The
greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.
Santiago Zabala
The underbelly
of contemporary violence is colonialism, the politics of
disposability, religious fundamentalism, neoliberalism,
and raw militarism. Violence seems to have engulfed the
earth like a blinding sandstorm. Women and children are
being killed en mass in Gaza, homelessness is increasingly
spreading among youth in many countries, inequality exists
at staggering levels, and a culture for justice has been
replaced by a global culture of war. Gangster capitalism
is waging a war on the working class, women’s reproductive
rights, gay rights, people of color, and democracy itself–brazenly
wrapping itself in the discourse of fascism.
Morality increasingly
collapses under the weight of historical amnesia, the repression
of dissent, and the ruination of civic culture. Right-wing
attacks on historical consciousness and memory shore up
a defense against moral witnessing while providing a cover
for willful ignorance. Language has lost its ability to
awaken consciousness under the suffocating weight of the
spectacle and the crazed vocabulary of demagogues. Social
responsibility is adrift and is no longer associated with
how American society functions. The politicians and entrepreneurs
of death ignore the blood produced by their weapons and
invest heavily without accountability in state and global
terrorism. Entire families, children, schools, hospitals,
and places of worship are bombed, women and children are
killed as the barbarians of fascism and the arms industries
gloat over their mounting profits made from bloodshed and
unimaginable suffering. As Chris Hedges has argued, gangster
capitalism has reached its logical and toxic conclusion,
“fertilized by widespread despair, feelings of exclusion,
worthlessness, powerlessness and economic deprivation.”
The outcome is a slide into a fascist politics that portends
the death of the idea of democracy in the United States.
The Vichy journalists
and media outlets now more than ever trade in “objectivity”
and calls for even-handedness as violence escalates at all
levels of society. Trump is treated as a normal candidate
for the presidency despite embracing nihilistic forms of
lawlessness. He spews racism, hatred, and endless threats
of violence, indifferent to calls for accountability, however
timid. Cowardice hides behind the false appeal to a wobbly
notion of balance. The mainstream media have a greater affinity
for the bottom line than for the truth. Their silence amounts
to a form of complicity.
The Republican
Party is now mostly a vehicle for fascist politics. The
United States has reached endpoint of a cruel economic and
political system that resembles a dead man walking–a
zombie politics that thrives on the exploitation of the
working class, immigrants, the poor, dispossessed, and helpless
children dying under the bombed-out rubble of state terrorism.
White Christian nationalism merges with the most extreme
elements of capitalism to enforce cruel and heartless policies
of dispossession, elimination, and a politics of disposability.
Mouthfuls of blood saturate the language of authoritarianism,
and policies of destruction, exploitation, and utter despair
follow. Public time based on notions of equality, the common
good, and justice fades into the dustbin of a white-washed
history. As James Baldwin once noted, until the Nazis knock
on their door, these “let’s be balanced”
types refuse to have the courage to name fascism for what
it is.
In the face
of emergency time, it is crucial to develop a great awakening
of consciousness, a massive broad-based movement for the
defense of public goods, and a mobilization of educators
and youth who can both say no and fight for a socialist
democracy. The fight against fascism cannot take place without
new ideas, vision, and the ability to translate them into
action. Dangerous memories and the resuscitation of historical
consciousness help. And are even more necessary as democracy
is choking on the filth of demagogues, white nationalism,
class warfare, militarism, and Christian nationalism. Those
Americans who believe in democracy and justice can no longer
accept being reduced to a nation of spectators; they can
no longer define democracy by reducing it to a voting machine
controlled by the rich; nor they can equate it with the
corpse of capitalism; they can no longer allow the silence
of the press to function as a disimagination machine that
functions to largely depoliticize the public; they can no
longer allow education to be pushed as a machinery of illiteracy,
historical amnesia, and ignorance.
I am not engaging
in a paralyzing pessimism, but rather highlighting the urgency
of a historical moment that is on the verge of spelling
the death knell for America as an idea, as a promise of
what a radical democracy might presume for the future. We
live in an era of emergency time—a time of crises
in which time has become a disadvantage and public time
a necessity and call for militant thought and action. Without
agency there is no possibility of imagining a future that
does not echo the fascism of the past, without possibility
there is no reason to acknowledge the very real material
and ideological threats to the United States and the rest
of the globe now face.
Fascism is no
longer interred in history. The spirit of Weimar 1933 is
being replayed. How else to explain Trump’s openly
fascist claim that he plans, once elected, to imprison political
dissidents in the prison camps? Or his pledge “to
root out the communist, Marxist, fascist, and the radical
left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of
our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and
will do anything possible—they’ll do anything,
whether legally or illegally—to destroy America and
to destroy the American dream.” Trump’s belligerent
rhetoric merges a vocabulary of dehumanization with a language
of racial cleansing and repeated threats of violence. He
claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of
our country,” states that “the former chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed, and
to discourage shoplifters urges police officers to shoot
them. Running an openly authoritarian political campaign,
Trump unapologetically states, with a smirk on his face,
that he wants to be a dictator. For the far-right and MAGA
politicians, fascist politics is now displayed and enacted
as a badge of honor. There is more at work here than an
echo of former authoritarian regimes. The ensuing threats
from Trump and his warrior-soldier types lead directly to
the Gulags and camps in a former age of authoritarianism.
The spirit of
the Confederacy along with an upgraded and Americanized
version of fascism is back. The corpse-like orthodoxies
of militarism, racial cleansing, and neoliberal fascism
point to both the bankruptcy of conscience and an instance
in which language fails and morality collapses into barbarism,
and any vestige of democracy is both mocked and attacked.
What is clear
is that there is a massive rebellion against democracy taking
place in the United States and across the globe. And it
is not simply being imposed from above through military
dictatorships. People now vote for fascist politics. Disimagination
machines such as the mainstream media and far-right online
platforms have become powerful ideological fictions–
pedagogical machineries of political illiteracy inflicting
upon the American people an astonishing vacancy that amounts
to a moral and political coma. The underlying causes of
poverty, dispossession, exploitation, misery, and massive
suffering disappear in a spectacularized culture of silence,
commodification, and cult-like mystifications. As civic
culture collapses, the distinction between truth and falsehoods
dissolves, and with it a public consciousness able to discern
the difference between good and evil. Too many Americans
have internalized what Paulo Freire once called the tools
of the oppressor. They not only accept the shift in American
politics towards authoritarianism, they also support the
idea. The latter is evident in the large public support
Trump garners in spite of his overt embrace of fascist politics,
his claim to revoke the Constitution, and call to use his
office if he returns to the White House to lock up his political
enemies.
On the side
of resistance, Les Leopold is right in arguing that the
fight against neoliberal fascism will never succeed until
both “our sense of the possible expands” and
we take seriously “that real education about big picture
issues can make a difference in how people see the world.
At the same time, any commanding vision of the future must
embrace as part of a viable pedagogical struggle, anti-capitalist
values capable of mobilizing a broad-based movement in which
the call for political and personal rights is matched by
the demand for economic rights. Vaclav Havel, the world-renowned
playwright, statesman, and human activist, astutely noted
the need for a massive resistance against the leveling of
meaning, language, subjectivity, and social responsibility.
His call for a revolution in human consciousness echoes
that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s similar appeal for
a revolution of values. For Havel, morality had to be put
ahead of politics, economic, and science and for that to
happen he states that “the main task in the coming
era is … a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility.
Our conscience must catch up to our reason-otherwise we
are lost.” For Havel, matters of consciousness, subjectivity,
and agency are a crucial part of a politics of resistance.
But they are only the beginning of the long struggle towards
a radical restructuring of society. Ideas have to be articulated
to action in order to address the political pathologies
of our time. There can be no viable resistance without a
massive campaign against both gangster capitalism–with
its destructive emphasis on economic inequality, the plundering
of the environment, widespread attacks on social justice–
and a movement to restructure rather than reform society
based on democratic socialist values. Militant critique
must be matched by a militant sense of possibility. Howard
Zinn got it right when he argued that “To be hopeful
in bad times is not just foolishly romantic . . . If we
see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places—and there are
so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this
gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility
of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction
. . . The future is an infinite succession of presents,
and to live now as we think human beings should live, in
defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous
victory.”
We live in an
era of dire emergencies. The urgency of the times demands
a politics that recognizes that the looming threat of fascism
presents us with a moment in which it is crucial not to
give up on the imagination, to imagine the impossible as
possible, and to embrace a vision of the future and sense
of collective struggle in which there is life beyond gangster
capitalism. This is not a choice; it is a necessity.
