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the unambiguous and legitimate
OUSTER OF TRUMP AND BEYOND
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.
YOUR
COMMENTSThe 2020 election was a contest between the
centrist elements in the Democratic Party — as embodied
by President-elect Joe Biden and his reputed neoliberal policies
— and the resurgent fascist politics of an updated party
of white supremacists and ultra-nationalists. It is a meaningful,
though limited, victory that the crude white supremacist side
of capitalism has lost the election, and it would not have happened
if not for the hard work of grassroots organizers, who were
fighting not for Biden, but against a fascist future.
Still, even amid
the celebrations of this step, we must face the threat that
the now-empowered centrist elements in the Democratic Party
are likely to continue to reverse the legacy of the New Deal
and maintain relations of power that sustain if not increase
vast inequities in US wealth and power.
In offering voters Biden’s neoliberalism as the only
alternative to Trump’s fascistic politics, the election
revealed the failure of the Democratic Party to address the
economic reality faced by working-class people as a result
of the scourge of neoliberalism with its mantra of austerity,
privatization and deregulation.
Meanwhile,
the Biden campaign is already participating in downplaying
the full urgency of the fascist threat that Trump posed to
democracy. In his acceptance speech, Biden claimed that there
is no red or blue America but a United States of America —
a statement that may be strategic in attempting to gain mass
support for the democratic transfer of power in January, but
that fails to acknowledge that over 70 million people voted
to embrace Trump’s fascist politics with enthusiasm.
Biden’s acceptance speech reiterated the well-worn narratives
of centrist politics, including the undying embrace of a mythical
American dream waiting to resurrect itself again. Imagine
how much more powerful this appeal would be if instead of
seeking to win public support for his mandate through these
Trump-like statements, Biden sought to offer convincing policies
that large swaths of the working class could support, especially
those elements of the working class hit hardest by the pandemic.
Instead of offering the public a universal health care plan,
huge investments in crucial infrastructure, guaranteed basic
income, a moratorium on evictions, support for a Green New
Deal, or an updated Marshall Plan for creating millions of
jobs, Biden and the party regulars have continued to use empty
phrases such as “restoring the soul of America.”
In place of such liberal platitudes, what this country needs
right now is a robust agenda that addresses a diverse racial
and ethnic working class and prioritizes “the upgrading
of schools, clinics, roads, mass transit systems, waterworks,
and other public services with good-paying jobs,” as
Ralph Nader has argued.
Regardless of
Biden’s win, we still live in a world that appears to
have descended into Dante’s version of hell.
Focusing largely on the important goal of bringing the pandemic
under control, Biden overlooked the fact that, for many working-class
people, being powerless and viewed as disposable was as threatening
as the fear of getting sick or dying from the pandemic. Containing
the pandemic was a key issue, and working-class people, particularly
people of color, are undoubtedly hardest hit by COVID. However,
Biden should have also addressed other core issues impacting
millions of working-class people whose incomes have been stagnant
for 40 years, who have suffered the humiliation of being evicted
from their homes, and who have watched as their jobs dried
up and their towns turned into landscapes of despair and dashed
hopes.
Missing from Biden’s
neoliberal script was the scourge of the carceral state, a
call for massively reducing the military budget, the horrible
consequences of global capitalism, the financialization of
the economy, and the toxic effects of deindustrialization.
Trump’s
fascist politics, once again, stepped into this void, feeding
off the powerlessness felt by so many Americans, all the while
stoking their racial fears and offering fantasies that proved
far more effective than the Democrats’ empty neoliberal
rhetoric. Trump offered their heightened sense of contempt
and resentment of the elite with a script that promised what
Mark Danner has called a kind of “imaginary revenge.”
The real issue
in this election is not simply the story of winners and losers,
but the death of the social sphere, evisceration of the welfare
state, the broad appeal of right-wing populism, and the destruction
of the formative public institutions and civic culture which
produced the crucial democratic values of solidarity, trust,
compassion, economic equality, and most of all, a sense of
ethical and social responsibility. The limitations of what
could be hoped for in this election made clear once again
the long legacy of the ongoing assault on meaningful politics
and its slow death. A long-simmering racist and fascist culture
of lies has shredded any hope of the shared values necessary
to give meaning to the relationship between truth and social
responsibility, citizenship and compassion. In the current
election, the legacy of shared fears, falsehoods, racism and
lawlessness came home to roost destroying the values and shared
standards necessary to distinguish right from wrong, compassion
from expedience, economic activity from social costs.
Through its destruction
of the economy, environment, education and public health care,
neoliberal capitalism has created a petri dish for the virus
to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.
The United States
has become a fortress of militarized ignorance, hate and resentment.
The barriers and boarded storefronts that went up before the
election may be coming down, but their presence symbolized
a deeper reality that will be with the United States for some
time to come in the future.
The tsunami of
violence, rhetorical and real, now moves beyond the rhetoric
of a dictatorial mode of governance into the realm of a heavily
polarized country willing “to lock American democracy
into an undetermined, perhaps indeterminable, condition.”
The current culture of fear began with 9/11, revealed its
ugly truth regarding the priority of profits over human needs
with the 2008 financial crisis, and the pandemic and current
economic crisis made visible the deep-seated racism and white
supremacy and white nationalism at the center of power in
the United States. Such fears have reached their endpoint
in the rise of a fascist politics coupled with those who aid
it and those who deny it. While Biden’s win succeeds
in ejecting white nationalists like Stephen Miller from the
White House, it does not change the fundamental reality that
we face: a United States in which overt white supremacy has
been emboldened and received mainstream affirmation in chilling
new ways. The election did nothing to challenge that. Moreover,
it is crucial to acknowledge that Trumpism is vigorously alive
in a Republican Party that embraces minority rule and all
the toxic policies — voter suppression, packing the
Supreme Court, gerrymandering, and other tactical strategies
— that both undermine democracy and ensure an embrace
of authoritarianism. This is a party for whom only selected
voters count (read: white voters) and “the majority
can be conjured out of existence.” There is no morality
here, only the crude pragmatism of a fascist politics and
a large segment of the population along with Trump’s
political lackeys who embraced his authoritarianism with zeal.
Regardless of
Biden’s win, we still live in a world that appears to
have descended into Dante’s version of hell. This is
a world marked by horrifying political horizons — a
world in which authoritarian and medical pandemics merge in
what resembles a dystopian nightmare. In this age of uncertainty,
time and space have collapsed into a void of shared apprehensions,
relentless anxieties and the possibility of a human rights
abyss. The terrors of everyday life manifest themselves in
the metrics of rising infections, body counts and the daily
risk of contamination, sickness or worse.
Amid this collective
terror, the architecture of authoritarianism resurfaced under
Trump with a vengeance in the form of a waking nightmare with
a cast of horrors. Surveillance technologies proliferated;
armed militia defended groups refusing to wear protective
masks and intimidated those who did; voter suppression was
in full swing; conspiracy theories originated or were legitimated
by President Trump; immigrant children were forcibly separated
from their parents — sometimes disappearing into internment
camps with no hope of reuniting with their families. Echoes
of a fascist past surfaced in news accounts in which imprisoned
female immigrants were victims of forced sterilization; political
rallies emboldened the language of hate and violence; and
a steady stream of politicians and reactionary media pundits
used vitriolic language against almost anyone who criticized
Trump’s destructive and death-dealing policies, including
Democratic governors and liberal and progressive members of
the press.
The multiple threats
produced during the Trump regime have an afterlife and will
not disappear with Trump’s defeat.
In this post-election
climate, the COVID-19 plague points to more than a medical
pandemic and must be understood as part of a more comprehensive
narrative. For instance, the disproportionate impact of the
virus on poor people of color makes clear that the struggle
“for public health, goods, services, social protections,
and human rights, with special provisions for the most vulnerable,
including the precariat, migrant workers … indigenous
peoples” and the elderly cannot be separated from broader
struggles for social equality, economic justice and democracy.
The horror of the pandemic often overshadows the fact that
anti-democratic economic and political forces that have prioritized
profits over more urgent human needs have ground away at the
social order for the last 50 years. The COVID-19 crisis is
deeply rooted in years of neglect by hyper-capitalist governments
that denied the importance of public health, the public good
and the commons while defunding institutions that made them
possible.
At the same time,
this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive
inequalities in wealth, income and power that grew relentlessly
since the 1970s. Nor can it be separated from a crisis of
democratic values, critical education and the civic imagination.
With respect to the latter, the COVID-19 pandemic is deeply
interconnected with the politicization of the social order
through the destructive assaults waged by casino capitalism
on the welfare state, all manner of social provisions and
the ecosystem. Underlying the magnitude of the current pandemic,
there is the crucial and demanding question of: What kind
of world do we want to live in today and build for in the
future?
The pandemic has
revealed the ugly and cruel face of an extreme form of capitalism,
which has relentlessly attacked the social contract, the public
sphere and the common good since the 1970s. I use the term
neoliberalism to define this libertarian, market-driven form
of capitalism which gained prominence in Chile, under General
Pinochet in the 1970s with the help of the University of Chicago
Economics Department and Milton Friedman. It was later implemented
by U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who infamously stated,
“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual
men and women and there are families.” Soon afterwards,
President Ronald Reagan argued that, “Government is
not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
Of course, these ideas were later embraced with great enthusiasm
by Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada. The
endpoint here was an attempt to discredit any viable sense
of government responsibility.
Implicit in these
views is a neoliberal worldview that takes as its central
organizing idea the assumption that the market should govern
not only the economy, but all aspects of society. In addition,
it promotes untrammeled self-interest, indulgent individualism,
the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a financial
elite, and removes economic activity from social costs. Neoliberalism
views government as the enemy of the market, limits society
to the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed
hedonism and challenges the very idea of the common good.
In this logic, “individual interests are the only reality
that matters and those interests are purely monetary.”
In addition, neoliberalism
cannot be disconnected from the spectacle of fearmongering,
ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and bigotry that
has dominated the national zeitgeist in the U.S., Brazil and
a number of other countries as a means of promoting shared
anxieties rather than shared responsibilities. Through its
destruction of the economy, environment, education and public
health care, neoliberal capitalism has created a petri dish
for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.
There is an urgent
need to deal with the larger issue of eliminating a hyper-capitalist
system structured in massive racial and economic inequalities.
Under neoliberalism,
the language of the public good and community is replaced
by the market-driven rhetoric of commodification, privatization,
deregulation and commercialization. One consequence is that
public goods whither and begin to fail. That is, as Naomi
Klein observes the “publicly owned bones of society”
— public education, public health systems, roads, bridges,
levees, water systems — are underfunded, and in many
ways, pushed to the breaking point of disrepair and dysfunctionality.
[Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s
Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 152-153] Moreover, the bonds of
trust and solidarity are replaced by the bonds of fear and
suspicion, and a growing culture of cruelty. Drained of civic
values and lacking a commanding vision, the institutions of
liberal democracy atrophied, further undermining civic literacy,
historical memory and the capacity to discern the truth from
falsehoods.
Neoliberalism
is not just an economic system, but also an ideological and
cultural system that functions as a powerful educational force.
Its presence is on display daily in the rise of the corporate-controlled
social media that has accelerated a culture of distraction,
immediacy and self-absorption. In this overabundance of civic
glut, language has succumbed to the aesthetics of vulgarity.
What is new about the era in which we live is that the attack
on the welfare state and common good is increasingly legitimated
and normalized through oppressive forms of education in a
variety of sites such as newspapers, social media, magazines
and popular culture. This is the space in which willful ignorance,
the disdain of science, the repudiation of evidence and conspiracy
theories are produced. Moreover, these views are reinforced
and reciprocated at the highest levels of government. Far
from being objective sources of information or innocent forms
of entertainment, these cultural apparatuses have become disinformation
and disimagination machines that objectify people of color,
promote spectacles of violence and endorse consumerism as
the only viable way of life. This emptying out of social relations,
democratic values and visions of the good life legitimates
a language of exclusion, bigotry and white nationalism.
One result is
that the distinction between fact and fiction disappear and
“somewhere along the way, the democratization of the
flow of information [becomes] the democratization of the flow
of disinformation.” Lost here is a critical language
capable of producing a narrative that promotes shared values
and enables people to develop the sustained connections crucial
to a vibrant democracy. All of this was on display in Trump’s
campaign of misinformation and lies about both the pandemic
and about almost everything else. As a tabloid anti-intellectual
who thrives in a culture of spectacle, entertainment and distraction,
Trump emptied politics of any substantive meaning given his
efforts to both infantilize and depoliticize the public while
disdaining any effort at critical analysis, translation or
self-reflection. All that was left is what Viktor Frankl in
1965 called “the mask of nihilism.”
In Trump’s
hands, ignorance was not innocent and provided a legitimating
force from the center of power to fuel a number of extremist
groups that use the corporate media and social media to peddle
their hatred, lies and self-serving ignorance. Soon after
the election, Trump prematurely declared victory, spread lies
about the legitimacy of the election, questioned its fairness,
and in doing so ran the risk of provoking outrage and sowing
potential violence on the part of his more extremist supporters.
He claimed that any suggestion he had lost was “a fraud
on the American people” and that any further counting
of votes after the election should stop. The language of violence,
fear and lies has been the preferred political drug of the
Trump presidency. In the past he has threatened Adam Schiff
and Nancy Pelosi, supported violent right-wing extremists
such as the Proud Boys, defended the 17-year-old who fatally
shot two protesters in Wisconsin, and demanded that his Attorney
General William Barr arrest Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton.
Trump’s
penchant for violence has also asserted itself dangerously
in the post-election climate. As Josh Israel observes:
Just
two days ago, Trump appeared to egg on his supporters to respond
with armed rebellion should states like Pennsylvania attempt
to count all the votes. “The Supreme Court decision
on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one,”
he tweeted. “It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating
and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also
induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!”
He was referencing a court ruling allowing the state to count
ballots postmarked on time and received within three days
of the election in the state. The Washington Post
reported on Wednesday that many of his supporters appear to
be taking that advice seriously. Dozens of users on a pro-Trump
online message board posted messages urging “war”
to stop Democrats from “trying to STEAL the election.”
One wrote that they are “standing by and keeping my
rifle by my side.”
There is more
at stake here than Trump’s false claim that he won the
election and his unwillingness to accept a peaceful transition
of power. There is also a threat this malignant Trump presidency
has posed to both American lives and democracy itself given
its wantonly destructive and tragic failure to contain the
COVID-19 pandemic. The multiple threats produced during the
Trump regime have an afterlife and will not disappear with
Trump’s defeat.
Amid the corpses
produced by neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, there are
emerging flashes of hope.
It is important
to acknowledge that the COVID-19 plague must also be understood
as part of a more comprehensive political and educational
narrative in which neoliberalism plays a central role. Trump’s
enduring narrative and politics of death was about more than
failed leadership, it was also about the scourge of neoliberalism.
In this case, we cannot separate the struggle for public health
and the common good from the struggles for emancipation, social
equality, economic justice and democracy itself.
As engaged citizens,
it is crucial to examine the anti-democratic and iniquitous
political, economic and social forces that have intensified
the pandemic while failing to contain it. These are not merely
economic and political issues, but also educational considerations.
Two of the more obvious questions include: How does a society
driven by the accumulation of capital at any cost, with its
appropriation of market-based values and regressive notions
of freedom and agency, use culture, education and language
to produce identities, values and modes of agency? How can
any democratic society survive a market-driven notion of freedom
in which free will and choice are untouched by any broader
notion of constraints and views responsibility as a purely
personal phenomenon? Lost here is any sense of the social,
the public and the connections that support the common good
and the general welfare of society.
Oppressive forms
of education have now become central elements of a society
threatened by a number of pandemics that endanger human life
and the planet itself. The propaganda machines of the right-wing
media echo the Trump regime’s support for conspiracy
theories, lies about testing and fake cures for the virus,
all the while engaging in a politics of evasion and denial
that covers up both Trump’s incompetence and the machineries
of violence, greed and terminal exclusion at the core of a
society that believes that the market is the template for
governing not just the economy, but all aspects of society.
In a society marked
by the proliferation of disimagination machines operating
both at the highest levels of government and throughout society,
matters of truth, evidence and science fall prey to the language
of mystification and legitimates a tsunami of ignorance and
the further collapse of civic culture and any sense of shared
citizenship. The coronavirus pandemic now works in tandem
with corporate media conglomerates to produce identities defined
narrowly by market values, while normalizing a notion of individual
responsibility that convinces people that whatever problems
they face they have no one to blame but themselves. This market-based
ideology operates under the depoliticizing false assumption
that there are only individual solutions to socially produced
problems, and reinforces states of individual alienation and
isolation, which increasingly are normalized, rendering human
beings numb and fearful, immune to the demands of economic
and social justice and increasingly divorced from matters
of politics, ethics and social responsibility.
The claims of
neoliberal capitalism have been broken and what was once unthinkable
is now being said in public by large groups of people.
This amounts
to a form of depoliticization in which individuals develop
a propensity to descend into a moral stupor and a deadening
cynicism, all the while becoming increasingly susceptible
to political shocks, and the seductive pleasure of the manufactured
spectacle. As the connections between democracy and education
wither, hope becomes the enemy of agency, and agency is reduced
to learning how to survive rather than working to improve
the conditions that bear down on one’s life and society
in general. Dealing with life’s problems becomes a solitary
affair, reducing matters of social responsibility to a regressive
and depoliticized notion of individual choice. In this instance,
the political becomes regressively personal, rendering difficult
any critical understanding of wider systemic forces while
undermining any viable notion of critical agency and collective
resistance. This form of depoliticization — with its
refiguring of the social sphere, individual responsibility,
historical memory, critical thinking and collective identity
— reinforces an acute indifference, withdrawal from
public life and a disdain for politics, all of which in a
time of tyranny amounts to a political and ethical catastrophe.
The U.S. and several
other countries are in the midst of a medical, racial, political,
economic and educational crisis which touches every aspect
of public life. Unfortunately, the crises many countries are
experiencing have not been matched by a crisis of ideas —
that is, a critical understanding of the conditions that produced
the crises in the first place. Within this crisis of ideas,
matters of poverty, economic inequality and racial injustices
disappear. Missing from this crisis is a recognition that
the globe is in a new historical period produced by a hyper-capitalist
system that lacks a commanding vision of democracy and is
at odds with any just, prudent and equitable notion of the
future.
The COVID-19 plague
cannot be separated from a broader plague of hyper-capitalism,
right-wing populism and the surge of authoritarian politics
around the globe. These forces represent the underside of
the pandemic and relentlessly subject workers, the elderly,
the homeless, the poor, children, people of color and more
recently, frontline hospital and emergency workers (and all
those others considered at risk) to lives of despair, precarity,
massive danger, and in some cases, death. At the roots of
this larger pandemic are an unbridled lawlessness and deep-seated
disdain for critical thought, meaningful forms of education
and any mode of analysis that holds power accountable.
The full-blown
pandemic has revealed with laser beam clarity both the irrationality
and incapability of a profit-driven capitalism in dealing
with a global public health crisis that has been as catastrophic
as it has been deadly. The horrors of inequality, compulsory
austerity, defunding of public health systems and the collapse
of the economy under the rubrics of extreme capitalism are
finally being acknowledged as the fundamental plague behind
the current pandemic. As Richard D. Wolff has argued, private
capitalism cannot “protect and maintain public health
and safety,” because it “pursues profits at the
expense of more urgent social needs and values…. This
pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people.”
He has also rightly argued that “both major parties
function as cheerleaders for capitalism under all circumstances,
when a killer pandemic coincides with a major capitalist crash.”
COVID-19 has produced
an age of uncertainty, fragmentation, despair and a dire foreboding
about the future. Shared certainties, hopes and dreams have
been replaced by shared fears. More troubling is the apprehension
that the present crisis has an air of longevity about it,
constituting a turning point in history. The stark choice
of what the future might look like appears to hang between
the forces of despotism and democracy. The pandemic has now
revealed in all its ugliness the death-producing mechanisms
of systemic inequality, institutional racism, the increasingly
dangerous assault on the environment and an anti-intellectual
culture that derides any notion of critical education —
that is, an education that equips individuals to think critically,
engage in thoughtful dialogue, learn the lessons of history
and learn how to govern rather than be governed.
Trump’s
defeat should not erase the notion that the political, economic
and cultural forces that created the conditions for his presidency
have disappeared.
The pandemic has
torn away the cover of a neoliberal economic system marked
by what Thomas Piketty calls “the violence of social
inequality.” Inequality is a toxin that destroys lives,
democratic institutions, historical consciousness, civic literacy,
and is normalized through politicians and a right-wing media
culture reduced to sounding boards for the rich and powerful.
The ideological
virus-plague has as one of its roots a politics of depoliticization
and normalization. It attempts to rob people of their sense
of agency all the while making unthinkable the matters of
alleged commonsense. Through a variety of market-based assumptions
and pedagogical practices, it works to undermine and discredit
those ideas, values, modes of identification and desires that
enable individuals to become critically engaged actors. As
the elevation of profit, greed, and unchecked notions of individualism
and self-interests become national ideals, democracy is eviscerated
and the habits of citizenship wither.
The pandemic crisis has shattered the myth that each of us
are defined exclusively by our self-interest, and as individuals,
are solely responsible for the problems we face. Both myths
run the risk of breaking down as it becomes obvious that as
the pandemic unfolds, shortages in crucial medical equipment,
lack of testing, lack of public investments, and failed public
health services are largely due to right-wing neoliberal measures
such regressive tax policies and bloated military budgets
that have drained resources from public health, public goods
and other vital social institutions.
COVID-19 has done
more than expose the cult of capitalism and its production
of social inequities operating on a vast scale in the U.S.
and around the globe. It has also revealed the inner workings
of an authoritarian politics exemplified by the blundering
and dangerous regime of Donald Trump, whose potential reelection
the editorial board of The New York Times stated
“poses the greatest threat to American democracy since
World War II.” According to The Times, Trump
degraded the office of the presidency by normalizing the unthinkable,
legitimating the inexcusable and defending the indefensible.
The administration has been more concerned about the health
of the economy than saving lives, especially the lives of
those marginalized by color, class, age and preexisting health
conditions. For Trump, public relations mattered more than
the truth, justice and social responsibility. Trump’s
exercise of power was unchecked and untethered to any sense
of ethical and political responsibility. Instead, it was used
to inflame partisan positions, exploit racial tensions and
flagrantly promote a culture of corruption, lawlessness and
violence.
Because of Trump’s
failure to address the COVID-19 crisis, the United States
has been turned into a giant funeral home. Trump lied about
the severity of the virus, calling it no more dangerous than
the flu, even saying it would just disappear. He admitted
to journalist Bob Woodward that the virus was deadly and airborne
and that millions of people could get infected, sicken and
die. He flouted the advice of experts and put incompetents
in positions of power to shape health policies. More recently,
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows acknowledged that
the Trump administration can’t stop the spread and is
focusing instead on getting a vaccine. In other words, in
spite of the spiraling number of infections and deaths from
the virus in the United States, the White House has made the
decision to do nothing but wait for a vaccine. There is more
at stake here than incompetence and the collapse of moral
responsibility made clear by a public admittance that the
U.S. cannot control the pandemic; there is also a criminogenic
policy, if not an act of domestic terrorism, that will result
in unnecessary massive suffering and deaths particularly among
the poor, vulnerable and elderly.
Moreover, as the
virus spread throughout the country, Trump disregarded the
advice of medical and health authorities and held indoor rallies
in cities around the United States, impervious to the danger
large group gatherings posed to his followers. After downplaying
the virus since its inception while modeling behavior that
promotes it, going so far as to treat mask-wearing as a weakness
while ridiculing his rival Joe Biden for wearing one, Donald
and Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19. For four years,
this administration has lied, deceived the public, and undermined
the health and safety of the nation. Events have now caught
up with Trump’s world of deceit, lies and willful ignorance,
and he has to bear the fate of his own hypocrisy and moral
failing. What is crucial here is that Trump is not the only
the victim of his own inept leadership and the disdain of
health experts and the laws of science. More importantly,
because of his lack of leadership, the economy tanked, millions
lost their jobs, at least 237,000 people have died from COVID-19
and more than 9.5 million are infected. Trump did not deserve
this virus, but neither did the people who contracted it because
his irresponsible and vicious disregard for the lives of others.
Trump has blood on his hands, and his failure to address the
pandemic’s reach, severity and danger is no longer an
issue he can ignore.
In the aftermath of Biden’s election, there is a need
for renewed efforts to put into play policies that raise the
minimum wage, support decent and safe work, offer access to
affordable housing, provide universal health care, lower prescription
drug costs, provide free quality education to everyone, expand
infrastructure, defund the police and military, and invest
in community services. But such calls do not go far enough,
there is also an urgent need to deal with the larger issue
of eliminating a hyper-capitalist system structured in massive
racial and economic inequalities. The renowned educator David
Harvey is right in arguing that the “immediate task
is nothing more nor less than the self-conscious construction
of a new political framework for approaching the question
of inequality [and racism], through a deep and profound critique
of our economic and social system.”
As real and foreboding
as the current crisis appears, the future does not have to
repeat the present, and how it unfolds remains in the balance.
If neoliberalism contributed to the unraveling of social connections
and the institutions that support them, the pandemic made
it clear how vital such connections are to both the public
health of a society and its democratic institutions. Young
people and others are recognizing that as social spheres are
privatized, commercialized and individualized, it becomes
difficult to translate private issues into systemic consideration.
Under such circumstances, inequality becomes normalized, and
the pandemic crisis is isolated from the political, economic,
social and cultural conditions that fuel it.
Crucial to any
politics of resistance is the necessity to take seriously
the notion that education is central to politics itself, and
that social problems have to be critically understood before
people can act as a force for empowerment and liberation.
In the face of the pandemic, matters of criticism, informed
judgments and critical modes of understanding are crucial
in making a choice between democracy and authoritarianism,
life and death.
The stark choice
regarding what the future might look like appears to hang
between the forces of despotism and democracy. Yet, as ominous
as this foreboding appears, history is open, and how it will
unfold hangs in the balance. The pandemic is a crisis that
cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all
hope is lost. While this pandemic threatens democracy’s
ability to breathe, it should also offer up the possibility
to rethink politics and the habits of critical education,
human agency and elements of social responsibility crucial
to any viable notion of what life would be like in a truly
democratic society.
Amid the corpses
produced by neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, there are
emerging flashes of hope, especially among young people who
seem to be all that stands between a declining faith in democracy
and the ghosts of an ugly past. Beyond the normalizing ideologies
of a poisonous cynicism and an immobilizing conformity endemic
to neoliberal capitalism, there is a growing global movement
protesting racism, state violence and economic inequality.
This is a collective movement of resistance to a hyper-capitalist
system that is out of control; it is a movement in search
of a new language that includes investments in education and
public health, a living wage, and the creation of an economy
that benefits us all and not just a wealthy financial elite.
It is a movement that refuses to accept the erosion of democratic
ideals, the decline of communal institutions and the rise
of a toxic culture of consumerism, greed and self-interest,
one that places profit over people. This is a movement attempting
to reclaim a collective political vision that is more compassionate,
equitable, just and inclusive. Central to its task is the
necessity to create a unified democratic political formation,
a revival of the civic imagination, and an inspired and energized
fight for a radical democracy. This is both a political project
and an educational challenge given the need to break through
the corrosive commonsense belief that “there is no alternative”
to the existing society with its dangerous notions of agency,
values and disregard for the common good.
The claims of
neoliberal capitalism have been broken and what was once unthinkable
is now being said in public by large groups of people. Young
people are calling for a new narrative to repair the safety
net, provide public investment in health care, child care,
elder care and free quality public schools for everyone. Resistance
movements in the U.S. are forming in order to protect and
expand the voting process, cancel student debt, establish
universal health care, expand Social Security, reform the
criminal legal system with an eye to ending mass incarceration,
protect workers’ rights (including the right to unionize)
and a renewed call to support Indigenous rights. There are
increasing efforts to address state violence and the plagues
of poverty, racism, homelessness, economic inequality and
the pollution of the planet. The spirit of an insurgent democracy
is in the air.
In spite of the ugly terror of authoritarianism that lurks
in the background of the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic can
teach us that democracy is fragile as “a way of life”
and that if it is to survive, critical education, civic courage,
historical consciousness, moral witnessing and political outrage
must become central elements of a pedagogical practice capable
of producing citizens who are informed, politically aware
and willing to struggle to keep justice, equity and the principles
of a socialist democracy alive.
A Biden presidency
does not point to the end of Trumpism or, more accurately,
a toxic form of neoliberal fascism. If the Republican Party
has become the party of white supremacy, the Democratic Party
as a whole is a party of dead ideas, a funeral home for the
decaying corpse of global neoliberal capitalism.
The struggle ahead
will be to expose the forces that made Trump possible and
to examine how both political parties participated in putting
in place the conditions that enabled his coming to power.
The end of Trump’s
presidency does not suggest that the national nightmare has
come to an end — it simply means it is no longer at
the center of a mode of governance that wears its racism,
corporate greed, cruelty, deadly incompetence and authoritarianism
like a badge of honor. Trump’s defeat should not erase
the notion that the political, economic and cultural forces
that created the conditions for his presidency have disappeared.
The struggle ahead
will be to expose the forces that made Trump possible and
to examine how both political parties participated in putting
in place the conditions that enabled his coming to power.
It is also crucial to think big and create a civic vision
that puts in place a notion of democracy that is truly radical
in its call for social justice, broad-based political representation
and economic equality. This project is not merely a political
task but also an educational necessity. Politics has to be
reinvented and rethought and it has to be done through social
movements working simultaneously at the local levels and federal
and international levels.
We need to act
en masse to defend public goods and the welfare state, and
to bring about the end of neoliberal capitalism. If a new
understanding of politics and social and economic justice
and equality is to be born, it is crucial to take seriously
waging a war of ideas against the normalization of a dying
order. And this task cannot be left to young people alone.
While there are signs of a social revival in the U.S., social
movements must intensify their efforts to unite and embrace
educational tools and programs that provide the knowledge
and skills necessary for Americans to be critical, engaged
and willing to face down the power of the financial elite
and right-wing populist movements.
Democracy cannot
survive with its current toxic mix of economic inequality,
political corruption and institutionalized racism. We need
to understand both how dominant power works in all of its
manifestations and how to defeat it. This is not simply an
economic issue but also a pedagogical consideration —
one in which people learn to think hard, work at the frontiers
of the imagination, embody a sense of moral courage and civic
imagination, and use the tools of persuasion and the power
of beliefs to construct public spaces where civic action can
be born.
This is a crisis
in which the various protests now evolving internationally
at the popular level offer the promise of developing invigorated
global movements for the struggle for popular sovereignty
and economic, racial and social justice. Central to such struggles
is the challenge of making good on the ideals and promise
of a substantive democratic order. In the current moment,
democracy may be under a severe threat and appear frighteningly
vulnerable, but with young people and others rising up across
the globe — inspired, energized and marching in the
streets — the future of a radical democracy is waiting
to be reimagined, if not reborn. In order for democracy to
breathe again, it needs to resurrect a language of critique
and possibility, one that draws from history, rethinks the
meaning of politics, and provides the economic, cultural and
political conditions to lift the U.S. and other societies
out of the present-day sociopolitical malaise so that the
public can envision alternatives and build the institutions
necessary for democracy to become a reality. Democracy needs
a vision rooted in a deep politics of solidarity that enables
people to both fight against the forces of authoritarianism
and to overcome them. Angela Davis was right in stating, “We
cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot
be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say
no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and
our many bodies.”
The issue is no
longer about who won this election, it is about defeating
the political, economic and social conditions that have produced
a culture of fear, bear the burden of a fascist past, and
promise the consequences of something even worse. It is about
whether the last glimmer of a failed democracy will be able
to breathe until current and future generations can rescue
it.
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