in the post-truth era
THE NORMALIZATION OF FASCISM
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
COMMENTSTalk of a fascist politics emerging in the
United States is often criticized as either a naive exaggeration
or a failure to acknowledge the strength of liberal institutions.
Yet, the case can be made that rather than harbor an element
of truth, such criticism further normalizes the very fascism
it critiques, allowing the extraordinary and implausible to
become ordinary. After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both
in the United States and abroad, the mobilizing passions of
fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since
the 1930s. The architects and managers of extreme capitalism
have used the crisis of economic inequality and its “manifestly
brutal and exploitative arrangements” to sow social divisions
and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy.
In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering
and anxieties of millions of Americans in order to redirect
their anger and despair through a culture of fear and discourse
of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes
by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance,
and a militarized spirit of white nationalism. While there is
no perfect fit between Trump and the fascist societies of Mussolini,
Hitler, and Pinochet, “the basic tenets of extreme nationalism,
racism, misogyny, and a hatred of democracy and the rule of
law” are too similar to ignore.
In
this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance
in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement
that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies
of casino capitalism” with fascist ideals. These ideals
include: the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization;
a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity;
the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a
politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over
reason, the weaponization of language; a discourse of decline,
and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never
entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce
its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in
a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards
homicidal extremes.
The
deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural
production and becomes visceral in its ongoing generation of
domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of
people of colour, 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 has also
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 termed neoliberal fascism.
I am
not suggesting that all conservative politicians, including
right-wing elements of the Democratic Party such as the Clinton/Obama
wing, support the same reactionary policies embraced by Trump
and his followers. In fact, Democratic Party politicians from
Hillary Clinton and Obama to Feinstein and Pelosi actually profess
to be a counter force to Trump—often labeling themselves
as the party of resistance—but in the long run, they end
up supporting neoliberal policies and power relations that favour
the ruling elites. If one is willing to throw some light on
the historical amnesia that the current crop of democratic presidential
hopefuls appear to embrace, it becomes clear that previous Democratic
Party policies under Clinton and Obama paved the way for Trump.
Clinton signed a draconian crime bill in 1994. The bill slavishly
indulged the then “national frenzy” for law and
order as a form of punishment and enacted policies such as “three
strikes,” “truth in sentencing,” and “mandatory
minimums.” The bill was also responsible for implementing
tsunami of mass incarceration that destroyed lives, families,
and mostly black communities. At the same time, Clinton signed
on to NAFTA, and deregulated the financial industry. The class
and racist thread that connects these two bills is shamefully
obvious. Fast forward to the Obama presidency. Rather than challenge
the utopian greed of a savage capitalism, Obama turned hope
for the many into hope for the bankers and financial elite and
hopelessness for millions of Americans who had lost their homes
during the 2008 economic recession. Rather than bailing out
people who suddenly found themselves in massive debt and prosecuting
the financial elite who caused the economic crisis, Obama bailed
out the bankers who rewarded themselves with big bonuses and
even bigger profits. He also sold billions of dollars of military
arms to Saudi Arabia.
As
Mike Davis and Daniel Monk once put it, “the Champaign
days of the Great Gatsby have returned with a vengeance”
and we cannot put the entire blame on Trump and his Vichy Republican
Party gravediggers. Unfortunately, the political proponents
of fanatical capitalism are still with us in the likes of a
number of Democratic Party presidential candidates that extend
from Joe Biden who “once opposed busing to desegregate
his state’s public schools” to Beto O’Rourke
who refused to even label himself as a progressive. There is
no talk among these candidates for addressing massive financial
and social inequality, redistributing wealth to the working
and middle classes, or dismantling the power of the criminogenic
financial and cultural institutions modeled after Goldman Sachs.
Under
such circumstances, these alleged “liberal” politicians,
not unlike the German-Socialist in the Weimer Republic, turned
their back on the needs of workers, the poor, minorities of
class and color, and in doing so helped to create a populist
revolt that supported the anti-elitist, anti-government discourse
on which Trump ran his presidential campaign. It is worth noting
that I am not arguing that neoliberalism is intrinsically fascist
as much as I am insisting that it created the conditions, particularly
in the wake of the Trump regime, for an updated form of fascist
politics in the United States.
The
urgency of addressing the rise of fascism both in the United
States and abroad might begin with the regime of untruth and
manufactured illiteracy that allows and normalizes the catastrophic
conditions that make neoliberal fascism a potent source of identity,
fantasy, and pleasure. One place to start would be a critical
analysis of the Trump administration’s efforts to abandon
and discredit traditional sources of evidence, facts, and analysis
in its attempt to normalize fake news, a culture of lying, and
the world of alternative facts. At issue here is making visible
a radical new relationship between the public and truth and
the ensuing demise of civic culture and the public institutions
that make it possible. As the public’s grip on civic literacy
weakens, language is emptied of any substantive meaning and
the shared standards necessary for developing informed judgments
and sustained convictions are undermined. In a world where nothing
is true, all that is left to choose from are competing fictions.
One consequence is that everything begins to look like a lie.
As the historian, Timothy Snyder points out “To abandon
facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one
can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to
do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” More
startling is the assumption that what matters in an age of deep
divisions, exploitation, and precarity is not whether something
is true or false but the promise of a consistent narrative in
which people can recognize themselves while willing to “abolish
their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood,
between reality and fiction.” Of course, there is more
at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture
of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified
as the theatricalization of politics, there is also the threat
to democracy itself.
We
do not live in a post-truth world and never have. On the contrary,
we live in a pre-truth world where the truth has yet to arrive.
As one of the primary currencies of politics, lies have a long
history in the United States. For instance, state sponsored
lies played a crucial ideological role in pushing the US into
wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, legitimated the use
of Torture under the Bush administration, and covered up the
crimes of the financial elite in producing the economic crisis
of 2008. Moreover, we have been living the lie of neoliberalism
and white nationalism for over forty years and because of the
refusal to face up to that lie, the United States has slipped
into the abyss of an updated American version of fascism of
which Trump is a both symptom and endpoint.
Under
Trump, lying has become a rhetorical gimmick in which everything
that matters politically is denied, reason loses its power for
informed judgments, and language serves to infantilize and depoliticize,
as it offers no room for individuals to translate private troubles
into broader systemic considerations. Truth is now mobile making
it easier to deny even a modicum of rational judgment while
reinventing a fascist politics that echoes the past and allows
the “intrusion of criminality into politics.” Post-truth
is a pedagogical tool of deflection that as the novelist Toni
Morrison points out functions “like a coma on the population”
imposing misery and traumas so deep and cruel that they kill
the moral imagination and “purge democracy of all of its
ideals. This period of civic and political decline has been
termed by many theorists and pundits as the era of post-truth.
While
questions about truth have always been problematic among politicians
and the wider public, both groups, however disingenuous, gave
lip service to the assumption that the search for truth and
respect for its diverse methods of validation were based on
the shared belief that “truth is distinct from falsehood;
and that, in the end, we can tell the difference and that difference
matters.” It certainly appeared to matter in a democracy,
particularly when it became imperative to be able to distinguish,
however difficult, between facts and fiction, reliable knowledge
and falsehoods, and good and evil. Under the Trump administration
that principle however no longer appears to be the case, especially
as chronic right-wing lying has taken over the white house.
As the politics of lying moves from the margins to the center
of power, Trump’s fake news industry wields enormous political
and pedagogical power while at the same time accelerating and
normalizing and endless stream of fake news and misrepresentations,
wrapped in a kind of dystopian legitimacy. Trump’s attack
on the truth wages a war against the ethical imagination, privatizes
experiences, and resonates with a larger culture of speed, instant
gratification, and consumerism. Coupled with a society that
worships celebrity culture, the power of spectacle and the masculinization
of the public sphere make it easier for Trump and his associates
to rehabilitate fascist ideas, principles, and a fascist political
culture.
In
the current historical moment, the boundaries between truth
and fiction are disappearing, giving way to a culture of immediacy,
consumerism, and falsehoods. Under such circumstances, civic
culture withers and politics collapses into the personal and
irrational. At the same time, pleasure is harnessed to a culture
of corruption and cruelty, language operates in the service
of violence, and the boundaries of the unthinkable become normalized.
How else to explain President Trump’s strategy of separating
babies and young children from their undocumented immigrant
parents in order to incarcerate them in Texas in what some reporters
have called cages. Trump’s misleading rhetoric is used
not only to cover up the brutality of oppressive political and
economic policies, but also to resurrect elements of a fascist
politics that have emerged in an unceasing stream of hate, bigotry
and militarism. Trump’s indifference to the boundaries
between truth and falsehoods reflects not only a deep-seated
anti-intellectualism, lawlessness, and unchecked paranoia, it
also points to his willingness to judge any appeal to the truth
as inseparable from an unquestioned individual and group loyalty
on the part of his followers. As self-defined sole bearer of
truth, Trump disdains reasoned judgment and evidence, relying
instead on instinct and emotional frankness (his gut) to determine
what is right or wrong and who can be considered a friend or
enemy.
In
this instance, truth becomes a performance strategy designed
to test his followers’ loyalty and willingness to believe
whatever he says. Truth now, in part, becomes synonymous with
a regressive tribalism that rejects shared norms and standards
while promoting a culture of corruption and what former New
York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called an “epidemic
of dishonesty.” Truth is now part of a web of relations
and worldview that draws its elements from a fascist politics
that can be found in all the commanding political institutions
and media landscapes. Truth is no longer merely fragile or problematic;
it has become toxic and dysfunctional in a media ecosystem largely
controlled by militant conservatives and a financial elite who
invest heavily in right-wing media apparatuses such Fox News
and white nationalist social media platforms such as Breitbart
News.
At
a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power,
culture, politics, finance, and everyday life now merge in ways
that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all
over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in
the hands of the ultra-rich and major tech companies, the educative
force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn.
This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems
of production and consumption that produce, shape, and sustain
ideas, desires, and social relations that contribute to the
disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form
of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness
and the Hobbesian rule of a ‘war of all against all’
replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion
for others. The era of post-truth is in reality a period of
crisis which as Gramsci observed “consists precisely in
the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and
that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms
appear.” Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s
mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt
to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics
of disposability and social sorting while hyping a culture of
fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.
Trump’s
lying is the mask of nihilism that reinforces the ideological
architecture of neoliberal fascism. Under such circumstances,
the state is remade on the model of finance, all social relations
are valued according to economic calculations, and the dual
project of ultra-nationalism and right-wing apocalyptic populism
merge in an embrace of a toxic and unapologetic defense of white
supremacy. Unsurprisingly, Trump views language as a weapon
of war, and social media as an emotional minefield that gives
him the power to criminalize the political opposition, malign
immigrants as less than human, and revel in his role as a national
mouthpiece for white nationalists, nativists, and other extremist
groups. Unconcerned about the power of words to inflame, humiliate,
and embolden some of his followers to violence, he embraces
a sadistic desire to relegate his critics, enemies, and those
considered outside of the boundaries of a white public sphere
to zones of terminal exclusion. In this instance, truth when
aligned with the search for justice becomes an object of disdain,
if not pure contempt.
The
entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin
of history, particularly the proto fascist era of 1930s and
1940s. They are with us once again producing dystopian fantasies
out of the decaying communities and landscapes produced by forty
years of a savage capitalism. White male rage has emerged out
of the destruction of social bonds and the gutting of the welfare
state and intensified with the neoliberal unleashing of destructive
energies of “deracination, displacement, and disintegration.”
Angry white male loners looking for a cause, a place to put
their agency into play, are fodder for cult leaders. They have
found one in Trump for whom the relationship between the language
of fascism and its toxic worldview of “blood and soil”
and the “fear of inferior blood” has moved to the
center of power in the United States.
While
campaigning for the mid-term 2018 elections, President Trump
reached deep into the abyss of fascist politics and displayed
a degree of racism, hatred, and ignorance that sent alarm bells
ringing across the globe. Blind to public criticism, Trump has
refused to acknowledge how his rhetoric, rallies, and interviews
fan the flames of racism and anti-Semitism. Instead, he blames
the media for the violence he encourages among his followers,
calls his political rivals enemies of the American people, labels
immigrants as invaders, and publicly claims he is a nationalist
emboldening right-wing extremist groups. Incapable of both empathy
and self-reflection, he can only use language in the service
of vilification, insults, and violence. Trump is the necessary
outcome of a neoliberal culture of hyper-punitiveness amplified
through an ascendant fascist politics that enshrines militarization,
privatization, deregulation, manic consumerism, the criminalization
of entire groups of people, and the financialization of everything.
Fascism first begins with language and then gains momentum as
an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate
violence against entire groups — Black people, immigrants,
Jews, Muslims and others considered “disposable.”
In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains,”
describes immigrants as “losers” and “criminals,”
and has become a national mouthpiece for violent nationalists
and a myriad of extremists who trade in hate and violence. Using
a rhetoric of revulsion as a performance strategy and media
show to whip up his base, Trump employs endless rhetorical tropes
of bigotry and demonization that set the tone for real violence.
Trump
appears utterly unconcerned by the accusation that his highly
charged rhetoric of racial hatred, xenophobia and virulent nationalism
both legitimates and fuels acts of violence. He proceeds without
concern about the consequences of either his deprecating discourse
or lending his voice to conspiracy theorists claiming that George
Soros is funding the caravan of migrant workers, calling CNN
anchor Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television,”
or referring to the basketball star, LeBron James as not being
very smart. While Trump insults a variety of public figures,
his attacks on African-Americans follows the standard racist
stereotype of calling into question their intelligence. Meanwhile,
this inflammatory invective offers a platform for inducing violence
from the numerous fascist groups that support him.
Trump
thrives on promoting social divisions that amplify friend/enemy
distinctions, and he often legitimates acts of violence and
expressions of radical extremism as a means of addressing them.
Trump has repeatedly embraced rhetorical divides between law-abiding
citizens and criminal elements, between us and them, and hardworking
versus lazy. Drawing from the fascist playbook, he portrays
whites as victims and privileged members of a chosen nation.
For instance, he has cast immigrants at the Southern border
as terrorists and infamously stated, without irony, that the
neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were “very fine
people.” He declared in 2016 “I think Islam hates
us,” lied about seeing Muslims celebrate the September
11 attacks, and refers to immigrants on the southern border
as invaders and in doing so uses the language of white nationalists
and White supremacists. Moreover, he has stated without shame
that he is a nationalist. For example, in one of his rallies,
he urged his base to use the word nationalism stating, “You
know…we’re not supposed to use that word. You know
what I am? I am a nationalist, Okay? I am a nationalist. Nationalist.
Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.” Not only
does Trump’s embrace of the term stoke racial fears, it
ingratiates him with elements of the hard right, particularly
white nationalists.
After
Trump’s strong appropriation of the term at an October
2018 rally, Steve Bannon in an interview with Josh Robin indicated,
“he was very very pleased Trump used the word ‘nationalist.’”
Trump has drawn praise from a number of white supremacists including
David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys–a
vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brown Shirts-and more
recently by the alleged New Zealand shooter who in his Christchurch
manifesto praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white
identity and common purpose.” Trump’s use of the
term is neither innocent nor a clueless faux pas. In the face
of a wave of anti-immigration movements across the globe, it
has become code for a thinly veiled racism and signifier for
racial hatred.
In
the alleged era of post-truth, actions are removed from any
notion of social responsibility, and truth is detached from
the search for justice. One consequence is the growing influence
of a neo-fascist-type spectacle modeled after the emptiness
and cheap pleasures of game shows, reality TV, and celebrity
culture. All of which provide further opportunities for Trump
to harness the public’s “free-floating anger, despair
and apathy” into a celebration of militarism, hyper-masculinity,
and spectacularized violence that mark his “frenzied Nuremberg-style
rallies,” which serve largely as a cauldron of race baiting
and anti-Semitic demagoguery.
There
are historical precedents for this collapse of language into
a form of coded militarism and racism — the anti-Semitism
couched in critiques of globalization and the call for racial
and social cleansing aligned with the discourse of borders and
walls. Echoes of history resonate in this assault on minority
groups, the use of racist taunts, and twisted references that
code a belief in racial purity, and legitimate attacks on and
possible criminal action against those who do not mirror the
twisted notions of white supremacy.
In
an age when civic literacy and efforts to hold the powerful
accountable for their actions are dismissed as “fake news,”
ignorance becomes the breeding ground not just for hate, but
for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding
of the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance
a non-negotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful
to weaponize everyday discourse. While Trump has been portrayed
as a serial liar, it would be a mistake to view this pathology
as a matter of character. Lying for Trump is a tool of power
used to discredit any attempt to hold him accountable for his
actions while destroying those public spheres and institutional
foundations necessary for the possibility of a democratic politics.
At the heart of Trump’s world of lies, fake news, and
alternative facts is a political regime that trades in corruption,
the accumulation of capital, and promotes lawlessness, all of
which provides the foundation for a neoliberalism on steroids
that now merges with an unabashed celebration of white nationalism.
The post-truth era constitutes both a crisis of politics and
a crisis of history, memory, agency, and education. It is worth
reiterating that, this new era of barbarism cannot be understood
or addressed without a reminder that fascism has once again
crystalized into new forms and has become a model for the present
and future. Trump’s language and policies are best understood
as a contemporary remnant of the fascist imagination.
Fantasies
of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism,
and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination
that has turned lethal. This is a dystopian imagination marked
by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive
meaning, cleansed of compassion, and used to legitimate the
notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain.
What we are witnessing is a shrinking of the political and moral
horizons and a full-scale attack on justice, thoughtful reasoning,
and collective resistance.
Trump’s
aversion to the truth resembles Orwell’s Ministry of Truth
in that it provides a bullhorn for violence against marginalized
groups, journalists, and undocumented immigrants, all the while
disseminating its lies through a massive disimagination tweet
machine. This dystopian propaganda apparatus is also fueled
by a language of silence and moral irresponsibility couched
in a willingness on the part of politicians and the public to
look away in the face of violence and human suffering. This
is the worldview of fascist politics and a dangerous nihilism
— one that reinforces a contempt for human rights in the
name of financial expediency and the cynical pursuit of political
power.
In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mind set has been
resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the facts, ethics,
and human weakness. Trump is a 21-century man without any virtues
for whom success amounts to acting with impunity, using government
power to sell or license his brand, hawking the allure of power
and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity,
selfishness, and state sanctioned violence. His approach to
politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical
abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein
rightly argues, Trump “approaches everything as a spectacle”
and edits “reality to fit his narrative.”
Under
the current reign of neoliberal fascism, politics extends beyond
the attack on any vestige of truth, informed judgments, and
constructive means of communication. There is more at work here
than the need to decode and analyze Trump’s language as
a tool for misrepresenting reality and shielding corrupt practices
and policies that benefit major corporations, the military,
and the ultra-rich. There is also a worldview, a mode of hegemony,
which comes out of a fascist playbook, and translates into dangerous
policies and potentially violent acts. This is evident in Trump’s
attacks on dissent and his support for the use of violence against
journalists and politicians who are critical of his views. One
such example can be found in his critique of members of the
Democratic Party whom he labeled as the radical left. Not only
did he hurl a McCarthyite slur at them, he also implied in one
instance that one response to their opposition might be violence.
His comments speak for themselves.. He stated “O.K.? I
can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of
the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the
tough people but they don’t play it tough until they go
to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
There is more at work here than infantilizing schoolyard threats.
We have seen too many instances where Trump’s followers
have beaten critics, attacked journalists, and shouted down
any form of critique aimed at Trump’s policies —
to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals
and journalist critical of the administration.
A few
weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, a number of Trump’s
outspoken critics, all of whom have been belittled and verbally
attacked by Trump, were sent homemade pipe bombs in the mail.
Cesar Sayoc — the man who was charged in connection with
the bombings — is a strong Trump fan whose Twitter feed
is littered with right-wing conspiracy theories along with an
assortment of “apocalyptic, right-wing dystopian fantasies.”
Trump’s fans include a number of white nationalist and
white supremacists who have been involved in recent killings
in both Pittsburgh and New Zealand. Trump does not just fan
the flames of violence with his rhetoric; he also provides legitimization
to a number of white nationalist and right wing extremists groups
who are emboldened by his words and actions. These groups too
often are ready to translate their hatred into the desecration
of synagogues, schools, and other public sites as well as engage
in violence against peaceful protesters, and in some cases commit
heinous acts of violence.
Without
a care as to how his own vicious and aggressive rhetoric has
legitimated and galvanized acts of violence by an assortment
of members of the “alt-right,” neo-Nazis and white
supremacists, Trump refuses to acknowledge the growing threat
of white nationalism and supremacy, even as he enables it with
his discourse of walls, alleged invading hordes, and celebration
of nativism. Trump remains silent about the fringe groups he
has incited with his vicious attacks on the press, the judiciary
and his political opponents. That is, he refuses to criticize
them while shoring up their support by claiming he is a nationalist
and surrounding himself with people like Stephen Miller who
leaves little to the imagination regarding his white supremacist
credentials. Trump told reporters after the Christchurch massacre
that white nationalism both in the United States and across
the globe was not a serious problem. In this instance, he appears
clueless and incapable of empathy regarding the suffering of
others, all while accelerating neoliberal and racist policies
that inflict massive suffering and misery on millions. Violent
fantasies are Trump’s trademark, whether expressed in
his support for ruthless dictators or in his urging his followers
at his rallies to “knock the crap out of” protesters.
We have seen this celebration of violence in the past with its
infantile appeal to a hyper-masculinity and its willingness
to engage further in genocidal acts.
Trump
is the consequence of a malady that has been growing for decades.
What is different about Trump is that he basks in his role and
is unapologetic about enacting policies that further enable
the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him)
and by mega-corporations. He embodies with unchecked bravado
the sorts of sadistic impulses that could condemn generations
of children to a future of misery and in some cases state terrorism.
He loves people who believe that politics is undermined by anyone
who has a conscience, and he promotes and thrives in a culture
of violence and cruelty. Trump is not refiguring the character
of democracy, he is destroying it, and in doing so, resurrecting
all the elements of a fascist politics that many people thought
would never re-emerge again after the horrors and death inflicted
on millions by previous fascist dictators. Trump represents
an emergence of the ghost of the past and we should be terrified
of what is happening both in the United States and in other
countries such as Brazil, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary. Trump’s
ultra-nationalism, racism, policies aimed at social cleansing,
his love affair with some of the world’s most heinous
dictators, and his hatred of democracy echoes a period in history
when the unimaginable became possible, when genocide was the
endpoint of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and
nationalist rhetoric ended in the horrors of the camp. The world
is at war once again, it is a war against democracy, and Trump
is at the forefront of it.
Trump
represents a distinctive and dangerous form of American-bred
authoritarianism, but at the same time, he is the outcome of
a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed, and engaged for
the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has
Trump “normalized the unspeakable” and in some cases
the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have
never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and, yes,
courage itself. In part, this means recovering a language for
politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship, and justice
that has real substance. One challenge is to confront the horrors
of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism
under Trump. There will be no real movement for change without,
as David Harvey has pointed out, “a strong anti-capitalist
movement,” At the same time, no movement will succeed
without addressing the need for a revolution in consciousness,
one that makes education central to politics. As Fred Jameson
has suggested such a revolution cannot take place by limiting
our choices to a fixation on the “impossible present.”
Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves to a language of
critique and a narrow focus on individual issues.
What
is needed is also a language of militant possibility and a comprehensive
politics that draws from history, rethinks the meaning of politics,
and imagines a future that does not imitate the present. We
need what Gregory Leffel calls a language of “imagined
futures,” one that “can snap us out of present-day
socio-political malaise so that we can envision alternatives,
build the institutions we need to get there and inspire heroic
commitment.” Such a language has to create political formations
capable of understanding neoliberal fascism as a totality, a
single integrated system whose shared roots extend from class
and racial injustices under financial capitalism to ecological
problems and the increasing expansion of the carceral state
and the military-industrial-academic complex.
Nancy
Fraser is right in arguing that we need a subjective response
capable of connecting diverse racial, social and economic crises
and in doing so addressing the objective structural forces that
underpin them. William Faulkner once remarked that we live with
the ghosts of the past or to be more precise: “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past.” Such a task
is all the more urgent given that Trump is living proof that
we are not only living with the ghosts of a dark past, which
can return. Nevertheless, it is also true that the ghosts of
history can be critically engaged and transformed into a radical
democratic politics for the future. The Nazi regime was more
than a frozen moment in history. It is a warning from the past
and a window into the growing threat Trumpism poses to democracy.
The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly,
they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice
and collective action in the fight for a substantive and inclusive
democracy.
