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Striking Teachers Beat Back Neoliberalism’s War on Public Schools

Dr. Henry Giroux

Thousands of teachers and students are walking out of schools, marching in the streets, and raising their hands and signs in protest against the war on education. Most recently, South Carolina has joined the wave of teachers’ protests and strikes taking place across the nation. In the age of illiberal democracy and the growing fascism of the Trump administration, the unimaginable has once again become imaginable as teachers inspired and energized by a dynamic willingness to fight for their rights and the rights of their students are exercising bold expressions of political power. The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism in which they and their students are treated with little respect, dignity and value. They have had enough with corrupt politicians, hedge fund managers and civically illiterate pundits seduced by the power of the corporate and political demagogues who are waging a war on critical teaching, critical pedagogy and the creativity and autonomy of classroom teachers.

Since the 1980s, an extreme form of capitalism — or what in the current moment I want to call neoliberal fascism — has waged a war against public education and all vestiges of the common good and social contract. In addition, this is a war rooted in class and gender discrimination — one that deskills teachers, exploits their labor and bears down particularly hard on women, who make up a dominant segment of the teaching force. In doing so, it not only undermines schooling as a public good, but also weaponizes and weakens the formative cultures, values and social relations that enable schools to create the conditions for students to become critical and engaged citizens.

Schools have been underfunded, increasingly privatized and turned into testing factories that deliver poor students of color to the violence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Moreover, they have also been restructured in order to weaken unions, subject teachers to horrendous working conditions and expose students to overcrowded classrooms. In some cases, the dire working environment and dilapidated conditions of schools and classrooms appear incomprehensible in the richest nation in the world. For instance, as South Carolina teachers go on strike, Hiram Lee reports:

The average salary stands at $10,000 below the national average, while the minimum starting salary is only $30,113 a year…. Working conditions are extremely poor. [In one instance] raw sewage mixed with worms and insects flowed into the hallways of Ridgeland Elementary in Jasper County, where it was tracked into classrooms by students. In other schools, holes in the floors of some classrooms allowed students to see into the classrooms below them. Teachers used old rags and sandbags to prevent a flood of rainwater coming in through cracks in the walls. Libraries were filled with shockingly few books, and those on hand were so outdated that one teacher recalled finding a book that predicted, «One day man will land on the moon.»

What the South Carolina mobilization and the other teacher walkouts across the nation suggest is that these expressions of collective resistance are about both the survival of democracy in Trump’s America and a challenge to the commanding institutions and organizing ideals and principles that make it possible.

The Reclamation of Education as a Public Good

Fortunately, teachers, students, progressive social movements and others are rising up, refusing to be written out of the script of a potentially radical democracy.

Yet, what has often been lost on those who have courageously charted this growing assault on democracy is perhaps its most debilitating legacy: the long-standing and mutually reinforcing attacks on both public education and young people. Such attacks are not new; rather, they have simply intensified under the Trump administration. As a war culture has started organizing all aspects of society, schools have transformed into zones of economic and political abandonment. Increasingly modeled after prisons, schools have become subject to pedagogies of oppression and purged of the experiences, values and creativity necessary for students to expand and deepen their knowledge, values and imagination. Moreover, as state and corporate violence engulfs the entire society, schools have been subject to forms of extreme violence that in the past existed exclusively outside of their doors. Under such circumstances, youth are increasingly viewed as suspects and are targeted both by a gun culture that places profits above student lives and by a neoliberal machinery of cruelty, misery and violence dedicated to widespread educational failure. Instead of imbibing students with a sense of ethical and social responsibility while preparing them for a life of social and economic mobility, public schools have been converted into high-tech security spheres whose defining principles are fear, uncertainty and anxiety. In this view, a corporate vision of the US has reduced the culture of schooling to the culture of business and an armed camp, and in doing so, imposed a real and symbolic threat of violence on schools, teachers and students. As such, thinking has become the enemy of freedom, and profits have become more important than human lives.

Today’s teachers and students are facing not only a crisis of schooling but also a crisis of education.

Public schools are at the center of the manufactured breakdown of the fabric of everyday life. They are under attack not because they are failing, but because they are public — a reminder of the centrality of the role they play in making good on the claim that critically literate citizens are indispensable to a vibrant democracy. Moreover, they symbolize the centrality of education as a right and public good whose mission is to enable young people to exercise those modes of leadership and governance in which «they can become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.»

Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence, and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.

Under the current era of neoliberal fascism, education is especially dangerous when it does the bridging work between schools and the wider society, between the self and others, and allows students to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. Schools are dangerous because they exemplify Richard J. Bernstein’s idea in The Abuse of Evil that «democracy is ‘a way of life,’ an ethical ideal that demands active and constant attention. And if we fail to work at creating and re-creating democracy, there is no guarantee that it will survive.»

How the Current Crisis in Education Emerged

Insisting on the right to teach, the right to learn and the right to view schools as a valued public good historically have been radical acts. How did we get to this present moment? Under the regime of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the tax revolt of the 1970s, and the increasing attack on the social contract and welfare state imposed new burdens on public education at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.

Schools were increasingly underfunded as inner cities descended into poverty, class sizes increased, poor students dropped out, and schools became more segregated by class and race. Teachers were increasingly deskilled and lost control over the conditions of their labor as lifeless accountability schemes and mind-numbing testing regimes were passed off as reform initiatives under the Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.

Once the teachers realized that the terrible conditions under which they worked were commonplace they were ready to act regardless of whether they had the support of their unions.

These reforms, while allegedly appealing to educational ideals, especially the assumption that they would help economically underprivileged students, did just the opposite and turned schools largely into imagination-crushing citadels of boredom and conformity. President Bush’s educational policy, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which did a great deal to leave many children behind, was followed by Obama’s policy titled Race to the Top. Unfortunately, Obama simply provided more of the same dead-end approaches to education that had damaged public education for decades.

What is different under the Trump administration is that today’s teachers and students are facing not only a crisis of schooling but also a crisis of education. Trump is upfront in stating without apology that he loves both the uneducated and being uneducated. Not only does he disparage any display of critical intelligence — whether in the critical media, courts or online culture — he has made it clear with his education secretary choice, Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and utterly clueless charter school advocate, that he holds the very notion of public education as a crucial democratic public sphere in low regard.

In a meeting with 2018 teachers of the year, DeVos stuck to her anti-public school, anti-teacher script by stating that she hoped that teachers «would take their disagreements and solve them not at the expense of kids and their opportunity to go to school and learn.» In part, this is code for a broader narrative in which conservatives and liberals for years have been blaming teachers exclusively for students who drop out of school, end up in the criminal legal system, perform poorly academically and distrust authority, among other issues. As if such failures are entirely the fault of teachers, regardless of the defunding of schools, the rise of overcrowded classrooms, the increase in widespread poverty, the starving of the public sector, accelerated attacks on public servants, the transformation of cities into ghost towns, the smashing of teacher unions and the creation of labor conditions for teachers that are nothing short of deplorable. No surprises here. DeVos appears to have a penchant for reaching for the low-hanging rhetorical fruit when it comes to commenting on public schools, teachers and students.

The ideological assault against public schools, teachers and students is now in full force thanks to an alliance among big corporations, billionaires such as the Koch brothers, conservative foundations, business lobbying groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Trump administration. This alliance seeks to privatize public schools, increase tax breaks for the rich (depriving schools of essential revenue), substitute privately run charter schools for public schools, support voucher programs, cut public services, endorse online instruction and redefine public schools around issues of safety and security, further situating them as armed camps and extensions of the criminal legal system. The question here is why corporations, politicians, hedge fund managers and a horde of billionaires want to destroy public education and inflict irreparable harm on millions of children.

Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, has argued in his book, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time that the US is a country in decline, characterized by a rise in economic inequality, families unable to support themselves, increased hardships for workers, the decline of social provisions, the evisceration of public goods, restricted voter rights, lowered employment standards, an ongoing attack on social safety nets and a dwindling middle-class. Lafer believes that the war on schools is rooted in a terrifying set of neoliberal policies and that big business is determined to dismantle public education. He argues that

big corporations are … worried … about how to protect themselves from the masses as they engineer rising economic inequality [and] they try to avoid a populist backlash … by lowering everybody’s expectations of what we have a right to demand as citizens…. When you think about what Americans think we have a right to, just by living here, it’s really pretty little. Most people don’t think you have a right to healthcare or a house. You don’t necessarily have a right to food and water. But people think you have a right to have your kids get a decent education.

Teachers Fight Back

Against the current frontal assault on public education and the rights of teachers and students, a new wave of opposition has developed around the nation’s schools that has provoked the public imagination and mobilized mass numbers of students, educators and the public at large. Teachers have been walking out, striking and demonstrating in states across the country. From the initial strike in West Virginia to demonstrations in Colorado, Kentucky, Arizona and North Carolina, and potentially other states including Louisiana, Nevada and South Carolina, teachers are protesting not only low salaries, but also related issues such as, school defunding (prompted by regressive tax measures designed to benefit the rich and corporations), overcrowded classrooms and rising health premiums.

The successful West Virginia strike was especially notable, Kate Aronoff argues, because it was one of the biggest «work actions in recent U.S. history, rebuffing austerity and, at points, even the wishes of their union leaders.» Teachers in West Virginia were under increasing attack by a GOP-controlled legislature and their Republican governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, who colluded to force teachers to pay increasingly higher premiums for their health care, put up with large classes, and endure what Lynn Parramore has described as «increasingly unlivable conditions — including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app … [while allowing] them no more than an annual 1% raise — effectively a pay cut considering inflation — in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states.»  At the end of a nine-day strike, they negotiated a 5 percent pay increase from the state.

Similar strikes followed in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and beyond. While all of these strikes addressed issues specific to their states, they shared a number of issues that revealed a broader attempt to undermine public education. In all of these states, teachers made paltry wages «nearly $13,077 below the nationwide average of $58,353 and well below the nationwide high of New York at $79,152.» Many teachers had to work two or three extra jobs simply to be able to survive. In a number of cases, their pension plans were being weakened. Growing pay inequities stretch across two decades for most teachers as they «are contributing more and more toward health care and retirement costs as their pay falls further behind. Teacher pay (accounting for inflation) actually fell by $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, while pay for other college graduates increased by $124.»

There is a direct line between spending cuts for schools and a decrease in taxes for the rich and big corporations. In Oklahoma, taxes had not been raised since 1990, and in 2010 the Republican governor passed «huge breaks for the oil and gas companies» and in 2015 reduced the tax rate to 2 percent with the «cost to the state … estimated at $300 to $400 million per year.» Schools were shockingly underfunded and the consequences for both teachers and students have been devastating. Eric Blanc observes that:

Since 2008, per-pupil instructional funding has been cut by 28 percent — by far the worst reduction in the whole country. As a result, a fifth of Oklahoma’s school districts have been forced to reduce the school week to four days. Textbooks are scarce and scandalously out of date. Innumerable arts, languages, and sports courses or programs have been eliminated. Class sizes are enormous…. Many of Oklahoma’s 695,000 students are obliged to sit on the floor in class.

Meanwhile, Mike Elk reports that the Oklahoma Education Association released a statement saying: «Over a decade of neglect by the legislature has given our students broken chairs in classrooms, outdated textbooks that are duct-taped together, four-day school weeks, classes that have exploded in size and teachers who have been forced to donate plasma, work multiple jobs and go to food pantries to provide for their families.»

All of the states engaged in wildcat strikes, demonstrations and protests have been subject to similar toxic austerity measures that have come to characterize a neoliberal economy. Once the teachers realized that the terrible conditions under which they worked were commonplace in other schools and states and that many other teachers had reached a boiling point, they were ready to act regardless of whether they had the support of their unions. This was another important thread running through demonstrations. The strikes were not initiated by the leadership in the unions, and when they did act, they were too slow to be consequential. As working conditions for teachers deteriorated and the assault on public schools reached fever pitch, teachers bypassed their unions while using social media to speak to other teachers, communicate across national boundaries and educate a wider public.

The striking teachers hopefully will make clear that there is no contradiction between the struggle for quality public schools and fighting other injustices.

In spite of a number of attacks by conservative politicians such as Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who stated that teachers were displaying «a thug mentality,» the striking teachers gained broad popular support. It is hard to miss the irony here of the neoliberal apostles of austerity labeling teachers as losers, given that many teachers have extra jobs to support themselves and use their own money to provide books, basic resources and in some cases, even toilet paper for their students. Recent findings by the National Center of Educational Statistics show that 94 percent of teachers pay out of their own pockets for school supplies — such as notebooks, pens and paper — which amounts on average to $480 annually. The real losers are the politicians who defund public schools, deskill teachers, force students to put up with repressive test-taking pedagogies «while whittling away at [teacher] salaries, supplies, tenure arrangements, and other union protections … lengthening teaching hours, [and] reducing vital prep periods.» This is a neoliberal script for the social abandonment of public goods, the termination of the democratic ethos and the precondition for the rise of an American version of fascism. What is particularly promising about these widespread protest movements is that they have the potential to move public consciousness toward a wide-ranging recognition in which the assaults on public schooling will be understood as part of a larger war on schools, on youth, and on the very possibility of teaching and learning, and that these struggles cannot be separated.

The use of the social media by the teachers was particularly effective in getting their message out. Individual teachers talked publicly about having to donate blood, visit food pantries and teach with textbooks that were 10 years old. Images of broken chairs and desks, along with rodents infesting classrooms, and students complaining about books that were held together with tape offered a compelling visual archive of not only dilapidated schools, impoverished classrooms and overburdened students, but also a political system in which Republican governors and legislators were willing to implement economic policies that slashed the taxes of the rich and big corporations at the expense of public schools, teachers and students.

Arizona is another case in point: Not only does it have abysmal teacher pay, it is also a state that lacks collective bargaining rights. Debbie Weingarten offers a succinct summary of the effects of budget cuts on Arizona schools, teachers and students:

During the Recession, the Arizona state legislature cut $1.5 million from public schools, more than any other state, leaving Arizona schools more than $1 billion short of 2008 funding…. Arizona currently ranks 49th in the country for high school teacher pay and 50th for elementary school teacher pay. When adjusted for inflation, teacher wages have declined more than 10 percent since 2001. Per-student spending in Arizona amounts to $7,205, compared with the national average of $11,392. There are currently 3,400 classrooms in Arizona without trained or certified teachers, and the state has over 2,000 teacher vacancies.

Arizona teachers ended their strike after a six-day walkout, and while they did not get everything they demanded, the state gave them a «20 percent raise by 2020 and investing an additional $138 million in schools.» Most importantly, the Arizona teacher strike — along with other strikes and teacher walkouts — proved not only the power of organized labor prompted by the radical initiatives of teachers willing to fight for their rights even if the unions do not support them, but also the growing support of a public unwilling to allow neoliberal fascism destroy all vestiges of the public good, especially schools. As Jane McAlevey observes:

Remarkably, these strikes have garnered overwhelming support from the public, despite years of well-funded attacks on teachers’ unions. In a recent NPR/Ipsos poll, just one in four respondents said they think teachers are paid enough, and three-quarters said teachers have the right to strike. Remarkably, this support cut across party lines. «Two thirds of Republicans, three-quarters of independents and nearly 9 in 10 Democrats» support the teachers’ right to strike, the poll showed.

Protests against the gutting of teacher salaries, pensions and health care benefits are not simply about school budgets. They are also about a larger politics in which big corporations and the financial elite have waged a war on democracy and instituted polices that produce a massive redistribution of wealth upward into the hands of the ruling elite. Energized young people and teachers are creating a new optics for both change and the future.

A Mass Movement to Resist Neoliberalism

The teacher strikes and walkouts point to a grassroots movement that will no longer allow the apostles of neoliberalism, the Republican and Democratic parties, and the financial elite to ruthlessly take apart public education. Implicit in the current walkouts and strikes is the necessity of such groups to learn from each other, share power and work to create a mass-based social movement. This type of social formation is all the more crucial given that no one movement or group organized around singular issues can defeat the prevailing concentrated economic and political forces of casino capitalism. Given the public support the striking teachers have received, it is crucial that such a struggle connect the struggle over schools to a broader struggle that appeals to parents who still view public schooling as one of the few avenues their children have for economic and social mobility. At the same time, it is crucial for the striking teachers to make the case to a larger public that without a quality and accessible public education system, the protective and crucial public spaces provided by a real democracy are endangered and could be lost.

Teachers, young people and others are creating both a new and potentially radical language for politics and educational reform. Given the authoritarian times in which we live, this language is desperately needed by a society facing an impending crisis of memory, agency and democracy. If American society is to offset the deeply anti-democratic populist revolt that has put a fascist government in power in the United States, progressives and others need a new language that connects the crisis of schooling to the crisis of democracy while at the same time rejecting the equation of capitalism and democracy. The attack on public schooling is symptomatic of a more profound crisis that involves the extension of market principles to every facet of power, culture and everyday life. Public schooling is under siege along with the values and social relations that give viable meaning to the common good, economic justice and democracy itself.

Striking teachers have recognized that any radical call for educational reform demands more than a call for salary increases, adequate pensions and school resources. Demands for radical educational reforms also necessitate what Martin Luther King Jr. once called a «revolution of values.»

This would suggest a radical reworking of the language of freedom, autonomy, equality and justice that refused to be articulated with the neoliberal spheres of privatization, consumer culture, deregulation, and a politics of terminal exclusion, disposability and the acceleration of the unwanted. Schools can no longer be viewed as zones of political, economic and social abandonment. The striking teachers across the nation are making clear that everyone has the right to live in both an educated society and a democracy, and that you cannot have one without the other. Hopefully, they can learn from past historical battles while leading the struggle to merge a number of different movements for a radical democracy. One option in doing so is to build support for what Michael Lerner has called developing a global Marshall Plan in order to redistribute wealth, build infrastructures, expand public goods, create the conditions for environmental responsibility, and eliminate the capitalist structural and economic conditions that prevent such movements, policies and investments from taking place.

The striking teachers hopefully will turn a moment into a movement, and in doing so, make clear that there is no contradiction between the struggle for quality public schools and fighting other injustices such as poverty, mass incarceration, unchecked inequality, massive student debt, systemic violence, escalating militarization of society and the war on the planet. Across the nation, teachers, students and other educators have demonstrated that democratic ideals, even under conditions of neoliberal tyranny and a dystopian mode of education, can be recognized, embraced and struggled over. Education is a symptom of a deeper, dangerous and more fundamental crisis that demands analyses and actions aimed at root causes. The brutal neoliberal fascism of the moment can only be defeated if teachers, young people and grassroots activists develop alliances and develop new topographies for addressing the root causes of the current brutal despotism and loss of faith in democratic institutions — that means a strong anti-capitalist movement.

The struggle over public education has ignited new modes of criticism that contain the potential to build a mass movement from the bottom up and translate single-issue demands into wider expectations for social change and alternative visions for a democratically socialist United States. Hopefully, this movement will continue to be guided by the kind of energy and insight that Ursula K. Le Guin once articulated: «We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.»

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/44564-striking-teachers-beat-back-neoliberalism-s-war-on-public-schools

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Switching sides: Whitewashing history in the age of Trump

By: Henry Giroux

Madeleine Albright, without irony, has written a book on resisting fascism. She has also published an op-ed in the New York Times pushing the same argument.

Albright, former secretary of state under Bill Clinton, is alarmed. She wants to warn the public to stop the fascism emerging under the Trump regime before it’s too late.

Unfortunately, moralism on the part of the infamous and notorious is often the enemy of both historical memory and the truth, in spite of their newly discovered opposition to tyranny.

It defies belief that a woman who defended the killing of 500,000 children as a result of the imposed U.S. sanctions on Iraq can take up the cause of fighting fascism while positioning herself as being on the forefront of resistance to American authoritarianism.

Albright appears on ‘60 Minutes’ in 1996.

Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, once said of those measures: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.”

Is any policy worth the death of 500,000 children?

Albright, however, is not alone.

Hillary Clinton, herself a former war-monger and an unabashed ally of the financial elite, has also resurrected herself as a crusader in fighting the creeping fascism that now marks the Trump regime.

Speaking recently at the PEN World Voices Festival, Clinton appeared to have completely removed herself from her notorious past as a supporter of the Iraq war and the military-industrial-financial complex in order to sound the alarm “that freedom of speech and expression is under attack here in our own country.” She further called for action against America’s creeping authoritarianism.

‘Flight from memory’

It’s an odd flight from memory into the sphere of moral outrage given her own role in supporting a number of domestic and foreign policies both as a former first lady and as secretary of state.

There was the refusal to punish CIA torturers, the drone killings, the lavishing of funds to the military war machine, the shredding of the federal safety net for poor people and the endorsement of neoliberal policies that offered no hope or prosperity “for neighbourhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work.”

Clinton’s critique of Trump’s fascism does more than alert the public to the obvious about the current government, it also legitimatizes a form of historical amnesia and a long and suppressed legacy of cruelty and human misery. It gets worse.

Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W. Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a proto-fascist.

Writing in the New York Times, Hayden, ironically, chastised Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that “Post-Truth is pre-fascism.”

And yet he’s now being regarded as an honest, expert commentator on intelligence and other issues.The irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush’s illegal National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while the head of the NSA, he also lied repeatedly about about his role in Bush’s sanction and implementation of state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Dubious heroes

The United States and its Vichy Republican Party has drifted so far to the fascist right that people like Albright, Clinton and Hayden are serving as heroes in the political and ethical resistance to fascism.

While the call to resist fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated, not aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious and educational forces that produced it.

I am not simply condemning the hypocrisy of former politicians who are now criticizing the emerging fascism in the United States. Nor am I proposing that only selective condemnations should be welcomed.

What I am suggesting is that the seductions of power in high places often work to impose a silence upon people that allow them to benefit from and become complicit with authoritarian tendencies and anti-democratic policies and modes of governance. Once they’re out of power, their own histories of complicity are too often easily erased, especially by the mainstream media.

Their newly found stances against fascism do nothing to help explain where we are and what we might do next to resist it now that it’s engulfing American society and its economic, cultural and political institutions.

What is often unrecognized in the celebrated denunciations of fascism by celebrity politicians is that neoliberalism is the new fascism.

And what becomes invisible in the fog of such celebration is neoliberalism’s legacy and its deadly mix of market fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, rabid individualism, unchecked selfishness, shredding of the welfare state, privatization of the public sphere, white supremacy, toxic masculinity and all-embracing quest for profit.

‘Savage politics’

The new and more racist, violent and brutal form of neoliberalism under Trump has produced both a savage politics in the U.S. and a corrupt financial elite that now controls all the commanding institutions of U.S. society.

Systemic corruption, crassness, overt racism, a view of misfortune as a weakness, unapologetic bigotry and a disdain of the public and common good has been normalized under Trump, but it’s been gaining strength for the last 50 years in U.S. politics. Trump is merely the blunt instrument at the heart of a fascistic neoliberal ideology.

We need to be wary, to say the least, about those mainstream politicians now denouncing Trump’s fascism who while in power submitted, as noted U.S. sociologist Stanley Aronowitz puts it, “to neoliberal degradations of health care, jobs, public housing, and income guarantees for the long-term unemployed (let alone the rest of us).”

What is often ignored in the emerging critiques of fascism is neoliberalism’s legacy coupled with the mainstream media’s attempts to hold up many of its architects and supporters as celebrated opponents of Trump’s fascist government.

Trump is the extreme point of a long series of attacks on democracy —and former politicians like Albright and Clinton cannot be removed from that history.

Unchecked and systemic power, a take-no-prisoners politics and an unapologetic cruelty are the currency of fascism because they have long been the wedge that makes fear visceral and violence more than an abstraction.None of these politicians have denounced nationalism, the myth of American exceptionalism and the forces that produce obscene inequality in wealth and power in the U.S., or the oppressive regime of law and order that has ruled the U.S. ruthlessly and without apology since the 1980s.


This lethal mix is also a pathological condition endemic to brutal demagogues such as Trump. Trump and his ilk demand loyalty —not to justice and democracy, but loyalty to themselves, one that stands above the truth and rule of law.

Stamp out amnesia

The calls to resist fascism are welcome, but they can’t be separated from the acts of bad faith that helped produce it.

The fight against fascism is part of a struggle over memory. We must not engage in historical and social amnesia.

It is also a fight to defend the public spheres and institutions that make civic literacy, the public imagination and critical consciousness possible. We must expose the forces that are and have been complicit in the longstanding attack on democratic institutions, values and social relations, especially those that now hide their past and ideological convictions.

Any resistance to fascism has to be rooted in the call to make education central to politics with a strong emphasis on the teaching of historical consciousness and civic literacy as crucial weapons.

At the same time, the fight must be unwavering in its refusal to equate capitalism and democracy. We are at war over not just the right of economic equality and social justice, but also against the powerful and privileged positions of whiteness, toxic masculinity and the elimination of solidarity and compassion.

This is a war waged over the possibility of a radical democracy while acknowledging that the rich and powerful will not give up their power without a fight.

Looking for guidance on fascism in the U.S. today? Listen to Parkland activist Emma Gonzalez, 18, not Albright, Clinton or anyone else who has been complicit. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

And so instead of listening to complicit politicians and others deeply embedded in a system of exploitation, disposability, austerity and a criminogenic culture, we need to listen to the voices of the striking teachers, the Parkland students, the women driving the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter organizers and others willing to make resistance visible, collective and widespread.

The fight against American-style fascism cannot and will not be lead by establishment politicians and pundits parading as the new heroes of the resistance to Trump’s fascism.

Source:

http://theconversation.com/switching-sides-whitewashing-history-in-the-age-of-trump-95729

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Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis and the Challenge to Higher Education

By: Henry Giroux

The march across the University of Virginia campus in the summer of 2017 by a thousand or more white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other right-wing extremists offered a glimpse of the growing danger of authoritarian movements both in the United States and across the globe, signalling a danger that mimics the increasingly forgotten horrors of the 1930s. The image of hundreds of fascist thugs chanting anti-Semitic, racist, and white nationalist slogans such as “Heil Trump” and later attacking peaceful anti-racist counter-demonstrators makes clear that radical right-wing groups which historically have been on the margins of American society are now more comfortable in public with their nihilistic and dangerous politics. They appear especially emboldened to come out of the shadows because elements of their neo-fascist ideology have found a comfortable if not supportive place at the highest levels of the Trump administration, especially in the initial and telling presence of Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller, all of whom embrace elements of the nefarious racist ideology that was on full display in Charlottesville.

As is well-known, Trump has not only supported the presence and backing of white nationalists and white supremacists, but he has refused to denounce their Nazi slogans and violence in strong political and ethical terms, suggesting his own complicity with such movements. It should surprise no one that David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, told reporters in the midst of the events that the Unite the Right followers were “going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump…to take our country back.” Nor should it surprise anyone that Trump initially refused to condemn the fascist groups behind the horrifying, shocking images and violence that took place in Charlottesville. His silence made elements of the far-right quite happy. For instance, The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, issued the following statement: “Refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”

It appears that the presence of Nazi and Confederate flags along with the horrendous history of millions lost to the Holocaust and slavery, lynchings, church bombings, and the assassination of Black leaders such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. did little to move Trump to a serious understanding or repudiation of the poisonous historical forces that surfaced in Charlottesville. The demonstration held in Charlottesville by militarized torch-bearing groups of Nazi sympathizers, Ku Klux Klan members, and white nationalist represents a historical moment that capture some of the elements of a past that led to some of the worse crimes in human history. At the risk of falling prey to historical amnesia, the crucial lesson to be learned is that the ideology, values, and institutions of a liberal democracy are once again under assault by those who no longer believe in equality, justice, and democracy. As the historian Timothy Snyder has observed, it is crucial to remember that the success of authoritarian regimes in Germany and other places succeeded, in part, because they were not stopped in the early stages of their development.

The events in Charlottesville provide a glimpse of authoritarianism on the rise and speak to the dark clouds that appear to be ushering in a new and dangerous historical moment both in the United States and across the globe. While it is problematic to assume that an American-style totalitarianism will soon become the norm in the United States, it is not unrealistic to recognize that the possibility for a return to authoritarianism is no longer the stuff of fantasy or hysterical paranoia, especially since its core elements of hatred, exclusion, racism, and white supremacy have been incorporated into both the highest levels of state power and throughout the mainstream right-wing media. The horrors of the past are real and the fears they produce about the present are the necessary work of both historical memory and the power of civic courage and moral responsibility.

The authoritarian drama unfolding across the United States has many registers and includes the use of state violence against immigrants, right-wing populist violence against mosques and synagogues, and attacks on Muslims, young blacks, and others who do not fit into the vile script of white nationalism. The violence in Charlottesville is but one register of a larger mirror of domestic terrorism and home-grown fascism that is growing in the United States. Trump’s irresponsible response to the violence in Charlottesville should surprise no one given the long history of racism in the Republican Party that extends from Nixon’s Southern strategy and George W. Bush’s treatment of the Black victims of Hurricane Katrina to the current party’s efforts at voter suppression. Like many of his fellow Republican extremist, Trump embraces this long legacy of white supremacy, though he elevates it to a new level of visibility in his refusal to expunge its most naked expressions and his open support for its values and policies.

How else to explain his administration’s announcement that it would no longer “investigate white nationalists, who have been responsible for a large share of violent hate crimes in the Unites States.” How else to explain Trump’s willingness to lift restrictions imposed by the Obama administration to provide local police departments with military surplus equipment such as armed vehicles, bulletproof vests, and grenade launchers. Clearly, such actions accelerate Trump’s law and order agenda, escalate racial tensions in cities that are often treated like combat zones, and reinforce a warrior mentality among polices officers. More telling is Trump’s presidential pardon of Joe Arpaio, the notorious White supremacist and disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Not only did Arpaio engage in racial profiling, despite being ordered by the court to decease, he also had a notorious reputation for abusing prisoners in his Tent City, which he once called “a concentration camp.” These inmates were, among other practices, subjected to blistering heat, forced to work on chain gangs, wear pink underwear, and dress in demeaning striped uniforms.

There is more at work here than Trump’s endorsement of white nationalism; there is also the sending of a clear message of support for a culture of violence that gives meaning to acts of domestic terrorism. Moreover, there is a clear contempt for the rule of law, and an endorsement not just for racist ideology but also for institutional racism and the primacy of the racially-based incarceration state. There is also the chilling implication that Trump would be willing to pardon those who might be found guilty in any upcoming investigations involving Trump and his administration. Trump’s law-and-order regime represents a form of domestic terrorism because it is a policy of state violence designed to intimidate, threaten, harm, and instil fear in a particular community. Pardoning Arpaio, Trump signals to his right-wing extremist base and fellow politicians that he justifies state enacted violence against immigrants, especially Latinos. In addition, Trump’s language of fear and violence emboldens right-wing extremists and gives them the green light to support legislation and ideologies that are profoundly reactionary. For instance, this is evident in attempts on the part of 20 states to criminalize dissent, overtly decry the benefits of higher education, and state without apology that Republicans would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it.

The events in Charlottesville raise serious questions about the role of higher education in a democracy. What role if not responsibility do universities have in the face of wide spread legitimized violence? What role does education have at a time when rigorous knowledge is replaced by opinions, the truth is equated with fake news, self-interest replaces the social good, and language operates in the service of violence? Surely, institutions of higher education cannot limit their role to training in at a time when democracy is under assault all over the globe. What does it mean for institutions of higher education to define themselves as a public good, a protective space for the promotion of democratic ideals, the social imagination, values, and the imperatives of critically engaged citizenship? As Jon Dixon observes, what does mean to view and take responsibility for developing education as “a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion: a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing, to understand what it means to assume responsibility”?

Surely, with the ongoing attack on civic literacy, truth, historical memory, and justice it becomes all the more imperative for colleges and universities to educate students to do more than learn work based skills. What might it mean to educate them to become intelligent, compassionate, critically engaged citizens fully aware of the fact that without informed citizens there is no democracy? There is much more at stake here than protecting and opening the boundaries of free speech; there is the more crucial imperative of deepening and expanding the formative cultures and public spheres that make a democracy possible.

We live in an age in which there is emerging a relentless attack on the truth, honesty, and the ethical imagination. Under such circumstances, there is a need for educators to reclaim the discourse of democracy and to expand the parameters of civic literacy and courage by once teaching students to think critically, embrace civic courage, develop a historical consciousness, hold on to shared responsibilities rather than shared fares, think historically and comprehensively, translate private issues into larger social problems, and learn how to think differently in order to act responsibly. Education is central to politics and such pedagogical practices raise the bar regarding what counts as education in a democracy, especially in societies that appear increasingly amnesiac—that is, countries where forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only wilfully practiced but celebrated. All of which becomes all the more threatening at a time when a country such as the United States has tipped over into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. How else to explain the present historical moment with its collapse of civic culture and the future it cancels out? Democracy is always the outcomes of ongoing struggles to preserve its ideals, values, and practices. When democracy is taken for granted, justice dies, social responsibility becomes a burden, and the seeds of authoritarianism flourish.

We may be in the midst of dark times, but history is open and resistance is no longer an option but a necessity. Educators have a particular responsibility to address this growing assault on democracy. Any other option is an act of complicity and a negation of what it means for education to matter in an alleged democratic society.

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Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis and the Challenge to Higher Education

 

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Unfashionable Fascism: Mainstream Politicians Switching Sides Under Trump’s Regime of Barbarism

 

Madeleine Albright, without irony, has written a book on resisting Fascism. She has also published an op-ed in the New York Times pushing the same argument. Albright is alarmed and wants to warn the public to stop the fascism emerging under the Trump regime before it is too late.[1]  Unfortunately, moralism on the part of the infamous and notorious is often the enemy of both historical memory and the truth, in spite of their newly discovered opposition to tyranny.   It is hard to believe that a woman who defended the killing of 500,00 children as a result of the imposed US sanctions on Iraq can take up the cause of fighting Fascism while positioning herself (or being positioned by the mainstream media) as being on the forefront of resistance to US authoritarianism. Here is what David Rieff writing in the New York Times says about the sanctions Albright justified: “For many people, the sanctions on Iraq were one of the decade’s great crimes, as appalling as Bosnia or Rwanda. Anger at the United States and Britain, the two principal architects of the policy, often ran white hot. Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, expressed a widely held belief when he said in 1998: ‘We are in the process of destroying an entire society.’ It is as simple and terrifying as that.”[2]Is any policy worth the death of 500,000 children?  She is not alone.

Hilary Clinton, known more politically as a former war monger and an unabashed ally of the financial elite, has also resurrected herself as a crusader in fighting the creeping fascism that now marks the Trump regime. Speaking with Ngozi Adichie at the PEN World Voices Festival, Clinton appears to have completely removed herself from her notorious past as a supporter of the Iraqi war and the military-industrial-financial complex in order to sound the alarm “that freedom of speech and expression is under attack here in our own country” while further calling for numerous voices to make visible the creeping authoritarianism in America.[3] This is an odd flight from memory into the sphere of moral outrage given her own role in supporting domestic and foreign policies both as a former first lady and as Secretary of State that refused to punish CIA torturers, lavished funds on the military war machine, shredded the federal safety net for poor people, and endorsed neoliberal policies that offered no hope and prosperity “for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work.”[4] No irony here. Just the opposite. Her critique of Trump’s fascism does more than alert the public to the obvious about the current government, it also legitimizes a  form of historical amnesia and a long and suppressed legacy of cruelty and human misery. She is not alone.

The U.S. and its Vichy Republican Party has drifted so far to the fascist right that people such as Albright and Clinton come across as the heroic vanguard of a political and ethical resistance to fascism. Under such circumstances, even some outspoken Republicans, again without irony, such as Flake, Corker and McCain are viewed in the mainstream press as principled heroes in spite of the fact that they have supported Trump’s domestic and foreign policies, including his tax reform bill and his cruel and obscene budget, which not only offers $700 billion to the military but condemns millions of people to a life of misery and suffering. While the call to resist fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated and not aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious, and educational forces that helped produce it.

I am not simply condemning the hypocrisy of mainstream politicians who are now criticizing the emerging fascism in the United States. Nor am I proposing that only selective condemnations should be welcomed. What I am suggesting is that the seductions of power in high places often work to impose a silence upon people that allows them to not only benefit from and become complicit with authoritarian tendencies and anti-democratic policies and modes of governance, but also once such people are out of power their own histories of complicity are too often easily erased, especially in the mainstream media. Regardless of such a newly found stance against fascism, such actions do nothing to help explain where we are and what we might do next to resist the fascism that has now engulfed American society and its economic, cultural, and political institutions.

What is often unrecognized in the celebrated denunciations of fascism by celebrity politicians is that neoliberalism is the new fascism. And what becomes invisible in the fog of such celebration is neoliberalism’s legacy and deadly mix of market fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, rabid individualism, white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and all embracing quest for profits. The new and more racist, violent and brutalizing form of neoliberalism under Trump, has produced both a savage politics in the US and a corrupt financial elite that now controls all the commanding institutions of American society including the state. In other words, what disappears are the very conditions that have made possible a new and more feral American-style fascism.   Systemic corruption, crassness, overt racism, a view of misfortune as a weakness, unapologetic bigotry, and a disdain of the public and common good has been normalized under Trump after gaining strength over the last 50 years in American politics. Trump is merely the blunt instrument at the heart of a fascistic neoliberal ideology. We need to be wary, to say the least, about those mainstream politicians now denouncing Trump’s fascism who while in power submitted, as Stanley Aronowitz puts it, “to neoliberal degradations of health care, jobs, public housing, and income guarantees for the long-term unemployed (let alone the rest of us).”[5]

What is often ignored in the emerging critiques of fascism is the history of neoliberalism’s legacy coupled with the mainstream media’s attempts to foreground many if its architects and supporters as celebrated opponents of Trump’s fascist government. Trump is the extreme point of a long series of attacks on democracy and former politicians such as Albright and Clinton cannot be removed from that history. None of these politicians have denounced state violence, nationalism, the myth of American exceptionalism, and the forces that produce obscene inequality in wealth and power in the US, or the oppressive regime of law and order that has ruled America ruthlessly and without apology since the 1980s.

Unchecked and systemic power, a take no prisoners politics, and an unapologetic cruelty are the currency of fascism because they are the wedge that makes fear visceral and violence more than an abstraction. This lethal combination is also a pathological condition endemic to brutal demagogues such as Trump. They demand loyalty not to an ideal that expands the meaning of justice and democracy but loyalty to themselves, one that stands above the truth and rule of law. As The Economist points out, “Trump demands loyalty to himself and to the prejudice and rage which consume the voter base that, on occasion, even he struggles to control. In America that is unprecedented and it is dangerous.”[6] This combination of a demand to an insular notion of loyalty and their penchant for cruelty offers such demagogues not only a terrifying symbol of their unchecked power but also the emotional rush that may provide one of the few options for them to feel any emotion at all.  Cruelty also feeds on irony and cleanses the past of the conditions that allow the mobilizing passions of fascism to bloom. The call to resist fascism is welcome but also complicated and cannot be separated from acts of bad faith that cleanse the historical record of the forces that helped produce it. The public imagination withers under the assault on historical consciousness and the institutions that nurture it.

The fight against fascism is part of a struggle over memory and those critical narratives that refuse to be couched in a form of historical and social amnesia. It is also a fight over the public spheres and institutions that make civic literacy, the public imagination, and critical consciousness possible.  This suggests both a struggle to reclaim historical consciousness and to expose the forces that are and have been complicit with the long standing attack on democratic institutions, values, and social relations, especially those that now hide their past and ideological convictions in the purifying discourse of outrage, disingenuousness, and resistance.

Any resistance to fascism has to be rooted in the call to make education central to politics with a strong emphasis on the teaching of historical consciousness and civic literacy as crucial weapons in the fight against fascism. At the same time, such a fight must take an unwavering standpoint in its refusal to equate capitalism and democracy. Such a battle has to be waged in diverse struggles that can be aligned through a common thread willing to recognize that we are at war over not just the right of economic equality and social justice but also against the powerful and privileged positions of whiteness, a toxic masculinity, and the elimination of the very notion of the social, solidarity, and compassion.

This is a war waged over the possibility of a radical democracy while acknowledging that the rich and powerful will not give up their power without a fight. Instead of listening to politicians and others deeply embedded in a system of exploitation, disposability, austerity, and a criminogenic culture, we need to listen to the voices of the striking teachers, the Parkland students, the women driving the me too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and others willing to make resistance visible, collective, and widespread. But we also need to connect these voices as part of a more comprehensive struggle against fascism and the diverse forms of repression that it produces.

A radical and progressive struggle against fascism needs a comprehensive vision, a struggle against economic inequality, and strategies that privilege direct action such as the wildcat strikes we have seen among public school teachers in West Virginia.  There is also a need for wide-ranging educational struggle willing to use both established and alternative institutions of schooling, digital spaces, and diverse forms of social media in order to challenge the propaganda produced by the powerful cultural apparatuses of the right such as Sinclair broadcasting, Fox News, and other establishment sources. There is also a crucial necessity to take up the challenge to educate the young and old in the new technologies and how to use them in the service of economic and social justice. At the same time, there is challenge of the left to produce its own public intellectuals who can write and speak in ways that are rigorous, accessible, and attractive to a broader public. A new politics of education is a precondition for creating a new political formation that refuses to be coopted by the liberal center and is rooted in a vision that endorses fundamental social changes in the fight against American style fascism. Such a challenge will not come from establishment politicians and pundits parading as the new heroes of the resistance to Trump’s fascism.

Notes.

[1] Madeleine Albright, “Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?” New York Times (April 6, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/opinion/sunday/trump-fascism-madeleine-albright.html

[2]David Rieff, “Were Sanctions Right?” New York Times (July 27, 2003). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/magazine/were-sanctions-right.html

[3] Nina Pearlman, “Creeping Authoritarianism in America: The former secretary of state spoke with author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the PEN World Voices Festival,” The Village Voice (April 24, 2018). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes

[4] Michelle Alexander, Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America,” The Nation(February 29, 2016). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/

[5] Stanley Aronowitz, “What Kind of Left Does America Need?,” Tikkun, April 14, 2014

[6]Editorial, “What Has become of the Republican Party?,”The Economist (April 21, 2018), p. 9.

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Unfashionable Fascism: Mainstream Politicians Switching Sides Under Trump’s Regime of Barbarism

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Education as a Weapon of Struggle: Rethinking the Parkland Uprising in the Age of Mass Violence

 

Under the regime of Donald Trump, the role of education in producing the formative cultures in and out of schools necessary to support critical thinking, civic courage, and critically engaged citizens appears to be disappearing. Words that speak to the truth and hold power accountable are in retreat as lies become normalized and the relationship between the truth and the citizen is treated either with disdain or simply ignored. The democratization of information has given way to the democratization of disinformation as disimagination machines proliferate and corporate controlled cultural apparatuses colonize the media and political landscapes. One consequence is that historical memory is not only vanishing in a culture of immediacy, sensationalism, and “fake news,” it is also being rewritten in school textbooks so as to eliminate dangerous memories and align the past with narratives that reinforce anti-democratic ideologies and social relations.[1] In the current historical moment, memory has no place in the dark cave of civic depravity—a space where freedom is abandoned in an educational ecosystem where nothing is true, and the basis for criticizing power collapses under the spectacle of presidential bomb throwing-like tweets, endless spectacles of diversion, and high-level stretches of newspeak illiteracy.

At a time when political extremists and war mongers have moved from the margins of politics to the center of power, a culture of fear and cruelty becomes the essence of politics reinforced by the denigration and erasure of any viable notion of morality and personal and social responsibility. As notions of social justice and political visions fall prey to draconian notions of unchecked self-interest, greed is elevated to a national virtue, and the ethical imagination withers along with the public spheres that make it possible. In the age of “fake news” everything that matters disappears, and institutions that were meant to address crucial social issues and problems begin to vanish. Notions of honesty, honor, respect, and compassion are increasingly policed and those who advocate them are either muzzled or punished. How else to explain the collective silence of Vichy-like Republicans supporting Trump’s reign of horror and the cravenly actions of the mainstream media, which refuses to engage critically a society that has fallen into the abyss of fascism?

This flight from the ideal and promise of a substantive democracy is especially dangerous at a time in which a broad-based notion of authoritarian education has become central to politics, particularly in a digital age in which there is an overabundance of information and a proliferation of educational platforms from schools to the social media.  In the age of Trump, education has lost its alleged role in cultivating an informed, critical citizenry capable of participating in and shaping a democratic society. Lost also is an educational vision that takes people beyond the world of common sense, functions as a form of provocation, teaches them to be creative, exposes individuals to a variety of great traditions, and creates the pedagogical conditions for individuals to expand the range of human possibilities. Under the influence of corporate power and a growing authoritarianism in the United States, education in multiple informal and formal platforms operates increasingly in the service of lies, racism, unadulterated market values, and a full-fledged assault on critical consciousness and public values.  Under such circumstances, democracy is cast as the enemy of freedom, and politics turns dark.

These anti-democratic tendencies are evident in the ways in which neoliberalism since the 1980s has reshaped formal education at all levels into a site for training, inundating market values, and imposing commercial relations as a template for governing all of social life. Every idea, value, social relationship,  institution, and form of knowledge runs the risk of being economized, turned into either a commodity, brand, or source of profits, or all of the latter. Increasingly aligned with market forces, public and higher education are mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in an audit culture.[2] In addition, students are viewed as clients and customers while faculty are treated like service workers. Public education is especially under assault with the appointment of Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education. DeVos hates all things public and believes that beyond privatizing public education, her role is to “advance God’s Kingdom” through the school system.[3]

Under the Trump administration, the role of education as a medium of culture is reduced to a tool of management, conformity, and repression. Operating through a conservative social media and right-wing radio and television platforms, education under Trump has become a powerful weapon to produce and distribute hate, bigotry, and reactionary policies. Moreover, it has become a commanding tool to legitimate a range of right-wing policies that constitute an assault on the environment, transgender people in the military, and undocumented immigrants, among others. It has also become a bullhorn for spreading conspiracy theories including the ridiculous and caustic claim by a number of right wing pundits that the student leaders and survivors of the Parkland mass shooting are either “crisis actors,” bankrolled by George Soros, or pawns of left-wing gun control advocates.[4]

Operating in the service of a strictly instrumental rationality that erodes the boundaries between economic power and politics, enables a culture of racial exclusion, and furthers a politics of repression, education in a range of formal and informal sites is used to empty politics of any substance. With regards to higher education, students are not only inundated with the competitive, privatized, and market-driven values of neoliberalism, they are also punished by those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, crippling astronomical debt owed to banks and other financial institutions, and lack of meaningful employment.[5]

At the level of public education, too many students especially those marginalized by class and race are subject to disciplinary measures and oppressive forms of pedagogy that kill the imagination and increasingly criminalize student behavior. Solidarity, critical thought, and shared values are the enemy of Trump’s notion of education and pedagogy, which serves largely to disdain public values while canceling out a democratic future for too many young people. All of these forces are exacerbated in the wider society through a notion of popular education that accelerates a modern day pandemic of fear, anxiety, anger, and despair.

What is often lost on the part of the left and progressives is that the educational force of the wider culture functions through a range of what the sociologist C. Wright Mills termed cultural apparatuses, which extend from the mainstream and conservative media to digital and online platforms that largely operate in the service of a commodified and authoritarian political media sphere that has become what Mort Rosenblum calls a “cesspool of misleading babble.”[6]  Trump has managed to shape the cultural landscape in ways that have unleashed a poisonous public pedagogy of sensationalism, easy consumption, bigotry, fear, militarism, and distraction.  For instance, insightful and critical reporting is dismissed as “fake news,” while corporate profiteers accelerate a culture of instant gratification and feed off spectacles of violence.

Against this backdrop of civic illiteracy lies Trump’s 2018 budget, which adds $80 billion to the military’s bloated machinery of death.  All the while, Trump fills the Twitter world with an ongoing bombast of emotional drivel. Simultaneously, he appoints cabinet and other high ranking officials whose chief role is to dismantle those institutions central to a democracy: “its schools, courts, civil liberties, environment, natural wealth, and underlying morality.”[7]  Former chief strategist Steve Bannon makes visible and boasts about Trump’s racist politics as he travels the globe proclaiming to his fascist friends that they should not be troubled if called a racist. In fact, he announced to a gathering of the National Front party in 2018 at their annual congress in France, “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”[8]

Squandering America’s moral authority, whatever is left, comes easy for Trump given his well publicised celebration of state violence and his endorsement of the use of torture.   The latter provides a context for his nomination of Gina Haspel as the head of the CIA. Haspel once headed a secret “black site” prison in Thailand where Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was water boarded three times.[9] Haspel “also participated in the controversial decision to destroy evidence of interrogation sessions in which detainees were subjected to waterboarding.”[10]  Another egregious example of Trump’s militaristic and morally vacuous mind set can be seen in his appointment of John Bolton as Trump’s National Security Advisor, whom Juan Cole has called a “war criminal.”[11]  Bolton is a jingoistic hawk and warmonger of the first order and resembles a mix between Brig. General Jack D. Ripper, the trigger-happy war loving character out of the film, Dr. Strangeloveand the psychopathic, Patrick Bateman, the main character in American Psycho. Trump’s facile appointment of militarists, war criminals, and his ruthless “law and order” policies point to both a rhetoric and set of practices that provide the ideological and political foundation for acts of domestic terrorism.

Domestic terrorism, defined in part as acts designed by the state “intimidate or coerce a civilian population”[12] now operates unapologetically at the highest levels of power as Trump rails against undocumented immigrants, advises police officers to rough up people they are arresting, and relentlessly cultivates “fear and contempt among … white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of ‘the law’.”[13] In addition, Trump undermines the rule of law by attacking the courts and other legal institutions if they don’t pander to his policies. Moreover, his implementation of his “law and order” agenda is highly selective, depending upon who is the perpetrator of the alleged crime, or who is considered a friend or enemy. If it is “illegals” or anyone in his target audience of “criminals,” they should be roughed up by the police but if it is a friend such as Rob Porter, a former White House senior aide charged with abuse by both of his ex-wives, such accusations are simply dismissed by Trump.

Trump has ushered in a world of political and educational tyranny, misery, and oppression with his endless impetuous outbursts, insults, misrepresentations, corruption, and hucksterism. His emotional outbursts and unchecked narcissism provide the levers that promote a pedagogy in the service of mass illiteracy, ethical bankruptcy, and political conformity.  As the liar-in-chief, Trump collapses the distinction between facts and fiction and in doing so undermines the necessity for institutions that promote shared beliefs in facts, truth, and moral integrity, while valuing the common good above the facilitation of narrow private interests. Without some allegiance to evidence-based arguments, informed judgements, and reason, politics and the public spheres that support it begin to disappear. Moreover, morality and the ethical imagination wither as it becomes more and more difficult within Trump’s universe of “alternative facts” to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and compassion from cruelty.

Americans live in Kafkaesque times—a time in which the fight for justice has given way at the highest levels of government to the legitimation of injustice. How else to explain Trump’s claim that there are “very fine people on both sides” when referring to the deadly violence perpetrated in Charlottesville, Virginia by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Klu Klux Klan and those protesting such hatred.[14]  While the latter is another example of Trump’s muddled politics of diversion, it is also testimony to Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.”[15] In this instance, the pedagogical call to think, inspire, and energize has been replaced by a discourse and pedagogical practices designed to misdirect rage, empty meaning of any substance, deaden the ethical imagination, and encourage the collective fog of unchecked nihilism, white nationalism, and a depoliticizing privatism.

Trump’s pedagogy is largely fashioned through his use of Twitter, his support by conservative media such as Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the aggressive support by tribal social media, and extreme talk radio, all of which function as thinly veiled propaganda and disimagination machines. Trump’s unrelenting pedagogical shocks to the body politics and civic culture have done more than lower the bar of civic discourse and the rules of governing, they have normalized the unimaginable. Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan captures the damage in the following commentary in which he asserts that Trump:

[is] a cult leader of a movement that has taken over a political party [whose] twisted, compulsive insecurity requires him to use his office to attack, delegitimize and weaken every democratic institution that may occasionally operate outside his own delusional narcissism. He cannot help this. His tweets are a function of spasms, not plots. But the wreckage after only one year is extraordinary. The F.B.I. is now widely discredited; the C.I.A. is held in contempt; judges, according to the president, are driven by prejudice and partisanship (when they disagree with him); the media produce fake news; Congress is useless (including both Republicans and Democrats); alliances are essentially rip-offs; the State Department — along with the whole idea of a neutral Civil Service — is unnecessary. And the possibility of reasoned deliberation at the heart of democratic life has been obliterated by the white-hot racial and cultural hatreds that Trump was able to exploit to get elected and that he constantly fuels.[16]

Following Arendt’s insight into the dynamics of totalitarianism, education both within and outside of institutionalized schooling has the capacity to become a tool not only to instill authoritarian convictions but also to destroy the ability of the populace to form any convictions that are on the side of justice, freedom, and thoughtfulness.  I think it is fair to argue that the nightmarish vision of an impending American-style authoritarianism is no longer a product of dystopian fiction—found in the work of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, and others.  Under the regime of Donald Trump, the language of “Newspeak” has been normalized, functions through multiple platforms, and has morphed into a giant disimagination machinery of propaganda, violence, bigotry, hatred, and war. The latter is clearly visible in Trump’s language and politics which in its various forms has a high threshold for disappearance and zones of terminal exclusion, especially for Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and African-Americans.

As a form of pedagogical regulation, intelligence is considered a liability and Trump’s White House works hard to eliminate expressions of discontent, resistance, and popular democratic struggles.  Trump’s criminogenic machinery of power is on full display in the educational landscape of the wider culture. New unapologetic forms of racist discrimination, unbridled commodification undermine the democratic mission of both formal and informal educational institutions and apparatuses in an age of increasing tyranny. Against the force of a highly militarized mode of casino capitalism in which violence and a resurgence of white supremacy are at the center of power, education as the practice of freedom is losing its ability to resist the authoritarian machinery of social death now shaping American society. The modern loss of faith in the merging of education and democracy needs to be reclaimed, but that will only happen if the long legacy of struggle over education is once again brought to life as part of a more comprehensive understanding of education being central to politics itself. Such a task is particularly urgent as the United States descends into the abyss of authoritarianism under the regime of Donald Trump.

What forces have allowed education to be undermined as a democratic public sphere, capable of producing the formative culture and critical citizens that could have prevented such a catastrophe from happening in an alleged democracy? In the more general sense, education is now viewed either as a form of mass entertainment or as a form of training, aligned to market values.  As a market driven pedagogical practice, it is wedded to a technocratic rationality dominated by the imperatives of commercial exchange.  As education becomes central to politics itself, it removes democratic values and a compassion for the other from the ideology, policies, and institutions that now control American society. At its worst, particularly regarding public education, it is reduced to an instrument of the carceral state used to warehouse young people considered suspect and disposable who become fodder for the school-to-prison pipeline.  What happens to a public that retreats into private silos and becomes indifferent to the use of language in the service of a panicked rage that stokes anger but not about issues that matter? What happens to a social order when it treats millions of illegal immigrants as disposable, potential terrorists, and criminals? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal and as a reality?

In the present moment, it becomes particularly urgent for educators and concerned citizens all over the world to protect and enlarge the formative cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible. The attack on the truth, honesty, and the ethical imagination, makes it all the more imperative for educators to think dangerously, especially in societies that appear increasingly amnesiac—that is, countries where forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. All of which becomes all the more threatening at a time when a country such as the United States has tipped over into a mode of authoritarianism that views critical thought as both a liability and a threat.

Given the crisis of education, agency, and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological– increasingly used to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be self-reflective and directive without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about “that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”[17]

At the same time it means educators, cultural workers, young people, and the wider public need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. At the heart of such a challenge is the need to ask what the role is of both formal education and the wider functions of education in a democracy? What pedagogical, political, and ethical responsibilities should educators and other cultural workers take on at a time when there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses? How can educational and pedagogical practices be connected to the resurrection of historical memory, new modes of solidarity, a resurgence of the radical imagination, and broad-based struggles for an insurrectional democracy?   The question regarding what role education should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march all across the globe.

Vaclav Havel once argued that politics followed culture. That is, politics is inextricably connected to how individual and social consciousness are shaped, experiences are narrated, and investments organized so as speak convincingly to people’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. The mix of power, culture, and everyday life imposes new demands on those of us willing to make education and pedagogy central to politics itself if we want to breathe life and hope into a future that refuses the authoritarian impulses of the present. One productive sign of the times is that women, scientists, and young people are marching and organizing against the impending violence and fascism of the Trump administration. Many individuals and groups are beginning to wage a brave fight against oppressive neoliberal modes of governance. Prison abolitionists are making their voices heard, and new groups are mobilizing to fight the rise of white nationalism, militarism, and the threat of a nuclear war. Young people are reinventing new forms of collective resistance against gun violence. What all of these groups recognize is that to be voiceless is to be powerless. They are striking, organizing, and protesting to make their voices heard, refusing to allow their grievances to go unheard and ignored by the financial elite.

A new militancy can be seen in educators such as the striking teachers in West Virginia who have demonstrated the power of the wildcat strike as a mode of organized collective struggle against a criminogenic corporate based ideologies, pedagogies or repression, and ruthless labor practices.[18] What is crucial about this strike and its success is that it was not waged simply to improve paltry salaries and abominable labor conditions, but to also make clear that public schools are not for sale and that they represent one of the most crucial public spheres in a democracy.

But the most promising act of resistance on the horizon in the level and scope of protest against gun violence being mobilized by young people since the Parkland massacre. Not only have they exposed the toxic violence produced by the NRA but also the cowardice of those politicians, such as Senator Marco Rubio, who sell their conscience and dignity for blood money by putting profits from gun sales ahead of children’s lives. Gun deaths among children are rising in the United States as evident by the fact that “3,128 children and teens were killed with a gun 1n 2016, enough to fill 156 classrooms of 20 children.”[19]Yet it is young people, rather than adults, who are arousing the conscience of the nation with their demonstrations, interviews, and March for Our Lives demonstrations, in which is hundreds of thousands of students protested throughout the United States and in 800 cities around the world, all of which was designed to end “the plague of gun violence.”[20]

State and corporate sanctioned violence comes in many forms and hopefully the issues raised by the students marching against gun violence across the United Sates will begin to expand the public’s political horizons by addressing how violence functions as a mode of domestic terrorism in a range of sites. Among others, these include: schools modeled after prisons; streets and poor cities treated as war zones by many police departments; airports that have become centers of repressive surveillance practices against immigrants; shopping centers that exclude poor minorities; debtor prisons designed to punish the impoverished; detention centers for young people whose range of behaviors is being increasingly criminalized;  a carceral state that has used the prison as containing centers for racial minorities, and in a range of deadly policies that have turned civil society into a breeding ground for everyday and organized violence.

The retreat to nationalism, state sanctioned racism, the expansion of the military-industrial complex, and accelerating police violence and the growth of the carceral state, particularly with respect to the war on undocumented immigrants constitute a short list of issues to be addressed by a broad based movement of collective resistance. Hopefully, such issues will be eventually in the crosshairs of the protesters being mobilized by young people who refuse put up with the reign of domestic terrorism and gun violence at work in their schools and enabled by the Trump administration.

At a time when people’s lives are more precarious, hope for a better society seems to be in short supply. The Parkland youth protesters have put new energy into creating a new vision of hope, or what Ronald Aronson, calls “social hope.” That is, a belief in the ability to act collectively to make a better world and act “not blindly but with a sense of possibility.”[21] They have seized upon a vision of social justice rooted in the belief that they can not only challenge oppression but also can change the fundamental nature of an oppressive social order.  Education for them becomes a way of translating personal issues into larger systemic concerns, changing the way people see things, and investing a variety of modes of communication in order to use elements of belief and persuasion as appropriate weapons of struggle. They are talking back, writing, marching, and thinking outside of the boundaries of the deadening political horizons preached by established politicians and the mainstream media. They are also using the new digital technologies and the social media in order to educate a nation about the necessity of collective struggle and a shared militancy based on the need to both change public consciousness and to inspire people to act. What these young people have made clear is that education is central to such a struggle and that it provides the foundation for turning momentary protests into broad-based movements, which cannot come fast enough in the age of Trump with its fascist investment in legitimized and organized violence.

Notes.

[1] For one example among many, see Emma Brown, “Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War,” The Washington Post (July 5, 2012). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-later-schools-are-still-a-battlefield-for-interpreting-civil-war/2015/07/05/e8fbd57e-2001-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html?utm_term=.207f36cf4609; Of course, Howard Zinn, in his A People’s History of the United States made clear that history was being written from the point of view of the dominant classes, leaving out much of what came to be called history from the bottom up. I believe the problem is more severe today than when Zinn published his book.

[2] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3] Jon Sharman, “Education secretary Betsy DeVos wants to ‘advance God’s kingdom’ through US school system,” The Independent (February 8, 2017). Online: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/betsy-devos-us-education-secretary-advance-gods-kingdom-donald-trump-pick-confirmed-senate-hearing-a7568641.html

[4] Tina Nguyen, “‘Give me a Break’: How the far right is Smearing School-Shooting Survivors,” Vanity Fair (February 21, 2018). Online: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/how-the-far-right-is-smearing-parkland-school-shooting-survivors

[5] Creston Davis, “The Time of the Intellectual-Activists Has Come,” Truthout (November 4, 2017). Online: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/42472-the-time-of-the-intellectual-activists-has-come

[6] Mort Rosenblum, “The Loon Ranger; All the fits that are news to print,” Reader Supported News (March 16, 2018). Online: https://www.amazon.com/Fascism-Today-What-How-End/dp/1849352941/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521399237&sr=1-1&keywords=fascism+today+what+it+is+and+how+to+end+it+by+shane+burley

[7] Ibid, Mort Rosenblum.

[8] Daniel Politi, “Bannon: Let Them Call You Racist…Wear it as a Badge of Honor,” Slate (March 10, 2018). Online: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/steve-bannon-let-them-call-you-racist-wear-it-as-a-badge-of-honor.html

[9] David Smith, “Torture allegations dog Gina Haspel as she is poised to be first female CIA head,” The Guardian (March 16, 2018). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/16/gina-haspel-cia-torture-allegations

[10] Sarah Childress and Priyanka Boghani, “Trump’s New CIA Director Nominee Helped Cover Up Torture,” PBS: Frontline (March 13, 2018). Online: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-new-cia-director-nominee-helped-cover-up-torture/

[11] Juan Cole, “Let’s Call Bolton What He Is: A War Criminal with Terrorist Ties, Not Just ‘Hawkish’.” Common Dreams (March 23, 2018). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/23/lets-call-bolton-what-he-war-criminal-terrorist-ties-not-just-hawkish

[12] See, US Federal code at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2331

[13] Chris Hayes, “What ‘Law and Order” Means to Trump,” New York Times (March 17, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/opinion/sunday/chris-hayes-trump-law-order.html

[14] Rosie Gray, “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’,” The Atlantic (August 15, 2017). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/

[15] Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (March-April, 2002), P. 2

[16] Andrew Sullivan, “Can Donald Trump Be Impeached?” New York Times (March 12, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/books/review/impeachment-cass-sunstein-can-it-happen-here.html

[17] Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,” Journal of Advanced Composition (1999), pp. 3-35.

[18] Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The New Old Politics of the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike,” The New Yorker (March 2, 2018). Online: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-old-politics-of-the-west-virginia-teachers-strike

[19] Marian Wright Edelman, “Marching for Our Children’s Lives and Nation’s Soul,” Child Watch Column: Children’s Defense Fund (March 23, 2018). Online: http://www.childrensdefense.org/newsroom/child-watch-columns/child-watch-documents/MarchingForOurChildrensLives.html

[20] Jake Johnson, “Ahead of ‘March for Our Lives,’ Student Manifesto Outlines Steps to Eradicate ‘Plague of Gun Violence’,”Common Dreams (March 23, 2018). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/23/ahead-march-our-lives-student-manifesto-outlines-steps-eradicate-plague-gun-violence

[21] Ronald Aronson, We, Reviving Social Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 33.

Source:

Education as a Weapon of Struggle: Rethinking the Parkland Uprising in the Age of Mass Violence

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Trump, guns and the warnings of history

By. Henry Giroux

The ongoing crisis of democracy has two markers: The erasure of memory and the politics of disposability.

In the age of Donald Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears.

This seems especially true regarding the current cult of violence, guns and domestic terrorism.

Such violence is not only evident in the horrors of early fascist and Nazi regimes, but also in the massacre of Vietnamese infants and children at My Lai , and in the guns turned repeatedly on children in the United States, most recently in Florida.

An estimated 188 shootings have occurred at U.S. schools and universities since 2000. There will be no escape from mass violence in the U.S. until it is placed within a broader historical, economic and political context to address the totality of forces that produce it.

Focusing merely on mass shootings or meaningless gun-control laws does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce America’s love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it. Historical and social amnesia in fact facilitates America’s addiction to violence.

This is especially troubling when the “mobilizing passions” of a fascist past now emerge in a stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated at the highest levels of the Trump administration and in powerful conservative media such as Fox News, Breitbart News and conservative talk radio stations.

These right-wing media stalwarts have been joined by newcomers like Clear Channel and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

And so the politics of disposability, in which the well-being of citizens, democratic ideals and the social contract are tossed away, is no longer the discourse of marginalized extremists. It’s now trumpeted daily by the conservative media machine and exists at the highest levels of government.

America is watching and listening, and so too is Trump himself. His tweets often make reference to actual fake news, and not just the stories he labels as such because they fail to fawn over him:

 Thank you to @foxandfriends for the great timeline on all of the failures the Obama Administration had against Russia, including Crimea, Syria and so much more. We are now starting to win again!

The politics of disposability is increasingly evident not so much in rise of mass shootings in the United States but in the fact that they are getting deadlier, especially as they involve the maiming and killing of children.

Seventeen people, most of them teens, are now dead at the hands of a 19-year-old shooter armed with an AR-15 assault rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. They won’t be the last to die. The question is not if, but when, in a society that has turned malignant with violence.

Violence is indeed a cancer metastasizing through American society. The proliferation and sales of guns as both an industry and form of entertainment is at the heart of such violence. The profits from weapons of war and death are now a more important investment than investing in the safety, security and lives of young people.

The logic of disposability and the war culture it legitimates was on display recently as Trump listened to the impassioned testimony of parents and children who have seen their children and friends killed in gun shootings.

President Donald Trump listens to Florida high school students and one of their parents as they issue a plea for tougher gun laws at the White House on Feb. 21, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

He responded by advocating for teachers to be armed and trained to have concealed weapons. Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, he followed the NRA line of addressing the epidemic of violence, mass shootings and the ongoing carnage with a call for more guns. He normalized the insane logic that mass violence can be met with more violence.

“A teacher would have shot the hell out of the gunman before he knew what happened,” Trump said at the annual CPAC conference.

Trump, who was the recipient of US$30 million in campaign funds from the NRA, channels its head, Wayne LaPierre, who calls for more armed teachers. LaPierre trades in fear-mongering, mistrust and even Cold War rhetoric, calling gun control advocates “socialists.”

Trump and LaPierre have no interest in preventing school shootings. On the contrary, they want to “prepare for shootings” by turning schools into war zones.

This logic is breathtaking in its moral depravity, its refusal to get to the root of the problem and its unwillingness even to advocate for the most minor reforms such as banning assault rifles, making illegal the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines and expanding background checks.

There are 300 million guns in the United States and since the 2012 mass murder of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hundreds more children have died of gun violence.

There is no defence for putting the policies of the NRA ahead of the lives of children.

Criminal acts often pass for legislative policies. How else to explain the Florida legislature voting to refuse to even debate outlawing assault weapons while students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sat in the gallery and watched this wretched and irresponsible act take place?

How else to explain that the U.S. House of Representatives, seemingly reduced to an adjunct of the NRA, voted to pass a law that would allow individuals to carry concealed weapons across state lines?

These are the people who have the blood of thousands on their hands. The power of money in politics has morphed into a form of barbarism in which financial gain and power have become more important than protecting the lives of America’s children.

Children no longer have a safe space in America, a country saturated in violence as a spectacle sport, its citizens routinely brutalized by repeated deadly acts of domestic terrorism followed by the criminal inaction of their elected representatives.

Any defence for the proliferation of guns, especially those designed for war, is, in fact, criminal. It’s political corruption, a government in the hands of the gun lobby, and a country that trades in violence at every turn in order to accrue profits at the expense of the lives of innocent children.

This is how the logic of disposability works. This is how democracies die.

Children have more moral courage

And this debate is not simply about gun violence, it is about the rule of capital and how the architects of violence accrue enough power to turn the machinery of death and destruction into profits while selling violence as a commodity.

Violence is both a source of profits and a cherished national ideal. It is also the defining feature of a toxic masculinity so perfectly personified by Trump, pussy-grabber-in-chief.

Gun reform is no substitute for real justice and the necessary abolition of a death-dealing and cruel economic and political system that is the antithesis of democracy.

What are we to make of a society in which young children have a greater sense of moral courage and social responsibility than the zombie adults who make the laws that fail to invest in and protect the lives of present and future generations?

First step: Expose their lies, make their faces public, use the new media to organize across state lines, and work like hell to vote them out of office in 2018.

Hold these ruthless walking dead responsible and then banish them to the gutter where they belong. At the same time, imagine and fight not for a reform of American society but a restructuring along the lines of a truly democratic order.

Source:

https://theconversation.com/trump-guns-and-the-warnings-of-history-92027

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Gun Violence as State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism

By. Henry Giroux

Passing thoughts on the willingness of the politicians and merchants of death who allow the unimaginable to become imaginable, allow financial gain to prevail over the lives of innocent children, and are more willing to protect guns at the expense of the lives of children.

President Trump listened recently to the impassioned testimony of parents and children who have seen their children and friends killed in gun shootings. He responded by advocating that teachers be armed and trained to have concealed weapons.

Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, he followed the NRA line of addressing the issue of mass violence, shootings, and the ongoing carnage with a call to arm more people, putting more guns into play, and stating that violence can be met with more violence. This logic is breathtaking in its insanity, moral depravity, refusal to get to the root of the problem, and even advocate minor reforms such as banning assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines, and expanding background checks.

There are 300 million guns in the United States and since the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School of 20 young children and 6 teachers a decade ago, 11,000 more children have died of gun violence.

There is no defense for putting the policies of the NRA ahead of the lives of children. Criminal acts often pass for legislative policies. How else to explain the Florida legislature refusing to even debate outlawing assault weapons while students from Majory Stoneman Douglas High School sat in the galleys and watched this wretched and irresponsible act take place. How else to explain that the House of Representatives – reduced to an adjunct of the NRA – voted to pass the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act (H.R.38) which would allow individuals to carry concealed weapons across state lines. These are the people who have the blood of thousands on their hands.

The power of money in politics has morphed into a form of barbarism in which financial gain and power have become more important than protecting the lives of America’s children.

I find it extremely difficult to watch the debates about gun violence on the mainstream media. The call for reform is so limited as to be useless. Instead of banning assault rifles, they celebrate Trump for suggesting that he raise the age to 21 in order for people to buy a weapon of war. Instead of preventing violence from engulfing the country and schools, he calls for arming teachers and the press celebrates his willingness to entertain this issue. Instead of speaking about justice and allowing people to speak who are against deregulating laws restricting or abolishing the merchants of death, the media allows an NRA hawk to speak at the town meeting and rather than calling her out for being a spokesperson for violence rather than justice, they congratulate themselves on promoting balance.

The corporate media has become a normalizing force for violence because they lack the courage to challenge the corporations that control them. They also benefit by peddling extreme violence as a spectacle. They refuse to begin with the issue of money in politics and start instead with what one parent called non-starters. Guns disappear from the conversation and appeals to fear and security take over. Young people have to lead this conversation and move beyond the mainstream media. And when they do appear they have to flip the script and ask the questions they think are important.

Children no longer have a safe space in America, a country saturated in violence as a spectacle, sport, and deadly acts of domestic terrorism. Any defense for the proliferation of guns, especially those designed for war, is criminal. This is the discourse of political corruption, a government in the hands of the gun lobbies, and a country that trades in violence at every turn in order to accrue profits at the expense of the lives of innocent children.

This debate is not simply about gun violence, it is about the rule of capital and how the architects of violence accrue enough power to turn machineries of death and destruction into profits while selling violence as a commodity. Violence is both a source of profits and a cherished national ideal. It is also the defining feature of a toxic masculinity. Gun reform is no substitute for real justice and the necessary abolition of a death-dealing and cruel economic and political system that is the antithesis of democracy.

What are we to make of a society in which young children have a greater sense of moral courage and social responsibility than the zombie adults who make the laws that fail to invest in and protect the lives of present and future generations. First step, expose their lies, make their faces public, use the new media to organize across state lines, and work like hell to vote them out of office in 2018. Hold these ruthless walking dead responsible and then banish them to the gutter where they belong. At the same time, imagine and fight for not a reform of American society but a restructuring along the lines of a democratic socialist order.

Source:

https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/henry-giroux-on-gun-violence

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