s
adult mental patients, both programs “planned and administered
by medical professionals” involving “some of Germany’s
oldest and most highly respected hospitals.” The
utilitarian calculation of the cost of sustaining life for these
so-called unproductive members of German society does not account
for the full reasoning behind such measures. Rather, one must
look to an altered moral outlook best represented by the notion
of the “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,” that
is, the “destruction” or “extermination,”
of “lives not worth living.”
The
politics of disposability now exists at the highest levels of
the US government and is central to the creation of a death-saturated
age.
The
politics of disposability is no longer a discourse limited to
the historical memory of totalitarian governments, internment
camps and extermination policies. As both a state-legitimated
ideology and established policy, it now exists at the highest
levels of the US government and is central to the creation of
a death-saturated age. Fantasies of absolute control, racial
cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the
heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This
dystopian mindset is marked by hollow words and lethal actions;
similarly, its dreamscape is pillaged of any substantive meaning,
cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that
alternative worlds are impossible to entertain.
In
this worldview, the present creates nightmares parading as dreams
in which the future is imagined “by way of a detour through
a mythic past,” in the words of AK Thompson. There is
more at stake here than shrinking political horizons and the
aligning of the existing moment with echoes of a bygone fascist
era. What we are witnessing is a mode of governing fuelled by
fantasies of exclusion accompanied by a full-scale attack on
morality, thoughtful reasoning and collective resistance rooted
in democratic forms of struggles. We are also witnessing an
unprecedented assault on the mainstream media and the fundamental
necessity in a democracy for an independent, critical journalism.
Trump’s
threat to use “libel laws,” his labelling critical
news outlets as “fake news,” and his notion of the
media as the “enemy of the American people”—a
term linked to authoritarian regimes—are key warning signs
of a fascist politics, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
have shown in their book How Democracies Die. Trump
has degraded the office of the president and has elevated the
ethos of political corruption, hyper-masculinity and lying to
a level that leaves many people numb and exhausted. He has normalized
the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the
indefensible. Pollution in its biological, ecological and material
forms has become the centerpiece of Trump’s endorsement
of a fascist politics that is at the heart of a growing right-wing
populism across the globe and is bolstered by his support.
Trump
has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable
and defended the indefensible.
Trump
has also expanded the discourse of pollution and disposability
to enact a full-fledged attack on the environment. As the editorial
board of the New York Times put it, “Trump imperils
the planet” with his corporate-friendly retrograde policies.
Not only has he appointed cabinet members who harbour a deep
disdain for environmental regulations to head the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and other
agencies whose purpose is to serve the public good, he has also
enacted policies utterly destructive to the environment and
human life.
For
example, the Trump administration is lifting federal protections
for thousands of waterways and wetlands, compromising the safety
of water for millions of Americans. The Department of Interior
will allow oil drilling on millions of previously protected
acres including the establishment of oil and gas production
wells in federally controlled waters of the US Arctic. The Environmental
Protection Agency will lift restrictions on carbon emissions
from new coal plants and has proposed weakening greenhouse gas
emissions and fuel standards for light duty vehicles. The Trump
administration has weakened the Endangered Species Act and the
Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement as part of what
Eliot Weinberger describes as “Trump administration’s
‘energy dominancy’ agenda, to eliminate safety rules
for offshore oil and natural gas drilling platforms.”
Responding to a government report that predicted dire consequences
to the US from climate change, Trump stated, “I don’t
believe it.”
Trump’s
astonishingly irrational response is not simply about his own
ignorance regarding scientific studies or the validity of science
itself; it is primarily about pandering to the major corporations
who make big profits in plundering the environment. Wealth extraction,
exploitative low wages, employment contingency, manufactured
inequality, brutal forms of labour discipline and engineered
suffering are the defining characteristics of the neoliberal
capitalism now driving Trump’s policies. Ted Steinberg
is right in arguing, “Flirtation with disaster is in a
sense the essence of neoliberal capitalism, a hyperactive form
of [an] exploitative economic order that seems to know no limits.”
It
is important to note that Trump’s environmental rollbacks
do more than increase the profits of plundering corporations;
they also endanger the lives of millions. For instance, a Harvard
University study by professors David Cutler and Francesca Dominici
calculated that repealing the Clean Power Plan Rule would “lead
to an estimated 36,000 deaths each decade and nearly 630,000
cases of respiratory infection in children alone.” Moreover,
the authors estimate that the repeal of emission requirements
for heavy trucks alone “could lead to as many as 41,000
premature deaths per decade and 900,000 cases of respiratory
tract symptoms.” They conclude with this sobering warning:
Overall,
an extremely conservative estimate is that the Trump environmental
agenda is likely to cost the lives of over 80,000 US residents
per decade and lead to respiratory problems for many more than
1 million people. This sobering statistic captures only a small
fraction of the cumulative public health damages associated
with the full range of rollbacks and systemic actions proposed
by the Trump administration.
In
pursuing policies such as these, Trump is abetting the inhumane
and ethically irresponsible ethos and pragmatism at the heart
of a sordid capitalism that thrives on economic shock doctrines.
In
pursuing policies such as these, Trump is abetting the inhumane
and ethically irresponsible ethos and pragmatism at the heart
of a sordid capitalism that thrives on economic shock doctrines.
In doing so, he refuses to acknowledge that the emerging disasters
overtaking the planet call into question the very foundations
of a predatory global capitalism, which divorces economic activity
from social costs, and embraces a death-dealing notion of progress
at any price. Neoliberal fascism is on the march and has produced
a wide-ranging shift in the economy, ideology, power, culture
and politics. Ways of imagining society through the lens of
democratic ideals, values and social relations have given way
to narratives that substitute cruelty for compassion, greed
for generosity, and pollution for social bonds rooted in human
rights. Pollution has become not only the new mantra for an
assault on human rights but also a warning and unapologetic
forecast of the horrors of state power and its turn to a politics
of social and racial cleansing, along with its embrace of authoritarianism.
We face in the current era a major challenge to education, reason
and informed judgment and their relationship to democracy. The
formative cultures necessary to ensure the production of informed
and critical citizens necessary for a democracy are collapsing
under the weight of the powers of the financial elite and big
corporations. At the same time, as Anthony DiMaggio has argued,
fascism is on the table and “has become a permanent feature
of American politics.”
Such
a threat in terms of its historical genesis and its contemporary
modes of expression can no longer be ignored. The stakes are
much too high.
This
essay is from The Truthout Series (The Public Intellectual)
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