Author: Henry Giroux

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el valor de una noción dialéctica de resistencia para una teoría crítica de escolarización.

Henry Giroux

América del Norte/EEUU/Octubre 2016/Henry Giroux/

Tomado de : Teorías De La Reproducción Y La Resistencia
En La Nueva Sociología De La Educación:
Un Análisis Critico∗ Henry Goroux

El valor pedagógico de la resistencia se apoya, en parte, en las conexiones que hace entre estructura y agenciamiento humano por un lado y lacultura y el proceso de autoformación por el otro.

La teoría de la resistencia rechaza la idea de que las escuelas son sitios simplementeinstruccionales, no sólo politizando la noción de cultura sino analizando también las culturas escolares dentro del convulsionado terreno de la lucha y la protesta. En efecto,esto representa un nuevo contexto teórico para comprender el proceso de escolarización que ubica el conocimiento, valores y relaciones sociales educativas dentro del contexto de relaciones antagónicas y las examina dentro del interjuego de las culturas escolares dominante y subordinado.

Cuando se incorpora una teoría de la resistencia a la pedagogía radical, los elementos de la conducta de oposición en las escuelas devienen el punto focal para analizar relaciones sociales y experiencias diferentes, frecuentemente antagónicas, entre los estudiantes de la cultura dominante y subordinado. Dentro de este
modelo de análisis crítico se vuelve posible iluminar cómo los estudiantes pueden con los limitados recursos a su disposición reafirmar las dimensiones positivas de sus propias culturas e historias.

La teoría de la resistencia ilumina la complejidad de respuestas de los estudiantes a la lógica de la escolarización. En consecuencia, ilumina la necesidad de los educadores radicales de develar cómo la conducta de oposición frecuentemente emerge dentro de formas de conciencia contradictorias que no están nunca libres de la racionalidad reproductiva incluida en las relaciones sociales del capitalismo. Una pedagogía radical, entonces debe reconocer que la resistencia estudiantil en todas sus formas representa ensus manifestaciones de lucha y solidaridad que en su incompletitud (incompleteness), a la vez critican (challenge) y confirman la hegemonía capitalista. Lo que es más importante es la voluntad de los educadores radicales de buscar los intereses emancipatorios que
subyacen a tal resistencia y hacerlos visibles a los estudiantes y a otros como para que puedan ser objeto de debate y análisis político.

Una teoría de la resistencia es central para el desarrollo de una pedagogía radical por otras razones también. Ayuda a traer al foco aquellas prácticas sociales en las escuelas cuyo objetivo final es el control del proceso de aprendizaje y la capacidad para el pensamiento crítico y la acción. Por ejemplo, señala a la ideología subyacente del currículum hegemónico, a sus cuerpos de conocimiento jerárquicamente organizados, y particularmente a la manera en que este curriculum margina o descalifica el conocimiento de la clase trabajadora tanto como el conocimiento sobre la mujer y las minorías.

Másaún, la teoría de la resistencia revela la ideología que subyace en tal curriculum, con susénfasis en la apropiación del conocimiento individual más que grupal (colectivo) y cómoeste énfasis conduce a un “wedge” entre los estudiantes de las diferentes clases sociales.
Esto es particularmente evidente en las diferentes aproximaciones al conocimiento llevadas a cabo en muchas familias de clase trabajadora y clase media.

El conocimiento en la cultura de la clase trabajadora es frecuentemente construido sobre los principios de la solidaridad y el compartir, mientras que dentro de la cultura de clase media, el
conocimiento se forja en competencia individual y visto como una barrera de separación.

En resumen, la teoría de la resistencia llama la atención sobre la necesidad que tienen  los educadores radicales de descubrir (develar) los intereses ideológicos incluidos en los variados sistemas de mensajes de la escuela, particularmente aquellos encerrados en el curriculum, sistema de instrucción y modos de evaluación.

Lo que es más importante es que la teoría de la resistencia refuerza la necesidad de los educadores radicales de descifrar cómo las formas de producción cultural mostradas por los grupos subordinados, pueden ser analizados para revelar sus limitaciones y sus posibilidades para permitir un pensamiento crítico, discurso analítico y aprendizaje a través de la práctica colectiva.

Finalmente, la teoría de la resistencia sugiere que los educadores radicales deben desarrollar una relación crítica más que pragmática con los estudiantes. Esto significa que cualquier forma viable de pedagogía radical debe analizar cómo las relaciones dedominación en las escuelas se originan, cómo se sostienen y cómo los  estudiantes, en particular se relacionan con ellos. Esto implica mirar más allá de las escuelas. Esto sugiere tomar seriamente la contra-lógica que empuja a los estudiantes fuera de las escuelas, hacia las calles, los bares y la cultura subterránea (shopfloor)87.

En resumen, las bases para una nueva pedagogía radical deben ser extraídas de una comprensión teóricamente sofisticada de cómo el poder, la resistencia y el agenciarniento humano pueden devenir elementos centrales en la lucha por el pensamiento y aprendizaje
críticos.

Las escuelas no cambiarán la sociedad, pero podemos crear en ellas bolsas de resistencia que provean módulos pedagógicos para nuevas formas de aprendizaje y relaciones sociales, formas que pueden ser usadas en otras esferas más directamente involucradas en la lucha por una nueva moralidad y visión de la justicia social.

Para aquellos que sostienen que este es un objetivo político, replicaría que tienen razón, ya que es un objetivo que apunta a lo que debería ser la base de todo aprendizaje, la lucha por una vida cualitativamente mejor para todos.

Fuente

http://ecaths1.s3.amazonaws.com/teoriaeducacion/1638494347.06%20-%20Gi…

Libro de  Teorías De La Reproducción Y La Resistencia
En La Nueva Sociología De La Educación:
Un Análisis Critico∗ Henry Goroux

Fuente Imagen:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/aAX_cAWss-Z15PFs8Gqr-vek9Ozm2mz6VMJvTfTgCrkMO9pmFxKKGYMu1fnExefxG1oaUA=s85

 

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Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance

Henry Giroux

by HENRY GIROUX

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]

The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment; the emergence of an economic system which argues that only the market can provide remedies for the endless problems it produces, extending from massive poverty and unemployment to decaying schools and a war on poor minority youth; the expanding use of state secrecy and the fear-producing surveillance state; and a Hollywood fluff machine that rarely relies on anything but an endless spectacle of mind-numbing violence. Historical memory has been reduced to the likes of a Disney theme park and a culture of instant gratification has a lock on producing new levels of social amnesia.

As we learned in the recent debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton (a billionaire and millionaire), ignorance is the DNA of authoritarianism, serving to subvert the truth and obscure the workings of power. Willful ignorance has become a normalized political tool and form of public pedagogy that both provides the foundation for what Noam Chomsky labels as the rise of the “stupid party” and which works incessantly to create a “stupid nation.”[4] Trump, of course, proves that stupidity is in fashion and deeply entrenched within the larger culture while Hilary capitalizes on her penchant for disingenuousness by claiming support for policies she really disdains, i.e., stating she will raise taxes on her buddies from Goldman Sachs and other members of the financial elite. Hardly believable from a woman who “has earned millions of dollars from speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms (and) was paid $675,000 for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs.”[5] No hints of the radical imagination here, or the truth for that matter. Only the politics of stupidity and evasion and a media spectacle supporting the celebration of corrupted and limited and pathologized political horizons.

Manufactured ignorance also makes invisible the corruption of the financial elite, allowing them to plunder resources and define the accumulation of capital as a divine blessing. It gets worse. Manufactured ignorance aided by the voracious seductions of commodified corporate-driven disimagination machine that promotes a culture of empty pleasures through and endless regime of consuming and discarding. American society is now dominated by a pervasive commodified landscape of disimagination machines that extends from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, magazines, news, and the social media. These mind-numbing desiring machines which thrive on speed and sensation function mostly as workstations of ignorance to create a fog of distractions that promote forms of social amnesia that erase from memory and public discourse the structural, systemic and social forces that reinforce what can be called organized powerlessness and massive human suffering. This is the stuff of a politics of disappearance that erases the presence of the poor, unemployed, the “approximately 11 million Americans cycle[d] through jails and prisons each year,” black youth, immigrants, ecological disasters, class warfare, acts of state sponsored terrorism, the rise of the police state, and the rise of the warfare state.[6] As the machinery of social death accelerates, America’s most precious investment, youth, also disappear. As neoliberal disimagination machines such as Fox News make clear youth as a social investment no longer count in a society that disdains long term investments and their messy calls for being included in the script of democracy. As such, the current war on youth is about erasing the future, at least any alternative future and any notion of imagination that might summon one into view.

When coupled with an age of precarity and endless uncertainty in which young people have few decent jobs, are strangulated by debt, face a future of career-less jobs, and isolation, young people have little room for politics because they are more concerned with trying to survive rather than engaging in political struggles, or imagining a different future. At the same time, armies of the unemployed or underemployed are caught in a spiral of receding wages, diminished social provisions, and increasingly find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and free-floating anger. In such situations, thinking and informed action become more difficult while a politics wedded to economic and social justice is eviscerated. Moreover, politics becomes toxic when dominated by unapologetic discourses of racism and hatred and is on full display in the Trump campaign. Tapping into such anger and redirecting away from the real problems that produce it has become the central script in the rise of the new authoritarians. This poisonous discourse gains momentum and accelerates as it moves between white supremacist incantations of Trump and his zealots and the deceptive vocabulary of Hillary Clinton and her financial elite backers who embrace a savage neoliberalism with its false claims to freedom, choice, and the virtues of militarization. Civic death is on full display as the ideals of democracy disappear in an election in which authoritarianism in its various forms rules without apology. As thinking dangerously and acting with civic courage wanes, state violence, disposability and voicelessness become the dominant registers of an authoritarian politics that has intensified in American life producing neo-fascist movements in American society that have moved from the fringes to the center of political life.

Tragedy looms large in American society as the forces that promote powerlessness and voicelessness intensify among those elements of the population struggling just to survive the symbolic violence of a culture of cruelty and the material violence of a punishing state. The issue of losing one’s voice either to the forces of imposed silencing or state repression weaken dissent and open the door to the seductions of a dogmatism that speaks in the language of decline, making America great again, while touting the coded vocabulary of white nationalism and racial purity. How else to explain Trump’s call for imposing racial profiling as a way to boost the notion of law and order.

Thinking undangerously is the first step in the triumph of formalism over substance, theater over politics, and the transformation of politics into a form of celebrity culture. The refusal to think works in the service of a form of voicelessness, which is another marker of what it means to be powerless. Within this moral and political vacuum, the codes, rhetoric, and language of white supremacy is on the rise wrapped in the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, emotion become more important than reason, ideas lose their grip on reality, and fashion becomes a rationale for discarding historical memory, informed arguments, and critical thought. Reflection no longer challenges the demands of commonsense. In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance.”[7] Within such an environment, the truth of an event is not open to public discussion or informed judgment at least in the official media apparatuses producing, distributing and circulating ideas that parade as commonsense. As a result, all that remains is the fog of ignorance and the haze of political and moral indifference.

Americans occupy a historical moment in which it is crucial to think dangerously, particularly since such thinking has the power to shift the questions, provide the tools for offering historical and relational contexts, and “push at the frontiers…of the human imagination.”[8] Stuart Hall is right in insisting that thinking dangerously is crucial “to change the scale of magnification. … to break into the confusing fabric that ‘the real’ apparently presents, and find another way in. So it’s like a microscope and until you look at the evidence through the microscope, you can’t see the hidden relations.”[9] In this instance, the critical capacity for thinking becomes dangerous when it can intervene in the “continuity of commonsense, unsettle strategies of domination,” and work to promote strategies of transformation.[10]

As Adorno observes, such thinking “speaks for what is not narrow-minded—and commonsense most certainly is.”[11] As such, dangerous thinking is not only analytical in its search for understanding and truth, it is also critical and subversive, always employing modes of self and social critique necessary to examine its own grounds and those poisonous fundamentalisms in the larger society haunting the body politic. As Michael Payne observes, thinking dangerously (or critical theory in this instance) should be cast in the language of hints, dialogue, and an openness to other positions, rather than be “cast in the language of orders.”[12] Of course, this is not to suggest that thinking dangerously guarantees action, but at the same time, any action that distances itself from such thinking is bound to fail.

In an age when shouting, rage, and unchecked emotions shape public discourse, self-reflection becomes a liability and suppresses the axiom that critical thought should function to “lift…human beings above the evidence of our senses and sets appearances apart from the truth.”[13] Salmon Rushdie is right in viewing thinking dangerously as a type of political necessity whose purpose is to “push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world.”[14] As Hannah Arendt noted, thoughtfulness, the ability to think reflectively and critically is fundamental to radical change and a necessity in a functioning democracy. Put differently, formative cultures that make such thinking possible along with the spaces in which dialogue, debate, and dissent can flourish are essential to producing critically literate and actively engaged citizens.

Unfortunately, thinking undangerously cuts across ideological and political divides. For instance, there is a new kind of historical and social amnesia overtaking some elements of resistance in the United States. Many progressives have forgotten the lessons of earlier movements for real change extending from the anti-Vietnam War and Black Freedom movements to the radical feminist and gay rights movements of the sixties. History as a repository of learning with vast resources to enable people to build on historical legacies, develop mass movements, and take seriously the pedagogical task of consciousness raising, is in decline. Too much of contemporary politics has become more personal, often reducing agency to the discourses and highly charged emotions of trauma. These historical legacies of resistance did not limit their politics to a call recognition and security within the confines of isolated political issues. Instead, they called for a radical transformation of capitalist and other authoritarian societies. Moroever, they understood that the truth of domination lie in understanding the totality of a society and how various issues were connected to each other. George Monbiot exemplifies this issue in arguing against responding to the varied crisis associated with neoliberalism as if they emerged in isolation—a response that contributes to neoliberalism’s anonymity. He writes:

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007?8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalyzed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?[15]

This politics of the disconnect is exacerbated by the fact that mass social movements run the risk of undermining by a politics that has collapsed into the personal. For example, for too many progressives personal pain represents a retreat into an interiority that focuses on trauma. Robin Kelley provides a caveat here in pointing out that all too often “managing trauma does not require dismantling structural racism” and the larger issues of “oppression, repression, and subjugation” get replaced with “words such as PTSD, micro-aggressions, and triggers.” [16] Kelley is not suggesting that the pain of personal suffering be ignored. Instead, he warns “against … the consequences of framing all grievances in the ‘language of personal trauma.’”[17]

Personal trauma in this case can begin with legitimate calls for spaces free of racism, sexual harassment, and various other forms of hidden but morally and politically unacceptable assaults. And at its best, such a politics functions as an entry into political activism; but when it becomes less a justifiable starting point than an endpoint it begins to sabotage any viable notion of radical politics. Kelley is right in insisting that “trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and objects rather than agents.”[18] Moreover, the language of safe spaces, personal trauma, and triggers can easily become a topsy-turvy discursive universe of trick mirrors and trapdoors that end up reproducing a politics of intimidation and conformity, while forgetting that pedagogical practices and a corresponding politics in the service of dramatic transformation are always unsettling and discomforting.

Progressives must avoid at all cost is the rebirth of a politics in which how we think and act is guaranteed by the discourses of origins, personal experience, and biology. When individuals become trapped within their own experiences, the political imagination weakens, and a politics emerges that runs the risk of inhabiting a culture of exclusion and hardness that shuts down dialogue, undermines compassion, kills empathy, makes it more difficult to listen to and learn from others. A politics that puts an emphasis on personal pain can become blind to its own limitations and can offer falsely a guaranteed access to the truth and a comforting embrace of a discourse of political certainty.

In such cases, the walls go up again as the discourses of biology and exclusion merge to guard the frontiers of moral righteousness and political absolutism. Put differently, the registers of militarization are on full display in such alleged sites of resistance such as higher education where a growing culture of political purity marks out a space in which the personal becomes the only politics there is housed within a discourse of “weaponized sensitivity” and “armed ignorance.”[19] The first causality of armed ignorance is a kind of thoughtfulness that embraces empathy for the other, a willingness to enter into public discussion, and dialogue with those who exist outside of the bunkers of imagined communities of exclusion. Leon Wieseltier is right in arguing that “grievance is sometimes the author of blindness, or worse.”[20]

Under such conditions, empathy wanes and only extends as far as recognizing those who mirror the self, one that endlessly narrates itself on the high ground of an unassailable moralism and stultifying orbits of self-interests. In addition, politics collapses into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public discourse in which boundaries break down and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as fundamental to a substantive democracy. Of course, there is more at work here than what might be called the atrophy of critical thought, self-reflection, and theory, there is also the degeneration of agency itself.

What does thinking look like when it is transformed into a pedagogical parasite on the body of democracy? At one level, it becomes toxic, blinding the ideological warriors to their own militant ignorance and anti-democratic rhetoric. At the same time, it shuts down any attempt to develop public spheres that connect rather than separate advocates of a politics walled in by suffocating notions of essentialism dressed up in the appeal to orthodoxy parading as revolutionary zeal. What must be remembered is that thinking undangerously mimics a pedagogy of repression that falsely assumes a revolutionary stance when in fact everything about it is counter-revolutionary. In the end this suggests a kind of theoretical helplessness, a replacing of the courage to think dangerously with the discourse of denunciation and a language overflowing with the comforting binary of good and evil.

There is more at risk here than legitimating the worse forms of thoughtlessness, there is also the intolerable potential for both the moral collapse of politics and the undermining of any vestige of democracy. Thinking dangerously as a critical enterprise is about both a search for the truth and a commitment to the recognition that no society is ever just enough and hence is fundamental to the always unfinished struggle, making the impossible all the more possible. Not one or the other but both. Such thinking should be used to both understand and engage the major upheavals people face and to connect such problems to larger political, structural, and economic issues.

Thinking dangerously can make the pedagogical more political by mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable in all of its uses. Thinking dangerously is about more than doing a critical reading of screen culture and other texts, it is also about how knowledge, desire, and values become invaluable tools in the service of economic and political justice, how language provides the framework for dealing with power and what it means to develop a sense of compassion for others and the planet. Dangerous thinking is more than a mode of resistance, it is the basis for a formative and pedagogical culture of questioning and politics that takes seriously how the imagination can become central to the practice of freedom, justice, and democratic change.

Notes.

[1] This essay draws upon a number of ideas in Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015).

[2] I have borrowed this term from Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Economics of Contempt,” Counterpunch (May 23, 2014).

[3] Brad Evans and I have taken up the issue of violence in its various valences in Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015). Also, see Henry A. Giroux, America’s Addiction to Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

[4] Noam Chomsky, “Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose the Common good,” Alternet (Sep9tember 29, 2014). Online: http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-corporations-and-richest-americans-viscerally-oppose-common-good

[5] Chris Cillizza , “The New York Times just perfectly explained Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speech problem,” The Washington Post (February 26, 2016). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/the-new-york-times-just-perfectly-explained-why-hillary-clintons-answers-on-her-paid-speeches-dont-work/

[6] Rebecca Gordon, “There Oughta Be a Law…Should Prison Really Be the American Way?,” TomDispatch.com (September 25, 2016). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176190/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_arresting_our_way_to_%22justice%22/

[7] Brad Evans and Julien Reid, “The Promise of Violence in the Age of Catastrophe,” Truthout (January 5, 2014. Online: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20977-the-promise-of-violence-in-the-age-of-catastrophe

[8] Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, Ma: South End Press, 2001), P. 1

[9] Stuart Hall and Les Back, “In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home”, Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, (July 2009), pp. 664-665.

[10] I have taken this phrases from an interview with Homi Bhaba in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy JAC ((1999), p. 9.

[11] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity Press, 2005), p.139.

[12] Michael Payne, “What Difference Has Theory Made? From Freud to Adam Phillips,” College Literature 32:2 (Spring 2005), p. 7.

[13] Ibid., Bauman, Liquid Life, 151.

[14] Salman Rushdie, “Whither Moral Courage?” The New York Times, (April 28, 2013)

[15] George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” The Guardian, (April 15, 2016) Online: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

[16] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,” Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response

[17] Ibid., Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response.” Boston Review.,

[18] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, (March 7, 2016) Online: https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

[19] The notion of weaponized sensitivity is from Lionel Shriver, “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?” New York Times (September 23, 2016). Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/opinion/will-the-left-survive-the-millennials.html. Armed ignorance was coined by my colleague Brad Evans in a personal correspondence.

[20] Leon Wieseltier, “How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason – and brought us Donald Trump,” Washington Post, (June 22, 2016). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/22/how-voters-personal-suffering-overtook-reason-and-brought-us-donald-trump/

Fuente: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/30/thinking-dangerously-in-the-age-of-normalized-ignorance/

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Assassination Talk, the Banality of Evil, and the Paranoid State of American Politics

Henry Giroux

Por: Henry Giroux

During a campaign rally in North Carolina, Donald Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” would take care of Hilary Clinton for picking Supreme Court judges who favor stricter gun laws. The Clinton campaign and many others saw this as a veiled endorsement of an assassination attempt.[1] These inflammatory, if not dangerous, comments are part of a wider movement in American politics to empty political discourse of any substance, turning it mostly into a form of rhetorical theater designed to mimic a larger culture of stupidity, idiocy, and spectacle. The spectacle of titillating and infantilizing consciousness and public discourse with a flood of shocks, sensations and simplistic views has become the hallmark of a broken political system now largely controlled by the ideological extremists who inhabit big corporations, hedge funds, and the ranks of the ultra-rich. It is a strategy that mixes what Hannah Arendt once called the “banality of evil” with what the eminent historian, Richard Hofststadter has called the paranoid style of American politics.[2]

Trump’s rhetoric, along with the discourse of other extremists, echoes Hannah Arendt’s insight that totalitarianism is produced, in part, by making human beings superfluous, ignoring their voices, and silencing them in fascistic discourses of certainty, absolutes, and unaccountability that allow no space for critical thinking, informed judgment, and critical agency. Trump’s speeches and his off-the-cuff comments bear an eerie resemblance to what Arendt once called in her famous book on Adolf Eichmann “the banality of evil,” in which she defines the roots of totalitarianism being shaped by a type of thoughtlessness, the inability to think, and the disavowal of any form of self-reflection and critical inquiry. For some theorists such as Richard J. Bernstein, Arendt was largely interested in understanding how ordinary people with banal motives can commit horrendous crimes and how such actions were connected to making human beings superfluous as critical, thinking agents.[3] He is only partly right. Arendt connected the dethroning of the political and the emergence of a kind of anti-politics to the inability or reluctance of individuals to “imagine what the other person is experiencing…a kind of stupidity (in which) obedience is idealized.”[4] Trump and other ideological and political fundamentalists exemplify a kind of thoughtlessness in which informed judgment and dialogue are replaced by a rigid ideological embrace of certainty, the eschewing of doubt, and a willingness to sacrifice critical inquiry to the realms of emotion, anger, and contempt for others.

Language in the service of violence is on full display in Trump’s use of the term “loser,” a term that he carries over from his Reality TV shows and is used in many of his political speeches. Trump’s use of the term, echoing Hofstadter, denotes a language in the service of humiliation, but there is also a deeper structure of meaning that is indebted to the current fascistic embrace of “total war” and a “survival-of-the fittest” ethos in which winning and losing become the central organizing principles of a neoliberal society. As the discourse of war and excessive competition moves into the realm of the market place, consumption also serves to reward winners and debase losers based upon a fetishistic notion of consumption. Subjecting the majority of the polity to the discourse of humiliation and disdain and praise for the small number of winners who constitute the .01 percent of the population create an affective economy of misdirected rage, resentment, and retaliation, which finds its most egregious expression in the hateful and racist discourses of authoritarianism, buttressed by a kind of stupidity that is as banal as it is dangerous. The economic and pedagogical forces at work in the production of the banality of evil in reinforced in the registers of atomization, loneliness, and humiliation that often provide fertile ground for the rise of the fascistic sovereign. This was evident at the 2016 Republican National Convention when Donald Trump told his adoring crowd that “I am your voice. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.” As Yoni Appelbaum points out in The Atlantic, Trump “did not appeal to prayer, or to God. He did not ask Americans to measure him against their values, or to hold him responsible for living up to them. He did not ask for their help. He asked them to place their faith in him.”[5] And in doing so, he was greeted with sporadic emotional outburst that amounted to disturbing expressions of racism, hyper-nationalism and calls for lawlessness. According to Applebaum, “when Trump said, ‘I am your voice,’ the delegates on the convention floor roared their approval. When he said, “I alone can fix it,” they shouted their approbation. The crowd peppered his speech with chants of ‘USA!’ and ‘Lock her up!’ and ‘Build the wall!’ and ‘Trump!’ It booed on cue, and cheered when prompted.”[6]

In this instance, neoliberal values support and amplify what the Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.” Writing in the 1960s in the aftermath of the McCarthy period, Hofstadter made clear that the animosities, anger, “heated exaggerations, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantas[ies]” that characterize such a style were deeply rooted in American politics and history and did not simply apply “to men with profoundly disturbed minds.”[7] Such a paranoid style could only be understood with a broader social, cultural, and political context specific to a distinctive historical era. Hofstadter performed a theoretical service in providing a language for unpacking the new authoritarianism in American society. Building on Hofstadter’s insights, Trump represents more than the fascistic celebration of the heroic leader, there is also a systemic attempt to empty politics of its democratic impulses, repress debate and dialogue, and construct an anti-politics that thrives on conflict, on an enemy/friend divide, fueled by a rhetoric of demonization, objectification, and hatred. Under such circumstances, language becomes militarized, serving as an expression of politics in which persuasion becomes armed, wedded to the production of desires, modes of agency, and forms of identification compatible with political and economic forms of authoritarian domination. The friend/enemy divide creates the boundaries, borders, gate keeping, and circle of certainties that intensify the paranoid state of mind in the American polity while at the same time creating the foundation for new forms of totalitarianism unique to American society.

What is distinct about the current era is that such extremism has moved to the center of politics and has become the hallmark of a period characterized by the destruction of civil liberties, the emergence of what Mike Lofgren calls The Deep State,[8] mass surveillance, the militarization of everyday life, the widespread spectacle of violence, and a culture steeped in the mobilization of mass fear and cruelty. Donald Trump’s take over of the Republican Party alone cannot explain the emergence and embrace of right-wing populism among millions of Americans who as Beverly Bandler observes: “sport idiocy as a ‘badge of honor,’ cling to the discredited, silly birtherism, brazenly support serial lying, rampant xenophobia, racism, misogynism, [and] suggest that [Trump’s] political opponent is ‘the devil’.”[9]

We live in an era when knowledge has been replaced by information, and propaganda seeps into every institution in American society fueled by the billions of dollars provided advertisers, the Koch brothers, hedge fund criminals, bankers, the ultra-rich, and big corporations, all of whom provide the pedagogical parameters for what can be considered to falsely be acceptable ideas, views, and frames of reference. Screen culture is the new force of politics and it is signed, sealed, and delivered by powerful corporate interests, with some exceptions in the mainstream media and certainly a sprinkling of alternative views in online progressive sites such as Truthout, Truthdig, Counterpunch, and others, though such sites operate at the margins of American society. Combine the control by the rich of commanding cultural apparatuses such as the media and public and higher education with the Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United, which allowed politics to be flooded and controlled by big money and you have what Tom Engelhardt has rightly called the “first 1% elections” coupled with a dominant public pedagogy infused with insults, stupidity, insults, racism, and a toxic “sea of words and images.”[10]

Arend’t’s notion that evil becomes banal when it is normalized, supported by a culture in which thinking is seen as an act of stupidity and thoughtlessness provides the foundation for mass violence is crucial to understanding one of the most fundamental elements of American politics—an attack on all vestiges of critical thought and the institutions that support them. Hofstadter makes clear that such extremism has to be understood within broader historical, political, and cultural context and cannot be addressed in limited vocabulary of the eccentric or outlandish personality.

Both Arendt and Hofstadter offer fertile ground for addressing the question of what might be learned from the rise of the political and economic structures of domination in the current historical moment. Implicit in their work is the notion that any viable understanding of politics has to address the role of the educative nature of a politics as a powerful force that demoralizes and infantalizes consciousness, stunts any viable notion of agency, and embraces view of war that thrives on demonization, exclusion, and the production of losers. Central to such a task is expanding the notion of the political to include a notion of public pedagogy that would be fundamental to addressing matters of identity, consciousness, and agency. The teaching machines of the current era are not limited to simply schools but are found in multiple sites in society. Hence, addressing the ideological and structural forces that celebrate the inability to think, readily eliminate institutions and public spheres that make thinking possible, intensify the connection between non-thinking, thoughtlessness and the routinization of misery, human suffering, along with the destruction of the eco system should be at the heart of any viable movement for political and economic change. At stake here is the creation of a politics willing to address the distinctive challenges posed by the emergence of a digital age in which culture, power, and politics become more integrated and serve to reconstitute the ways in which people relate to themselves, others, and the larger world. What Arendt and Hofstadter teach us is that the task of politics in the age of an overabundance of information and knowledge is not to make politics a discourse limited to structural forms of domination but to broaden its meaning as part of a wider project of which pedagogy is central to how it understands, addresses, and shapes the world, particularly how it shapes memory, consciousness, and individual and social agency.

The emergence of Donald Trump, and the deeply corrupt Republican and Democratic political parties on the current American political scene exemplify how ignorance breeds corruption and endears a large number of people to falsehoods, venality, and carnival barking. The corruption of both the truth and politics is made all the easer since the American public have become habituated to overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has the time to crystalize into mature and informed thought. Leon Wieseltier is right in stating that “words cannot wait for thoughts and patience [becomes] a liability.”[11]Opinion outdoes reasoned and evidence based arguments and the power of expression degenerates into a spectacle. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in the spectacles of shock and violence.[12] Universities now labor under the burden of a neoliberal regime that celebrate the corporate model made famous by McDonalds. Knowledge is now instrumentalized, standardized, and collapses the distinction between education and training. Knowledge is packaged for easy consumption resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu[13].

Many of the commanding institutions that produce and distribute ideas—from the media to higher education—have become disimagination machines, tools for legitimating ignorance, stoking paranoid fantasies, legitimating conspiracy theories, and are central to the formation of an authoritarian politics that is gutting any vestige of democracy from the ideology, policies, and institutions that now shape American society. Education has lost its moral, political, and spiritual bearings just as teachers, union members, and other public servants across the country are being belittled and attacked by economic and religious fundamentalists. One consequence is that an increasing number of public spheres have become corporatized, employ a top-down authoritarian styles of power, mimic a business culture, and infantilizes the larger polity by removing the public from all forms of governance. Clearly all of these defining relations produced in a neoliberal social order have to be challenged and changed.

The rise of thoughtlessness and the inability to think along with the demonization of vulnerable others constitute a political epidemic and do not augur well for democracy. Americans live in a historical moment that annihilates thought. A culture of cruelty and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos in the United States is the new norm and one consequence is that democracy is on the verge of disappearing or has already disappeared! Where are the agents of democracy and the public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? What role will progressives play at a time when the very ability of the public’s ability to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues is disappearing? How might politics itself be rethought in order to address the pedagogical and structural conditions that contribute to the growing intensification of violence in all spheres of American society? What role should intellectuals, cultural workers, artists, writers, journalists, and others play as part of a broader struggle to reclaim a democratic imaginary and exercise a collective sense of civic courage? What is now clear is that not only is pedagogy linked to social change but also to the production of modes of agency and the institutions that make radical change possible. Education as a political force makes us both the subjects of and subject to relations of power. The key is to expand that insight so as to make education central to politics itself. That is a lesson we can learn from both Arendt and Hofstadter.

Notes.

[1] Surprisingly, a good take on this issue can be found in Thomas L. Friedman, “Trump’s Wink Wink to ‘Second Amendment People’,” The New York Times, [August 9, 2016] Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/opinion/trumps-ambiguous-wink-wink-to-second-amendment-people.html?_r=0; see also, David S. Cohen, “Trump’s Assassination Dog Whistle Was Even Scarier Than You Think,” Rolling Stone Magazine, [August 9, 2016]

Online: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trumps-assassination-dog-whistle-was-scarier-than-you-think-w433615

[2] Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil was first used in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Hofstadter phrase the paranoid style of politics gained prominence in his book of the same title.

[3] Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of politics and Religion since 9/11, (Polity Press, 2005).

[4] Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2013), p. 50.

[5] Yoni Applebaum, “I Alone Can Fix it,” The Atlantic (July 21, 2016). Online;http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/trump-rnc-speech-alone-fix-it/492557/

[6] Ibid., Applebaum.

[7] Richard Hofstadter, “The paranoid style in American politics.”Harper’s (November 1964). Onlinehttp://www.harpers.org/archive/1964/11/0014706. As mentioned above, his more extensive treatment of this idea appears in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, Reprint Edition, June 10, 2008).

[8] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016).

[9] Beverly Bandler, “Paranoid Right-Wing Extremism,” email posting on August 12, 2016 (personal correspondence).

[10] Tom Engelhardt, “Better than reality television: The 2016 election is proving to be the greatest show on Earth,” Salon (August 10, 2016). Online: http://www.salon.com/2016/08/10/better-than-reality-televisio_partner/

[11] Leon Wieseltier, “Among the Disrupted,” International New York Times (January 7, 2015). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/books/review/among-the-disrupted.html?_r=0

[12] Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights, 2016).

[13] Ulrich Beck, Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil (London: Polity Press, 2010, especially pages 53-59

Fuente del articulo: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/12/assassination-talk-the-banality-of-evil-and-the-paranoid-state-of-american-politics/

Fuente de la imagen: http://hablemosyopinemos.blogspot.com/2009/05/paranoia-porcina-porsiaca.html

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Neoliberal Savagery and the Assault on Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere

Henry Giroux

 

By Henry A. Giroux

Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers, or academics – are intensifying with alarming consequences for both higher education and the formative public spheres that make democracy possible. Hyper-capitalism or market fundamentalism has put higher education in its cross hairs and the result has been the ongoing transformation of higher education into an adjunct of the very rich and powerful corporate interests. Marina Warner has rightly called these assaults on higher education, “the new brutalism in academia.”[i] It may be worse than she suggests. In fact, the right-wing defense of the neoliberal dismantling of the university as a site of critical inquiry is more brazen and arrogant than anything we have seen in the past. What we are witnessing is an attack on universities not because they are failing, but because they are public. This is not just an attack on political liberty but also an attack on dissent, critical education, and any public institution that might exercise a democratizing influence on the nation. In this case the autonomy of institutions such as higher education, particularly public institutions are threatened as much by state politics as by corporate interests. How else to explain in neoliberal societies such as the U.S., U.K. and India the massive defunding of public institutions of higher education, the raising of tuition for students, and the closing of areas of study that do not translate immediately into profits for the corporate sector?

The hidden notion of politics that fuels this market-driven ideology is on display in a more Western-style form of neoliberalism in which the autonomy of democratizing institutions is under assault not only by the state but also by the rich, bankers, hedge fund managers, and the corporate elite. In this case, corporate sovereignty has replaced traditional state modes of governance that once supported higher education as a public good. That is, it is now mostly powerful corporate elites who despise the common good and who as the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee, points out “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies” who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.”[ii] Viewed as a private investment rather than a public good, universities are now construed as spaces where students are valued as human capital, courses are defined by consumer demand, and governance is based on the Walmart model of labour relations. For Coetzee, this attack on higher education, which is not only ideological but also increasingly relies on the repressive, militaristic arm of the punishing state, is a response to the democratization of the university that reached a highpoint in the 1960s all across the globe. In the last twenty years, the assault on the university as a center of critique, but also on intellectuals, student protesters, and the critical formative cultures that provide the foundation for a substantive democracy has only intensified.[iii]

Coetzee’s defense of education provides an important referent for those of us who believe that the university is nothing if it is not a public trust and social good; that is, a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the civic imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility, and the struggle for justice. Rather than defining the mission of the university by mimicking the logic of the market in terms of ideology, governance, and policy, the questions that should be asked at this crucial time in American history might raise the following issues: how might the mission of the university be understood with respect to safeguarding the interests of young people at a time of violence and war, the rise of a rampant anti-intellectualism, the emerging specter of authoritarianism, and the threat of nuclear and ecological devastation? What might it mean to define the university as a public good and democratic public sphere rather than as an institution that has aligned itself with market values and is more attentive to market fluctuations and investors than educating students to be critically engaged citizens? Or, as Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis write: “how will we form the next generation of … intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like?”[iv] As public spheres – once enlivened by broad engagements with common concerns – are being transformed into “spectacular spaces of consumption”,[v] financial looting, the flight from mutual obligations and social responsibilities has intensified and resulted in not only a devaluing of public life and the common good, but also a crisis in the radical imagination, especially in terms of the meaning and value of politics itself.[vi]

What I am suggesting is that the crisis of higher education is about much more than a crisis of funding, an assault on dissent, and a remaking of higher education as another institution designed to serve the increasing financialization of neoliberal driven societies; it is also about a crisis of memory, agency, and the political. As major newspapers all over the country shut down and the media becomes more concentrated in the hands of fewer mega corporations, higher education becomes one of the few sites left where the ideas, attitudes, values, and goals can be taught that enable students to question authority, rethink the nature of their relationship with others in terms of democratic rather than commercial values, and take seriously the impending challenges of developing a global democracy.

The apostles of predatory capitalism are well aware that no democracy can survive without an informed citizenry, and they implement a range of policies to make sure that higher education will no longer fulfill such a noble civic task. This is evident in the business models imposed on governing structures, defining students as customers, reducing faculty to Wal-Mart workers, imposing punishing accounting models on educators, and expanding the ranks of the managerial class at the expense of the power of faculty.

As politics is removed from its political, moral, and ethical registers – stripped down to a machine of social and political death for whom the cultivation of the imagination is a hindrance, commerce is the heartbeat of social relations, and the only mode of governance that matters is one that rules Wall Street. Time and space have been privatized, commodified, and stripped of human compassion under the reign of neoliberalism. We live in the age of a new brutalism marked not simply by an indifference to multiple social problems, but also defined by a kind of mad delight in the spectacle and exercise of violence and what the famed film director, Ken Loach, has called “conscious cruelty.”[vii] America is marked by a brutalism that is perfectly consistent with a new kind of barbaric power, one that puts millions of people in prison, subjects an entire generation to a form of indentured citizenship, and strips people of the material and symbolic resources they need to exercise their capacity to live with dignity and justice.

For those of us who believe that education is more than an extension of the business world and the new brutalism, it is crucial that educators, artists, workers, labour unions, and other cultural workers address a number of issues that connect the university to the larger society while stressing the educative nature of politics as part of a broader effort to create a critical culture, institutions, and a collective movement that supports the connection between critique and action and redefines agency in the service of the practice of freedom and justice. Let me mention just a few. 

First, educators can address the relationship between the attack on the social state and the transformation of higher education into an adjunct corporate power. As Stefan Collini has argued, under the regime of neoliberalism, the “social self” has been transformed into the “disembedded individual,” just as the notion of the university as a public good is now repudiated by the privatizing and atomistic values at the heart of a hyper-market driven society.[viii] Clearly, in any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement. This suggests a reordering of state and federal priorities to make that happen. Much needed revenue can be raised by putting into play even a limited number of  reform policies in which, for instance, the rich and corporations would be forced to pay a fair share of their taxes, a tax would be placed on trade transactions, and tax loopholes for the wealthy would be eliminated. It is well known that the low tax rate given to corporations is a major scandal. For instance, the Bank of America paid no taxes in 2010 and “got $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits.”[ix]

In addition, academics can join with students, public school teachers, unions, and others to bring attention to wasteful military spending that if eliminated could provide the funds for a free public higher education for every qualified young person in the country. While there is growing public concern over rising tuition rates along with the crushing debt students are incurring, there is little public outrage from academics over the billions of dollars squandered on a massive and wasteful military budget and arms industry. As Michael Lerner has pointed out, democracy needs a Marshall Plan in which funding is sufficient to make all levels of education free, while also providing enough social support to eliminate poverty, hunger, inadequate health care, and the destruction of the environment. There is nothing utopian about the demand to redirect money away from the military, the powerful corporations, and the upper 1 percent. 

Second, addressing these tasks demands a sustained critique of the transformation of a market economy into a market society along with a clear analysis of the damage it has caused both at home and abroad. Power, particularly the power of the largest corporations, has become more unaccountable and “the subtlety of illegitimate power makes it hard to identify.”[x] Disposability has become the new measure of a savage form of casino capitalism in which the only value that matters is exchange value. Compassion, social responsibility, and justice are relegated to the dustbin of an older modernity that now is viewed as either quaint or a grim reminder of a socialist past. This suggests, as Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and others have argued, that there is a need for academics and young people to become part of a broader social movement aimed at dismantling the repressive institutions that make up the punishing state. The most egregious example of this is the prison-industrial complex, which drains billions of dollars in funds to put people in jail when such funds could be used for expanding public and higher education.We live in a country in which the police have become militarized, armed with weapons from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.[xi] The United States prison system locks up more people than any other country in the world, and the vast majority of them are people of color.[xii] Moreover, public schools are increasingly modeled after prisons and are implementing policies in which children are arrested for throwing peanuts at a school bus or violating a dress code.[xiii] The punishing state is a dire threat to both public and higher education and democracy itself. The American public does not need more prisons; it needs more schools, free health services, and a living wage for all workers.  

Third, academics, artists, journalists, and other young people need to connect the rise of subaltern, part-time labour – or what we might call the Walmart model of wealth and labour relations – in both the university and the larger society to the massive inequality in wealth and income that now corrupts every aspect of American politics and society. No democracy can survive the kind of inequality in which “the 400 richest people…have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire country [while] the top economic 1 percent of the U.S. population now has a record 40 percent of all wealth and more wealth than 90 percent of the population combined.”[xiv] Senator Bernie Sanders provides a statistical map of the massive inequality at work in the United States. In a speech to the U.S. Senate, he states:

Today, Madam President, the top 1% owns 38% of the financial wealth of America, 38%. And I wonder how many Americans know how much the bottom 60% own. They want people to think about it. Top 1% own 38% of the wealth. What do the bottom 60% own? The answer is all of 2.3%. Top 1% owns 38% of the financial wealth. The bottom 60% owns 2.3%. Madam President, there is one family in this country, the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart, who are now worth as a family $148 billion. That is more wealth than the bottom 40% of American society. One family owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of American society…That’s distribution of wealth. That’s what we own. In terms of income, what we made last year, the latest information that we have in terms of distribution of income is that from 2009-2012, 95% of all new income earned in this country went to the top 1%. Have you all got that? 95% of all new income went to the top 1%, which tells us that when we talk about economic growth, which is 2%, 3%, 4%, whatever it is, that really doesn’t mean all that much because almost all of the new income generated in that growth has gone to the very, very, very wealthiest people in this country.[xv]

Democracy in the United States, and many other countries, has been hijacked by a free-floating class of ultra-rich and corporate powerbrokers and transformed into an oligarchy “where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals.”[xvi] At least, this is the conclusion of a recent Princeton University study, and it may be much too moderate in its conclusions. 

Fourth, academics need to fight for the rights of students to get a free education, for them to be given a formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values, and to have a say in the shaping of their education and what it means to expand and deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. In many countries such as Germany, France, Denmark, Cuba, and Brazil, post-secondary education is free because these countries view education not as a private right but as a public good. Yet, in some of the most advanced countries in the world such as the United States and Canada, young people, especially from low income groups have been excluded from getting a higher education and, in part, this is because they are left out of the social contract and the discourse of democracy. They are the new disposables who lack jobs, a decent education, hope, and any semblance of a life better than the one their parents inherited. They are a reminder of how finance capital has abandoned any viable vision of a better future for young people. Youth have become a liability in the world of high finance, a world that refuses to view them as an important social investment. 

Fifth, there is a need to oppose the ongoing shift in power relations between faculty and the managerial class. Too many faculty are now removed from the governing structure of higher education and as a result have been abandoned to the misery of impoverished wages, excessive classes, no health care, and few, if any, social benefits. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsburg points out, administrators and their staff now outnumber full time faculty producing two-thirds of the increase in higher education costs in the past 20 years. This is shameful and is not merely an education issue but a deeply political matter, one that must address how neoliberal ideology and policy has imposed on higher education an anti-democratic governing structure. 

Sixth, it is important to stress once again that education must be viewed not simply as a practice endemic to schooling but goes on throughout society through a range of cultural apparatuses extending from the mainstream media to various aspects of screen culture. Education is at the center of politics because it is crucial to how agency is formed, how people view themselves and their relations to others. Educators and other cultural workers must acknowledge that domination is as much ideological as it is economic and structural. This means taking on the challenge of embracing the symbolic and ideological dimensions of struggle as part of the struggle against oppression and domination. Educators need to launch pedagogical campaigns aimed at dismantling the common sense logic of neoliberalism: people are only consumers, government is the enemy, the market should govern all of social life, social bonds are a pathology, self-interest is the highest virtue, and last but not least the market should govern itself. University faculty must join together and find ways to press the claims for economic and social justice and do so in a discourse that is aimed at multiple audiences and is both rigorous and accessible. Universities need to defend not only the idea of the university as a democratic public sphere but also faculty as public intellectuals capable and willing to question authority, hold power accountable, and be critical of existing affairs.

Finally, seventh, the fight to transform higher education cannot be waged strictly inside the walls of such institutions by faculty and students alone. As radical social movements more recently in Spain, Portugal, and India have made clear, there is a need for new social and political formations among faculty, unions, young people, cultural workers, and most importantly social movements, all of which need to be organized in part for the defense of public goods and what might be called the promise and ideals of a radical democracy. Any struggle against the anti-democratic forces that are mobilizing once again all over the world must recognize that power is not global and politics is local. A financial elite operates now in the flow and international spaces of capital and have no allegiances to nation-states and can impose their financial will on these states as we have seen recently in some European countries. Resistance must address this new power formation and think and organize across national boundaries. Resistance on a global level is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Neoliberal societies now live in the shadow of the authoritarian corporate state, but the future is still open. The time has come to develop a political language in which civic values and social responsibility – and the institutions, tactics, and long-term commitments that support them – become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic engagement, a renewed sense of social agency, and an impassioned international social movement with the vision, organization, and set of strategies capable of challenging the neoliberal nightmare that now haunts the globe and empties out the meaning of politics and democracy.

Photo: Google Images

[i] Marina Warner, “Dairy,” The London Review of Books 36:17, September 11, 2014.

[ii]JM Coetzee, “JM Coetzee: Universities head for extinction” Mail & Guardian, November 1, 2013.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 139.

[v] Steven Miles, Social Theory in the Real World (Thousand Oaks, Sage, 2001), p. 116.

[vi] Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

[vii] Fran Blandy, “Loach film on shame of poverty in Britain moves Cannes to tears,” Yahoo News, May 13, 2016.

[viii] These two terms are taken from Stefan Collini, “Response to Book Review Symposium: Stefan Collini, What are Universities For,” Sociology 1-2 (February 5, 2014).

[ix] Michael Snyder, “You won’t believe who is getting away with paying zero taxes while the middle class gets hammered,” InfoWars.com, February 19, 2013.

[x] Susan George, “State of Corporations: The Rise of Illegitimate Power and the Threat to Democracy,” in Transnational Institute and Occupy.com. State of Power 2014: Exposing the Davos Class (February 2014).

[xi] Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), and Jill Nelson, ed. Police Brutality (New York: Norton, 2000).

[xii] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2010).

[xiii] Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society (New York: Palgrave, 2012).

 [xiv] David DeGraw, “Meet the Global Financial Elites Controlling $46 Trillion in Wealth,”Alternet, August 11, 2011.

[xv] Sen. Bernie Sanders, “A Threat to American Democracy,” RSN, April 1 , 2014

[xvi] Tom McKay, “Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy,” Popular Resistance, April 16, 2014.

Bio:
Henry A. Giroux is University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His many books include Theory and Resistance in Education(1983), Critical Theory and Educational Practice (1983), Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (1988), Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (1992),Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Culture (1993), Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope Theory, Culture, and Schooling (1997), Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies(2000), Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (2003), Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post Civil Rights Era (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2004), The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy(2004), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007),Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (2009), America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (2013), and America’s Addiction to Terrorism (2016).

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Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age

Henry Giroux

Henry A. Giroux

This week, Donald Trump lowered the bar even further by attacking the Muslim parents of US Army Captain Humayan Khan, who was killed in 2004 by a suicide bomber while he was trying to save the lives of the men in his unit.

This stunt was just the latest example of his chillingly successful media strategy, which is based not on changing consciousness but on freezing it within a flood of shocks, sensations and simplistic views. It was of a piece with Trump’s past provocations, such as his assertion that Mexicans who illegally entered the country are rapists and drug dealers, his effort to defame Fox News host Megyn Kelly by referring to her menstrual cycle, and his questioning of the heroism and bravery of former prisoner-of-war Senator John McCain. This media strategy only succeeds due to the deep cultural and political effects of neoliberalism in our society — effects that include widespread atomization and depoliticization.

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, «Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016.»

I have recently returned to reading Leo Lowenthal, particularly his insightful essay, «Terror’s Atomization of Man,» first published in the January 1, 1946 issue of Commentary and reprinted in his book, False Prophets: Studies in Authoritarianism. He writes about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear that approximates a kind of updated fascist terror. What he understood with great insight, even in 1946, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational, political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible. He observed that atomized individuals are not only prone to the forces of depoliticization but also to the false swindle and spirit of demagogues, to discourses of hate, and to appeals that demonize and objectify the Other.

Lowenthal is helpful in illuminating the relationship between the underlying isolation individuals feel in an age of precarity, uncertainty and disposability and the dark shadows of authoritarianism threatening to overcome the United States. Within this new historical conjuncture, finance capital rules, producing extremes of wealth for the 1 percent, promoting cuts to government services, and defunding investments in public goods, such as public and higher education, in order to offset tax reductions for the ultra-rich and big corporations. Meanwhile millions are plunged into either the end-station of poverty or become part of the mass incarceration state. Mass fear is normalized as violence increasingly becomes the default logic for handling social problems. In an age where everything is for sale, ethical accountability is rendered a liability and the vocabulary of empathy is viewed as a weakness, reinforced by the view that individual happiness and its endless search for instant gratification is more important than supporting the public good and embracing an obligation to care for others. Americans are now pitted against each other as neoliberalism puts a premium on competitive cage-like relations that degrade collaboration and the public spheres that support it.

To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

Within neoliberal ideology, an emphasis on competition in every sphere of life promotes a winner-take-all ethos that finds its ultimate expression in the assertion that fairness has no place in a society dominated by winners and losers. As William Davies points out, competition in a market-driven social order allows a small group of winners to emerge while at the same time sorting out and condemning the vast majority of institutions, organizations and individuals «to the status of losers.»

As has been made clear in the much publicized language of Donald Trump, both as a reality TV host of «The Apprentice» and as a presidential candidate, calling someone a «loser» has little to do with them losing in the more general sense of the term. On the contrary, in a culture that trades in cruelty and divorces politics from matters of ethics and social responsibility, «loser» is now elevated to a pejorative insult that humiliates and justifies not only symbolic violence, but also (as Trump has made clear in many of his rallies) real acts of violence waged against his critics, such as members of the Movement for Black Lives. AsGreg Elmer and Paula Todd observe, «to lose is possible, but to be a ‘loser’ is the ultimate humiliation that justifies taking extreme, even immoral measures.» They write:

We argue that the Trumpesque «loser» serves as a potent new political symbol, a caricature that Trump has previously deployed in his television and business careers to sidestep complex social issues and justify winning at all costs. As the commercial for his 1980s board game «Trump» enthused, «It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win!» Indeed, in Trump’s world, for some to win many more must lose, which helps explain the breath-taking embrace by some of his racist, xenophobic, and misogynist communication strategy. The more losers — delineated by Trump based on every form of «otherism» — the better the odds of victory.

Atomization fueled by a fervor for unbridled individualism produces a pathological disdain for community, public values and the public good. As democratic pressures are weakened, authoritarian societies resort to fear, so as to ward off any room for ideals, visions and hope. Efforts to keep this room open are made all the more difficult by the ethically tranquilizing presence of a celebrity and commodity culture that works to depoliticize people. The realms of the political and the social imagination wither as shared responsibilities and obligations give way to an individualized society that elevates selfishness, avarice and militaristic modes of competition as its highest organizing principles.

Under such circumstances, the foundations for stability are being destroyed, with jobs being shipped overseas, social provisions destroyed, the social state hollowed out, public servants and workers under a relentless attack, students burdened with the rise of a neoliberal debt machine, and many groups considered disposable. At the same time, these acts of permanent repression are coupled with new configurations of power and militarization normalized by a neoliberal regime in which an ideology of mercilessness has become normalized; under such conditions, one dispenses with any notion of compassion and holds others responsible for problems they face, problems over which they have no control. In this case, shared responsibilities and hopes have been replaced by the isolating logic of individual responsibility, a false notion of resiliency, and a growing resentment toward those viewed as strangers.

We live in an age of death-dealing loneliness, isolation and militarized atomization. If you believe the popular press, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions in advanced industrial societies. A few indices include the climbing suicide rate of adolescent girls; the rising deaths of working-class, less-educated white men; and the growing drug overdose crises raging across small towns and cities throughout America. Meanwhile, many people often interact more with their cell phones, tablets and computers than they do with embodied subjects. Disembodiment in this view is at the heart of a deeply alienating neoliberal society in which people shun in-person relationships for virtual ones. In this view, the warm glow of the computer screen can produce and reinforce a new type of alienation, isolation and sense of loneliness. At the same time, it is important to note that in some cases digital technologies have also enabled young people who are hyper-connected to their peers online to increase their face-to-face time by coordinating spontaneous meetups, in addition to staying connected with each other near-constantly virtually. How this dialectic plays out will in part be determined by the degree to which young people can be educated to embrace modes of agency in which a connection to other human beings, however diverse, becomes central to their understanding of the value of creating bonds of sociality.

Needless to say, however, blaming the internet itself — which has also helped forge connections, and has facilitated movement-building and much wider accessibility of information — is too easy. We live in a society in which notions of dependence, compassion, mutuality, care for the other and sociality are undermined by a neoliberal ethic in which self-interest and greed become the organizing principles of one’s life and a survival-of-the fittest ethic breeds a culture that at best promotes an indifference to the plight of others and at worst, a disdain for the less fortunate and support for a widespread culture of cruelty. Isolated individuals do not make up a healthy democratic society.

New Forms of Alienation and Isolation

A more theoretical language produced by Marx talked about alienation as a separation from the fruits of one’s labor. While that is certainly truer than ever, the separation and isolation now is more extensive and governs the entirety of social life in a consumer-based society run by the demands of commerce and the financialization of everything. Isolation, privatization and the cold logic of instrumental rationality have created a new kind of social formation and social order in which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections, a sense of intimacy, and long term commitments.

Neoliberalism fosters the viewing of pain and suffering as entertainment, warfare a permanent state of existence, and militarism as the most powerful force shaping masculinity. Politics has taken an exit from ethics and thus the issue of social costs is divorced from any form of intervention in the world. For example, under neoliberalism, economic activity is removed from its ethical and social consequences and takes a flight from any type of moral consideration. This is the ideological metrics of political zombies. The key word here is atomization, and it is the defining feature of neoliberal societies and the scourge of democracy.

At the heart of any type of politics wishing to challenge this flight into authoritarianism is not merely the recognition of economic structures of domination, but something more profound — a politics which points to the construction of particular identities, values, social relations, or more broadly, agency itself. Central to such a recognition is the fact that politics cannot exist without people investing something of themselves in the discourses, images and representations that come at them daily. Rather than suffering alone, lured into the frenzy of hateful emotion, individuals need to be able to identify — see themselves and their daily lives — within progressive critiques of existing forms of domination and how they might address such issues not individually but collectively. This is a particularly difficult challenge today because the menace of atomization is reinforced daily not only by a coordinated neoliberal assault against any viable notion of the social but also by an authoritarian and finance-based culture that couples a rigid notion of privatization with a flight from any sense of social and moral responsibility.

The culture apparatuses controlled by the 1 percent, including the mainstream media and entertainment industries, are the most powerful educational forces in society and they have become disimagination machines — apparatuses of misrecognition and brutality. Collective agency is now atomized, devoid of any viable embrace of the social. Under such circumstances, domination does not merely repress through its apparatuses of terror and violence, but also — as Pierre Bourdieu argues — through the intellectual and pedagogical, which «lie on the side of belief and persuasion.» Too many people on the left have defaulted on this enormous responsibility for recognizing the educative nature of politics and the need for appropriating the tools, if not weapons, provided by the symbolic and pedagogical for challenging this form of domination, working to change consciousness, and making education central to politics itself.

Donald Trump’s Media Strategy

Donald Trump plays the media because he gets all of this. His media strategy is aimed at erasing memory, thoughtfulness and critical dialogue. For Trump, miseducation is the key to getting elected. The issue here is not about the existing reign of civic illiteracy, it is about the crisis of agency, the forces that produce it, and the failure of progressives and the left to take such a crisis seriously by working hard to address the ideological and pedagogical dimensions of struggle. All of which is necessary in order, at the very least, to get people to be able to translate private troubles into wider social issues. The latter may be the biggest political and educational challenge facing those who believe that the current political crisis is not simply about either the election of Trump, the ruling-class carnival barker, or Clinton, the warmonger, both of whom are in the end different types of cheerleaders for the financial elite and big corporations.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that Trump represents the more immediate threat, especially for people of color. As the apotheosis of a brutal, racist, fascist expression of neoliberalism, Trump would eliminate 21 million from the ranks of those insured under Obamacare, would deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and would stack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues who would implement reactionary polices for the next few decades.

At stake here is a different type of conflict between those who believe in democracy and those who don’t. The upcoming election will not address the ensuing crisis, which is really a fight for the soul of democracy. One consequence will be that millions one way or another will once again bear the burden of a society that hates democracy and punishes all but the financial elite. Both candidates and the economic and political forces they represent are part of the problem and offer up different forms of domination. What is crucial for progressives to recognize is that it is imperative to make clear that neoliberal economic structures register only one part of the logic of repression. The other side is the colonization of consciousness, the production of modes of agency complicit with their own oppression.

This dual register of politics, which has been highlighted by theorists extending from Hannah Arendt and Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams and C. Wright Mills, has a long history but has been pushed to the margins under neoliberal regimes of oppression. Once again, any viable notion of collective resistance must take matters of consciousness, identity, desire and persuasion seriously, so as to speak to the underlying conditions of atomization that depoliticize and paralyze people within orbits of self-interest, greed, resentment, misdirected anger and spiraling violence.

Addressing the affective and ideological dimensions not only of neoliberalism but also of the radical imagination is crucial to waking us all up to our ability to work together, recognize the larger social and systemic structures that dominate our lives, and provide each other with the tools to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues. The power of the social does not only come together in social movements; it is also central to the educative force of a politics that embraces democratic social relations as the foundation for collective action.

Overcoming the atomization inherent in neoliberal regimes means making clear how they destroy every vestige of solidarity in the interest of amassing huge amounts of wealth and power while successfully paralyzing vast numbers of people in the depoliticizing orbits of privatization and self-interest. Of course, we see examples of movements that embrace solidarity as an act of collective resistance — most visibly, the Movement for Black Lives. This is model that needs to take on a more general political significance in which the violence of apparatuses of oppression can be connected to a politics of atomization that must be addressed as both an educational and political issue. Neoliberal precarity, austerity and the militarization of society inflict violence not just on the body but on the psyche as well. This means that the crisis of economic structures must be understood as part of the crisis of memory, thinking, hope and agency itself.

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Teorías de la reproduccion y la resistencia en la nueva sociologia de la educacion: un analisis critico

Henry Giroux

América del Norte/ EEUU/ Septiembre 2016/http://www.pedagogica.edu.co

Teorías de la reproduccion y la resistencia en la nueva sociologia de la educacion: un analisis critico  parte III. por Henry A. Giroux

Hacia una teoría de la resistencia “Resistencia” es un valioso constructo (concepto) teórico e ideológico que provee un foco importante para analizar la relación entre la escuela y la sociedad más amplia y más importante aun, provee un nuevo medio para comprender las complejas maneras en que los grupos subordinados experimentan el fracaso escolar, señalando nuevas maneras de pensar y reestructurar modos (posturas) de pedagogía crítica. Como he notado, el uso corriente del concepto de resistencia por parte de los educadores radicales sugiere una falta de rigor intelectual y una sobredosis de “sloppines” teórica.

Es imperativo que los educadores sean más precisos sobre lo que “resistencia” realmente es y lo que no es, y sean más específicos sobre cómo el concepto puede usarse para desarrollar una pedagogía crítica. También es claro que es necesario considerar más extensamente la racionalidad del empleo del concepto. Discutiré ahora estas ideas y delinearé brevemente algunos conceptos teóricos básicos para desarrollar un fundamento más riguroso intelectualmente y útil políticamente para realizar tal tarea. En el sentido más general, la resistencia debe ubicarse en una racionalidad teórica que provee un nuevo contexto para examinar las escuelas como sitios sociales que estructuran la experiencia de los grupos subordinados.

El concepto de resistencia, en otras palabras, representa más que un nuevo hallazgo (catchword) heurístico en el lenguaje de la pedagogía radical, describe un modo de discurso que rechaza las explicaciones tradicionales del fracaso escolar y las conductas de oposición y lleva el 84 Jean Cohen, review of Theory and Need in Marx, by Agnes Heller, Telos, 33 (1977), 170-184. 85 Para un excelente análisis de las relaciones entre marxismo y psicoanálisis, véase las diferentes Interpretaciones de Richard Lichtman, The production of Desire (New York: Free Press, 1982; and Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press. 1973). análisis de la conducta de oposición del terreno teórico del funcionalismo y las principales corrientes en psicología educacional, al terreno de la ciencia política y sociología. “Resistencia” en este caso, redefine las causas y significado de la conducta de oposición sosteniendo que tiene poco que ver con la desviación y la “Helplessness” aprendida pero que tiene mucho que ver con la indignación política y moral.

Además de cambiar la base teórica para analizar la conducta de oposición, el concepto de resistencia señala un número de supuestos (assumtions) y expresiones (ideasconcerns) sobre la escolarización que son generalmente descuidadas en las visiones tradicionales de la escuela y las teorías radicales de la reproducción. Primero, celebra una noción dialéctica del agenciamiento humano que describe correctamente a la dominación como un proceso ni estático ni completo. Concomitantemente, no se ve a los oprimidos como simplemente pasivos frente a la dominación.

La noción de resistencia señaló la necesidad de comprender más profundamente las complejas maneras en que la gente mediatiza y responde a la conexión entre sus propias experiencias y las estructuras de dominación y limitaciones (constraint). Las categorías centrales que emergen en una teoría de la resistencia son intencionalidad, conciencia, el significado del sentido común y la naturaleza y valor de la conducta no discursiva.

Segundo, la resistencia agrega nueva profundidad a la noción de que el poder es ejercido sobre y por la gente dentro de diferentes contextos que estructuran las relaciones interactuantes de dominación y autonomía. Entonces, el poder no es nunca unidimensional, es ejercido no sólo como un modo de dominación sino también como un acto de resistencia.

Por último, es inherente a una noción radical de resistencia, un deseo manifiesto de una transformación radical, un elemento de trascendencia que parece estar faltando en las teorías radicales de la educación, que parecen estar atrapadas en el cementerio teórico del pesimismo Orwelliano. En adición al desarrollo de una racionalidad para la noción de resistencia, hay una necesidad de formular criterios contra los cuales el término pueda ser definido como una categoría central de análisis en las teorías de escolarización.

En el sentido más general, pienso que la resistencia debe situarse en una perspectiva que tome a la noción de emancipación como un interés-guía. Esto es, la naturaleza y significado de un acto de resistencia deben ser definidos por el grado en el cual contiene posibilidades de desarrollar lo que Herbert Marcuse denomino “un contenido de emancipación de la sensibilidad, imaginación y razón en todas las esferas de la subjetividad y objetividad”86.

Entonces, el elemento central para analizar cualquier acto de resistencia debe concernir con el descubrimiento del grado en que este ilumina, implícita y explícitamente, la necesidad de luchar contra la dominación y la sumisión. En otras palabras, el concepto de resistencia debe tener una función reveladora que contenga una crítica de la dominación y provea oportunidades teóricas para la auto-reflexión (self-reflection) y lucha en el interés de la emancipación propia y social con el grado en que la conducta de oposición suprima las contradicciones sociales mientras simultáneamente “emergíng with”, en lugar de criticar, la lógica de la dominación ideológica, no cae en la categoría de resistencia sino en su opuesto: acomodación y conformismo.

El valor del concepto de resistencia reside en su función crítica y en su potencial para utilizar las posibilidades radicales incluidas en su propia lógica y los intereses contenidos en el objeto de su expresión.

En otras palabras, el concepto de resistencia representa un elemento de diferencia, de 86 Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977). contra lógica que debe ser analizado para revelar su interés subyacente en la libertad y su rechazo de esas formas de dominación inherentes en las relaciones sociales contra los que reacciona.

Por supuesto, este es un conjunto más bien general de stándares sobre los cuales apoyar la noción de resistencia, pero provee una noción de interés y un “scaffold” teórico sobre el cual hacer una distinción entre formas de conducta de oposición que pueden ser usadas o bien para el mejoramiento de la vida humana o para la destrucción y la denigración de valores humanos básicos. Algunos actos de resistencia revelan bastante visiblemente su potencial radical, mientras otros son más bien ambiguos, otros aún pueden revelar nada más que una afinidad por la lógica de la dominación y destrucción.

Es el área ambigua que yo quiero analizar brevemente ya que las otras dos se explican por sí mismas. Recientemente, oía un educador radical sostener que los maestros que corren a casa temprano después de la escuela están, efectivamente, cometiendo actos de resistencia. Ella también sostenía que los maestros que no se preparan adecuadamente para sus lecciones de clase participan en una forma de resistencia también.

Por supuesto, es igualmente sostenible (debatible) que los maestros en cuestión son simplemente holgazanes, que se preocupan muy poco por enseñar y que lo que en efecto se muestra no es resistencia sino conducta no profesional y no ética. En estos casos, no hay una respuesta lógica y convincente a ningún argumento. Las conductas descritas no hablan por sí mismas.

Llamarlas resistencia es transformar el concepto en un término que no tiene precisión analítica. En casos como estos, uno debe ligar la conducta bajo análisis con una interpretación provista por los sujetos mismos o hurgar profundamente las condiciones históricas y relacionadas desde la cual se desarrollan las conductas. Sólo entonces se revelará el interés incluido en tales conductas. Se sigue de mi argumento que los intereses subyacentes de una forma específica de conducta pueden hacerse claros una vez que la naturaleza de tal conducta es interpretada por la persona que lo exhibe.

Pero no quiero decir que tales intereses serán revelados automáticamente. Los individuos pueden no ser capaces de explicar las nociones de sus conductas, o la interpretación puede estar distorsionada. En este caso, el interés subyacente en tal conducta puede ser iluminado contrastando con el fondo de prácticas y valores sociales del cual emerge esa conducta.

Tal referencia debe encontrarse en las condiciones históricas que promovieron la conducta, los valores colectivos del grupo de pares, o las prácticas incluidas en otros sitios sociales tales como la familia, el lugar de trabajo o la iglesia. Quiero acentuar que el concepto de resistencia no debe transformarse en una categoría colgada indiscriminadamente sobre cada expresión de conducta de oposición”. Por el contrario, debe devenir un constructo analítico y un modo de averiguar (inquiry) que es autocrítico (self-critical) y sensible a sus propios intereses, conciencia radical en aumento y una acción colectiva crítica.

Volvamos a la cuestión de cómo definimos resistencia y cómo vemos las conductas de oposición, y a las implicaciones para hacer tales distinciones. En un nivel, es importante ser preciso teóricamente sobre cuáles formas de conducta de oposición constituyen la resistencia y cuáles no. En otro nivel, es igualmente importante sostener que todas las formas de conducta de oposición representan un punto focal para el análisis crítico y deben ser analizadas para ver si representan una forma de resistencia, descubriendo sus intereses emancipatorios.

Es una cuestión de precisión y definición teórica y por otro lado, como una cuestión de estrategia radical, todas las formas de conductas de oposición, realmente de resistencia o no, deben ser examinadas para su posible uso como base para un análisis crítico. Entonces, la conducta de oposición deviene el objeto de clarificación teórica y el sujeto de consideraciones pedagógicas.

En un nivel más filosófico, quiero acentuar que el constructo teórico de la resistencia rechaza la noción positivista de que el significado de conducta es sinónimo de una lectura literal basada en la acción inmediata. En cambio, se debe ver a la resistencia desde un punto de partida teórico que liga la manifestación de la conducta con el interés que ella encierra, yendo más allá de la inmediatez de la conducta al interés que subyace a su lógica frecuentemente oculta, una lógica que también debe ser interpretada a través de las mediaciones histórica y culturales que la conforman. Finalmente, quiero enfatizar que el valor último de la noción de resistencia debe ser medido no sólo por el grado en que promueve pensamiento crítico y acción reflexiva sino, más importante aún, por el grado en que contiene la posibilidad de galvanizar la lucha política colectiva entre padres, maestros y estudiantes alrededor de las ideas de poder y determinación social.

Discutiré ahora brevemente el valor de una noción dialéctica de resistencia para una teoría crítica de escolarización. El valor pedagógico de la resistencia se apoya, en parte, en las conexiones que hace entre estructura y agenciamiento humano por un lado y la cultura y el proceso de autoformación por el otro. La teoría de la resistencia rechaza la idea de que las escuelas son sitios simplemente instruccionales, no sólo politizando la noción de cultura sino analizando también las culturas escolares dentro del convulsionado terreno de la lucha y la protesta.

En efecto, esto representa un nuevo contexto teórico para comprender el proceso de escolarización que ubica el conocimiento, valores y relaciones sociales educativas dentro del contexto de relaciones antagónicas y las examina dentro del interjuego de las culturas escolares dominante y subordinado. Cuando se incorpora una teoría de la resistencia a la pedagogía radical, los elementos de la conducta de oposición en las escuelas devienen el punto focal para analizar relaciones sociales y experiencias diferentes, frecuentemente antagónicas, entre los estudiantes de la cultura dominante y subordinado.

Dentro de este modelo de análisis crítico se vuelve posible iluminar cómo los estudiantes pueden con los limitados recursos a su disposición reafirmar las dimensiones positivas de sus propias culturas e historias. La teoría de la resistencia ilumina la complejidad de respuestas de los estudiantes a la lógica de la escolarización.

En consecuencia, ilumina la necesidad de los educadores radicales de develar cómo la conducta de oposición frecuentemente emerge dentro de formas de conciencia contradictorias que no están nunca libres de la racionalidad reproductiva incluida en las relaciones sociales del capitalismo.

Una pedagogía radical, entonces debe reconocer que la resistencia estudiantil en todas sus formas representa en sus manifestaciones de lucha y solidaridad que en su incompletitud (incompleteness), a la vez critican (challenge) y confirman la hegemonía capitalista. Lo que es más importante es la voluntad de los educadores radicales de buscar los intereses emancipatorios que subyacen a tal resistencia y hacerlos visibles a los estudiantes y a otros como para que puedan ser objeto de debate y análisis político.

Una teoría de la resistencia es central para el desarrollo de una pedagogía radical por otras razones también. Ayuda a traer al foco aquellas prácticas sociales en las escuelas cuyo objetivo final es el control del proceso de aprendizaje y la capacidad para el pensamiento crítico y la acción. Por ejemplo, señala a la ideología subyacente del currículum hegemónico, a sus cuerpos de conocimiento jerárquicamente organizados, y particularmente a la manera en que este curriculum margina o descalifica el conocimiento de la clase trabajadora tanto como el conocimiento sobre la mujer y las minorías.

Más aún, la teoría de la resistencia revela la ideología que subyace en tal curriculum, con sus énfasis en la apropiación del conocimiento individual más que grupal (colectivo) y cómo este énfasis conduce a un “wedge” entre los estudiantes de las diferentes clases sociales. Esto es particularmente evidente en las diferentes aproximaciones al conocimiento llevadas a cabo en muchas familias de clase trabajadora y clase media.

El conocimiento en la cultura de la clase trabajadora es frecuentemente construido sobre los principios de la solidaridad y el compartir, mientras que dentro de la cultura de clase media, el conocimiento se forja en competencia individual y visto como una barrera de separación. En resumen, la teoría de la resistencia llama la atención sobre la necesidad que tienen los educadores radicales de descubrir (develar) los intereses ideológicos incluidos en los variados sistemas de mensajes de la escuela, particularmente aquellos encerrados en el curriculum, sistema de instrucción y modos de evaluación.

Lo que es más importante es que la teoría de la resistencia refuerza la necesidad de los educadores radicales de descifrar cómo las formas de producción cultural mostradas por los grupos subordinados, pueden ser analizados para revelar sus limitaciones y sus posibilidades para permitir un pensamiento crítico, discurso analítico y aprendizaje a través de la práctica colectiva, Finalmente, la teoría de la resistencia sugiere que los educadores radicales deben desarrollar una relación crítica más que pragmática con los estudiantes.

Esto significa que cualquier forma viable de pedagogía radical debe analizar cómo las relaciones de dominación en las escuelas se originan, cómo se sostienen y cómo los estudiantes, en particular se relacionan con ellos. Esto implica mirar más allá de las escuelas. Esto sugiere tomar seriamente la contra-lógica que empuja a los estudiantes fuera de las escuelas, hacia las calles, los bares y la cultura subterránea (shopfloor)87. Para muchos estudiantes de clase trabajadora, estos campos (realms) son “tiempo real” como opuesto al “tiempo muerto” que frecuentemente experimentan en las escuelas.

Las esferas sociales que forman esta contra-lógica pueden representar unos pocos terrenos restantes que proveen a los oprimidos la posibilidad de agenciarniento humano y autonomía. Todavrn estos terrenos parecen representar menos una forma de resistencia que una expresión de solidaridad y autoafirmación. El empuje de esta contra-lógica debe ser críticamente tornado (engaged) y construido dentro del contexto de una pedagogía radical.

Esto no sugiere que debe ser absorbido dentro de una teoría de la escolarización. Por el contrario, debe ser apoyado por educadores radicales y otros desde adentro y fuera de las escuelas. Pero como objeto de análisis pedagógico, esta contra-lógica debe ser visto corno un terreno teórico importante en el cual uno encuentra imágenes de libertad que señalan fundamentalmente nuevas estructuras en la organización pública de la experiencia, inherentes a las esferas públicas de oposición, que constituyen la contralógica, son las condiciones alrededor de las cuales los oprimidos organizan importantes necesidades y relaciones.

Entonces, representa un terreno importante en la batalla ideológica por la apropiación de significado y experiencia. Por esta razón provee a los educadores una oportunidad para ligar lo político con lo personal para comprender cómo el poder es mediado, resistido, y reproducido en la vida cotidiana. Más aún, sitúa la relación entre las escuelas y la sociedad más amplia dentro de un contexto teórico informado fundamentalmente por una pregunta política: ¿cómo desarrollamos una pedagógica radical que haga significativas a Las escuelas para hacerlas críticas, y cómo las hacemos críticas para hacerlas emancipatorias? 87

Debo a una conversación con Stanley Aronowitz el llamarme la atención sobre la idea de contrasentido. Para una mayor elaboración al respecto véase su Crisis in Historial Metarialism (New York: Preager. 1981). En resumen, las bases para una nueva pedagogía radical deben ser extraídas de una comprensión teóricamente sofisticada de cómo el poder, la resistencia y el agenciarniento humano pueden devenir elementos centrales en la lucha por el pensamiento y aprendizaje críticos. Las escuelas no cambiarán la sociedad, pero podemos crear en ellas bolsas de resistencia que provean módulos pedagógicos para nuevas formas de aprendizaje y relaciones sociales, formas que pueden ser usadas en otras esferas más directamente involucradas en la lucha por una nueva moralidad y visión de la justicia social. Para aquellos que sostienen que este es un objetivo político, replicaría que tienen razón, ya que es un objetivo que apunta a lo que debería ser la base de todo aprendizaje, la lucha por una vida cualitativamente mejor para todos.

 

Fuente:

http://www.pedagogica.edu.co/storage/rce/articulos/17_07pole.pdf

Fuente imagen:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/mf0vJAejynDPjne6nbIKBy0FqVBmQvLOKf07KxW1Ks9EIRcrl1Hei3TxAU5UfoK1xt0ctQ=s152

 

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lyOsAdPjjMuLSc0Sx_CmVdWu42K8G3LFB3WJjvJ7iGQYOvyqTL-h75__RCyLw4uU1vt5xQ=s85

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The New, Old Authoritarianism of Donald Trump

Henry Giroux

Por: Henry A. Giroux

The following is an excerpt from the new book America at War with Itself by Henry A. Giroux (City Lights, 2016): 

In the current historical moment in the United States, the assault on social tolerance is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One of the most egregious examples of these attacks can be found in the political rise of Donald Trump. Trump’s popular appeal speaks not just to the boldness of what he says and the shock his inflamed rhetoric provokes, but the increasingly large numbers of Americans who respond to his aggressive bigotry with the eagerness of an angry lynch mob. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting, “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action—for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our understanding of American society are produced by a corporate-influenced model that brings ruin to language, community, and democracy itself.

Missing from most of the commentaries by mainstream media regarding the current rise of Trumpism is any historical context that would offer a critical account of the ideological and political disorders plaguing U.S. society. A resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the present crisis, particularly the long tradition of white racial hegemony, exceptionalism, and the extended wars on youth, women, immigrants, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged. As Chip Berlet points out, what is missing from most media accounts are traces of history that would make clear that Trump’s presence on the American political landscape is the latest expression of a long tradition of “populist radical right ideology—nativism, authoritarianism, and populism . . . not unrelated to mainstream ideologies and mass attitudes. In fact, they are best seen as a radicalization of mainstream values.” Berlet goes even further, arguing that “Trump is not an example of creeping totalitarianism; he is the injured and grieving white man growing hoarse with bigoted canards while riding at the forefront of a new nativist movement.” For Adele M. Stan, like Berlet, the real question that needs to be asked is: “What is wrong with America that this racist, misogynist, money-cheating clown should be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of its two major parties?” Berlet is on target when he suggests that understanding Trump in terms of fascism is not enough. But Berlet is wrong in suggesting that all that the Trump “clown wagon” represents is a more recent expression of the merger of right-wing populism and racist intolerance. History does not stand still, and as important as these demagogic elements are, they have taken on a new meaning within a different historical conjuncture and have been intensified through the registers of a creeping totalitarianism wedded to a new and virulent form of savage capitalism. Racism, bigotry, and xenophobia are certainly on Trump’s side, but what is new in this mix of toxic populism is the emergence of a predatory neoliberalism that has decimated the welfare state, expanded the punishing state, generated massive inequities in wealth and power, and put into place an ethos in which everybody has to provide for themselves. America has become a society of permanent uncertainty, intense anxiety, human misery, and immense racial and economic injustice. Trump offers more than what might be called a mix of The Jerry Springer Show and white supremacist ideology; he also offers up domestic and foreign policies that point to a unique style of neo-fascism, one that has deep roots in American history and society. What is necessary in the current political moment is an analysis in which the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism is made visible in Trump’s rallies, behavior, speeches, and proposals.

One example can be found in Steve Weissman’s commentary in which he draws a relationship between Trump’s casual racism and the rapidly emerging neo-fascist movements across Europe that “are growing strong by hating others for their skin color, religious origin, or immigrant status.” Weissman’s willingness to situate Trump in the company of European radical right movements such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s populist National Front, Greece’s Golden Dawn political party, or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia provides a glimpse of what Trump has in common with the new authoritarianism and its deeply racist, anti-immigration, and neo-Nazi tendencies.

Unfortunately, it was not until late in Trump’s presidential primary campaign that journalists began to acknowledge the presence of white militias and white hate groups at Trump’s rallies, and almost none have acknowledged the chanting of “white power” at some of his political gatherings, which would surely signal Trump’s connections not only to historical forms of white intolerance and racial hegemony but also to the formative Nazi culture that gave rise to genocide. When Trump was told that he had the support of the Ku Klux Klan—a terrorist organization—Trump hesitated in disavowing such support. Trump appears to have no issues with attracting members of white hate groups to his ranks. Nor does Trump seem to have issues with channeling the legitimate anger and outrage of his followers into expressions of hate and bigotry that have all the earmarks of a neo-fascist movement. Trump has also refused to condemn the increasing racism at many of his rallies, such as the chants of angry white men yelling, “If you’re an African first, go back to Africa.” Another example of Trump’s embrace of totalitarian politics can be found in Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the mainstream media’s treatment of Trump’s attack on Jorge Ramos, an influential anchor of Univision. When Ramos stood up to question Trump’s views on immigration, Trump not only refused to call on him, but insulted him by telling him to go back to Univision. Instead of focusing on this particular lack of civility, Greenwald takes up the way many journalists scolded Ramos because he had a point of view and was committed to a political narrative. Greenwald saw this not just as a disingenuous act on the part of establishment journalists, but as a failure on the part of the press to speak out against a counterfeit notion of objectivity that represents a flight from responsibility, if not political and civic courage. Greenwald goes further, arguing that the mainstream media and institutions at the start of Trump’s campaign were too willing, in the name of objectivity and balance, to ignore Trump’s toxic rhetoric and the endorsements and expressions of violence. He writes:

«Actually, many people are alarmed, but it is difficult to know that by observing media coverage, where little journalistic alarm over Trump is expressed. That’s because the rules of large media outlets—venerating faux objectivity over truth along with every other civic value—prohibit the sounding of any alarms. Under this framework of corporate journalism, to denounce Trump, or even to sound alarms about the dark forces he’s exploiting and unleashing, would not constitute journalism. To the contrary, such behavior is regarded as a violation of journalism. Such denunciations are scorned as opinion, activism, and bias: all the values that large media-owning corporations have posited as the antithesis of journalism in order to defang and neuter it as an adversarial force.»

Timothy Egan argues that it would be wrong to claim that Trump’s followers are simply ignorant, or to suggest that they are only driven by economic issues. Though he underplays the diversity of Trump’s supporters and the legitimacy of some of their complaints, I think he is right in suggesting that many of them know exactly what Trump represents, and in doing so embody the darkest side of Republican Party politics, which have a long history of nurturing hate, racism, and bigotry. Egan writes:

«Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society. Educated and poorly educated alike, men and women—they know what they’re getting from him. . . . But ignorance is not the problem with Trump’s people. They’re sick and tired of tolerance. In Super Tuesday exit polls, Trump dominated among those who want someone to ‘tell it like it is.’ And that translates to an explicit ‘play to our worst fears,’ as Meg Whitman, the prominent Republican business leader, said. ‘He’s saying how the people really feel,’ one Trump supporter from Massachusetts, Janet Aguilar, told The Times. ‘We’re all afraid to say it.'»

Robert Reich draws a number of parallels between early twentieth-century fascism and Trump’s ideology, practices, and policies. He argues that the fascist script is repeated in Trump’s use of fear to scare and intimidate people, his “repeated attacks on Mexican immigrants and Muslims,” his appeal as the patriotic strongman who can personally remedy economic ills, his vaunting of “national power and greatness,” his willingness to condone or appear to legitimate violence against protesters at his rallies, and his preying on the economic distress, misery, and collective anxiety of millions of people “to scapegoat others and create a cult of personality.”

Mike Lofgren echoes a number of Reich’s criticisms but goes further and argues that Trump represents the decision on the part of the American public to choose fascism over what he calls a “managed democracy.” According to Lofgren, a managed democracy has been produced in the United States by a culture of war and fear, especially since the massacre of thousands of Americans on 9/11. The effects of such a war psychosis were evident in the lies made by the Bush administration regarding nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, lies that were repeated ad nauseam to dupe Americans into an unjustified war against Iraq. It is also evident in the rise of the national insecurity surveillance state and its declared notion that everyone is a potential suspect, a notion that helps to further the internalization of the Terror Wars. Another boost to America’s culture of fear, insecurity, and war was the economic crash of 2008, which furthered anxiety to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Amidst this decade-long culture of fear and war, Lofgren argues that the United States may very well become a fascist political system by 2017.

Predictions about America’s descent into fascism are not new and should surprise no one who is historically literate. Rick Perlstein is correct in arguing that Trump provides a service in making clear how conservative ideology works at its deepest levels, and that he exposes the hypocrisy of dressing reactionary politics in a discourse of liberation. Journalists such as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan predictably downplay the racist and fascist undertones of Trump’s candidacy, arguing that Trump is simply a symptom of massive disillusionment among Americans who are exhibiting a profound disdain, if not hatred, for the political and economic mainstream elites. Disappointingly, however, this argument is often bolstered by progressives who claim that criticism of Trump’s bigotry and racism cannot fully account for his political appeal. For instance, Thomas Frank observes that Trump actually embraces a number of left-leaning positions that make him popular with less educated working-class whites. He cites Trump’s criticism of free trade agreements, his call for competitive bidding with the drug industry, his critique of the military-industrial-complex and its wasteful spending, and his condemnation of companies that displace U.S. workers by closing factories in the United States and opening them in much less developed countries such as Mexico in order to save on labor costs.

In this view, the working class becomes a noble representative of a legitimate populist backlash against neoliberalism, and whether or not it embraces an American form of proto-fascism seems irrelevant. Frank, however, has a long history of ignoring cultural issues, ideologies, and values that do not simply mimic the economic system. As Ellen Willis pointed out in a brilliant critique of Frank’s work, he makes the mistake of imagining popular and media culture as simply “a pure reflection of the corporate class that produces it.” Hence, racism, ultra-nationalism, bigotry, religious fundamentalism, and other anti-democratic factors get downplayed in Frank’s analysis of Trump’s rise to power. This view is reductionist and ignores research indicating that a large body of Trump supporters, who back explicit authoritarian polices, rarely complain about the predatory economic policies pushed by the Republican and Democratic parties. If anything, such economic pressures intensify these deep-seated authoritarian attitudes. What Trump’s followers have in common is support for a number of authoritarian policies mobilized around “an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action—with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality.” Such policies include:

Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States; changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants; imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism; requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism; allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism.

John Judis extends this progressive line of argument by comparing Trump with Bernie Sanders, claiming that they are both populists and outsiders while suggesting that Trump occupies a legitimate outsider status and raises a number criticisms regarding domestic policies for which he should be taken seriously by the American people and not simply dismissed as a racist, clown, or pompous showman. Judis writes:

«Sanders and Trump differ dramatically on many issues—from immigration to climate change—but both are critical of how wealthy donors and lobbyists dominate the political process, and both favor some form of campaign finance reform. Both decry corporations moving overseas for cheap wages and to avoid American taxes. Both reject trade treaties that favor multinational corporations over workers. And both want government more, rather than less, involved in the economy. Sanders is a left-wing populist. He wants to defend the “collapsing middle class” against the “billionaire class” that controls the economy and politics. He is not a liberal who wants to reconcile Wall Street and Main Street, or a socialist who wants the working class to abolish capitalism. Trump is a right-wing populist who wants to defend the American people from rapacious CEOs and from Hispanic illegal immigrants. He is not a conventional business conservative who thinks government is the problem and who blames America’s ills on unions and Social Security. Both men are foes of what they describe as their party’s establishment. And both campaigns are also fundamentally about rejecting the way economic policy has been talked about in American presidential politics for decades.»

Some liberals, such as Arthur Goldhammer, go so far as to suggest that Trump’s appeal is largely an extension of the “cult of celebrity,” his management of “a very rational and reasonable set of business practices,” and his attention to the anger of a disregarded element of the working class. He asserts without irony that Trump “is not an authoritarian but a celebrity,” as if one cancels out the other. While celebrity culture confers authority in a society utterly devoted to consumerism, it also represents less a mode of false identification than a manufactured spectacle that cheapens serious and thoughtful discourse and puts into play a focus on the commercial world of fashion, style, and appearances. This has given rise to mainstream media that devalue politics, treat politicians as celebrities, refuse to give them a serious hearing, and are unwilling to raise tough questions. Precisely because it is assumed that celebrities are too dumb to answer such questions and that the public is more concerned about their personal lives than anything else, they are too often exempt from being held accountable for what they say, especially if it doesn’t square comfortably with the spectacle of banality. Celebrity culture is not simply a mode of entertainment, it is a form of public pedagogy central to creating a formative culture that views thinking as a nuisance at best, or at worst, as dangerous. Treated seriously, celebrity culture provides the architectural framing for an authoritarian culture by celebrating a deadening form of self-interest, narcissism, and civic illiteracy. As Fritz Stern, the renowned historian of Germany, has argued, the dark side of celebrity culture can be understood by the fact that it gave rise to Trump and represents the merger of financial power and a culture of thoughtlessness.

Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center, takes Goldhammer’s argument further and claims that Trump is a celebrity who knows how to work the “art of the deal” (a reference to the title of Trump’s well-known neoliberal manifesto). That is, Trump is a celebrity with real business acumen and substance. In particular, he argues, Trump’s appeal is due in part to his image as a smart and successful businessman who gets things done. Berkowitz goes into overdrive in his claim that Trump is not a Hitler, as if that means he is not a demagogue unique to the American context. Without irony, Berkowitz goes so far as to write, “It is important to recognize that Trump’s focus on illegal immigrants, protectionism, the wall on the Mexican border, and the terrorist danger posed by Muslims transcends race.” I am assuming he means that Trump’s racist ideology, policies, and rhetoric can be removed from the poisonous climate of hate that he promotes, the policies for which he argues (such as torture, which is a war crime), and the violence he breeds at his rallies. Indeed, Berkowitz implies that these policies and practices derive not from a fundamental orientation of white intolerance but from a sound understanding of free-market economics and business.

The sound business practice that Berkowitz finds admirable has a name; it is called neoliberal capitalism and it has spread an untold degree of human misery, political corruption, and inequality throughout the world. It has given us a social and political formation that promotes militarization, attacks the welfare state, aligns itself slavishly with corporate power, corrupts politics, and aggressively demeans women, Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, protesters, and immigrants.

Trump and his followers may not yet be a fascist party in the strict sense of the word, but they certainly display elements of a new style of American authoritarianism that comes close to constituting a proto-fascist movement. Trump’s call to raise the nation to greatness, the blaming of Mexican immigrants and Muslims for America’s troubles, the vitriolic disdain for protesters, the groups of thugs that seem to delight in cheering at Trump’s references to violence and gladly administer it to protesters, especially members of the Black Lives Matter movement, all echo historical elements that have shaped totalitarian regimes that have plagued the West from the Nazis of Europe to the dictators of Latin America.

As American society moves from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting, it restages politics and power in ways that are truly unproductive, frightening, and anti-democratic. Writing about Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism, Jerome Kohn provides a commentary that contains a message for the present age, one that points to the possibility of hope triumphing over despair—a lesson that needs to be embraced at the present moment. He writes that for Arendt, “what matters is not to give oneself over to the despair of the past or the utopian hope of the future, but ‘to remain wholly in the present.’ Totalitarianism is the crisis of our times insofar as its demise becomes a turning point for the present world, providing us with an entirely new opportunity to realize a common world, a world that Arendt called a ‘human artifice,’ a place fit for habitation by all human beings.” If Trump is the manifestation of an emerging self-destructive totalitarianism, the movement for solidarity and change developing among a diverse range of national networks including the Black Lives Matter movement, fast food workers, environmentalists, and a range of other social justice groups, points to an alternative, diversified, and sustainable future.

Trump signifies the marshaling of self-destructive white anxiety, bigotry, and intolerance to the service of an exclusionary grid of economic, military, surveillance, police, and corporate self-interest. Rather than view Trump as an eccentric clown, perhaps it is time to portray him in a historical context connected with the West’s totalitarian past, a story that needs to be publicly retold and remembered. By making such connections and telling such stories, we strengthen ourselves and spread the insurgent call to prevent contemporary manifestations from gaining further ground.

The great writer James Baldwin once said we are living in dangerous times, that the society in which we are living is “menaced from within,” and that young people have to “go for broke.” And while he acknowledged that “going for broke” would mean meeting the “most determined resistance,” he argued that it was necessary for young people to rise up and use their energy to reclaim their right to live with dignity, justice, equity, and a sense of possibility. Baldwin got it right, and so do the young people who are now taking up this challenge and, in doing so, are imagining a future free of the menace of totalitarianism that now hangs like a punishing sandstorm over our current political moment.

Henry A. Giroux’s most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting and America’s Addiction to Terrorism. A prolific writer and political commentator, he has appeared in a wide range of media, including The New York Times and Bill Moyers.

Fuente: http://www.alternet.org/books/new-old-authoritarianism-donald-trump

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