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Killing Children in the Age of Disposability: The Parkland Shooting Was About More Than Gun Violence

marzo 13, 2018marzo 11, 2018Henry Giroux

By: Henry A. Giroux

Donald Trump may have startled Republican lawmakers with his sudden and unexpected support for background checks and other gun control measures, but a closer look at his comments to lawmakers reveals his continued adherence to the core of the pro-gun script that he has been following all along.

At his meeting with lawmakers on February 28 Trump buckled down on the idea that the real problem is the existence of gun-free zones, arguing that eliminating gun-free zones «prevent [mass shootings] from ever happening, because [the shooters] are cowards and they’re not going in when they know they’re going to come out dead.»

The president’s repeated efforts to disparage the idea of gun-free zones fit with the earlier call for arming teachers made by Trump and one of his most powerful financial and ideological backers — the dark knight of gun violence, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Meanwhile, Trump has shown no interest in preventing school shootings by hiring more guidance teachers, support staff and psychologists. Trump’s call for a comprehensive gun bill may have made for «captivating» television, but it rattled NRA lobbyists and initiated a tsunami of calls to their allies on Capitol Hill. Nothing surprising to this reaction. It gets worse. Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the NRA, met with Trump a few days after Trump made his remarks and suggested in a tweet that the president had backed away from his apparent embrace of gun control.

Moreover, there is little confidence following Trump’s remarks that Republicans would even remotely endorse legislation for gun control. The NRA «paid $5 million to lobbyists last year» and there is no indication that the time and money spent buying off cowardly politicians will prove ineffectual.

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders.

The deeply troubling call for eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers comes at a time when many schools have already been militarized by the presence of police and the increasing criminalization of student behaviors. Suggesting that teachers be armed and turned into potential instruments of violence extends and normalizes the prison as a model for schools and the increasing expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. What is being left out of this tragedy is that the number of police in schools has doubled in the last decade from 20 percent in 1996 to 43 percent today. Moreover, as more police are put in schools, more and more children are brutalized by them. There is no evidence that putting the police in schools has made them any safer. Instead, more and more young people have criminal records, are being suspended, or expelled from school, all in the name of school safety. As Sam Sinyangwe, the director of the Mapping Police Violence Project, observes:

The data … that does exist … shows that more police in schools leads to more criminalization of students, and especially black and brown students. Every single year, about 70,000 kids are arrested in school…. [Moreover] since 1999, 10,000 additional police officers have been placed at schools, with no impact on violence. Meanwhile, about one million students have been arrested for acts previously punishable by detention or suspension, and black students are three times more likely to be arrested than their white peers.

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders, foolishly imagining that armed teachers would be able to stop a killer with military grade weapons, and disregarding the risk of teachers shooting other students, staff or faculty in the midst of such a chaotic moment.

In addition, the proposal points to the insidious fact that mass shootings and gun violence have become so normalized in the United States that, as Adam Gopnik points out, «we must now be reassured that, when the person with the AR-15 comes to your kid’s school, there’s a plan to cope with him.» Such statements make visible a society rife with the embrace of force and violence. How else to explain the fact that, at the highest levels of government, horrendous acts of violence, such as mass shootings involving school children, are now discussed in terms of containing their effects rather than eliminating their causes.

Protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people.

In this logic the underlying causes of mass shootings and gun killings disappear and the emphasis for dealing with such violence reproduces an act of political and moral irresponsibility in its call to curtail or contain such violence rather than address the underlying causes of it.

We live in an age in which the politics of disposability has merged with what Jeffrey St. Clair has called the spectacle of «American Carnage.» The machineries of social death and misery now drive a mode of casino capitalism in which more and more people are considered waste, expendable and excess. The politics of disposability now couples with acts of extreme violence as pressure grows to exclude more and more people from the zones of visibility, justice and compassion. This is especially true for children. Violence against children in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. As Marian Wright Edelman points out,

Pervasive gun violence against children is a uniquely shameful all-American epidemic. Consider that since 1963, over three times more children and teens died from guns on American soil than U.S. soldiers were killed by hostilities in wars abroad. On average 3,426 children and teens — 171 classrooms of 20 children — were killed by guns every year from 1963 to 2016. And gun violence comes on top of other major threats of global violence that threaten our children.

A culture of cruelty, silence and indifference to the needs of children, built on the backs of the conservative media politicians and the gun industry and lobby, has become a central and ethically disturbing feature of American society. This is a culture of political corruption and social abandonment that «has a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others.» This culture of violence has a long history in the United States, and has become increasingly legitimated under the Trump regime, a regime in which lawlessness and corruption combine to ignore the needs of children, the poor, elderly, sick and vulnerable. In the age of neoliberal brutality, protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people. As is apparent from its policies, our society no longer views young people as a worthy social investment or the promise of a decent future. On the contrary, as John and Jean Comaroff note in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, instead of becoming a primary register of the dreams of a society, youth have become «creatures of our nightmares, of our social impossibilities, and our existential angst.»

Viewed largely as a liability, the institutions that young people inhabit have been discarded as citadels of critical thinking and social mobility. As a result, such institutions, including schools, have become zones of social abandonment — often modeled after prisons — that appear to exist in a state of perpetual danger and fear, especially for students marginalized by race and class, for whom violence operates routinely and in multiple ways. Children are now defined largely as consumers, clients and fodder for the military or the school-to-prison pipeline. As a result, their safety is now enmeshed with the weaponized discourse of surveillance, and security personnel and police patrol their corridors. Horrific shootings boost the ratings and profit margins of the mainstream press, undercutting these news outlets’ will and ability to use their resources to address the culture and political economy of violence that now amounts to a form of domestic terrorism in the United States.

The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them.

As Brad Evans and I have argued in Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle, violence has now become the defining organizing principle for society in general. It is also worth noting that the spectacle, marketing and commodification of violence powerfully mediates how the American public both understands the relations of power that benefit from the production of violence at all levels of society and how the visceral suffering that is produced can be neutralized in a culture of immediacy and «alternative facts.»

Of course, this logic is part of the politics of distraction that has become a trademark of the Trump administration. At the same time, it creates more profits for the gun industries and makes clear that most people, including children, have no safe space in the US. The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them. It gets worse. Rather than engage young people and other gun rights advocates in a debate about gun control, some conservatives mimic the discourse of humiliation and lies used relentlessly by Trump in claiming that «bereaved students were being manipulated by sinister forces, or even that they were paid actors.»

As objects of moral and social abandonment, young people are beginning to recognize that the response to their call for safety, well-being and future without fear is cruel and cynical. In addition, their struggle against gun violence makes clear that the Trump administration, the NRA, and the industries that trade in instruments of violence and death, are waging a war against democracy itself. The call to arm teachers also speaks to the Trump administration’s efforts to further militarize and expand the weaponization not only of the armed forces but also of spaces in which large numbers of students congregate. In his call to arm 20 percent of all teachers, Trump is suggesting that 640,000 teachers be trained and given guns. The Washington Post estimates that the costs of training teachers sufficiently could reach as high as $718 million while the cost of providing teachers with firearms could amount to an additional $251 million. According to the Post, «the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm … creeps past $1 billion.» Furthermore, putting 640,000 more guns in schools is not only a reckless suggestion, it also further enriches the profits of gun makers by adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. Why not invest this amount of money in providing support staff and services for students — services that could meaningfully support those facing mental health issues, bullying, homelessness and poverty?

When combined with a culture of fear and a massive government investment in a carceral state, the politics of disposability eerily echoes the damaging legacy of a fascist past in the US, with its celebration of violence, concentration of power in the hands of the few, massive inequities in wealth and militarization of all aspects of society. There is no defense for weapons of war to be sold as commodities either to children or anyone else. Gun violence in the US is not simply about a growing culture of violence, it is about the emergence of a form of domestic terrorism in which fear, mistrust, lies, corruption and financial gain become more important than the values, social relations and institutions that write children into the script of democracy and give them hope for a decent future.

When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence.

A war culture now permeates American society — extending from sports events and Hollywood films to the ongoing militarization of the police and the criminalization of everyday behaviors such as violating a dress code or doodling on a desk. War has become a permanent element of everyday life, deeply etched into our national ideals and social relations. And those responsible for the bloodshed it produces appear immune from social criticism and policies that limit their power.

This debate about school shootings is not simply about gun violence; it is about a neoliberal order that has tipped over into authoritarianism, one for which the highest measure of how a society judges itself ethically and politically is no longer about how it treats its children. Violence on a grand scale certainly has produced a high sense of moral outrage within the US public at times, but not over the fate of young people.

People in the US need a new language to talk about violence in order to capture its many registers and the threads that tie them together. Under such circumstances, school violence cannot be understood outside of the deeply inordinate influence of money and power in US politics. The call to model schools after prisons would have to be examined against the rise of the punishing state and the Trump administration’s celebration of a «law and order» regime. The anger fueling what might be called white rage would have to be analyzed against the gutting of jobs, wages, pensions, health care benefits and the massive growth of inequality in wealth and power in the United States.

US society has become an abyss in which violence, disposability and the logic of social abandonment and terminal exclusion work against the interests of most children and for the interests of the rich and powerful. Weapons now operate in the service of what might be called the necro-power of casino capitalism. How else to explain the fact that there are more than 13,000 homicides a year in the United States, or that on average, seven teens are killed with guns daily. Yet the response on the part of politicians is either silence and inaction, or a more aggressive push to put more guns in circulation?

A cult of militarism has dragged extreme violence into the very soul of the US and has become a source of pride rather than alarm and anger. This depraved transformation is accelerated by a crisis of agency in which every relation is reduced to an exchange relation, one in which, as political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, «everything from learning to eating become matters of speculative investments — ranked, rated, balanced in your portfolio.» When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence, unsympathetic to the growing multitudes of disposable individuals and groups, and unmoved by a culture of deepening collective cynicism. Casino capitalism has numbed large segments of the American public into moral and political callousness. One consequence is an indifference to a society in which the killing of children is routine.

Mass shootings and gun violence in the US cannot be abstracted from what I call the death of the social, which involves the collapse of an investment in the public good, the ongoing destruction of democratic values, and the undermining of the common good. A toxic mix of rugged individualism, untrammeled self-interest, privatization, commodification and culture of fear now shapes American society, leaving most people isolated, unaware of the broader systemic forces shaping their lives, and trapped in a landscape of uncertainty and precarity that makes them vulnerable to having their anxieties, anger and rage misdirected.

The students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle.

All too often, the only discourse available for them to deal with their problems is provided by the disingenuous vocabulary of fear and security delivered in the call for gun ownership, the allure of violence as an antidote to their individual and collective anxieties, and a hateful appeal to racism, Islamophobia and demonization.

The hijacking of freedom and individual responsibility by extremists is corrosive and rots society from within, making people susceptible to what C.W. Mills describes as «organized irresponsibility» in his book The Politics of Truth. The right-wing attack on the welfare state, community and democracy functions to dissolve crucial solidarities and bonds of social obligation, and undermines mutual responsibilities. In the absence of the discourse of community, compassion and mutual respect, fear and violence have become the new currency mediating social relations at all levels of society. In a society in which the war of all against all prevails, the call for more guns is symptomatic of the shredding of the social fabric, the hardening of society, the evisceration of public trust, and a ratcheting up of a political and economic investment by the ruling elite in the machinery of cruelty, inequality and militarism.

Violence in the United States is part of a wider politics of disposability in which the machineries of social and political death accelerate the suffering, hardships and misery of children. For too long, youth have been written out of the script of justice and democracy. Gun violence, mass shootings and state violence are simply the most visible elements of a society that organizes almost every aspect of civil society for the production of terror and fear, and which views young people within the specter of uselessness and indifference.

Fortunately, the students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, shunning the coarse language used by apologists for systemic violence while embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle. These young people are refusing to privatize hope or allow the ethical imagination and their sense of moral outrage and social responsibility to be tranquilized. They are not only outraged over the brutal actions of the defenders of gun violence, they feel betrayed. Betrayed, because they have learned that the power of the gun industries and the politicians who defend them do not consider their lives worthy of protection, hope and a future free of violence. They recognize that US society is unusually violent and that they are a target. Moreover, they are arguing convincingly that mass shooting in the United States have a direct correlation with the astronomical number of guns present in this country. But there is more at stake here than an epidemic of gun violence, there is the central idea of the US as defined by carnage — violence that extends from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery to the rise of mass incarceration and the instances of state violence now sweeping across the US.

At least for the moment, young people are refusing to live with a modern system of violence that functions as a form of domestic terrorism. Engaged in a form of productive unsettling and collective dissent, they are fighting back, holding power accountable and giving birth to a vibrant form of political struggle. The distinctiveness of this generation of survivors is clear in their use of social media, their willingness to speak out, their planned marches, their civic courage, and their unwillingness to continue to live with the fear and insecurity that have shaped most of their lives. Hopefully, this moment will transform itself into a movement.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43732-killing-children-in-the-age-of-disposability-the-parkland-shooting-was-about-more-than-gun-violence

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When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto

marzo 6, 2018marzo 4, 2018Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.1 Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students. They have also been refigured as punishment centers where low-income and poor minority youth are harshly disciplined under zero tolerance policies in ways that often result in their being arrested and charged with crimes that, on the surface, are as trivial as the punishment is harsh. 2 Under casino capitalism’s push to privatize education, public schools have been closed in cities such as, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York to make way for charter schools. Teacher unions have been attacked, public employees denigrated and teachers reduced to technicians working under deplorable and mind-numbing conditions. 3

Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. The reform movement is also determined to underfund and disinvest resources for public schooling so that public education can be completely divorced from any democratic notion of governance, teaching and learning. In the eyes of billionaire un-reformers and titans of finance such as Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family and Michael Bloomberg, public schools should be transformed, when not privatized, into adjuncts of shopping centers and prisons. 4

Like the dead space of the American mall, the school systems promoted by the un-reformers offer the empty ideological seduction of consumerism as the ultimate form of citizenship and learning. And, adopting the harsh warehousing mentality of prison wardens, the un-reformers endorse and create schools for poor students that punish rather than educate in order to channel disposable populations into the criminal justice system where they can fuel the profits of private prison corporations. The militarization of public schools that Secretary Arnie Duncan so admired and supported while he was the CEO of the Chicago School System was not only a ploy to instill authoritarian discipline practices against students disparagingly labeled as unruly, if not disposable. It was also an attempt to design schools that would break the capacity of students to think critically and render them willing and potential recruits to serve in senseless and deadly wars waged by the American empire. And, if such recruitment efforts failed, then students were quickly put on the conveyor belt of the school-to-prison pipeline. For many poor minority youth in the public schools, prison becomes part of their destiny, just as public schools reinforce their status as second-class citizens. As Michelle Alexander points out, “Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, [they] are feeding our prisons.” 5

Market-driven educational reforms, with their obsession with standardization, high-stakes testing, and punitive policies, also mimic a culture of cruelty that neoliberal policies produce in the wider society. They exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. Trust, imagination, creativity, and a respect for critical teaching and learning are thrown to the wind in the pursuit of profits and the proliferation of rigid, death-dealing accountability schemes. As John Tierney points out in his critique of corporate education reforms in The Atlantic, such approaches are not only oppressive – they are destined to fail. He writes:

Policies and practices that are based on distrust of teachers and disrespect for them will fail. Why? ‘The fate of the reforms ultimately depends on those who are the object of distrust.’ In other words, educational reforms need teachers’ buy-in, trust, and cooperation to succeed; ‘reforms’ that kick teachers in the teeth are never going to succeed. Moreover, education policies crafted without teacher involvement are bound to be wrongheaded. 6

The situation is further worsened in that not only are public schools being defunded and public school teachers attacked as the new welfare queens, but social and economic policies are being enacted by Republicans and other right-wingers to ensure low-income and poor minority students fail in public schools. For instance, many Tea Party-elected governors in states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina and Maine, along with right-wing politicians in Congress, are enacting cruel and savage policies (such as the defunding of the food stamp program) that directly impact on the health and well-being of poor students in schools. 7 Such policies shrink, if not destroy, the educational opportunities of poor youth by denying them the basic provisions they need to learn and then utilizing the consequent negative educational outcomes as one more illegitimate rationale for turning public schools over to private interests.

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

When billionaire club members, such as Bill Gates and right-wing donors such as Art Pope, are not directly implementing policies that defund schools, they are funding research projects that turn students into test subjects for a world that even George Orwell would have found hard to imagine. 8 For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided a $500,000 grant to Clemson University to do a pilot study in which students would wear galvanic skin bracelets with wireless sensors that would track their physiological responses to various stimuli in the schools. A spokesperson for the foundation argues in defense of this creepy obsession with measuring students’ emotional responses by claiming that the biometric devices are a help to teachers who can measure “‘real-time’ (reflective feedback), kind of like a pedometer.” 9

It is not the vagueness of what this type of research is trying to achieve that is the most ludicrous and ethically offensive part of this study: It is the notion that reflective feedback can be reduced to measuring emotional impulses rather than produced through engaged dialogue and communication between actual teachers and students. How can bracelets measure why students are acting out if they are hungry, bored, fearful, sick or lack sleep because their parents might be homeless? How do such studies address larger structural issues such as the 50 million people in the United States who go hungry every night, one-third of whom are children? And how do they manage to ignore their own connection to the rise of the surveillance state and the ongoing destruction of the civil rights of children and others? Research of this kind cannot speak to the rise of a Jim Crow society in which the mass incarceration of poor minorities is having a horrible effect on children. As Michelle Alexander points out, these are children “who have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste – the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives.” 10 And the effect of such daily struggle is deadly. She writes:

. . . For these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps. For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated. 11

In contrast to the socially and ethically numb forms of educational research endorsed by so-called reformers, a recent study has linked high-stakes testing to lower graduation rates and higher incarceration rates, indicating that such testing plays a significant role in expanding “the machinery of the school-to-prison pipeline,” especially for low-income students and students of color.12 Most critics of the billionaires’ club ignore these issues. But a number of critics, such as New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, have raised significant questions about this type of research. Ravitch argues that Gates should “devote more time to improving the substance of what is being taught . . . and give up on all this measurement mania.” 13 Such critiques are important, but they could go further. Such reform efforts are about more than collapsing teaching and learning into an instrumental reductionism that approximates training rather than education. As Ken Saltman points out, the new un-reformers are political counter-revolutionaries and not simply misguided educators. 14

Noam Chomsky gets it right in arguing that we are now in a general period of regression that extends far beyond impacting education alone. 15 This period of regression is marked by massive inequalities in wealth, income and power that are fueling a poverty and ecological crisis and undermining every basic public sphere central to both democracy and the culture and structures necessary for people to lead a life of dignity and political participation. 16 The burden of cruelty, repression and corruption has broken the back of democracy, however weak, in the United States. America is no longer a democracy, nor is it simply a plutocracy. It has become an authoritarian state steeped in violence and run by the commanding financial, cultural and political agents of corporate power. 17

Corporate sovereignty has replaced political sovereignty, and the state has become largely an adjunct of banking institutions and financial service industries. Addicted to “the political demobilization of the citizenry,” the corporate elite is waging a political backlash against all institutions that serve democracy and foster a culture of questioning, dialogue and dissent. 18 The apostles of neoliberalism are concerned primarily with turning public schools over to casino capitalism in order to transform them into places where all but the privileged children of the 1% can be disciplined and cleansed of any critical impulses. Instead of learning to become independent thinkers, they acquire the debilitating habits of what might be called a moral and political deficit disorder that renders them passive and obedient in the face of a society based on massive inequalities in power, wealth and income. The current powerful corporate-based un-reform movement is wedded to developing modes of governance, ideologies and pedagogies dedicated to constraining and stunting any possibility for developing among students those critical, creative, and collaborative forms of thought and action necessary for participating in a substantive democracy.

At the core of the new reforms is a commitment to a pedagogy of stupidity and repression that is geared toward memorization, conformity, passivity, and high stakes testing. Rather than create autonomous, critical, and civically engaged students, the un-reformers kill the imagination while depoliticizing all vestiges of teaching and learning. The only language they know is the discourse of profit and the disciplinary language of command. John Taylor Gatto points to some elements of this pedagogy of repression in his claim that schools teach confusion by ignoring historical and relational contexts. 19 Every topic is taught in isolation and communicated by way of sterile pieces of information that have no shared meanings or context.

A pedagogy of repression defines students largely by their shortcomings rather than by their strengths, and in doing so convinces them that the only people who know anything are the experts – increasingly drawn from the ranks of the elite and current business leaders who embody the new models of leadership under the current regime of neoliberalism. Great historical leaders who exhibited heightened social consciousness such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, John Dewey, Paulo Freire and Mahatma Ghandi are relegated to the dustbin of history. Students are taught only to care about themselves and to view any consideration for others as a liability, if not a pathology. Ethical concerns under these circumstances are represented as hindrances to be overcome. Narcissism along with an unchecked notion of individualism is the new normal.

Under a pedagogy of repression, students are conditioned to unlearn any respect for democracy, justice, and what it might mean to connect learning to social change. They are told that they have no rights and that rights are limited only to those who have power. This is a pedagogy that kills the spirit, promotes conformity, and is more suited to an authoritarian society than a democracy. What is alarming about the new education un-reformers is not only how their policies have failed, but the degree to which such policies are now embraced by liberals and conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican Parties despite their evident failure. 20 The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education study provides a list of such failures that are instructive. The outcomes of un-reform measures noted in the study include:

Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts. Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination. Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers. School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money. Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students. Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise. The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance. Real, sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient and multipronged. 21

The slavish enthusiasm of the cheerleaders for market-driven educational policies becomes particularly untenable morally and politically in light of the increasing number of scandals that have erupted around inflated test scores and other forms of cheating committed by advocates of high stakes testing and charter schools. 22 David Kirp offers an important commentary on the seriousness and scope of the scandals and the recent setbacks of market-oriented educational reform. He writes:

In the latest Los Angeles school board election, a candidate who dared to question the overreliance on test results in evaluating teachers and the unseemly rush to approve charter schools won despite $4 million amassed to defeat him, including $1 million from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and $250,000 from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Former Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall, feted for boosting her students’ test scores at all costs, has been indicted in a massive cheating scandal. Michelle Rhee, the former Washington D.C. school chief who is the darling of the accountability crowd, faces accusations, based on a memo released by veteran PBS correspondent John Merrow, that she knew about, and did nothing to stop, widespread cheating. In a Washington Post op-ed, Bill Gates, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting high-stakes, test-driven teacher evaluation, did an about-face and urged a kinder, gentler approach that teachers could embrace. And parents in New York State staged a rebellion, telling their kids not to take a new and untested achievement exam. 23

While pedagogies of repression come in different forms and address different audiences in various contexts, they all share a commitment to defining pedagogy as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prescribed subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. There is no talk here of connecting pedagogy with the social and political task of resistance, empowerment or democratization. Nor is there any attempt to show how knowledge, values, desire and social relations are always implicated in power. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must reject such definitions of teaching and their proliferating imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumentalized reduction of pedagogy to a mere method that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship, critical pedagogy works to illuminate the relationships among knowledge, authority and power. 24 For instance, it raises questions regarding who has control over the conditions for producing knowledge such as the curricula being promoted by teachers, textbook companies, corporate interests or other forces?

Central to any viable notion of what makes a pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what forms of knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. In this case, critical pedagogy draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific conditions of learning, and in doing so rejects the notion that teaching is just a method or is removed from matters of values, norms, and power – or, for that matter, the struggle over agency itself and the future it suggests for young people. Rather than asserting its own influence in order to wield authority over passive subjects, critical pedagogy is situated within a project that views education as central to creating students who are socially responsible and civically engaged citizens. This kind of pedagogy reinforces the notion that public schools are democratic public spheres, education is the foundation for any working democracy and teachers are the most responsible agents for fostering that education.

This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies. It stresses, instead, the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions such as: What is the relationship between learning and social change? What knowledge is of most worth? What does it mean to know something? And in what direction should one desire? Yet the principles and goals of critical pedagogy encompass more. Pedagogy is simultaneously about the knowledge and practices teachers and students might engage in together and the values, social relations and visions legitimated by such knowledge and practices. Such a pedagogy listens to students, gives them a voice and role in their own learning, and recognizes that teachers not only educate students but also learn from them.

In addition, pedagogy is conceived as a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. Pedagogy provides a discourse for agency, values, social relations, and a sense of the future. It legitimates particular ways of knowing, being in the world, and relating to others. As Roger Simon observed, it also “represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension.” 25 It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all, value is informed by practices that organize knowledge and meaning.

Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about power, but also, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,” 26 indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. Critical pedagogy rejects the notion of students as passive containers who simply imbibe dead knowledge. Instead, it embraces forms of teaching that offer students the challenge to transform knowledge rather than simply “processing received knowledges.” 27 Under such circumstances, critical pedagogy becomes directive and intervenes on the side of producing a substantive democratic society. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches that strip what it means to be educated from its critical and democratic possibilities. 28

Critical pedagogy becomes dangerous in the current historical moment because it emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history. Rather than viewing teaching as technical practice, pedagogy in the broadest critical sense is premised on the assumption that learning is not about memorizing dead knowledge and skills associated with learning for the test but engaging in a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice. The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of neoliberalism, militarism, and religious fundamentalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them to nourish a substantive democracy, recognize antidemocratic forms of power and fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities.

Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must be understood as central to politics itself and rather than disconnect public education from larger social, economic and political issues, it must connect them to such forces as part of a wider crisis of both education and democracy. At the very least, education must be viewed as part of an emancipatory project that rejects the privatization and corporatization of public schools and the tax and finance forces that support iniquitous schools systems. For pedagogy to matter, it must support a culture and the relations of power that provide teachers with a sense of autonomy and control over the conditions of their labor. Teachers must be viewed as public intellectuals and a valuable social resource, and the conditions of their labor and autonomy must be protected. In this instance, the fight to preserve labor unions must be viewed as central to preserving the rights and working conditions necessary for public school teachers to teach with dignity under conditions that respect rather than degrade them.

Critical pedagogy must reject teaching being subordinated to the dictates of standardization, measurement mania and high stakes testing. The latter are part of a pedagogy of repression and conformity and have nothing to do with an education for empowerment. Central to the call for a critical pedagogy and the formative and institutional culture that makes it possible is the need to reconfigure government spending and to call for less spending on death and war and more on funding for education and the social programs that make it possible as a foundation for a democratic society. Schools are about more than measurable utility, the logic of instrumentality, abject testing, and mind-numbing training. In fact, the latter have little to do with critical education and pedagogy and must be rejected as part of an austerity and neoliberal project that is deeply anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and antidemocratic.

As a moral and political project, pedagogy is crucial for creating the agents necessary to live in, govern and struggle for a radical democracy. Moreover, it is important to recognize how education and pedagogy are connected to and implicated in the production not only of specific agents, a particular view of the present and future, but also how knowledge, values and desires, and social relations are always implicated in power. Power and ideology permeate all aspects of education and become a valuable resource when critically engaged around issues that problematize the relationship between authority and freedom, ethics and knowledge, language and experience, reading texts differently, and exploring the dynamics of cultural power. Critical pedagogy address power as a relationship in which conditions are produced that allow students to engage in a culture of questioning, to raise and address urgent, disturbing questions about the society in which they live, and to define in part the questions that can be asked and the disciplinary borders that can be crossed.

Education as a democratic project is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. Teachers need to be able to work together, collaborate, work with the community, and engage in research that informs their teaching. In this instance, critical pedagogy refuses the atomizing structure of teaching that informs traditional and market-driven notions of pedagogy. Moreover, critical pedagogy should provide students with the knowledge, modes of literacy, skills, critique, social responsibility, and civic courage needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.

Critical pedagogy is a crucial antidote to the neoliberal attack on public education, but it must be accompanied and informed by radical political and social movements willing to make educational reform central to democratic change. 29 The struggle over public education is inextricably connected to a struggle against poverty, racism, violence, war, bloated defense budgets, a permanent warfare state, state sanctioned assassinations, torture, inequality, and a range of other injustices that reveal a shocking glimpse of what America has become and why it can no longer recognize itself through the moral and political visions and promises of a substantive democracy. And such a struggle demands both a change in consciousness and the building of social movements that are broad-based and global in their reach.

The struggle to reclaim public education as a democratic public sphere needs to challenge the regressive pedagogies, gated communities, and cultural and political war zones that now characterize much of contemporary America. These sites of terminal exclusion demand more than making visible and interrogating critically the spectacle of cruelty and violence used to energize the decadent cultural apparatuses of casino capitalism. They demand an encounter with new forms of pedagogy, modes of moral witnessing, and collective action, and they demand new modes of social responsibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted, “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” 30 We can update King’s speech to encompass the weak, voiceless, and victims of our nation who are now represented by the low-income and poor minority youth who inhabit both the public schools and increasingly the prisons. These are the throwaway youth of an authoritarian America; they are the excess who painfully remind the elite of the need for social provisions, the viability of the public good, and those principles of economic life in need of substantial rethinking.

Under neoliberalism, it has become more difficult to respond to the demands of the social contract, public good, and the social state, which have been pushed to the margins of society – viewed as both an encumbrance and a pathology. And yet such a difficulty must be overcome in the drive to reform public education. The struggle over public education is the most important struggle of the 21st century because it is one of the few public spheres left where questions can be asked, pedagogies developed, modes of agency constructed and desires mobilized, in which formative cultures can be developed that nourish critical thinking, dissent, civic literacy and social movements capable of struggling against those antidemocratic forces that are ushering in dark, savage and dire times. We are seeing glimpses of such a struggle in Chicago and other states as well as across the globe and we can only hope that such movements offer up not merely a new understanding of the relationship among pedagogy, politics, and democracy, but also one that infuses both the imagination and hope for a better world.

[1] I have taken this term from David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012): 105-128.

[2] I address this issue in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

[3] See Michael D. Yates, “Public School Teachers: New Unions, New Alliances, New Politics,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17756-public-school-teachers-new-unions-new-alliances-new-politics Truthout (July 24, 2013). Online: See also the June 2013 special issue of Monthly Review, edited by Michael Yates, on “Public School Teachers Fighting Back.”

[4] For an excellent critique of this type of corporate educational un-reform, see Kenneth J. Saltman, The Failure of Corporate School Reform (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2013).

[5] Jody Sokolower, “Schools and the New Jim Crow: An Interview with Michelle Alexander,” Truthout (June 4, 2013). Online:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16756-schools-and-the-new-jim-crow-an-interview-with-michelle-alexander. These themes are more fully developed in Michelle Alexander, Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness(New York: New Press, 2012).

[6] John Tierney, “The Coming Revolution in Public Education,” The Atlantic (April 25, 2013). Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-coming-revolution-in-public-education/275163

[7] See, for example, Kristin Rawls, “North Carolina Becomes the Front Line of a Brutal Corporate Assault on Education Raging in America,” AlterNet (July 31, 2013). Online: http://www.alternet.org/activism/moral-monday-and-education

[8] For two examples of the appropriation of culture by corporate power and their donors and foundations, see Katherine Stewart, “The Right-wing Donors Who Fuel America’s Culture Wars,” The Guardian (April 23, 2013), online: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/23/rightwing-donors-fuel-america-culture-wars; and John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013).

[9] Luisa Kroll, “Gates Foundation Responds to GSR Bracelets Controversy,” Forbes (June 13, 2012). Online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2012/06/13/gates-foundation-responds-to-gsr-bracelets-controversy/

[10] Sokolower, “Schools and the New Jim Crow.”

[11] Sokolower, “Schools and the New Jim Crow.”

[12] Jaisol Noor, “Study Links High Stakes Testing to Higher Incarceration Rates,” The Real News Network (July 20, 2013). Online:http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10458

[13] Stephanie Simon, “Biosensors to Monitor Students’ Attentiveness,” Reuters(June 12, 2012). Online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/13/us-usa-education-gates-idUSBRE85C01820120613

[14] Kenneth Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

[15] Daniel Falcone, “Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21^stCentury and Beyond,” Truthout (June 1, 2013). Online:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16651-noam-chomsky-on-democracy-and-education-in-the-21st-century-and-beyond

[16] David Sirota, “It’s No Coincidence that the Public Education and Poverty Crises Are Happening at the Same Time,” Alternet (June 3, 2013). Online:

http://www.alternet.org/education/us-department-education-releases-study-schools-and-poverty-rate

[17] See, more recently, Norman Pollack, “Toward a Definition of Fascism,” CounterPunch (August 6, 2012), online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/06/toward-a-definition-of-fascism/

[18] Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. ix.

[19] John Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, second revised edition (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2002).

[20] On the predatory nature of such reforms, see Henry A. Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); and Michael Gecan, “How Predatory Reformers Are Destroying Education and Profiting at Our Children’s Expense,” AlterNet (June 14, 2013), online: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-predatory-reformers-are-destroying-education-and-profiting-our-childrens-expense. On the failure of such reforms, see the work of Kenneth Saltman, Diane Ravitch, Henry A. Giroux, Jonathan Kozol, Shirley Steinberg, bell hooks, and others.

[21] Elaine Weiss and Don Long, Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality: The impacts of test-based teacher revaluations, school closures, and increased charter school access on student outcomes in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (April 22, 2013). Online: http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bba-rhetoric-trumps-reality.pdf

[22] For instance, see Jaisol Noor, “Massive Cheating Scandals Rock School Districts Nationwide,” The Real News Network (April 20, 2013). Online: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10102.

[23] Kirp, “Why Cheating Scandals and Parent Rebellions Are Erupting in Schools in New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.” http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/science/2013/05/cheating_scandals_and_parent_rebellions_high_stakes_school_testing_is_doomed.html

[24] For examples of this tradition, see Maria Nikolakaki (ed.), Critical Pedagogy in the Dark Ages: Challenges and Possibilities (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); and Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011).

[25] Roger Simon, “Empowerment as a Pedagogy of Possibility,” Language Arts 64:4 (April 1987), p. 372.

[26] Cornelius Castoriadis, “Institutions and Autonomy.” In Peter Osborne (ed.), A Critical Sense (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 8.

[27] Chandra Mohanty, “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s,” Cultural Critique (Winter 1989-1990), p. 192.

[28] Amy Gutman, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

[29] Stanley Aronowitz, “Education Rediscovered,” The Indypendent, Issue #155 (September 9, 2010). Online:

http://www.indypendent.org/2010/09/09/education-rediscovered/

[30] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Information Clearing House. Speech delivered on April 4, 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. Online: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

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Schools as Punishing Factories: The Handcuffing of Public Education

febrero 27, 2018febrero 25, 2018Henry Giroux

By: Dr. Henry Giroux

The Nobel Prize-winning author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has insisted rightfully that «Children are the future of any society,» adding, «If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children.» (1)

As we move into the second Gilded Age, young people are viewed more as a threat than as a social investment.

If one important measure of a democracy is how a society treats its children – especially children of color, poor and working-class youth, and those with disabilities – there can be little doubt that the United States is failing. Half of all public school children live in near poverty, 16 million children receive food stamps and 90 percent of Black children will be on food stamps at some point during childhood. (2) Moreover, too many children are either incarcerated or homeless.

The National Center on Family Homelessness reports that «One in 45 children experience homelessness in America each year. That’s over 1.6 million children. [Moreover] while homeless, they experience high rates of acute and chronic health problems. The constant barrage of stressful and traumatic experience also has profound effects on their development and ability to learn.» (3) Sadly, these statistics rarely scratch the surface of the dire and deep-seated problems facing many young people in the richest country in the world, a state of affairs that provokes too little public outrage.

Teachable Moment or Criminal Offense?

Every age has its approach to identifying and handling problems. As we move into the second Gilded Age, young people are viewed more as a threat than as a social investment. Instead of being viewed as at-risk in a society that has defaulted on its obligations to young people, youth today are viewed as the risk itself. Instead of recognizing the social problems and troubles they face – ranging from poverty to punishing schools – our society sees youth as spoiled or threatening. (4) One consequence is that their behaviors are increasingly criminalized in the streets, malls, schools and many other places once considered safe spaces for them. As compassion and social responsibility give way to punishment and fear as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order, schools resort more and more to zero-tolerance policies and other punitive practices. Such practices often result in the handing over of disciplinary problems to the police rather than to educational personnel.

Children are being punished instead of educated in US schools.

With the growing presence of police, surveillance technologies and security guards in schools, more and more of what kids do, how they act, how they dress and what they say are defined as a criminal offense, regardless of how trivial the offense may be – in some cases just doodling on a desk or violating a dress code. Such behaviors, which teachers and administrators use to regulate through everyday means, are now treated as infractions within the purview of the police. Consequently, suspensions, expulsions, arrests and jail time have become routine for poor youth of color. Even more shocking is the rise of zero-tolerance policies to punish Black students and students with disabilities. (5) Instead of recognizing the need to provide services for students with special needs, there is a dangerous trend on the part of school systems to adopt policies «that end in seclusion, restraint, expulsion, and – too often – law enforcement intervention for the disabled children involved.» (6) Sadly, this is but a small sampling of the ways in which children are being punished instead of educated in US schools, especially inner-city schools. Rather than treating school infractions as part of the professional responsibilities of teachers and administrators, schools are criminalizing such behaviors and calling the police. What might have become a teachable moment becomes a criminal offense. (7)

Since the 1990s, the US public has been swamped by the fear of an alleged rise in teenage crime and what was called a superpredator crisis. This crisis was largely popularized by John J. DiIulio Jr., then a political scientist at Princeton University, who argued without irony «that hordes of depraved teenagers [were about to resort] to unspeakable brutality, not tethered by conscience.» (8) Politicians, intellectuals and news organizations were convinced that young people posed a dire threat to the US public and not only reveled «on these sensational predictions [but also] ran with them like a punt returner finding daylight.» (9) While such chaos proved to be nonsense, the theses spawned a plethora of disciplinary practices in schools, such as zero-tolerance policies, which have turned them into institutions that resemble prisons with students being subjected to harsh disciplinary practices, particularly poor black children and children suffering from mental health problems, such as ADHD.

Policing Students in Classrooms and on Playgrounds

These harsh practices have been inflicted disproportionately on poor Black children and children suffering from mental health problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This was on full display as social media lit up with a video that disclosed an 8-year-old boy in the third grade in an elementary school classroom in Covington, Kentucky, screaming in pain because he was being handcuffed with his arms placed behind his back. (10) Standing beside the child is police officer, Deputy Sheriff Kevin Sumner, who issues the chilling message, «You either behave the way you are supposed to or you suffer the consequences.» The child, it was later revealed, suffers from a learning disability. According to the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, «Charles Korzenborn, the sheriff in Covington, Kentucky … defended the officer … claiming that the police officer, Kevin Sumner, had done absolutely nothing wrong. The sheriff said his deputy had done ‘what he is sworn to do and in conformity with all constitutional and law enforcement standards…. I steadfastly stand behind Deputy Sumner who responded to the school’s request for help. Deputy Sumner is a highly respected and skilled law enforcement deputy, and is an asset to the community and those he serves.'» (11) Allegedly, Sumner was responding to the school’s call to diffuse «a threat.» It is hard to imagine what kind of threat a 3.5-foot tall 8-year-old elementary school child posed to either the school or to the police. At work here is not only a kind of bizarre rationality in which one becomes an asset to the community by handcuffing and arresting an 8-year-old boy but also the scourge of a willful ignorance which is the refusal to know or to recognize when an act of violence is being committed against a child.

Schools are considered dangerous because they are public, not because they are failing.

The sheriff’s unhinged defense of Sumner becomes even more apparent in light of the fact that it has been revealed that Sumner had engaged in similar behavior earlier in 2014. At that time, he participated in the handcuffing at John C. Carlisle Elementary School of a 9-year-old girl living with ADHD. At one level, this case reveals why police should not be in public schools in the first place and that the targeting of children by criminalizing their behavior represents the antithesis of how a school should treat its children. It also suggests something about the low regard the public has for public schools and the lives of our nation’s youth, especially poor children of color.

While the image of an 8-year-old boy handcuffed in an elementary school classroom in Covington, Kentucky, has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention on social media and in the mainstream news, it is far from unique. In 2013, a diabetic student in an Alabama high school was arrested and beaten for falling asleep in a classroom. (12) In 2013, Bronx police falsely accused a 7-year-old boy and «put him in handcuffs and held him in custody for ten hours after a playground fight» in which he was falsely accused of stealing $5 from another student. (13) It gets worse. The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in November 2012 charging that the Meridian, Mississippi, school district functioned largely as a school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionally focusing on Black youth. According to the Justice Department’s 37-page complaint, the Meridian school district engaged in «years of systemic abuse [which punished] youth ‘so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience.'» (14)

As Julianne Hing reports,

In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The police department’s policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency. Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations. (15)

The Meridian case makes clear what numerous reports have indicated for years: not only that zero-tolerance measures have failed, but also that they have made schools less secure, resulted in criminalizing student behavior and contributed to what has been called the school-to-prison pipeline, especially for poor youth of color. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points out, the school-to-prison pipeline is a «disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out.» (16) Putting the police in schools has little to do with improving the learning environment for children and a great deal to do with criminalizing students «for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline.» (17)

The war on youth and public schools is part of the larger assault on democracy itself.

The increasing criminalization of students of color, poor students and students with disabilities is taking place in the context of a broader attack on public schools as a whole. Like many institutions that represent the public good, public schools are under attack by market, religious and educational fundamentalists. Schools are considered dangerous because they are public, not because they are failing. State and corporate leaders are seeking to take power out of the hands of public school teachers and administrators because public schools harbor teachers with the potential to engage in pedagogies that are imaginative, empowering, critical and capable of connecting learning with the practice of freedom and the search for justice. The pedagogies of oppression – whether in the form of high-stakes testing, teaching for the test, imposing punitive disciplinary measures or the construction of relations that disempower teachers and empower security guards – are part of a broader attempt to destroy the social state and the institutions that produce the formative culture necessary for a democracy.

Students Are Not Criminals

There are no safe spaces left in the United States. As almost every aspect of society becomes militarized, the imposing apparatuses of the police state become more and more obvious, reckless and dangerous, and include more than the arming of local police forces.

As Chase Mader observes:

Even as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing – you will be sent the bill later. Air travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as nothing more than ‘security theater.’ As for staying at home, it carries its own risks as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found out when a Cambridge police officer mistook him for a burglar and hauled him away – a case that is hardly unique. (18)

The rise of the punishing and police state depends on conformity, the squelching of dissent and the closing down of any institution capable of educating the young and old to hold authority accountable. More specifically, pedagogies of oppression are a central tool for dismantling critical learning and dissent and for increasing the power of the punishing state. Under the reign of neoliberalism, all things public are under attack, from schools to health care to public servants. The war on youth and public schools is part of the larger assault on democracy itself. The controlling elite view schools as dangerous to their interests. For the financial elite, right-wing ideologues and billionaires such as the Walton family, the Koch brothers and Bill Gates, public education must be defunded, broken and privatized because it contains the potential to educate young people to question authority and hold it accountable, and produce civically literate and socially engaged students and critically engaged citizens.

Schools are not prisons, teachers are not a security detail and students are not criminals. Schools should model the United States’ investment in children and to do so they need to view young people as a resource rather than as a threat. If public schools are going to improve they have to be appropriately funded. That means, raising corporate taxes, cutting the defense budget, and allocating funds that contribute to the public good. It also means closing down and defunding those financial and military institutions that produce misery and destroy human lives, especially the lives of children. Educators should be given the power, autonomy and resources to be able to work closely with children in order to provide them with the conditions for meaningful learning while providing safe spaces for them to be nourished ethically, intellectually and spiritually. Schools are a public good and should be defined as such. How the United States invests in schools will shape an entire generation of young people. The lesson these youth should not be learning is that they can’t be trusted and should be treated as criminals. That view of schooling is one we associate with totalitarian states, not with a genuine democratic society.

Footnotes:

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom(London: James Currey, 1993), p. 76.

2. Lindsey Tanner, «Half of US Kids Will Get Food Stamps, Study Says,» The Associated Press (November 2, 2009). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/food-stamps-will-feed-hal_n_342834.html

3. Cited from the website of The National Center on Family Homelessness. Online: http://www.familyhomelessness.org/children.php?p=ts

4. I have taken this issue up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave, 2009). See also Kenneth Saltman, ed. Kenneth J. Saltman, David A. Gabbard, eds. Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2010).

5. Joy Resmovits, «American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds,» The Huffington Post (March 21, 2015). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/21/schools-discrimination_n_5002954.html

6. s.e. smith, «Police Handcuffing 7-Year-Olds? The Brutality Unleashed on Kids With Disabilities in Our School Systems,» AlterNet (May 22, 2012). Online: http://www.alternet.org/story/155526/police_handcuffing_7-year-olds_the_brutality_unleashed_on_kids_with_disabilities_in_our_school_systems?page=entire

7. Staff, Rethinking Schools, «Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline» Truthout, (Jan. 15, 2012).

8. Clyde Haberman, «When Youth Violence Spurred ‘Superpredator’ Fear,» The New York Times (April 6, 2014). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/us/politics/killing-on-bus-recalls-superpredator-threat-of-90s.html?_r=0

9. Ibid., Haberman.

10. The video can be seen here: Ed Pilkington, «Kentucky sheriff ‘steadfastly’ defends officer who handcuffed 8-year-old,» The Guardian (August 4, 2015). Online: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/04/kentucky-sheriff-defends-officer-handcuffed-child

11. Ibid., Pilkington.

12. Alex Kane, «Diabetic High School Girl Beaten by Police Officer and Arrested – For Falling Asleep in Class,» AlterNet, (May 7, 2013).

13. Natasha Lennard, «NYPD Handcuff, Interrogate 7-Year-Old Over $5,» AlterNet, (January 30, 2013). Online: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/nypd-handcuff-interrogate-7-year-old-over-5

14. Julianne Hing, «The Shocking Details of a Mississippi School-to-Prison Pipeline,» Truthout, (December 3, 2012). Online: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13121-the-shocking-details-of-a-mississippi-school-to-prison-pipeline

15. Ibid., Hing.

16. American Civil Liberties Union, «School-to-prison-pipeline,» ACLU Issues (August 5, 2015). Online: https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/race-and-inequality-education/school-prison-pipeline

17. Ibid.

18. Chase Madar, «Everyone Is a Criminal: On the Over-Policing of America», The Huffington Post. (December 13, 2013). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chase-madar/over-policing-of-america_b_4412187.html

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32238-schools-as-punishing-factories-the-handcuffing-of-public-education

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The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump

febrero 20, 2018febrero 19, 2018Henry Giroux

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has been hijacked. This is especially troubling when the «mobilizing passions» of a fascist past now emerge in the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and in powerful conservative media, such as Fox News, Breitbart News, conservative talk radio stations and alt-right social media. Power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. This mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption are not merely systems, but ecologies that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and modes of agency with unprecedented power and influence. Informal educational apparatuses, particularly the corporate-controlled media, appear increasingly to be on the side of tyranny. In fact, it would be difficult to overly stress the growing pedagogical importance of the old and new media and the power they now have on the political imaginations of countless Americans. This is particularly true of right-wing media empires, such as those owned by Rupert Murdoch, as well as powerful corporate entities such as Clearwater, which dominates the radio airwaves with its ownership of over 1,250 stations. In the sphere of television ownership and control, powerful corporate entities have emerged, such as Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the largest number of TV stations in the United States. In addition, right-wing hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have an audience in the millions. Right-wing educational apparatuses shape much of what Americans watch and listen to, and appear to influence all of what Trump watches and hears. The impact of conservative media has had a dangerous effect on American culture and politics, and has played the most prominent role in channeling populist anger and electing Trump to the presidency. We are now witnessing the effects of this media machine. The first casualty of the Trump era is truth, the second is moral responsibility, the third is any vestige of justice, and the fourth is a massive increase in human misery and suffering for millions.

Instead of refusing to cooperate with evil, Americans increasingly find themselves in a society in which those in commanding positions of power and influence exhibit a tacit approval of the emerging authoritarian strains and acute social problems undermining democratic institutions and rules of law. As such, they remain silent and therefore, complicit in the face of such assaults on American democracy. Ideological extremism and a stark indifference to the lies and ruthless polices of the Trump administration have turned the Republican Party into a party of collaborators, not unlike the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s. Both groups bought into the script of ultra-nationalism, encouraged anti-Semitic mobs, embraced a militant masculinity, demonized racial and ethnic others, supported an unchecked militarism and fantasies of empire, and sanctioned state violence at home and abroad.

Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices.

This is not to propose that those who support Trump are all Nazis in suits. On the contrary, it is meant to suggest a more updated danger in which people with power have turned their backs on the cautionary histories of the fascist and Nazi regimes, and in doing so, have willingly embraced authoritarian messages and tropes. Rather than Nazis in suits, we have a growing culture of social and historical amnesia that enables those who are responsible for the misery, anger and pain that has accompanied the long reign of casino capitalism to remain silent for their role and complicity in the comeback of fascism in the United States. This normalization of fascism can be seen in the way in which language that was once an object of critique in liberal democracies loses its negative connotation and becomes the opposite in the Trump administration. Politics, power and human suffering are now framed outside of the realm of historical memory. What is forgotten is that history teaches us something about the transformation and mobilization of language into an instrument of war and violence. As Richard J. Evans observes in his The Third Reich in Power:

Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism … so that ‘fanatical’, ‘brutal’, ‘ruthless’, ‘uncompromising’, ‘hard’ all became words of praise instead of disapproval… In the hands of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, the German language became strident, aggressive and militaristic. Commonplace matters were described in terms more suited to the battlefield. The language itself began to be mobilized for war.

Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the heart of much of the American imagination. This is a dystopian imagination marked by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain. There is more at work here than shrinking political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political and a full-scale attack on moral outrage, thoughtful reasoning, collective resistance and radical imagination. Trump has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible.

Of course, Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism, with its growing authoritarianism and social and political injustices that have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s. It was at that point in US history when both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and the institutions driving casino capitalism. As Ronald Reagan made clear, government was the problem. Consequently, it was framed as the enemy of freedom and purged for assuming any responsibility for a range of basic social needs. Individual responsibility took the place of the welfare state, compassion gave way to self-interest, manufacturing was replaced by the toxic power of financialization, and a rampaging inequality left the bottom half of the US population without jobs, a future of meaningful work or a life of dignity.

The call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

Trump has added a new swagger and unapologetic posture to this concoction of massive inequality, systemic racism, American exceptionalism and ultra-nationalism. He embodies a form of populist authoritarianism that not only rejects an egalitarian notion of citizenship, but embraces a nativism and fear of democracy that is at the heart of any fascist regime.

How else to explain a sitting president announcing to a crowd that Democratic Party congressional members who refused to clap for parts of his State of the Union address were «un-American» and «treasonous»? This charge is made all the more disturbing given that the White House promoted this speech as one that would emphasize «bipartisanship and national unity.» Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices. Such threats are not a joking matter and cannot be dismissed as merely a slip of the tongue. When the president states publicly that his political opponents have committed a treasonous act — one that is punishable by death — because they refused to offer up sycophantic praise, the plague of fascism is not far away. His call for unity takes a dark turn under such circumstances and emulates a fascist past in which the call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mindset has been resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the truth, ethics and alleged human weakness. For Trump, success amounts to acting with impunity, using government power to sell or to license his brand, hawking the allure of power and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity, selfishness and state-sanctioned violence. Trump is a master of performance as a form of mass entertainment. This approach to politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein rightly argues in No Is Not Enough, Trump «approaches everything as a spectacle» and edits «reality to fit his narrative.»

As the bully-in-chief, he militarizes speech while producing a culture meant to embrace his brand of authoritarianism. This project is most evident in his speeches and policies, which pit white working- and middle-class males against people of color, men against women, and white nationalists against various ethnic, immigrant and religious groups. Trump is a master of theater and diversion, and the mainstream press furthers this attack on critical exchange by glossing over his massive assault on the planet and enactment of policies, such as the GOP tax cuts, which are willfully designed to redistribute wealth upward to his fellow super-rich billionaires. Trump’s alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels garners far more headlines than his deregulation of oil and gas industries and his dismantling of environment protections.

Economic pillage has reached new and extreme levels and is now accompanied by a ravaging culture of viciousness and massive levels of exploitation and human suffering. Trump has turned language into a weapon with his endless lies and support for white nationalism, nativism, racism and state violence. This is a language that legitimates ignorance while producing an active silence and complicity in the face of an emerging corporate fascist state.

Like most authoritarians, Trump demands loyalty and team membership from all those under his power, and he hates those elements of a democracy — such as the courts and the critical media — that dare to challenge him. Echoes of the past come to life in his call for giant military parades, enabling White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to call people who disagree with his policies «un-American,» and sanctioning his Department of Justice to issue a «chilling warning,» threatening to arrest and charge mayors with a federal crime who do not implement his anti-immigration policies and racist assaults on immigrants. What can be learned from past periods of tyranny is that the embrace of lawlessness is often followed by a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism.

Whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses.

In Trump’s world view, the call for limitless loyalty reflects more than an insufferable act of vanity and insecurity; it is a weaponized threat to those who dare to challenge Trump’s assumption that he is above the law and can have his way on matters of corruption, collusion and a possible obstruction of justice. Trump is an ominous threat to democracy and lives, as Masha Gessen observes, «surrounded by enemies, shadowed by danger, forever perched on the precipice.» Moreover, he has enormous support from his Vichy-like minions in Congress, among the ultra-rich bankers and hedge fund managers, and the corporate elite. His trillion-dollar tax cut has convinced corporate America he is their best ally. He has, in not too subtle ways, also convinced a wide range of far-right extremists extending from the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to the deeply racist and fascist «alt-right» movement, that he shares their hatred of people of color, immigrants and Jews. Imaginary horrors inhabit this new corporate dystopian world and frighteningly resemble shades of a terrifying past that once led to unimaginable acts of genocide, concentration camps and a devastating world war. Nowhere is this vision more succinctly contained than in Trump’s first State of the Union Address and the response it garnered.

State of Disunion

An act of doublespeak preceded Donald Trump’s first State of the Union Address. Billed by the White House as a speech that would be «unifying» and marked by a tone of «bipartisanship,» the speech was actually steeped in divisiveness, fear, racism, warmongering, nativism and immigrant bashing. It once again displayed Trump’s contempt for democracy.

Claiming «all Americans deserve accountability and respect,» Trump nevertheless spent ample time in his speech equating undocumented immigrants with the criminal gang MS-13, regardless of the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens. (As Juan Cole points out, «Americans murdered 17,250 other Americans in 2016. Almost none of the perpetrators was an undocumented worker, contrary to the impression Trump gave.»)

For Trump, as with most demagogues, fear is the most valued currency of politics. In his speech, he suggested that the visa lottery system and «chain migration» — in which individuals can migrate through the sponsorship of their family — posed a threat to the US, presenting «risks we can just no longer afford.» In response to the Dreamers, he moved between allegedly supporting their bid for citizenship to suggesting they were part of a culture of criminality. At one point, he stated in a not-too-subtle expression of derision that «Americans are dreamers too.» This was a gesture to his white nationalist base. On Twitter, David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, cheered over that remark. Trump had nothing to say about the challenges undocumented immigrants face, nor did he express any understanding of the fear and insecurity hanging over the heads of 800,000 Dreamers who could be deported.

Trump also indicated that he was not going to close Guantánamo, and once again argued that «terrorists should be treated like terrorists.» Given the history of torture associated with Guantánamo and the past crimes and abuses that took place under the mantle of the «war on terror,» Trump’s remarks should raise a red flag, not only because torture is a war crime, but also because the comment further accelerated the paranoia, nihilist passions and apocalyptic populism that feeds his base.

Fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

Pointing to menacing enemies all around the world, Trump exhibited his love for all things war-like and militaristic, and his support for expanding the nuclear arsenal and the military budget. He also called on «the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.» Given his firing of James Comey, his threat to fire Jeff Sessions, and more recently his suggestion that he might fire Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — all of whom allegedly displayed disloyalty by not dismantling the Russian investigation conducted by Special Council Mueller — Trump seems likely to make good on this promise to rid the federal workforce of those who disagree with him, allowing him to fill civil service jobs with friends, family members and sycophants. This is about more than Trump’s disdain for the separation of power, the independence of other government agencies, or his attack on potential whistleblowers; it is about amassing power and instilling fear in those he appoints to government positions if they dare act to hold power accountable. This is what happens when democracies turn into fascist states.

Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined, and while his critics across the ideological spectrum have begun to go after him, they rarely focus on how dangerous he is, hesitant to argue that he is not only the enemy of democracy, but symptomatic of the powerful political, economic and cultural forces shaping the new US fascism.

There are some critics who claim that Trump is simply a weak president whose ineptness is being countered by «a robust democratic culture and set of institutions,» and not much more than a passing moment in history. Others, such as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser, view him as an authoritarian expression of right-wing populism and an outgrowth of neoliberal politics and policies. While many historians, such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton, analyze him in terms that echo some elements of a fascist past, some conservatives such as David Frum view him as a modern-day self-obsessed, emotionally needy demagogue whose assault on democracy needs to be taken seriously, and that whether or not he is a fascist is not as important as what he plans to do with his power. For Frum, there is a real danger that people will retreat into their private worlds, become cynical and enable a slide into a form of tyranny that would become difficult to defeat. Others, like Corey Robin, argue that we overstep a theoretical boundary when comparing Trump directly to Hitler. According to Robin, Trump bears no relationship to Hitler or the policies of the Third Reich. Robin not only dismisses the threat that Trump poses to the values and institutions of democracy, but plays down the growing threat of authoritarianism in the United States. For Robin, Trump has failed to institute many of his policies, and as such, is just a weak politician with little actual power. Not only does Robin focus too much on the person of Trump, but he is relatively silent about the forces that produced him and the danger these proto-fascist social formations now pose to those who are the objects of the administration’s racist, sexist and xenophobic taunts and policies.

The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice.

As Jeffrey C. Isaac observes, whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses; for instance, to the DACA children and their families, the poor, undocumented immigrants and a range of other groups. Moreover, authoritarianism is looming in the air and can be seen in the number of oppressive and regressive policies already put into place by the Trump administration that will have a long-term effect on the United States. These include the $1.5 trillion giveaway in the new tax code, the expansion of the military-industrial complex, the elimination of Obamacare’s individual mandate, the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and a range of deregulations that will impact negatively on the environment for years to come. In addition, there is the threat of a nuclear war, the disappearance of health care for the most vulnerable, the attack on free speech and the media, and the rise of the punishing state and the increasing criminalization of social problems. As Richard J. Evans, the renowned British historian, observes, «Violence indeed was at the heart of the Nazi enterprise. Every democracy that perishes dies in a different way, because every democracy is situated in specific historical circumstances.»

US society has entered a dangerous stage in its history. After 40 years of neoliberalism and systemic racism, many Americans lack a critical language that offers a consistent narrative that enables them to understand gutted wages, lost pensions, widespread uncertainty and collapsing identities due to feeling disposable, the loss of meaningful work and a formative culture steeped in violence, cruelty and an obsession with greed. Moreover, since 9/11, Americans have been bombarded by a culture of fear and consumerism that both dampens their willingness to be critical agents and depoliticizes them. Everyone is now a suspect or a consumer, but hardly a critically engaged citizen. Others are depoliticized because of the ravages of debt, poverty and the daily struggle to survive — problems made all the worse by Trump’s tax and health policies. And while there is no perfect mirror, it has become all the more difficult for many people to recognize how the «crystalized elements» of totalitarianism have emerged in the shape of an American-style fascism. What has been forgotten by too many intellectuals, critics, educators and politicians is that fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

Trump is not in possession of storm troopers, concentration camps or concocting plans for genocidal acts — at least, not at the moment. But that does not mean that fascism is a moment frozen in history and has no bearing on the present. As Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin and others have taught us, totalitarian regimes come in many forms and their elements can come together in different configurations. Rather than dismiss the notion that the organizing principles and fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us, a more appropriate response to Trump’s rise to power is to raise questions about what elements of his government signal the emergence of a fascism suited to a contemporary and distinctively US political, economic and cultural landscape.

What seems indisputable is that under Trump, democracy has become the enemy of power, politics and finance. Adam Gopnik refutes the notion that Trumpism will simply fade away in the end, and argues that comparisons between the current historical moment and fascism are much needed. He writes:

Needless to say, the degradation of public discourse, the acceleration of grotesque lying, the legitimization of hatred and name-calling, are hard to imagine vanishing like the winter snows that Trump thinks climate change is supposed to prevent. The belief that somehow all these things will somehow just go away in a few years’ time does seem not merely unduly optimistic but crazily so. In any case, the trouble isn’t just what the Trumpists may yet do; it is what they are doing now. American history has already been altered by their actions — institutions emptied out, historical continuities destroyed, traditions of decency savaged — in ways that will not be easy to rehabilitate.

There is nothing new about the possibility of authoritarianism in a particularly distinctive guise coming to the US. Nor is there a shortage of works illuminating the horrors of fascism. Fiction writers ranging from George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis and Aldous Huxley to Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth have sounded the alarm in often brilliant and insightful terms. Politicians such as Henry Wallace wrote about American fascism, as did a range of theorists, such as Umberto Eco, Arendt and Paxton, who tried to understand its emergence, attractions and effects. What they all had in common was an awareness of the changing nature of tyranny and how it could happen under a diverse set of historical, economic and social circumstances. They also seem to share Philip Roth’s insistence that we all have an obligation to recognize «the terror of the unforeseen» that hides in the shadows of censorship, makes power invisible and gains in strength in the absence of historical memory. A warning indeed.

Trump represents a distinctive and dangerous form of US-bred authoritarianism, but at the same time, he is the outcome of a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed and engaged for the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has Trump «normalized the unspeakable» and in some cases, the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and yes, courage itself. In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship and justice that has real substance. One challenge is to confront the horrors of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism under Trump. This cannot happen without a revolution in consciousness, one that makes education central to politics.

Moreover, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, such a revolution cannot take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the «impossible present.» Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves to a language of critique and a narrow focus on individual issues. What is needed is also a language of hope and a comprehensive politics that draws from history and imagines a future that does not imitate the present. Under such circumstances, the language of critique and hope can be enlisted to create a broad-based and powerful social movement that both refuses to equate capitalism with democracy and moves toward creating a radical democracy. William Faulkner once remarked that we live with the ghosts of the past, or to be more precise: «The past is never dead. It’s not even past.»

However, we are not only living with the ghosts of a dark past; it is also true that the ghosts of history can be critically engaged and transformed into a democratic politics for the future. The Nazi regime is more than a frozen moment in history. It is a warning from the past and a window into the growing threat Trumpism poses to democracy. The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice and collective courage in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy. The stakes are too high to remain complacent, cynical or simply outraged. A crisis of memory, history, agency and justice has mushroomed and opened up the abyss of a fascist nightmare. Now is the time to talk back, embrace the radical imagination in private and public, and create united mass based coalitions in which the collective dream for a radical democracy becomes a reality. There is no other choice.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43529-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump

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Manufactured illiteracy and miseducation: A long process of decline led to President Donald Trump

enero 30, 2018enero 31, 2018Henry Giroux

By Henry Giroux

A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There’s hope!

Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As Trump has galvanized his base of true believers in post-election demonstrations, the world is witnessing how a politics of bigotry and hate is transformed into a spectacle of demonization, division and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned not only in the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, threats and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.

The reality of Trump’s election may be the most momentous development of the age because of its enormity and the shock it has produced. The whole world is watching, pondering how such a dreadful event could have happened. How have we arrived here? What forces have allowed education, if not reason itself, to be undermined as crucial public and political resources, capable of producing the formative culture and critical citizens that could have prevented such a catastrophe from happening in an alleged democracy? We get a glimpse of this failure of education, public values and civic literacy in the willingness and success of the Trump administration to empty language of any meaning, a practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice and social responsibility.

Under such circumstances and with too little opposition, the Trump administration has taken on the workings of a dis-imagination machine, characterized by an utter disregard for the truth and often accompanied by the president’s tweet-storm of “primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.” In this instance, George Orwell’s famous maxim from “Nineteen Eighty-four,” “Ignorance is Strength,” materializes in the administration’s weaponized attempt not only to rewrite history but also to obliterate it. What we are witnessing is not simply a political project but also a reworking of the very meaning of education as both a crucial institution and a democratizing and empowering cultural force.

Truth is now viewed as a liability and ignorance a virtue. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and science is confused with pseudo-science. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughing stock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public can be easily seduced by exhortations, emotional outbursts and sensationalism, all of which mimic the fatuous spectacle of celebrity culture and reality TV. Image-selling now entails lying on principle, making it easier for politics to dissolve into entertainment, pathology and a unique brand of criminality.

The corruption of both the truth and politics is abetted by the fact that much of the American public has become habituated to overstimulation and lives in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has the time to crystallize into mature and informed thought. Opinion now trumps reason and evidence-based arguments. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in the spectacles of shock and violence. Defunded and corporatized, many institutions of public and higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business the business of education, and this transformation has corrupted their mission.

As a result, many colleges and universities have been McDonald-ized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity, resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu. In addition, faculty are subjected increasingly to a Walmart model of labor relations designed “to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.” Students are relegated to the status of customers and clients.

In addition, public education is under siege to an almost unprecedented degree. Both political parties have implemented reforms that “teach for the test,” weaken unions, deskill teachers, and wage a frontal assault on the imagination of students through disciplinary measures that amount to pedagogies of repression. Moreover, students marginalized by class and color find themselves in schools increasingly modeled after prisons. As more and more security guards and police personnel occupy schools, a wider range of student behaviors are criminalized, and students increasingly find themselves on a conveyor belt that has appropriately been described as the school-to-prison pipeline.

On a policy level, the Trump administration has turned its back on schools as public goods. How else to explain the president’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education? DeVos, who has spent most of her career attempting to privatize public schools while acting as a champion for charter schools. It gets worse: As a religious Christian extremist, DeVos not only supports religious indoctrination in public schools but has gone so far as to argue that the purpose of public education is “to help advance God’s Kingdom.” Not exactly a policy that supports critical thinking, dialogue or analytical reasoning, or that understands schooling as a public good. DeVos is Trump’s gift to the billionaires, evangelicals, hedge fund managers and bankers, who view schools strictly as training and containment centers — and as sources of profit.

On a larger scale, the educational force of the wider culture has been transformed into a spectacle for violence and trivialized entertainment, and a tool for legitimating ignorance. Cultural apparatuses that extend from the mainstream media and the diverse platforms of screen culture now function as neoliberal modes of public pedagogy parading as entertainment or truthful news reporting. As “teaching machines,” these apparatuses — as C. Wright Mills once predicted — have become the engines of manufactured illiteracy while producing identities, desires and values compatible with the crudest market ideologies.

Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of zombie politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations,and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding institutions that now control American society. Welcome to the land of the walking dead.

I am not referring here to only the kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such as Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky and Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of manufactured illiteracy that has become a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges captures this demagogic attack on thoughtfulness in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idioms of mass culture.” Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.

This updated form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. At the same time, illiteracy bonds people: It offers the pretense of a community bound by a willful denial of facts and its celebration of ignorance.

How else to explain the popular support for someone like Donald Trump who boldly proclaims his love for the “poorly educated”? Or, for that matter, the willingness of his followers to put up with his contemptuous and boisterous claim that science and evidence-based truths are “fake news,” his dismissal of journalists who hold power accountable as the opposition party, and his willingness to bombard the American public with an endless proliferation of peddled falsehoods that reveal his contempt for intellect, reason and truth.

What are we to make of the fact that a person who holds the office of the presidency has praised popular “rage addict” Alex Jones publicly, and thanked him for the role he played in his presidential election victory? Jones is a conspiracy trafficker who runs the website InfoWars. He has suggested that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” and that the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was faked.

Illiteracy is no longer restricted to populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is also about refusing to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency.

Illiteracy has become a political weapon and form of political repression that works to render critical agency inoperable, and restages power as a mode of domination. Illiteracy in the service of violence now functions to depoliticize people by making it difficult for individuals to develop informed judgments, analyze complex relationships and draw upon a range of sources to understand how power works and how they might be able to shape the forces that bear down on their lives. As a depoliticizing force, illiteracy works to make people powerless, and reinforces their willingness to accept being governed rather than learn how to govern.

This mode of illiteracy now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops and the need for instant gratification. This is a mode of illiteracy and education that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship. It is important to recognize that the prevalence of such manufactured illiteracy is not simply about the failure of colleges and universities to create critical and active citizens. It is about an authoritarian society that eliminates public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. At stake here is not only a crisis of education, memory, ethics and agency but a crisis that reaches into the very foundation of a strong democracy.

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

Not only is manufactured illiteracy obvious in the presence of a social order and government that collapses the distinction between the serious and frivolous, it is also visible in media platforms marked by the proliferation of anti-intellectual discourses among a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who are waging a war on science, reason and the legacy of the Enlightenment. How else to explain the present historical moment, with its collapse of civic culture and the future it cancels out? What is to be made of the assault on civic literacy and the institutions and conditions that produce an active citizenry at a time when massive self-enrichment and a gangster morality are operative at the highest reaches of the U.S. government, all of which serves to undermine the public realm as a space of freedom, liberty, dialogue and deliberative consensus?

One of the challenges facing the current generation of leftists, progressives and cultural workers is the need to address the question of what counts as education, and what it should accomplish in a society that is slipping into the dark night of authoritarianism. In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable? Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality and endless assaults on the environment, a social order that elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals.

At issue here is the need for educators, progressives, artists and other cultural workers to recognize the power of education both in schools and the wider culture in creating the formative spaces being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy. At the same time, there is a need for the left and others to fight for those public spheres that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking and social relations that support democratic socialism and radical democracy.

At the very least, this requires that education be regarded as central to politics, and that cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, digital culture and Hollywood films be perceived as powerful teaching machines and not only as sources of information or entertainment. Such sites should be viewed as spheres of struggle that need to be removed from the control of the financial elite and corporations who use them as work stations for propagandizing a culture of vulgarity, self-absorption and commodification while eroding any sense of shared citizenship and civic culture.

There is an urgent political need for the left and progressives to understand and combat an authoritarian society that uses education to weaponize and trivialize the discourse, vocabularies, images and aural means of communication in a variety of cultural sites. Or, for that matter, to grasp that a market-driven discourse does not and cannot provide the intellectual, ethical and political tools for civic education and the expansion of the social imagination.

On the contrary, the pedagogical machinery of capitalism uses language and other modes of representation to relegate citizenship to the singular pursuit of unbridled self-interests, to legitimate shopping as the ultimate expression of one’s identity, to portray essential public services as reinforcing and weakening any viable sense of individual responsibility, and to organize society for the production of violence as the primary method of addressing a vast array of social problems.

One of the most serious challenges facing progressives, educators and diverse cultural workers is the task of grasping education as a crucial political tool that can be used to enhance the capacities of people to translate their hidden despair and private grievances into public transcripts. At best, such transcripts can be transformed into forms of public dissent or what might be called a moment of rupture, one that has important implications for public action in a time of impending tyranny and authoritarianism.

In taking up this project, individuals and cultural workers can attempt to create the conditions that give the wider public an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and courage necessary to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?

In the age of financial and political zombies, the ability of finance capitalism to cloak itself in a warped discourse of freedom and choice has been weakened. Its willingness to separate toxic economic, cultural and political policies from their social costs has ruptured neoliberalism’s ability to normalize its worldview. The contradictions between its promises and its harsh effects have become too visible as its poisonous policies have put millions out of work, turned many black and brown communities into war zones, destroyed public education, undermined the democratic mission of higher education, flagrantly pursued war as the greatest of national ideals, turned the prison system into a default institution for punishing minorities of race and class, pillaged the environment and blatantly imposed a new mode of racism under the fanciful notion of a post-racial society.

The crisis of capitalism and the production of widespread misery has opened up new political opportunities to reclaim education as a central element of politics and resistance. Education as it functions on multiple levels and through diverse registers matters. It is one of the most powerful sources for changing consciousness, desires and agency itself.

Pierre Bourdieu was right to argue that leftists “must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” Bourdieu’s concerns about leftists underestimating “the pedagogical and symbolic dimensions of struggle” are more relevant today than ever, given the accelerated political merger of power, culture and everyday life.

Too often leftists and other progressives have focused on domination as mostly an economic or structural issue and in doing so have forgotten about the political role of education and consciousness-raising in providing a language and narrative in which people can recognize themselves, make identifications that speak to the conditions that bear down on them in new ways, and rethink the future so as not to mimic the present. Yet matters of subjectivity, identity and desire are not only central to politics, they are the crucial underpinning through which new theoretical and political horizons can be imagined and acted upon.

In an age in which authoritarianism is dismantling the foundations of democracy across the globe, the ideological and subjective conditions that make individual and collective modes of agency possible — and capable of engaging in powerful and broad-based movements of resistance — are no longer an option. They are a necessity.

Source:https://www.salon.com/2017/06/24/manufactured-illiteracy-and-miseducation-a-long-process-of-decline-led-to-president-donald-trump/

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Challenging Trump’s Language of Fascism

enero 16, 2018enero 15, 2018Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

George Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. Words now operate as «Newspeak,» in which language is twisted in order to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people to think critically and freely. As authoritarianism gains in strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible.

Words that speak to the truth, reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to hold dominant power accountable. Notions of virtue, honor, respect and compassion are policed, and those who advocate them are punished.

I think it is fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction. Under the regime of Donald Trump, the Ministry of Truth has become the Ministry of «Fake News,» and the language of «Newspeak» has multiple platforms and has morphed into a giant disimagination machinery of propaganda, violence, bigotry, hatred and war.

With the advent of the Trump presidency, language is undergoing a shift in the United States: It now treats dissent, critical media and scientific evidence as a species of «fake news.» The administration also views the critical media as the «enemy of the American people.» In fact, Trump has repeated this view of the press so often that almost a third of Americans believe it and support government-imposed restrictions on the media, according to a Poynter survey. Language has become unmoored from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific evidence, and is now being reconfigured within new relations of power tied to pageantry, political theater and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism, increasingly shaped by the widespread banality of celebrity culture, the celebration of ignorance over intelligence, a culture of rancid consumerism, and a corporate-controlled media that revels in commodification, spectacles of violence, the spirit of unchecked self-interest and a «survival of the fittest» ethos.

Under such circumstances, language has been emptied of substantive meaning and functions increasingly to lull large swaths of the American public into acquiescence, if not a willingness to accommodate and support a rancid «populism» and galloping authoritarianism. The language of civic literacy and democracy has given way to the language of saviors, decline, bigotry and hatred. One consequence is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear, injustices proliferate and language functions as a tool of state repression. The Ministry of «Fake News» works incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable, claiming that reason, standards of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth, because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. «Thought crimes» are now labeled as «fake news.»

The notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power — particularly his attacks on judges, courts, and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty. For Trump, intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing. One consequence is myriad practices in which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, willfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.

David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama, is right in stating:

And while every president is irritated by the limitations of democracy on them, they all grudgingly accept it. [Trump] has not. He has waged a war on the institutions of democracy from the beginning, and I think in a very corrosive way.

New York Times writer Peter Baker adds to this charge by arguing that Trump — buoyed by an infatuation with absolute power and an admiration for authoritarians — uses language and the power of the presidency as a potent weapon in his attacks on the First Amendment, the courts and responsible governing. Trump’s admiration for a number of dictators is well known. What is often underplayed is his inclination to mimic their language and polices. For instance, Trump’s call for «law and order,» his encouraging police officers to be more violent with «thugs,» and his adoration of all things militaristic echoes the ideology and language of Philippine President and strongman Rodrigo Duterte, who has called for mass murder and boasted about «killing criminals with his own hand.»

Fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political theater echo earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.

At the same time, it would be irresponsible to suggest that the current expression of authoritarianism in US politics began with Trump, or that the context for his rise to power represents a distinctive moment in American history. As Howard Zinn points out in A People’s History of the United States, the US was born out of acts of genocide, nativism and the ongoing violence of white supremacy. Moreover, the US has a long history of demagogues, extending from Huey Long and Joe McCarthy to George Wallace and Newt Gingrich. Authoritarianism runs deep in American history, and Trump is simply the end point of these anti-democratic practices.

With the rise of casino capitalism, a «winner-take-all» ethos has made the United States a mean-spirited and iniquitous nation that has turned its back on the poor, underserved, and those considered racially and ethnically disposable. It is worth noting that in the last 40 years, we have witnessed an increasing dictatorship of finance capital and an increasing concentration of power and ownership regarding the rise and workings of the new media and mainstream cultural apparatuses. These powerful digital and traditional pedagogical apparatuses of the 21st century have turned people into consumers, and citizenship into a neoliberal obsession with self-interest and an empty notion of freedom. The ecosystem of visual and print representations has taken on an unprecedented influence, given the merging of power and culture as a dominant political and pedagogical force. This cultural apparatus has become so powerful, in fact, that it is difficult to dispute the central role it played in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Analyzing the forces behind the election of Trump, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide a cogent commentary on the political and pedagogical power of an old and updated media landscape. They write:

Undoubtedly, Trump’s celebrity status played a role. But equally important was the changed media landscape…. By one estimate, the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC — four outlets that no one could accuse of pro-Trump leanings — mentioned Trump twice as often as Hillary Clinton. According to another study, Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season. Trump didn’t need traditional Republican power brokers. The gatekeepers of the invisible primary weren’t merely invisible; by 2016, they were gone entirely.

What is crucial to remember here, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political theater echo earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression. Commenting on the Trump administration’s barring the Centers for Disease Control to use certain words, Ben-Ghiat writes:

The strongman knows that it starts with words…. That’s why those who study authoritarian regimes or have had the misfortune to live under one may find something deeply familiar about the Trump administration’s decision to bar officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using certain words («vulnerable,» «entitlement,» «diversity,» «transgender,» «fetus,» «evidence-based» and «science-based»). The administration’s refusal to give any rationale for the order, and the pressure it places on CDC employees, have a political meaning that transcends its specific content and context…. The decision as a whole links to a larger history of how language is used as a tool of state repression. Authoritarians have always used language policies to bring state power and their cults of personality to bear on everyday life. Such policies affect not merely what we can say and write at work and in public, but also [attempt] to change the way we think about ourselves and about others. The weaker our sentiments of solidarity and humanity become — or the stronger our impulse to compromise them under pressure — the easier it is for authoritarians to find partners to carry out their repressive policies.

Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty was normalized through the proliferation of the strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization. As German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer have made clear, dictators such as Hitler did more than corrupt the language of a civilized society, they also banned words. Soon afterwards, they banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights. The endpoint was an all-embracing discourse of disposability, the emergence of concentration camps, and genocide fueled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing. Echoes of the formative stages of such actions are with us once again. They provide just one of the historical signposts of an American-style neo-fascism that appears to be engulfing the United States, after simmering in the dark for years.

Under such circumstances, it is crucial to interrogate, as the first line of resistance, how this level of systemic linguistic derangement and corruption shapes everyday life. It is essential to start with language, because it is the first place tyrants begin to promote their ideologies, hatred, and systemic politics of disposability and erasure. Trump is not unlike many of the dictators he admires. What they all share as strongmen is the use of language in the service of violence and repression, as well as a fear of language as a symbol of identity, critique, solidarity and collective struggle. None of them believe that the truth is essential to a responsible mode of governance, and all of them support the notion that lying on the side of power is fundamental to the process of governing, however undemocratic such a political dynamic may be.

In a throwback to the language of fascism, he has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses.

Lying has a long legacy in American politics and is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Victor Klemperer in his classic book, The Language of the Third Reich, reminds us that Hitler had a «deep fear of the thinking man and [a] hatred of the intellect.» Trump is not only a serial liar, but he also displays a deep contempt for critical thinking and has boasted about how he loves the uneducated. Not only have mainstream sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times published endless examples of Trump’s lies, they have noted that even in the aftermath of such exposure, he continues to be completely indifferent to being exposed as a serial liar.

In a 30-minute interview with The New York Times on December 28, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Trump made «false, misleading or dubious claims … at a rate of one every 75 seconds.» Trump’s language attempts to infantilize, seduce and depoliticize the public through a stream of tweets, interviews and public pronouncements that disregard facts and the truth. Trump’s more serious aim is to derail the architectural foundations of truth and evidence in order to construct a false reality and alternative political universe in which there are only competing fictions with the emotional appeal of shock theater.

More than any other president, he has normalized the notion that the meaning of words no longer matters, nor do traditional sources of facts and evidence. In doing so, he has undermined the relationship between engaged citizenship and the truth, and has relegated matters of debate and critical assessment to a spectacle of bombast, threats, intimidation and sheer fakery. This is the language of dictators, one that makes it difficult to name injustices, define politics as something more than rule by the powerful, and make and justify real equitable rules, shared relations of power, and a strong democratic politics.

But the language of fascism does more that normalize falsehoods and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term attention spans, immediacy and sensationalism. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange and communication. Masha Gessen is right in arguing that Trump’s lies are different than ordinary lies and are more like «power lies.» In this case, these are lies designed less «to convince the audience of something than to demonstrate the power of the speaker.» In short, Trump’s prodigious tweets are not just about the pathology of endless fabrications, they also function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism, designed to animate his base in a glut of shock while reinforcing a culture of war, fear, divisiveness and greed in ways that often disempower his critics.

Memories inconvenient to authoritarian rule are now demolished, so the future can be shaped so as to become indifferent to the crimes of the past.

How else to explain Trump’s desire to attract scorn from his critics and praise from his base through a never-ending production of tweets and electronic shocks reminiscent of the tantrums of a petulant 10-year-old? The examples just keep coming and appear to get more bizarre as time goes on. Peter Baker and Michael Tackett sum up a number of bizarre and reckless tweets that Trump produced to inaugurate the New Year. They write:

President Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea, boasting in strikingly playground terms on Tuesday night that he commands a «much bigger» and «more powerful» arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier government in Asia. «Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform [North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un] that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!» It came on a day when Mr. Trump, back in Washington from his Florida holiday break, effectively opened his new year with a barrage of provocative tweets on a host of issues. He called for an aide to Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail, threatened to cut off aid to Pakistan and the Palestinians, assailed Democrats over immigration, claimed credit for the fact that no one died in a jet plane crash last year and announced that he would announce his own award next Monday for the most dishonest and corrupt news media.

Trump appropriates crassness as a weapon. In a throwback to the language of fascism, he has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses, reproducing the tired script of the savior model endemic to authoritarianism. In 2016 at the Republican National Convention, Trump stated without irony that he alone would save a nation in crisis, captured in his insistence that, «I am your voice, I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.» Trump’s latter emphasis on restoring the authoritarian value of law and order has overtones of creating a new racial regime of governance, one that mimics what the historian Cedric J. Robinson once called the «rewhitening of America.» Such racially charged language points to the growing presence of a police state in the US and its endpoint in a fascist state where large segments of the population are rendered disposable, incarcerated or left to fend on their own in the midst of massive degrees of inequality. There is more at work here than an oversized, if not delusional ego. Trump’s authoritarianism is also fueled by braggadocio and misdirected rage. There is also a language that undermines the bonds of solidarity, abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable, and a full-fledged assault on the environment.

Trump’s language does more than produce a litany of falsehoods, fears and poisonous attacks on those considered disposable; it works hard to prevent people from having an internal dialogue with themselves and others.

In addition, Trump’s ceaseless use of superlatives models a language that encloses itself in a circle of certainty while taking on religious overtones. Not only do such words pollute the space of credibility, they also wage war on historical memory, humility and the belief that alternative worlds are possible. For Trump and his followers, there is a recognizable threat to their power in the political and moral imperative to learn from a dark version of the past, so as to not repeat or update the dark authoritarianism of the 1930s. Trump is the master of manufactured illiteracy, and his public relations machine aggressively engages in a boundless theater of self-promotion and distractions — both of which are designed to whitewash any version of the past that might expose the close alignment between Trump’s language and policies and the dark elements of a fascist past.

Trump revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered by a limited vocabulary filled with words like «historic,» «best,» «the greatest,» «tremendous» and «beautiful.» As Wesley Pruden observes:

Nothing is ever merely «good,» or «fortunate.» No appointment is merely «outstanding.» Everything is «fantastic,» or «terrific,» and every man or woman he appoints to a government position, even if just two shades above mediocre, is «tremendous.» The Donald never met a superlative he didn’t like, himself as the ultimate superlative most of all.

Trump’s relentless exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the self-indulgent use of language. This is true even when he claims he «knows more about ISIS than the generals,» «knows more about renewables than any human being on Earth,» or that nobody knows the US system of government better than he does. There is also a resonance with the rhetoric of fascism. As the historian Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power:

The German language became a language of superlatives, so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic, and incomparable…. The language used about Hitler, Klemperer noted was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people ‘believed in him,’ he was the redeemer, the savior, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation….Nazi institutions domesticated themselves [through the use of a language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.

Under the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to authoritarian rule are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives, so the future can be shaped so as to become indifferent to the crimes of the past. For instance, he has talked about the Civil War as if historians have not asked why it took place, while at the same time ignoring the role of slavery in its birth. During a Black History Month event, he talked about the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive. Trump’s ignorance of the past finds its counterpart in his celebration of a history that has enshrined racism, tweeted neo-Nazi messages, and embraced the «blood and soil» of white supremacy.

How else to explain the legacy of white racism and fascism historically inscribed in his signature slogan «Make America Great Again» and his use of the anti-Semitic phrase «America First,» long associated with Nazi sympathizers during World War II? How else to explain his support for bringing white supremacists such as Steve Bannon (now resigned) and Jeff Sessions, both with a long history of racist comments and actions, into the highest levels of governmental power? Or his retweeting of an anti-Islamic video originally posted by Britain First, a far-right extremist group — an action that was condemned by British Prime Minister Theresa May?

It gets worse: Trump created a false equivalence between white supremacist neo-Nazi demonstrators and those who opposed them in Charlottesville, Virginia. In doing so, he argued that there were «very fine people on both sides,» as if fine people march with protesters carrying Nazi flags shouting, «We will not be replaced by Jews.» Trump appears to be unable to differentiate «between people who think like Nazis and people who try to stop them from spewing their hate.»

If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education central to politics.

But there is more than ignorance at work in Trump’s lengthy history of racist comments. Trump’s sympathy for white nationalism and white supremacy offers a clear explanation for his unbroken use of racist language about Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Syrian refugees and Haitians. It also points to Trump’s use of language as part of a larger political and pedagogical project to «mobilize hatred,» legitimate the discourse of intimidation and encourage the American public «to unlearn feelings of care and empathy that lead us to help and feel solidarity with others,» as Ben-Ghiat writes.

Trump’s nativism and ignorance works in the United States because it not only caters to what the historian Brian Klass refers to as «the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian or fascist leanings,» it also enables what he calls Trump’s attempt at «mainstreaming fascism.» He writes:

Like other despots throughout history, Trump scapegoats minorities and demonizes politically unpopular groups. Trump is racist. He uses his own racism in the service of a divide-and-rule strategy, which is one way that unpopular leaders and dictators maintain power. If you aren’t delivering for the people and you’re not doing what you said you were going to do, then you need to blame somebody else. Trump has a lot of people to blame.

Trump’s language, especially his endorsement of torture and contempt for international norms, normalizes the unthinkable, and points to a return to a past that evokes what Ariel Dorfman has called «memories of terror … parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany…. executions, torture, imprisonment, persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too.» Dorfman sees in the Trump era echoes of policies carried out under the dictator Pinochet in Chile. He writes:

Indeed, many of the policies instituted and attitudes displayed in post-coup Chile would prove models for the Trump era: extreme nationalism, an absolute reverence for law and order, the savage deregulation of business and industry, callousness regarding worker safety, the opening of state lands to unfettered resource extraction and exploitation, the proliferation of charter schools, and the militarization of society. To all this must be added one more crucial trait: a raging anti-intellectualism and hatred of «elites» that, in the case of Chile in 1973, led to the burning of books like ours.

The language of fascism revels in forms of theater that mobilize fear, hatred and violence. Sasha Abramsky is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans. Instead, his language comes «with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society. They give the imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence.» Surely, the increase in hate crimes during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.

The history of fascism teaches us that language operates in the service of violence, desperation, and troubling landscapes of hatred, and carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history. It erodes our humanity, and makes too many people numb and silent in the face of ideologies and practices that are hideous acts of ethical atrocity. By undermining the concepts of truth and credibility, fascist-oriented language disables the ideological and political vocabularies necessary for a diverse society to embrace shared hopes, responsibilities and democratic values.

There is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.

Trump’s language — like that of older fascist regimes — mutilates contemporary politics, empathy, and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power. Trump’s language does more than produce a litany of falsehoods, fears and poisonous attacks on those considered disposable; it works hard to prevent people from having an internal dialogue with themselves and others, relegating self-reflection, critical thinking, and the ability to question and judge to a scorned practice.

Trump’s fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and racism. What was once an anxious discourse about what Harvey Kaye calls the «possible triumph in America of a fascist-tinged authoritarian regime over liberal democracy» is no longer a matter of speculation, but a reality.

Any resistance to the new stage of American authoritarianism has to begin by analyzing its language, the stories it fabricates, the policies it produces, and the cultural, economic and political institutions that make it possible. Questions have to be raised about how right-wing educational and cultural apparatuses function both politically and pedagogically to shape notions of identity, desire, values, and emotional investments in the discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s language both shapes and embodies policies that have powerful consequences on people’s lives, and such effects must be made visible, tallied up, and used to uncover oppressive forms of power that often hide in the shadows. Rather than treat Trump’s lies and fear-mongering as merely an expression of the thoughts of a petulant and dangerous demagogue, it is crucial to analyze their historical roots, the institutions that reproduce and legitimate them, the pundits who promote them, and the effects they have on the texture of everyday life.

Trump’s language is not his alone. It is the language of a nascent fascism that has been brewing in the US for some time. It is a language that is comfortable viewing the world as a combat zone, a world that exists to be plundered. It is a view of those deemed different as a threat to be feared, if not eliminated. Frank Rich is correct in insisting that Trump is the blunt instrument of a populist authoritarian movement whose aim is «the systemic erosion of political, ethical, and social norms» central to a substantive democracy. And Trump’s major weapon is a toxic language that functions as a form of «cultural vandalism» that promotes hate, embraces the machinery of the carceral state, makes white supremacy a central tenant of governance, and produces unthinkable degrees of inequality in wealth and power.

Trump’s language has a history that must be acknowledged, made known for the suffering it produces, and challenged with an alternative critical and hope-producing narrative. Such a language must be willing to make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods, and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the diverse modes of oppression that characterize the times that have overtaken the United States, and increasingly many other countries. Progressives need a language that both embraces the political potential of diverse forms racial, gender and sexual identity, and the forms of «oppression, exclusion, and marginalization» they make visible while simultaneously working to unify such movements into a broader social formation and political party willing to challenge the core values and institutional structures of the American-style fascism. No form of oppression, however hideous, can be overlooked. And with that critical gaze must emerge a critical language, a new narrative and a different story about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States.

At the same time, there is a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres as sites of critical learning. There is also a need to encourage artists, intellectuals, academics and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible, and challenge the normalizing discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy and fascism. There is no room here for a language shaped by political purity or a limited to politics of outrage. A truly democratic vision has a broader and more capacious overview and project of struggle and transformation.

Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education central to politics. In part this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. A critical language can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms. The search and use of such a language can also reinforce and accelerate the need for young people to continue creating alternative public spaces in which critical dialogue, exchange and a new understanding of politics in its totality can emerge. Focusing on language as a strategic element of political struggle is not only about meaning, critique and the search for the truth, it is also about power, both in terms of understanding how it works and using it as part of ongoing struggles that merge the language of critique and possibility, theory and action.

Without a faith in intelligence, critical education and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that fascism and right-wing populism pose to the world. All forms of fascism aim at destroying standards of truth, empathy, informed reason and the institutions that make them possible. The current struggle against a nascent fascism in the United States is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness and the power to shift the culture itself.

Progressives need to formulate a new language, alternative cultural spheres and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity and the promise of a real socialist democracy. We need a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism and democracy, normalize greed and excessive competition, and accept self-interest as the highest form of motivation. We need a language, vision and understanding of power to enable the conditions in which education is linked to social change and the capacity to promote human agency through the registers of cooperation, compassion, care, love, equality and a respect for difference.

Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if «the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions» and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society. Ariel Dorfman’s ode to the struggle over language and its relationship to the power of the imagination, collective resistance and hope offers a fitting reminder of what needs to be done. He writes:

We must trust that the intelligence that has allowed humanity to stave off death, make medical and engineering breakthroughs, reach the stars, build wondrous temples, and write complex tales will save us again. We must nurse the conviction that we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer and we will find a way to convince.

In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43159-challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism

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Fascism’s return and Trump’s war on youth

enero 6, 2018enero 5, 2018Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

Fascism is all too often relegated to the history books.

The word conjures up a period in which civilized societies treated democracy with contempt, engaged in acts of systemic violence, practised extermination and elimination, supported an “apocalyptic populism,” suppressed dissent, promoted a hyper-nationalism, displayed contempt for women, embraced militarism as an absolute ideal and insisted on obedience to a self-proclaimed prophet.

But the seeds that produced such fascist horrors have once again sprung to life, returning in new social and political forms.

Today, a culture of fear dominates American society, one marked by massive inequities in wealth and power that not only uphold structures of domination, but also view differences as threats, compassion as weakness and shared responsibilities —if not the common good itself — as pathology.

Fascist thought is on the rise all over the world, but its most blatant and dangerous manifestation has emerged in the Trump administration.

Fear and the ethos of mass consumerism —coupled with widespread insecurity and ignorance —now drive people into a malignant notion of security, self-inflicted cynicism and into the arms of demagogues like Trump. For too many Americans, critical thinking and hope have given way to emotional bonding and the revival of the discourse of ultra-nationalism and bigotry.

Trump: Not Hitler, but dangerous nonetheless

Trump is not Hitler in that he has not created concentration camps, shut down the critical media or rounded up dissidents; moreover, the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic.

But in the Trump era, remnants of fascism exist in different shapes and forms and include a celebration of the cult of the leader, systemic racism, the embrace of a toxic macho-populism and state support for ultra-nationalism, racism and the threat of violence against critics.

All of these elements are evident in Trump’s rhetoric and policy initiatives.

Trump’s corporate brand of neoliberal fascism is highly visible in right-wing policies that favour deregulation, corporate power and the interests of the ultra-rich.

Instead of draining the corporate swamp, Trump has embraced the merging of corporate and political power, and in doing so has turned the state into a battering ram designed to serve the most powerful and wealthiest members of society.

Trump’s mode of fascism is a unique product of our times, our commercial culture, and a corporate controlled media, all of which saps the foundations of a viable democracy.

American culture is advertising-saturated and celebrity-based, and has permitted a rich self-promoter to abandon any pretense of civility, accountability or integrity in order to hype, scam and market his way to power.

Call it Fascism, American-Style. It’s returned in the shadow of neoliberalism, with its celebration of the market as the template for governing all of society and its concentration of economic and political power in relatively few hands.

Friendly with dictators

How else to explain Trump’s unapologetic support and friendly attitude toward right-wing dictators such as the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, all of whom have a fawning attraction to Trump given he exhibits little interest in their massive human rights violations.

Trump and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte speak during a bilateral meeting at the ASEAN Summit in Manila in November 2017. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Trump’s fascism is also on full display in his ramping up of the police state, his relentless racist rhetoric, taunts and policies that cast Blacks, immigrants and Muslims as people unworthy of respect, compassion and dignity, and in his support for a war culture.

The latter is marked by his expansion of the U.S. military budget, his provocations aimed at North Korea and reckless policies such as recognizing Jerusalem the capital of Israel —widely condemned by almost all world leaders — that destabilize the Middle East, Asia and other parts of the world.

But there are more subtle, if not under-examined, indicators that point to resurgence of fascist principles in the United States.

One of the most powerful is Trump’s war on youth.

Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways. And it’s more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, if not democracy itself.

In an apparent war on children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis — not the least of which was the president’s support and defence of an accused serial pedophile, Roy Moore, in his unsuccessful attempt to win an Alabama Senate seat.

‘Foreclosed hope’

Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of casino capitalism or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued, “the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.”

American youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behaviour being criminalized in schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation.

Several states are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime that carries a huge fine, or subjects young people to possible felony charges? Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare.

The most recent example is evident in budget and tax reform bills that shift millions of dollars away from social programs vital to the health of poor youth to the pockets of the ultra-rich, who hardly need tax deductions.

As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”

She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”

Cruel mindset

The Trump administration is more than willing to pass massive tax cuts for the rich while at the same time refusing to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which supports over nine million children.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, meantime, has argued that tax cuts shouldn’t benefit the poor because they will just waste the money on booze and women.

So if you’re not rich, it’s because you’re lazy. Really? Tell that to the 10,000 people, some of them children, who may die each year as a result of losing their health insurance due to the proposed Senate tax bill.

Such a mindset, and statements like Grassley’s, are more than cruel, they represent a political and economic system that has abandoned any sense of moral and social responsibility.

In this view, children are undeserving of aid because offering such government support flies in the face of a ruthless neoliberal ideology that insists that the only responsibility of government is to aid the rich and powerful corporations.

If the poor are suffering and subject to harsh conditions, according to Grassley’s logic, it is because of a lack of character.

Another under-analyzed example of Trump’s war on youth can be seen his cancellation of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), instituted in 2012 by former president Barack Obama.

Under the program, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 were allowed to live, study and work in the United States without fear of deportation.

Loyola Marymount University student and dreamer Maria Carolina Gomez joins a rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program, in California in September 2017. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

In revoking the program, Trump enacted a policy that is both cruel and racist, given that 78 per cent of DACA residents are from Mexico. These are the same immigrants Trump once labelled rapists, drug addicts and criminals.

Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe are more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by a market-driven survival of the fittest ethos.

‘Systemic derangement’

It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and emergence of fascist politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state with no regard for its children.

Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption, and he revels in a mode of governance that merges his never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with deeply authoritarian politics.

One of the most disturbing features of Trump’s fascism is his disregard for the truth and his embrace of an infantilism that demonstrates, for young people, a lack of any viable sense of critical thought, agency and commitment to social and economic justice.

What’s more, Trump has unleashed a rancid populism and racist-fuelled ultra-nationalism that mimics older forms of fascism and creates a culture of cruelty that both disparages its children and cancels out a future that makes democracy possible for them — and therefore all of us.

At the same time, Trump has embraced a merging of corporate power and politics that is characteristic of all fascist regimes, and in doing so, he has shifted wealth and resources away from vital social programs for young people into the hands of the financial elite.

There is more at work here than regressive tax policies, there is also an attempt to disable the welfare state by eliminating its funding.

Domestic terrorism

One result is what might be called the unleashing of a form of domestic terrorism — terrorism practised in one’s own country against one’s own people —in which young people are subject to state violence and relegated to forms of terminal exclusion, spheres of social abandonment and set adrift in a state of disorientation and despair.

Under this new resurgence of fascism, thinking is dangerous, public spheres that promote critical thought are considered pathological and youth are viewed as a threatening disoriented class, especially those marginalized by race, sexual orientation and class.

And so under Trump, the winds of fascism have accelerated into a hurricane and pose a haunting crisis for youth, the future and democracy itself.

That crisis of youth under the Trump regime is a political disaster of the first order and threatens every vital cultural and political ideal, principle, social formation and public sphere that makes a democracy possible. It’s best illustrated by Trump’s support for Moore, a homophobe, unabashed racist and an accused child predator, sexual harasser and sexual abuser.

Yes, fascism us making a comeback and is with us once again — yet Moore’s defeat in the deep-red state of Alabama to his Democratic challenger gives us reason to hope. Black voters, particularly black women, and young voters stood up to say “no more.”

Fascism requires those among us who value equity, fairness, justice and morality to defeat it. To stop fascism, it is crucial that we show that democracy is the only alternative, and that the grotesque elements of fascism will be challenged. Here’s hoping Alabama is just the beginning of such a struggle.

Source:

https://theconversation.com/fascisms-return-and-trumps-war-on-youth-88867

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Page 4 of 13

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By: Henry A. Giroux

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders.

Protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people.

The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them.

When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence.

The students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle.

By. Henry Giroux

By: Dr. Henry Giroux

As we move into the second Gilded Age, young people are viewed more as a threat than as a social investment.

Children are being punished instead of educated in US schools.

Schools are considered dangerous because they are public, not because they are failing.

The war on youth and public schools is part of the larger assault on democracy itself.

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices.

The call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

Whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses.

State of Disunion

Fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice.

By Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

Fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political theater echo earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.

In a throwback to the language of fascism, he has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses.

Memories inconvenient to authoritarian rule are now demolished, so the future can be shaped so as to become indifferent to the crimes of the past.

Trump’s language does more than produce a litany of falsehoods, fears and poisonous attacks on those considered disposable; it works hard to prevent people from having an internal dialogue with themselves and others.

If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education central to politics.

There is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.

By: Henry Giroux

Trump: Not Hitler, but dangerous nonetheless

Friendly with dictators

‘Foreclosed hope’

Cruel mindset

‘Systemic derangement’

Domestic terrorism

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