Author: Henry Giroux

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Trump’s Neo-Nazis and the Rise of Illiberal Democracy

Henry Giroux

By Henry A. Giroux

The recent «Unite the Right» march by a couple of hundred white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists across the University of Virginia campus offered a glimpse of the growing danger of authoritarian movements both in the United States and across the globe, reeking of the 1930s. The image of hundreds of fascist bullies chanting anti-Semitic, racist and white nationalist slogans, such as «Heil Trump,» and later attacking peaceful anti-racist counter-demonstrators makes clear that the radical right-wing groups that have been on the margins of American society are now more comfortable in public with their nihilistic and dangerous politics.

They appear especially emboldened to come out of the shadows because elements of their neo-fascist ideology have found a comfortable if not supportive place at the highest levels of the Trump administration, especially in the presence of Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, who espouse elements of the nefarious racist ideology that was on full display in Charlottesville. As is well known, Trump has embraced the presence and backing of white nationalists and white supremacists while refusing to denounce their Nazi slogans and violence in strong political and ethical terms, suggesting his own complicity with such movements.

It should surprise no one that David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, told reporters on Saturday that the Unite the Right followers were «going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump … to take our country back.» Nor should it surprise anyone that Trump initially refused to condemn the fascist groups behind the horrifying, shocking images and violence that took place in Charlottesville.

Trump’s silence made elements of the far right quite happy. For instance, the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, issued the following statement: «Refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.»

It appears that the presence of Nazi and Confederate flags, along with the horrible history of millions lost to the Holocaust and slavery, lynchings, church bombings, and the assassination of Black leaders, such as Medgar Evans and Martin Luther King Jr., did little to move Trump to a serious understanding or repudiation of the poisonous historical forces that surfaced in Charlottesville. As New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb observes, this was a telling moment. He writes:

When [Trump] did speak about the crisis, he denounced bigotry and violence «on many sides,» in a statement that was bizarrely punctuated by references to efforts to reform trade relationships and better conditions for veterans. We have seen a great number of false equivalencies in the past two years, and the most recent Presidential election was defined by them. Yet it remains striking to hear Trump imply that Nazis and the interracial group of demonstrators who gathered to oppose them were, in essence, equally wrong.

While Trump finally gave way to overwhelming pressure on Monday and delivered a speech in which he asserted that «racism is evil» and described the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists as «repugnant,» by Tuesday he had already reverted to his initial assertion of «blame on both sides,» equating neo-Nazis with anti-racist counter-protesters (whom he labelled as the «alt-left») and speaking of «very fine people» among the crowd of right-wing extremists who chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans on Friday night.

The authoritarian drama unfolding across the United States has many registers and includes state violence against immigrants, right-wing populist violence against mosques and synagogues, and attacks on Muslims, Black people and others who do not fit into the vile script of white nationalism. The violence in Charlottesville is but one register of a larger mirror of domestic terrorism and home-grown fascism that is growing in the United States.

Such demonstrations represent a historical moment that capture some of the elements of a past that led to some of the worse crimes in human history. At the risk of falling prey to historical amnesia, the crucial lesson to be learned is that the ideology, values and institutions of a liberal democracy are once again under assault by those who no longer believe in equality, justice and democracy. As the historian Timothy Snyder has observed, it is crucial to remember that the success of authoritarian regimes in Germany and other places succeeded, in part, because they were not stopped in the early stages of their development.

The growing call for illiberal democracies (code for authoritarian regimes) first begins with the popularization and normalization of hate and bigotry, which we have witnessed under the Trump regime, and then morphs into right-wing groups developing their own militias, organs of violence and paramilitary forces.

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

Liberal Democracy Is Losing Its Grip

In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist philosopher, observed that one measure of a time of crisis is «that the great masses … become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.»

While Gramsci was characterizing a different historical period, his words are as relevant today as they were when written in the 1930s. All over the globe, liberal democracy is losing its grip on the public imagination and in the midst of this loss a toxic form of illiberal democracy is taking its place. As institutions that once provided public visions and proactive spaces are stripped of their authority and decay under the scourge of casino capitalism, the foundation is being set for the rise of new modes of authoritarianism. What they all share is both a hatred for democracy and a willingness to feed off the anger and rage of those who have suffered under punishing austerity measures imposed by global capitalism. At a time in which the growing problems of inequality, terrorism, war, state violence, immigration, precarity, mass poverty and the elimination of the welfare state have accelerated, stable democracies have been shattered.

In the midst of a massive global attack on the welfare state and social provisions fueled by neoliberal policies, the social contract central to liberal democracies has been shredded and with it any viable notion of solidarity, economic justice and the common good. Progress has been turned into its opposite and registers more inequality, suffering and violence. The older language of collective rights has given way to the discourse of individual rights, and the vocabulary of collaboration and compassion has been uprooted by a discourse of radical individualism and a harsh, survival-of-the fittest ethos. «Freedom» has morphed into a synonym for unbridled self-interest and a rationale for abdicating any sense of moral and political responsibility. Under global neoliberalism, the future is viewed as more of a curse than a blessing and has lost its value as what Zygmunt Bauman calls «the safest and most promising location for investing [one’s] hopes.» In contrast, as Bauman observes in his contribution to The Great Regression, the future has now become a repository for projecting our most dreaded anxieties. He writes that such fears and apprehensions are now driven by a number of elements that have come to characterize neoliberal societies:

the growing scarcity of jobs, of falling incomes reducing our and our children’s life chances, of the yet greater frailty of our social positions and the temporality of our life achievements, of the increasingly widening gap between the tools, resources and skills at our disposal and the momentousness of the challenges facing us. Above all, we feel our control over our own lives slipping from our hands, reducing us to the status of pawns moved to and fro in a chess game played by unknown players indifferent to our needs, if not downright hostile and cruel, and all too ready to sacrifice us in pursuit of their own objectives. Not so long ago associated with more comfort and less inconvenience, what the thought of the future tends nowadays to bring to mind most often is the gruesome menace of being identified or classified as inept and unfit for the task, denied value and dignity, and for that reason marginalized, excluded and outcast.

The dream of the democracy has turned into a nightmare as more and more people are considered expendable and subject to the whims of a market that reduces them to the status of merely surviving rather than getting ahead. The failure of neoliberalism’s promise of social mobility, equal opportunity, employment and privatized dream worlds gave way to regressive taxation, off shoring, deindustrialization, the slashing of social provisions, the dismantling of public services and the rise of right-wing populism. Desperation, isolation and a sense of abandonment coupled with the collapse of democratic institutions and public spheres have produced a new collective fatalism all over the globe.

Growing Support for Authoritarianism

The increasing failure of global neoliberalism has produced the conditions in which more and more people are inclined to express support for authoritarian alternatives that reproduce the power of right-wing populist nationalists and favor the interest of white majorities who advocate a return of barricades and borders rather than eliminating the systemic conditions of economic, cultural and social domination. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, spoke for many when he proclaimed that societies founded on liberal principles will not be able to compete successfully in a global market and that there is no reason for democracies to be liberal in order to be successful. According to Orbán, the state is not defined by democratic values, but by its economic and cultural interests, interests that fall on the side of a growing number of far-right regimes. He writes:

The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead…. We are searching for (and we are doing our best to find, ways of parting with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them) the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.

This worldwide rejection of liberal democracy is fuelled by a landscape of massive instability, inequality, fear and insecurity driven by a counterrevolutionary global capitalism of permanent change that, in the words of Pankaj Mishra, can neither «fulfil its own promise of general prosperity [or conceal] its contempt for the democratic principle of equality.» In the place of failed states and broken economies, there has been a retreat into promises offered by the rise of the security state, racial cleansing, economic nationalism, xenophobia and a call for the suppression of dissent and a growing emphasis on law and order. Heinrich Geiselberger has called this «the great regression,» an apt metaphor for the growing collapse of public discourse, values and democratic institutions and public spheres. As is well documented, the toxic effects of neoliberalism cannot be separated from diverse counterrevolutionary and right-wing populist forces that have contributed to the resurgence of authoritarianism across the globe.

The political crises and earthquakes shaking the foundations of liberal democracy reveal more than the pent-up collective energies of despair, rage and insecurity. They also speak to the growing mechanisms of exclusion and ideologies of racist contempt that have returned with a vengeance all over Europe and in the United States. Dressed up in the discourse of a ruthless hyper-capitalism, the crises haunting liberal democracies across the globe have provided fodder for right-wing demagogues to promote nationalistic policies. In so doing, they denounce democratic values in the name of a popular will that both resents what the political establishment has done to them and is comfortable with political leaders who are xenophobic, authoritarian and patriarchal. Accompanying the rise of authoritarian states in Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary, Egypt, the Philippines and the United States, among others, there is also the growing presence of right-wing political formations in France, Greece, Italy and a number of other countries.

Rising Bigotry and Nationalism

Politics has become more personal, wrapping itself in the narrow embrace of cultural nationalism and racial, religious and ethnic bigotry. Historic calls for democratization that marked the post-war period have given rise, in part, to a collective anxiety and apprehension fuelled by a despair and anger deeply tied to a form of casino capitalism that camouflaged its underlying modes of oppression and politics of disposability in the seductive yet failed discourses of freedom and justice, both of which were defined in strictly economic and market terms. Stoked by fear and a resentment toward those considered a threat to white nationalist ideologies, the retreat from the imposed death-dealing effects of neoliberalism parading as democracy gave rise to the awkward return of the repressive ideologies of ethno-nationalism, the stifling of dissent and exaltation of state violence as a mode of governance.

For instance, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey there has been a return to the traditions and grandeur of an Ottoman past. In India, the right-wing ideologue, Narendra Modi, has resurrected the ideology of Hindu nationalism. In a similar vein, President Trump has fuelled a culture of fear, racism and demonization as part of his efforts to resuscitate a culture of white Christian nationalism has reproduced in the first part of his presidency his own brand of political illiberalism. As Paul Mason points out:

If we analyse Trump through his actions, rather than his garbled words, it is political illiberalism that has won out during the first seven months of his presidency. When a judge blocked his Muslim immigration ban, he attacked the judiciary’s constitutional role. When the press revealed malfeasance, he labelled them «enemies of the American people». When James Comey refused Trump’s appeals for «loyalty,» he was sacked.

White resentment and white nationalism have come to symbolize Trump’s politics, beginning with his egregious and false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and taking shape in his appointment of white nationalists, such as Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, to the highest levels of government — an issue I have discussed in detail in my forthcoming book American Nightmare: The Challenge of American Authoritarianism (City Lights Press, 2018). Such measures have bolstered his credibility with white militias, neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups. Carol Anderson correctly states that «The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration.»

Arjun Appadurai argues that what Trump and similar authoritarian leaders have in common is a hatred of democracy because it stands in the way of their monomaniacal efforts to seize political power. In his contribution to The Great Regression anthology, he writes:

The leaders hate democracy because it is an obstacle to their monomaniacal pursuit of power. The followers are victims of democracy fatigue who see electoral politics as the best way to exit democracy itself. This hatred and this exhaustion find their natural common ground in the space of cultural sovereignty, enacted in scripts of racial victory for resentful majorities, national ethnic purity and global resurgence through the promises of soft power. This common cultural ground inevitably hides the deep contradictions between the neoliberal economic policies and well-documented crony capitalism of most of these authoritarian leaders and the genuine economic suffering and anxiety of the bulk of their mass followings. It is also the terrain of a new politics of exclusion, whose targets are either migrants or internal ethnic minorities or both.

It is against this wider historical and social context marked by a mounting embrace of illiberal democracy that the authoritarian populism of Donald Trump and other demagogues can be both interrogated and challenged, especially when the political interests that bear part responsibility for producing what Mike Lofgren has described as a «neoliberal economics turned punitive and illiberal» now claim to be the only force capable of resisting Trump’s authoritarianism. It is also against this worldwide embrace of illiberal democracy that a debate must begin over rethinking politics outside of the discourse of capitalism.

Failures of the Politics of Resentment

Trump’s appearance on the political landscape is part of a much broader politics of resentment, one that denies the theoretical and political tools to assess the conditions for free-floating anger and despair in the first place. Put differently, the political crisis signalled by the US morphing into a form of authoritarianism has not been matched by a crisis of ideas. That is, the issue of how everyday problems and hardships are connected to wider economic and political structures is left unanswered for most Americans. Instead, the politics of resentment has become part of a threefold failed project of politics. First, the politics of resentment has been appropriated by Republican extremists to serve as part of a politics of authoritarianism. Second, resentment politics has produced highly restricted forms of resistance on the part of many liberals whose focus is on Trump the man rather than on the economic conditions and ideological movements that produced him. Third, the expressions of resentment and the authoritarian politics they produced have become a new form of entertainment through which the corporate-controlled media generates an endless stream of what might be called tabloid politics in which the political realm dissolves into a lurid pornography of aesthetics. As one expression of such a politics, news cycles fill up their time slots and papers by devoting endless amounts of commentary to Trump’s tweets, all the while legitimating the notion that the pathology of authoritarian governance is primarily about the spectacle of performance. What the corporate media miss is that Trump’s tweets are meant to produce a politics of fatigue and theatrics that serve as code for his right-wing followers in an expanding counterrevolution that embraces the values of a Second Gilded Age.

The growing tide of demagoguery in the United States and across the globe must begin with the changing nature of neoliberal ideology and its transformation from a free-market utopia to a normalized dystopian reality. At stake here is the need for a post-neoliberal narrative in which democratic ideals can no longer be defended under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The rise of illiberal democracy is based on the premise that democracy should not be defended because it cannot be realized under neoliberal regimes. The bold new authoritarian strategy emerging out of this cold recognition is not to dispense with neoliberalism but with democracy itself.

No longer able to hide the massive misery, inequality and hardship that the «free market» has produced across the globe, the new authoritarians no longer praise the laws of an unfettered market fundamentalism. Instead, they rely on a politics of distraction, such as an appeal to cultural nationalism and the longing for the re-establishment of a mythic past. Trump has appropriated this politics of distraction, giving it a unique configuration, one that reinforces the domination of neoliberal elites while making invisible the underlying structures of predatory economic and political power that have consolidated further still under his administration. Of course, this is not meant to confuse elements of his popular racist, fascistic and white nationalist base. Rather, it is meant to distract those politicians, pundits and anti-public intellectuals who have no interest in fighting for progressive change and who prefer the theater associated with Trump’s tweets rather than engaging in a serious debate about the bankruptcy of the neoliberal system. This diversion has been successful in delaying the debate about how the crisis of democracy is largely connected to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, militarism and the emergence of an authoritarianism in support of an illiberal democracy.

While demagogues across Europe and other parts of the globe maintain control through the outright suppression of dissent and the dismantling of civil liberties [Turkey, China, Russia and Egypt], Trump has taken a different route. Trump’s policies benefit not only the financial master class but also the established neoliberal politicians and intellectuals who still champion globalization, assuming the role of his most serious opposition while posturing as the vanguard of resistance against his accelerating authoritarianism. Trump inverts the rules of ideology by denying its very premises, thus introducing a form of depoliticization and manufactured ignorance that eliminates the affective and educational foundations for a liberal democracy.

Trump’s endless lies, impetuous outbursts and regressive policies — such as stepping up deportations of undocumented immigrants, rolling back affirmative action and banning transgender troops from serving in the military — are largely engineered to satisfy his shrinking base of support. But there is more at work here than simply creating subterfuge for political ends or for justifying such deceitfulness as part of a militaristic and reactionary strategy of making politics an extension of the art of war. The latter has become an industry and it has a long history in US politics. Trump’s mendacity should be viewed as part of a staged politics of distraction that provides cover for the brutal neoliberal policies that he both ruthlessly supports and egregiously symbolizes. After all, it was largely the debris of neoliberal policies that brought Trump to power, a wreckage he relentlessly exploited.

Certainly, it is obvious that Trump is a racist, xenophobe and egregious sexist. But most of all, he is emblematic of a ruthless corporate, self-serving, greedy elite who will do anything to consolidate their class and financial power. His theatrical antics and spectacularized politics represent crude entertainment for his base and rising profit margins for the mainstream media; they also signal the need to divert attention away from the ideological, economic, political and structural forces that have laid the groundwork for the appeal of illiberal democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the United States. The latter is especially true for those Trump supporters who are more independent politically, who are not driven by white supremacist imperatives and who are sympathetic to the call of anti-establishment politicians.

What Trump, or at least Steve Bannon, is well aware of is that the struggle over power is not only about the struggle over language and beliefs, but also about the destruction of those intellectual and institutional elements that enable the capacity for informed judgment and the ability to hold onto any belief with a sense of commitment and integrity. Hence, his ongoing attempts to destroy critical media, public education and those democratic public spheres that provide the protective spaces of education in the broadest sense of the term. What is disturbing about this endorsement of mass illiteracy and political ignorance is that it is not just about accusing the critical media of producing fake news, it is also about creating support among his 35 million followers for supporting unconstitutional legislation designed to silence the so-called liberal press for inaccurate reporting. For instance, The Economist reported that «When YouGov asked whether courts should be allowed to ‘shut down news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased and inaccurate’, 45% of Republicans were in favour, compared with 20% who opposed the measure. More than half thought it acceptable to fine an offending news outlet (and 40% thought it would not violate the First Amendment to do so).»

Trump’s authoritarianism is as much about the crisis of democracy as it is about the crisis of casino capitalism, clearly exemplified by the emergence of right- and left-wing populist movements that are angry and bitter over what the conservative and liberal elites and their political and economic systems have done to them. No longer able to employ the mythical elements of neoliberalism in light of the growing attack of progressive activists on the financial ruling classes and a mounting criticism of what many believe is a failed state — an attack that cuts across ideological boundaries — the Republican disciples of neoliberalism have dispensed with ideology and now rely on a raw politics bent on voter suppression, gerrymandering, mass incarceration, defunding of public goods and other tactics to eliminate any vestige of a liberal democracy.

Trump’s diversions make it difficult for the public to uphold or even define the standards that sustain the rule of law, democratic governance and the value of educational institutions committed to individual freedom, civil liberties, justice and human rights. Trump’s lies do more than distract and pollute the space of a shared potential reality — they empty language of any substantive meaning and in doing so serve to erase the power and value of historical consciousness and the critical formative cultures that produce both informed agents and individual and collective acts of resistance. Trump’s presidency stands for the abandonment of ideology or what I will call a pedagogical politics of persuasion in which ideas become weapons and educational tools to shape consciousness, desires and identities. This is not to deny that Trump is afraid of ideas or the willingness to embrace them when it serves his political ends as much as to suggest that his deepest concern is with preventing people from developing the capacity to think critically in the first place and to act on informed critiques of power. This in part explains his obsession with a notion of loyalty that has little to do with a commitment to justice or the common good as much as it is a cover for unquestioned obedience to him.

Rites of «Purification» in the Wake of Neoliberal Corporate Sovereignty

What we are witnessing in the rise of illiberal democracies across the globe is a rite of political, racial and social purification that appeals to an imagined lost dominance on the part of individual nation states in the wake of neoliberalism’s corporate sovereignty. What is left out of this narrative by Trump and other authoritarian leaders is that modern states no longer control their economies, which are now in the hands of a global financial elite and authoritarian populists. Power is now financial, mobile and global, managed by a free-floating elite at liberty to pursue its own interests and targets. Fiscal and monetary policies are no longer in the hands of the nation states, residing in the hands of international financial institutions, such as the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, which exist beyond national accountability. As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis have argued in their book Moral Blindness, the nation state remains the repository of a politics «squeezed and robbed of all or nearly all of its power, muscles and teeth,» reduced to serving the dictates of global capital and expanding its role as a punishing state. As the protective functions of the state are targeted, the foundations of existential security and solidarity are eroded, giving rise to a Hobbesian world where no room exists for care and compassion, only callousness and indifference, cruelty and suffering.

Arjun Appadurai, in his discussion of «democracy fatigue,» captures the hollowing out of the nation state, describing the return to cultural purification and ethno-nationalism as a means to stifle dissent and to avoid addressing the underlying causes responsible for economic sovereignty being replaced by ethno-nationalism and cultural sovereignty. He writes:

This, then, is what the leaders of the new authoritarian populisms have in common: the recognition that none of them can truly control their national economies, which are hostages to foreign investors, global agreements, transnational finance, mobile labour and capital in general. All of them promise national cultural purification as a route to global political power. All of them are friendly to neoliberal capitalism, with their own versions of how to make it work for India, Turkey, the United States or Russia. All of them seek to translate soft power into hard power. And none of them has any reserva­tions about repressing minorities and dissidents, stifling free speech or using the law to throttle their opponents…. Thus populist authoritarian leaders and demagogues are to be found everywhere across the old continent, and they too operate with the same mix of neoliberalism, cultural chauvin­ism, anti-immigrant anger and majoritarian rage.

In Trump’s world, there is no need to rely heavily on ideology because there are no standards, no firm ground on which matters of persuasion and belief root themselves. Instead, ideas, reason, evidence and truth collapse in a sea of misrepresentations, engineered stupidity and diversions, all of which are designed, as Hannah Arendt once argued, to prepare the ground for a form of totalitarianism rooted in contempt for critical thought, if not the very act of thinking. The foundation for authoritarianism, she wrote, lies in a kind of mass thoughtlessness in which a citizenry «is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also its capacity to think and to judge.» Manufactured ignorance and the slide into authoritarianism has become a staple of American life, but it cannot be reduced to the scourge of economic structures.

Cultural politics and the educational force of the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media are a potent force for ignorance and depoliticization in the United States. The blight of celebrity culture, an engineered culture of fear that activates a hatred of others, the destruction of public education and the corporatization of higher education, the rise of the surveillance state and the war on terrorism all contribute to a collective paranoia that produces social isolation, a heightened sense of rootlessness, the privatization of everything and the conflation of citizenship with a dreary ethos of consumerism.

Under neoliberalism, too many people are trapped in their own private orbits, unable to address the systemic conditions that destroy the ties that connect them to others while reproducing the conditions in which the body is uprooted from any sense of community and the existential need for belonging. As George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and other prominent intellectuals have predicted, such isolation kills the imagination and finds symbolic compensation in the ideological appeals of authoritarian leaders who promise communities organized around hate, violence and exclusion. All of this amounts to a swindle of fulfillment and a rejection of liberal democracy.

Trump has dispensed with the fiction of democracy because he believes that in the interest of power both people and the planet are disposable, excess to be plundered and discarded. As part of an effort to normalize this pathology, he systematically employs a politics of diversion to prevent the public from addressing the underlying neoliberal forces and conditions that sold democracy to the bankers, hedge fund managers and other surrogates of finance. Under Trump, democracy is not being thinned out, it is being replaced by a regime that is hostile to its existence while fighting to maintain the economic conditions that have allowed the United States to slide into authoritarianism.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41617-neo-nazis-in-charlottesville-and-the-rise-of-illiberal-democracy

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Why the Democratic Party Can’t Save Us From Trump’s Authoritarianism

Henry Giroux

By Henry Giroux

There is a certain duplicity in the Democratic Party’s attempts to remake itself as the enemy of the corporate establishment and a leader in a movement to resist Trump and his mode of authoritarianism.

Democrats, such as Ted Lieu, Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren, represent one minority faction of the party that rails against Trump’s racism and authoritarianism while less liberal types who actually control the party, such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, claim that they have heard the cry of angry workers and are in the forefront of developing an opposition party that will reverse many of the policies that benefited the financial elite. Both views are part of the Democratic Party’s attempt to rebrand itself.

The Democrats’ new populist platform, called «A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages» has echoes of FDR’s New Deal, but it says little about developing both a radical democratic vision and economic and social policies that would allow the Democratic Party to speak more for the poor, people of color and young people than for the corporate and financial elite that run the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Their anti-Trump rhetoric rings hollow.

For Democratic Party leaders, the rebranding of the party rests on the assumption that resistance to Trump merely entails embracing the needs of those who are the economic losers of neoliberalism and globalization. What they forget is that authoritarianism thrives on more than economic discontent, as the recent white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, made clear. Authoritarianism also thrives on racism, xenophobia, exclusion, expulsion and the deeming of certain subgroups as «disposable» — a script that the «new» Democratic Party has little to say about.

David Broder has recently argued that being anti-Trump is not a sufficient political position because doing so inures people to a myriad of neoliberal policies that have impoverished the working class, destroyed the welfare state, waged foreign wars and a war on public goods, polluted the environment, created massive inequities and expanded the reach of the punishing and mass incarceration state. Even though these neoliberal policies were produced by both Republicans and liberal Democrats, this message appears to have been taken up, at least partly, by the Democrats in a focused attempt to rebrand themselves as the guardians of working class interests.

For too many members of the Democratic Party, Trump is the eccentric clown who unexpectedly stepped into history by finding the right note in rousing an army of «deplorables» willing to invest in his toxic script of hatred, demonization and exclusion. Of course, as Anthony DiMaggio, Thomas Frank, Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, Paul Street and others have pointed out, this is a false yet comforting narrative for a liberal elite whose moralism is as suffocating as is their belief in centrist politics. Neoliberal policies, especially under Clinton and Obama, created the conditions for Trump to actually come to power in the first place.

Trump’s presidency represents not merely the triumph of authoritarianism but also the tragedy of a neoliberal capitalism that benefited investment bankers, Wall Street, lawyers, hedge fund managers and other members of the financial elite who promoted free trade, financial deregulation, cutthroat competition and commercialization as the highest measure of individual and market freedom. Trump is not simply the result of a surprising voter turnout by an angry, disgruntled working class (along with large segments of the white suburban middle class), he is also the endpoint of a brutal economic and political system that celebrated the market as the template for governing society while normalizing a narrative of greed, self-interest and corporate power. Trump is the mirror reflection of the development of a form of illiberal democracy and authoritarianism that mixes neoliberal economic policies, anti-immigrant bigotry, the stifling of free speech, hyper-nationalism and a politics of disposability and exclusion.

A History of Betrayal by Both Political Parties

Getting in bed with Wall Street has also been a favorite pastime of the Democratic Party.

The tyranny of the current moment bespeaks a long history of betrayal by a financial and political class that inhabits both major parties. It is no secret that the Republican Party has been laying the groundwork for an American-style authoritarianism since the 1970s by aggressively pushing for massive tax cuts for the rich, privatizing public goods, promoting a culture of fear, crushing trade unions, outsourcing public services and eliminating restrictions designed to protect workers, women and the environment. But they have not been the only party reproducing the dictates of neoliberalism. Getting in bed with Wall Street has also been a favorite pastime of the Democratic Party.

It was the Democratic Party, especially under President Clinton, that prepared the groundwork for the financial crisis of 2007 by loosening corporate and banking regulations while at the same time slashing welfare provisions and creating the conditions for the intensification of the mass incarceration state. The Clinton administration did more than court Wall Street, it played a decisive role in expanding the neoliberal gains that took place three decades before he was elected. Nancy Fraser insightfully sums this up in her contribution to The Great Regression anthology:

Neoliberalism developed in the United States roughly over the last three decades and was ratified with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992…. Turning the US economy over to Goldman Sachs, it deregulated the banking system and negotiated the free-trade agreements that accelerated deindustrialization…. Continued by his successors, including Barack Obama, Clinton’s policies degraded the living conditions of all working people, but especially those employed in industrial production. In short, Clintonism bears a heavy share of responsibility for the weakening of unions, the decline of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and the rise of the ‘two-earner family’ in place of the defunct family wage.

The Obama administration continued this abandonment of democratic values by bailing out the bankers and selling out millions of people who lost their homes while at the same time aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers. It was the Obama administration that added a kill list to its foreign policy and matched it domestically with educational policies that collapsed education into vocational training and undermined it as a moral and democratizing public good. Obama mixed neoliberalism’s claim to unbridled economic and political power with an educational reform program that undermined the social imagination and the critical capacities that made democracy possible. Promoting charter schools and mind-numbing accountability schemes, Obama and the Democratic Party paved the way for the appointment of the hapless reactionary billionaire Betsy DeVos as Trump’s Secretary of Education. And it was the Obama administration that enlarged the surveillance state while allowing CIA operatives who tortured and maimed people in the name of American exceptionalism and militarism to go free. In short, the flirtation of neoliberalism with the forces of illiberal democracy was transformed into a courtship during the Clinton and Obama administrations and until death do us part under Trump.

The growing disregard for public goods, such as schools and health care, the weakening of union power, the erosion of citizenship to an act of consumption, the emptying out of political participation, and the widening social and economic inequality are not only the product of a form of ideological extremism and market fundamentalism embraced by Republicans. The Democratic Party also has a long legacy of incorporating the malicious policies of neoliberalism in their party platforms in order to curry favor with the rich and powerful. Neoliberalism stands for the death of democracy, and the established political parties have functioned as its accomplice. Both political parties, to different degrees, have imposed massive misery and suffering on the American people and condemned many to what David Graeber has described in his book The Democracy Project as «an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future.» While Trump and the Republican Party leadership display no shame over their strong embrace of neoliberalism, the allegedly reform-minded Democratic Party covers up its complicity with Wall Street and uses their alleged opposition to Trump to erase their criminogenic history with casino capitalism. With Republican majorities, mainstream Democrats share an unwillingness to detach themselves from an ideology that challenges the substance of a viable democracy and the public spheres and formative cultures that make it possible.

Democratic Party Remains Complicit in Neoliberal and Authoritarian Politics

Chris Hedges has laid bare both the complicity of the Democratic Party in neoliberal and authoritarian politics as well as the hypocrisy behind its claim to be the only political alternative to challenge Trump’s illiberalism. He is worth quoting at length:

The liberal elites, who bear significant responsibility for the death of our democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is quite a show…. Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our   militarized police carried out murderous rampages?

According to Katie Sanders, writing in PunditFact, under the Obama presidency, the Democrats «lost 11 governorships, 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69 House seats, and 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers.» And the losses and humiliations got worse in 2016 elections. It is no secret that the Democratic Party is a political formation of diminished power and hopes. Yet, in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism, it has attempted to reinvent itself as the party of reform by updating its worn out economic policies and ideological scripts. As proof of its reincarnation, it has proposed a platform titled «A Better Deal,» signaling a populist turn in economic policy. A number of its economic reforms would certainly help benefit the poor and underprivileged. These include proposed increases of the minimum wage to $15, tax credits to encourage job training and hiring, regulations to lower drug costs, stronger anti-trust laws and a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. The platform, however, does not support universal health care, and it says nothing about providing free higher education, reducing military spending or reversing the huge growth in inequality.

As Anthony DiMaggio points out, the plan «doesn’t even reach a Bernie Sanders level of liberalism, and it is a far cry from the kind of progressive populist policies introduced in FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society/War on Poverty.» Eric Cheyfitz adds to this argument by insisting that the plan does nothing to challenge the rapacious system of unfettered capitalism the Democrats and Republicans have supported since the 1970s. Democrats are completely unrepentant about having supported the deregulation of capital and thus ushered in a new form of US authoritarianism. Moreover, any reform policy worth its name would directly address income inequality and the power of the military-industrial complex, while fighting for single-payer health care and a redistribution of wealth and power. There will have to be a massive refiguring of power and redistribution of wealth to address the health care crisis, poverty, climate change, inadequacies in education and the plague of mass incarceration — problems not addressed in the Better Deal. It is not unreasonable to assume that such vexing challenges cannot be addressed within a two-party system that supports the foundational elements of predatory capitalism.

In spite of the horrendous neoliberal ideology and reactionary policies driving the Democratic Party, various Democrats and progressives cannot bring themselves to denounce either capitalism as the bane of democracy nor its suffocating hold on its reform efforts. They appear thunderstruck when asked to denounce a corrupt two-party system and develop a social movement and political apparatus that supports democratic socialism.

For instance, unrepentant centrist liberals, such as Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, have castigated progressives within the party while unapologetically embracing neoliberalism as a reform strategy. They believe that the Democratic Party has lost its base because it rushed to defend «identity politics» and leftist ideas and that workers felt abandoned by the party’s «shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures.» Instead, they claim that the Democratic Party needs «to reject socialist ideas and adopt an agenda of renewed growth, greater protection for American workers … return to fiscal responsibility, and give up on … defending sanctuary cities.»

This sounds like a script written by a Trump policy advisor. It gets worse. Others such as Leonard Steinhorn have argued that the real challenge facing the Democratic Party is not to change their policies but their brand and messaging techniques. This argument suggests that the Democrats lost their base because they failed to win the messaging battle rather than the loss being due to moving to the right and aligning themselves with corporate and moneyed interests.

Suffering from an acute loss of historical memory, Jonathan Chait argues that the Democratic Party never embraced the policies of neoliberalism and has in its recent incarnations actually moved to the left, upholding the principles of the New Deal and Great Society. As Leah Hunt-Hendrix observes:

One need not be anti-capitalist to understand that the Democratic [Party] … allowed for policies that deregulated the finance sector (under President Bill Clinton), allowed for the privatization of many public goods (including the weakening of the public education system through the promotion of charter schools) and bailed out Wall Street banks without taking measures to truly address the needs of struggling working Americans.

Chait seems to have overlooked the fact that Trump and Sanders have proved conclusively that the working class no longer belongs to the Democratic Party or that the Democratic Party under Clinton and Obama became the vanguard of neoliberalism. He goes even further, arguing implausibly that neoliberalism is simply an epithet used by the left to discredit liberals and progressive Democrats. Chait appears oblivious to the transformation of the Democratic Party into an adjunct of the rich and corporate elite.

Is Chait unaware of Clinton’s elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act, his gutting of the welfare system and love affair with Wall Street, among his many missteps? How did he miss Obama’s bailout of Goldman-Sachs, the abandonment of education as a public good, his attack on whistleblowers, or the Democrats’ assault on organized labor via NAFTA? Was he unware that, in a White House interview given to Noticias Univision 23, Obama admitted that his «policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican?»

In the end, Chait is most concerned about what he calls an attempt on the part of the left to engage in the trick of bracketing «the center-left with the right as ‘neoliberal’ and force progressives to choose between that and socialism.» He goes on to say that «The ‘neoliberal’ accusation is a synecdoche for the American left’s renewed offensive against the center-left and a touchstone in the struggle to define progressivism after Barack Obama [and] is an attempt to win an argument with an epithet.» Because of his fear of democratic socialism, Chait is like many other centrists in the Democratic Party who are oblivious to the damaging effects of the scorched-earth neoliberal polices adopted under the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Other progressive spokespersons, such as John Nichols and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, and groups, such as Our Revolution and the Incorruptibles, want to rebuild the Democratic Party from the base up by running candidates with progressive values «for local offices: in state houses, city councils, planning commissions, select boards and more.» The emphasis here would be for activists to revitalize and take over the Democratic Party by turning it to the left so that it will stand up for the poor and underprivileged.

Tom Gallagher adds to this reform strategy by arguing that Bernie Sanders should join the Democratic Party — forgetting that when he supported Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, he presented himself as a defacto member of the party in all but name.

Many of the strategies proposed to move the Democratic Party away from its history of centrism and the violence of neoliberalism are noble: If they were enacted at the level of policies and power relations, they would certainly make life easier for the poor, vulnerable and excluded. Progressives are right to be motivated and inspired by Sanders’s courage and policies. Sanders’s campaign against a rigged economy that redistributed wealth and income upward on a massive scale to the rich and corporate robber barons, coupled with his critique of the fixed political system that protected neoliberalism, provided a new language that had the potential to be visionary. But there is a difference between calling for reform and offering a new and compelling vision with an emphasis on a radical transformation of the political and economic systems.

At the same time, calls for a new vision and supporting values for radical democratic change do not mean abandoning attempts at reforming the Democratic Party as much as viewing such attempts as part of a broader strategy designed to make immediate progressive gains on a number of fronts. Most importantly, such a strategy moves beyond reform by pushing the party to its ideological and political limits so as to make visible the endpoint of liberal reform. At stake here is the assumption that such a strategy will make clear that the Democratic Party is incapable of being transformed radically and as such should not be expected to be on the forefront of radical democratic change.

Political and ideological centrism is endemic to the Democratic Party: It has never called for restructuring a system that is corrupt to the core. As a result, in the words of Nancy Fraser, the antidote to authoritarianism «is a left project that redirects the rage and the pain of the dispossessed towards a deep societal restructuring and a democratic political ‘revolution’.» The power of a left-progressive presence in the United States will, in part, depend on developing a comprehensive and accessible narrative that is able, as Nancy Fraser observes, to «articulate the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters with a fulsome critique of financialization on the one hand, and with an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-hierarchical vision of emancipation on the other.» The left needs a populism with a social conscience, one that allows young people, workers, the middle class, and others to see how their futures might develop in a way that speaks to their needs and a more just and equitable life, one in which the utopian possibilities of a radical democracy appear possible.

Looking Beyond the Democratic Party

A new vision for change cannot be built on the legacy of the Democratic Party. What is needed is a concerted attempt to figure out what democratic socialism will mean and look like in the 21st century. This suggests rethinking the meaning of politics, one that can rekindle the social imagination. Central to such a struggle is the role education must play in creating the formative culture capable of creating critical and engaged citizens. In this case, politics moves beyond ephemeral protests and recalibrates itself to create the public spheres that enable progressives to think about what long term movements, organizations and institutions can be aligned to create new political formations willing to confront neoliberal capitalism and other forms of oppression, not simply as symptoms of a distorted democracy but as part of a more radical project unwilling to compromise on identifying root causes.

Michelle Alexander is right in warning us that it would be a tragedy to waste the growing resistance against Trump «by settling for any Democrat the next time around.» I would similarly argue that we should not settle for a choice between good or bad Democrats. We must instead struggle for a radical restructuring of society, one that gives meaning to a substantive democracy. Resistance cannot be either defensive or ephemeral, reduced to either a narrow criticism of Trump’s policies or to short-lived expressions of protests. As Michael Lerner has pointed out, protests are moments, and however pedagogically and politically valuable, do not constitute a movement. As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis have suggested in their book Liquid Evil, protests function as «an explosion of political subjectivity» and generally tell us what people are against but not what they want. Coupled with a new vision, moral language and democratic values, the left and other progressives need a platform for thinking beyond neoliberal capitalism.

As David Harvey observes, the problems Americans face are too intractable and extensive to resolve without a strong anti-capitalist movement. This will only take place if progressives create a broad-based social movement that aligns struggles at the local, state and national level with democratic movements at the global level. The peripheral demands of single-issue movements cannot be abandoned, but they must translate into wider opportunities for social change. There should be no contradiction between the call for educational reform, women’s rights and ecological change and what Katrina Forrester calls an alternative economic and political vision for America. At the same time, it is a mistake for progressives to look at society only in terms of economic structures and issues. A mass-based movement to challenge neoliberalism and authoritarianism cannot be constructed unless it also commits to struggle against the many forms of oppression extending from sexism and racism to xenophobia and transphobia. Only a movement that unifies these diverse struggles will lead us toward a radical democracy.

Politics becomes radical when it translates private troubles into broader systemic issues and challenges the commanding institutional and educational structures of neoliberalism. To be effective, it must do so in a language that speaks to people’s needs, enabling them to both identify and invest in narratives in which they can recognize themselves and the conditions that produce the suffering they experience. For this reason, the call for institutional change is inextricably connected to the politics of social transformation. Such transformation must propel us toward an international movement to build a society that embraces the beauty of universal emancipation and promise of a radical democracy. At a time in history when the stakes for democracy are so threatened and life on the planet itself so imperiled, collective action is the only way out of the age of illiberal democracy. It is time to go for broke.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41672-why-the-democratic-party-can-t-save-us-from-trump-s-authoritarianism

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The United States’ War on Youth: From Schools to Debtors’ Prisons

Henry Giroux

By: Henry A. Giroux

If one important measure of a democracy is how a society treats its children, especially poor youth of color, there can be little doubt that American society is failing. As the United States increasingly models its schools after prisons and subjects children to a criminal legal system marked by severe class and racial inequities, it becomes clear that such children are no longer viewed as a social investment but as suspects. Under a neoliberal regime in which some children are treated as criminals and increasingly deprived of decent health care, education, food and  housing, it has become clear that the United States has both failed its children and democracy itself.

Not only is the United States the only nation in the world that sentences children to life in prison without parole, the criminal legal system often functions so as to make it more difficult for young people to escape the reach of a punishing and racist legal system. For instance, according to a recent report published by the Juvenile Law Center, there are close to a million children who appear in juvenile court each year subject to a legal system rife with racial disparities and injustices. This is made clear by Jessica Feierman, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center in her report «Debtors’ Prison for Kids? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System.» In an interview with the Arkansas Times, Feierman said:

Racial disparities pervade our juvenile justice system. Our research suggests that we can reduce those disparities through legislative action aimed at costs, fines, fees, and restitution … In every state, youth and families can be required to pay juvenile court costs, fees, fines, or restitution. The costs for court related services, including probation, a «free appointed attorney,» mental health evaluations, the costs of incarceration, treatment, or restitution payments, can push poor children deeper into the system and families deeper into debt. Youth who can’t afford to pay for their freedom often face serious consequences, including incarceration, extended probation, or denial of treatment — they are unfairly penalized for being poor. Many families either go into debt trying to pay these costs or forego basic necessities like groceries to keep up with payments.

According to the report, sometimes when a family can’t pay court fees and fines, the child is put in a juvenile detention facility. Such punitive measures are invoked without a degree of conscience or informed judgment as when children are fined for being truant from school. In her article in Common Dreams, Nika Knight pointed to one case in which a child was fined $500 for being truant and because he could not pay the fine, «spent three months in a locked facility at age 13.» In many states, the parents are incarcerated if they cannot pay for their child’s court fees. For many parents, such fines represent a crushing financial burden, which they cannot meet, and consequently their children are subjected to the harsh confines of juvenile detention centers. Erik Eckholm has written in The New York Times about the story of Dequan Jackson, which merges the horrid violence suffered by the poor in a Dickens novel with the mindless brutality and authoritarianism at the heart of one of Kafka’s tales. Eckholm is worth quoting at length:

When Dequan Jackson had his only brush with the law, at 13, he tried to do everything right. Charged with battery for banging into a teacher while horsing around in a hallway, he pleaded guilty with the promise that after one year of successful probation, the conviction would be reduced to a misdemeanor. He worked 40 hours in a food bank. He met with an anger management counselor. He kept to an 8 p.m. curfew except when returning from football practice or church. And he kept out of trouble. But Dequan and his mother, who is struggling to raise two sons here on wisps of income, were unable to meet one final condition: payment of $200 in court and public defender fees. For that reason alone, his probation was extended for what turned out to be 14 more months, until they pulled together the money at a time when they had trouble finding quarters for the laundromat.

Not only do such fines create a two-tier system of justice that serves the wealthy and punishes the poor, they also subject young people to a prison system fraught with incidents of violent assault, rape and suicide. Moreover, many young people have health needs and mental health problems that are not met in these detention centers, and incarceration also fuels mental health problems.

Suicide rates behind bars «are more than four times higher than for adolescents overall,» according to the Child Trends Data Bank. Moreover, «between 50 and 75 percent of adolescents who have spent time in juvenile detention centers are incarcerated later in life.» Finally, as the «Debtors’ Prison for Kids Report» makes clear, kids are being sent to jail at increasing rates while youth crime is decreasing. The criminal legal system is mired in a form of casino capitalism that not only produces wide inequalities in wealth, income and power, but it also corrupts municipal court systems that are underfunded and turn to unethical and corrupt practices in order to raise money, while creating new paths to prison, especially for children.

Debtors’ prisons for young people exemplify how a warfare culture can affect the most vulnerable populations in a society, exhibiting a degree of punitiveness and cruelty that indicts the most fundamental political, economic and social structures of a society. Debtors’ prisons for young people have become the dumping grounds for those youth considered disposable, and they are also a shameful source of profit for municipalities across the United States. They operate as legalized extortion rackets, underscoring how our society has come to place profits above the welfare of children. They also indicate how a society has turned its back on young people, the most vulnerable group of people in our society.

There is nothing new about the severity of the American government’s attack on poor people, especially those on welfare, and both political parties have shared in this ignoble attack. What is often overlooked, however, is the degree to which children are impacted by scorched-earth policies that extend from cutting social provisions to the ongoing criminalization of a vast range of behaviors. It appears that particularly when it comes to young people, especially poor youth and youth of color, society’s obligations to justice and social responsibility disappear.

Modeling Schools After Prisons

We live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect young people from the excesses of the police state and the market have been either weakened or abolished. The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on public education, poor students and students of color. Schools have become, in many cases, punishment factories that increasingly subject students to pedagogies of control, discipline and surveillance. Pedagogy has been emptied of critical content and now imposes on students mind-numbing teaching practices organized around teaching for the test. The latter constitutes both a war on the imagination and a disciplinary practice meant to criminalize the behavior of children who do not accept a pedagogy of conformity and overbearing control.

No longer considered democratic public spheres intended to create critically informed and engaged citizens, many schools now function as punishing factories, work stations that mediate between warehousing poor students of color and creating a path that will lead them into the hands of the criminal legal system and eventually, prison. Under such circumstances, it becomes more difficult to reclaim a notion of public schooling in which the culture of punishment and militarization is not the culture of education. Hope in this instance has to begin with a critical discourse among teachers, students, parents and administrators unwilling to model the schools after a prison culture.

Many schools are now modeled after prisons and organized around the enactment of zero tolerance policies which, as John W. Whitehead has pointed out, put «youth in the bullseye of police violence.» Whitehead argues rightfully that:

The nation’s public schools — extensions of the world beyond the schoolhouse gates, a world that is increasingly hostile to freedom — have become microcosms of the American police state, containing almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the «outside.»

Not only has there been an increase in the number of police in the schools, but the behavior of kids is being criminalized in ways that legitimate what many call the school-to-prison pipeline. School discipline has been transformed into a criminal matter now handled mostly by the police rather than by teachers and school administrators, especially in regard to the treatment of poor Black and Brown kids. But cops are doing more than arresting young people for trivial infractions, they are also handcuffing them, using tasers on children, applying physical violence on youth, and playing a crucial role in getting kids suspended or expelled from schools every year.

The Civil Rights Project rightly argues that public schools are becoming «gateways to prisons.» One estimate suggests that a growing number of young people will have been arrested for minor misbehaviors by the time they finish high school. This is not surprising in schools that already look like quasi-prisons with their drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance systems, metal detectors, police patrolling school corridors, and in some cases, police systems that resemble SWAT teams.

While there has been a great deal of publicity nationwide over police officers killing Black people, there has been too little scrutiny regarding the use of force by police in the schools. As Jaeah Lee observed in Mother Jones, the «use of force by cops in schools … has drawn far less attention [in spite of the fact that] over the past five years at least 28 students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by so-called school resource officers — sworn, uniformed police assigned to provide security on k-12 campuses.»

According to Democracy Now, there are over 17,000 school resource officers in more than half of the public schools in the United States, while only a small percentage have been trained to work in schools. In spite of the fact that violence in schools has dropped precipitously, school resource officers are the fastest growing segment of law enforcement and their presence has resulted in more kids being ticketed, fined, arrested, suspended and pushed into the criminal legal system.

In 2014 over 92,000 students were subject to school-related arrests. In the last few years, videos have been aired showing a police officer inside Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina throwing a teenage girl to the ground and dragging her out of her classroom. In Mississippi schools, a student was handcuffed for not wearing a belt, a black female student was choked by the police, and one cop threatened to shoot students on a bus.

Neoliberalism is not only obsessed with accumulating capital, it has also lowered the threshold for extreme violence to such a degree that it puts into place a law-and-order educational regime that criminalizes children who doodle on desks, bump into teachers in school corridors, throw peanuts at a bus, or fall asleep in class. Fear, insecurity, humiliation, and the threat of imprisonment are the new structuring principles in schools that house our most vulnerable populations. The school has become a microcosm of the warfare state, designed to provide a profit for the security industries, while imposing a pedagogy of repression on young people.

According to the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, a disproportionate number of students subject to arrests are Black. It states: «While black students represent 16% of student enrollment, they represent 27% of students referred to law enforcement and 31% of students subjected to a school-related arrest.»

Too many children in the Unites States confront violence in almost every space in which they find themselves — in the streets, public schools, parks, and wider culture. In schools, according to Whitehead, «more than 3 million students are suspended or expelled every year.» Violence has become central to America’s identity both with regards to its foreign policy and increasingly in its domestic policies.  How else to explain what Lisa Armstrong revealed in The Intercept: «The United States is the only country in the world that routinely sentences children to life in prison without parole, and, according to estimates from nonprofits and advocacy groups, there are between 2,300 and 2,500 people serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were minors.»

The predatory financial system targets poor, Black and Brown children instead of crooked bankers, hedge fund managers, and big corporations who engage in massive corruption and fraud while pushing untold numbers of people into bankruptcy, poverty and even homelessness. For example, according to Forbes, the international banking giant HSBC exposed the US financial system to «a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing … and channeled $7 billion into the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 which possibly included proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States.» Yet, no major CEO went to jail. Even more astounding is that «the profligate and dishonest behavior of Wall Street bankers, traders, and executives in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis … went virtually unpunished.»

Resisting Criminalization of School Discipline and Everyday Behavior

Violence against children in various sites is generally addressed through specific reforms, such as substituting community service for detention centers, eliminating zero tolerance policies in schools, and replacing the police with social workers, while creating supportive environments for young people. The latter might include an immediate stoppage to suspending, expelling and arresting students for minor misbehaviors. Legal scholar Kerrin C. Wolf has proposed a promising three-tier system of reform that includes the following:

The first tier of the system provides supports for the entire student body. Such supports include clearly defining and teaching expected behaviors, rewarding positive behavior, and applying a continuum of consequences for problem behavior. The second tier targets at-risk students — students who exhibit behavior problems despite the supports provided in the first tier — with enhanced interventions and supports, often in group settings. These may include sessions that teach social skills and informal meetings during which the students «check in» to discuss how they have been behaving. The third tier provided individualized and specialized interventions and supports for high-risk students — students who do not respond to the first and second tier supports and interventions. The interventions and supports are based on a functional behavior assessment and involve a community of teachers and other school staff working with the student to change his or her behavior patterns.

Regarding the larger culture of violence, there have also been public demands that police wear body cameras and come under the jurisdiction of community. In addition, there has been a strong but largely failed attempt on the part of gun reform advocates to establish policies and laws that would control the manufacture, sale, acquisition, circulation, use, transfer, modification or use of firearms by private citizens. At the same time, there is a growing effort to also pass legislation that would not allow such restrictions to be used as a further tool to incarcerate youth of color. In short, this means not allowing the war on gun violence to become another war on poor people of color similar to what happened under the racially biased war on drugs. And while such reforms are crucial in the most immediate sense to protect young people and lessen the violence to which they are subjected, they do not go far enough. Violence has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and bears down egregiously on children, especially poor youth and youth of color. If such violence is to be stopped, a wholesale restructuring of the warfare state must be addressed. The underlying structure of state and everyday violence must be made visible, challenged and dismantled.

The violence waged against children must become a flashpoint politically to point to the struggles that must be waged against the gun industry, the military-industrial-academic complex, and an entertainment culture that fuels what Dr. Phil Wolfson describes in Tikkun Magazine as «fictive identifications» associated with «murderous combat illusions and delusions.» Violence must be viewed as endemic to a regime of neoliberalism that breeds racism, class warfare, bigotry and a culture of cruelty. Capitalism produces the warfare state, and any reasonable struggle for a real democracy must address both the institutions organized for the production of violence and the political, social, educational and economic tools and strategies necessary for getting rid of it.

Americans live at a time in which the destruction and violence pursued under the regime of neoliberalism is waged unapologetically and without pause. One consequence is that it has become more difficult to defend a system that punishes its children, destroys the lives of workers, derides public servants, plunders the planet and destroys public goods.  Americans live in an age of disposability in which the endless throwing away of goods is matched by a system that views an increasing number of people — poor Black and Brown youth, immigrants, Muslims, unemployed workers and those unable to participate in the formal economy — as excess and subject to zones of social and economic abandonment. As Gayatri Spivak rightly observes, «When human beings are valued as less than human, violence begins to emerge as the only response.» At issue here is not just the crushing of the human spirit, mind and body, but the abandonment of democratic politics itself. Violence wages war against hope, obliterates the imagination, and undermines any sense of critical agency and collective struggle.

Sites of Resistance

Yet, resistance cannot be obliterated, and we are seeing hopeful signs of it all over the world. In the US, Black youth are challenging police and state violence, calling for widespread alliances among diverse groups of young people, such as the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), worker-controlled labor movements,  the movement around climate change, movements against austerity and movements that call for the abolition of the prison system among others. All of these are connecting single issues to a broader comprehensive politics, one that is generating radical policy proposals that reach deep into demands for power, freedom and justice. Such proposals extend from reforming the criminal legal system to ending the exploitative privatization of natural resources. What is being produced by these young people is less a blueprint for short-term reform than a vision of the power of the radical imagination in addressing long term, transformative organizing and a call for a radical restructuring of society.

What we are seeing is the birth of a radical vision and a corresponding mode of politics that calls for the end of violence in all of its crude and militant death-dealing manifestations.  Such movements are not only calling for the death of the two-party system and the distribution of wealth, power and income, but also for a politics of civic memory and courage, one capable of analyzing the ideology, structures and mechanisms of capitalism and other forms of oppression. For the first time since the 1960s, political unity is no longer a pejorative term, new visions matter and coalitions arguing for a broad-based social movement appear possible again.

A new politics of insurrection is in the air, one that is challenging the values, policies, structure and relations of power rooted in a warfare society and war culture that propagate intolerable violence. State violence in both its hidden and visible forms is no longer a cause for despair but for informed and collective resistance. Zygmunt Bauman is right in insisting that the bleakness and dystopian politics of our times necessitates the ability to dream otherwise, to imagine a society «which thinks it is not just enough, which questions the sufficiency of any achieved level of justice and considers justice always to be a step or more ahead. Above all, it is a society that reacts angrily to any case of injustice and promptly sets about correcting it.»

It is precisely such a collective spirit informing a resurgent politics within the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements — a politics that is being rewritten in the discourse of critique and hope, emancipation and transformation. Once again, the left has a future and the future has a left.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38044-america-s-war-on-youth-from-schools-to-debtors-prisons

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Rallying Cry: Youth Must Stand Up to Defend Democracy

Henry Giroux

By Henry Giroux

According to famed anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the central question of our times is whether we’re witnessing the worldwide rejection of liberal democracy and its replacement by some sort of populist authoritarianism.

There’s no doubt that democracy is under siege in several countries, including the United States, Turkey, the Philippines, India and Russia. Yet what’s often overlooked in analyses of the state of global democracy is the importance of education. Education is necessary to respond to the formative and often poisonous cultures that have given rise to the right-wing populism that’s feeding authoritarian ideologies across the globe.

 

Henry A. Giroux delivered this commencement speech upon receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of West Scotland in early July.

Under neo-liberal capitalism, education and the way that we teach our youth has become central to politics. Our current system has encouraged a culture of self-absorption, consumerism, privatization and commodification. Civic culture has been badly undermined while any viable notion of shared citizenship has been replaced by commodified and commercial relations. What this suggests is that important forms of political and social domination are not only economic and structural, but also intellectual and related to the way we learn and teach.

One of the great challenges facing those who believe in a real democracy, especially academics and young people, is the need to reinvent the language of politics in order to make clear that there is no substantive and inclusive democracy without informed citizens.

Democracy Demands Questions

It is imperative for academics to reclaim higher education as a tool of democracy and to connect their work to broader social issues. We must also assume the role of public intellectuals who understand there’s no genuine democracy without a culture of questioning, self-reflection and genuine critical power.

As well, it’s crucial to create conditions that expand those cultures and public spheres in which individuals can bring their private troubles into a larger system.

It’s time for academics to develop a culture of questioning that enables young people and others to talk back to injustice. We need to make power accountable and to embrace economic and social justice as part of the mission of higher education. In other words, academics need to teach young people how to hold politicians and authority accountable.

All generations face trials unique to their own times. The current generation of young people is no different, though what this generation is experiencing may be unprecedented. High on the list of trials is the precariousness of the time — a time in which the security and foundations enjoyed by earlier generations have been largely abandoned. Traditional social structures, long-term jobs, stable communities and permanent bonds have withered in the face of globalization, disposability and the scourge of unbridled consumerism.

Social Contract Shrinking

This is a time when massive inequality plagues the planet. Resources and power are largely controlled by a small financial elite. The social contract is shrinking: war has become normalized, environmental protections are being dismantled, fear has become the new national anthem, and more and more people, especially young people, are being written out of democracy’s script.

Yet around world, the spirit of resistance on the part of young people is coming alive once again as they reject the growing racism, Islamaphobia, militarism and authoritarianism that is emerging all over the globe.

They shouldn’t be discouraged by the way the world looks at the present moment. Hope should never be surrendered to the forces of cynicism and resignation.

Instead, youth must be visionary, brave, willing to make trouble and to think dangerously. Ideas have consequences, and when they’re employed to nurture and sustain a flourishing democracy in which people struggle for justice together, history will be made.

Youth must reject measuring their lives simply in traditional terms of wealth, prestige, status and the false comforts of gated communities and gated imaginations. They must also refuse to live in a society in which consumerism, self-interest and violence function as the only viable forms of political currency.

These goals are politically, ethically and morally deficient and capitulate to the bankrupt notion that we are consumers first and citizens second.

Vision Is More Than Sight

Instead, young people must be steadfast, generous, honest, civic-minded and think about their lives as a project rooted in the desire to create a better world.

They must expand their dreams and think about what it means to build a future marked by a robust and inclusive democracy. In doing so, they need to embrace acts of solidarity, work to expand the common good and collectivize compassion. Such practices will bestow upon them the ability to govern wisely rather than simply be governed maliciously.

I have great hope that this current generation will confront the poisonous authoritarianism that is emerging in many countries today. One strategy for doing this is to reaffirm what binds us together. How might we develop new forms of solidarity? What would it mean to elevate the dignity and decency of everyday people, everywhere?

Young people need to learn how to bear witness to the injustices that surround them. They need to accept the call to become visionaries willing to create a society in which people, as the great journalist Bill Moyers argues, can «become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.»

Near the end of her life, Helen Keller was asked by a student if there was anything worse than losing her sight. She replied losing her vision would have been worse. Today’s young people must maintain, nurture and enhance their vision of a better world.

The ConversationThis was adapted from a recent commencement address given in Glasgow, Scotland, by Prof. Giroux, named one of the top 50 educational thinkers of modern times.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41378-rallying-cry-youth-must-stand-up-to-defend-democracy

The Conversation

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Illuminating the Darkness in the Age of Despair

Henry Giroux

By Henry Giroux

Chancellor, Graduates, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am deeply honored to be with you today and to share in your success and the celebration of your talents and achievements. It is a humbling task to stand before you and say something worthy of this memorable event. Rather than dwell on my own biography, I want to take the advice of the great philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who insisted that award winners should talk less about their own merits and much more about the challenges the next generation will face and what it will mean to conduct your lives with a sense of dignity, civic courage, and social responsibility.

All generations face trials unique to their times and your generation is no different. Though yours may be unprecedented. High on the list would be the precarity of the current historical moment–a time in which the security and foundations enjoyed by an earlier generation have been largely abandoned. Traditional social structures, long term jobs, stable communities, and permanent bonds have withered before the speed of consumption, disposability, and the scourge of unbridled production. This is a time when massive inequality plagues the planet and resources and power are largely controlled by a small financial elite; a time when the social contract is shrinking, war has become normalized, environmental protections are being dismantled, fear has become the new national anthem, and more and more people, especially young people, are being written out of the script of democracy. Yet, around the globe the spirit of resistance on the part of young people is coming alive once again.

My first hope is that you will not be discouraged by the way the world looks at the present moment. Against the looming threats I have mentioned, the lesson I want to reinforce today is that hope is a precious gift and should never be surrendered to the forces of cynicism and resignation. On the contrary, I want to repeat what my friend the late Howard Zinn once wrote: “The lesson of history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change…To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.”

For change to happen, you must be visionary, risk taking, willing to make trouble and think dangerously. Ideas have consequences, and when they are employed to nurture and sustain a flourishing democracy, in which people struggle for justice together, you will learn how to make history rather than be swept away by it. Reject measuring your life simply in traditional terms of success–wealth, prestige, status, and the false comforts of gated communities and gated imaginations. These goals are politically, ethically, and morally deficient and capitulate to the bankrupt notion that we are consumers first and citizens second. Instead, be brave, generous, honest, civic minded, and think about your life as a project rooted in the desire to create a better world for yourself, your children and all children. Expand your dreams and think about what it means to build a future marked by a robust and inclusive democracy. In doing so, embrace acts of solidarity, work to expand the common good, and collectivize compassion. Such practices will bestow on your generation the ability to govern wisely rather than simply be governed maliciously. Remember, democracy is not given to us, it has to be fought for and its benefits have always emerged out of collective struggles of mass resistance. Democracy at its best raises questions about what your generations’ responsibility might be in the face of an unspeakable and unlivable future. Rather than be numb and silent, refuse to look away and act with courage in the face of injustice. Make the unimaginable ordinary and the space of the possible larger than what currently exists.

I have great hope that your generation will confront the poisonous authoritarianism that is emerging in many countries today. One strategy for doing this suggests reaffirming what binds us together, how we might develop new forms of solidarity, and what might it mean to elevate the dignity and decency of everyday people everywhere.

Today, you leave one experience of education and enter into another in which you will need to develop an active relationship with history because “memory produces hope,” enables critical questioning, and prevents justice from going dead in ourselves. Against the current moral vacuum overtaking market-driven societies, you will need to learn how to translate private troubles into public considerations and public issues into individual and collective rights. Learn how to bear witness to the injustices around you and accept the call to become visionaries willing to create a society in which people, as the great journalist Bill Moyers argues, can “become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.” Near the end of her career, Helen Keller was asked by a student if there was anything worse than losing her sight. She replied “yes, I could have lost my vision.” To add to this eloquent comment, I would say, that history is open and it is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if you want to imagine and bring into being alternative futures and horizons of possibility. The future is now in your hands and it is a future that needs your skills, critical judgment, sense of responsibility, compassion, imagination, and humility. Let me end by quoting my first teacher, the great novelist and critic James Baldwin. “The precise role of [your generation]…, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”

Source:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/illuminating_the_darkness_in_the_age_of_despair_20170701

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A New American Revolution: Can We Break Out of Our Nation’s Culture of Cruelty?

Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

Fighting back against the right’s politics of exclusion can be a path toward rebuilding American democracy

The health care reform bills proposed by Republicans in the House and Senate have generated heated discussions across a vast ideological and political spectrum. On the right, senators such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have endorsed a new level of cruelty — one that has a long history among the radical right — by arguing that the current Senate bill does not cut enough social services and provisions for the poor, children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups and needs to be even more friendly to corporate interests by providing massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Among right-wing pundits, the message is similar. For instance, Fox News commentator Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, in a discussion about the Senate bill, stated without apparent irony that rising public concerns over the suffering, misery and death that would result from this policy bordered on “hysteria” since “we are all going to die anyway.” Montgomery’s ignorance about the relationship between access to health care and lower mortality rates is about more than ignorance. It is about a culture of cruelty that is buttressed by a moral coma.

On the other side of the ideological and political divide, liberals such as Robert Reich have rightly stated that the bill is not only cruel and inhumane, it is essentially a tax reform bill for the 1 percent and a boondoggle that benefits the vampire-like insurance companies. Others, such as Laila Lalami of The Nation, have reasoned that what we are witnessing with such policies is another example of political contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable on the part of right-wing politicians and pundits. These arguments are only partly right and do not go far enough in their criticisms of the new political dynamics and mode of authoritarianism that have overtaken the United States. Put more bluntly, they suffer from limited political horizons.

What we do know about both the proposed Republican Party federal budget and health care policies, in whatever form, is that they will lay waste to crucial elements of the social contract while causing huge amounts of suffering and misery. For instance, the Senate bill will lead to massive reductions in Medicaid spending. Medicaid covers 20 percent of all Americans or 15 million people, along with 49 percent of all births, 60 percent of all children with disabilities and 64 percent of all nursing home residents, many of whom may be left homeless without this support.

Under this bill, 22 million people will lose their health insurance coverage, to accompany massive cuts proposed to food-stamp programs that benefit at least 43 million people. The Senate health care bill allows insurance companies to charge more money from the most vulnerable. It cuts maternity care and phases out coverage for emergency services. Moreover, as Lalami points out, “this bill includes nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts, about half of which will flow to those who make more than $1 million per year.” The latter figure is significant when measured against the fact that Medicaid would see a $772 billion cut in the next 10 years.

It gets worse. The Senate bill will drastically decrease social services and health care in rural America, and one clear consequence will be rising mortality rates. In addition, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has estimated that if health insurance is taken away from 22 million people, “it raises … death rates by between 3 and 29 percent. And the math on that is that if you take health insurance away from 22 million people, about 29,000 of them will die every year, annually, as a result.”

Leftists and other progressives need a new language to understand the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and the inhumane and cruel policies it is producing. I want to argue that the discourse of single issues, whether aimed at regressive tax cuts, police violence or environmental destruction, is not enough. Nor is the traditional Marxist discourse of exploitation and accumulation by dispossession adequate for understanding the current historical conjuncture.

The problem is not merely one of exploitation but one of exclusion. This politics of exclusion, Slavoj Žižek argues, “is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but … about not allowing some people to participate in public life.” People are not simply prevented from participating in public life through tactics such as voter suppression. It is worse than that. Many groups now suffer from a crisis of agency and depoliticization because they are overburdened by the struggle to survive. Time is a disaster for them, especially in a society that suffers from what Dr. Stephen Grosz has called a “catastrophe of indifference.” The ghost of a savage capitalism haunts the health care debate and American politics in general.

What does health care, or justice itself, mean in a country dominated by corporations, the military and the ruling 1 percent? The health care crisis makes clear that the current problem of hyper-capitalism is not only about stealing resources or an intensification of the exploitation of labor, but also about a politics of exclusion and the propagation of forms of social and literal death, through what the late Zygmunt Bauman described as “the most conspicuous cases of social polarization, of deepening inequality, and of rising volumes of human poverty, misery and humiliation.”

A culture of myopia now propels single-issue analyses detached from broader issues. The current state of progressive politics has collapsed into ideological silos, and feeds “a deeper terror — of helplessness, to which uncertainty is but a contributing factor,” as Bauman puts it, which all too often is transformed into a depoliticizing cynicism or a misdirected anger fed by a Trump-like politics of rage and fear. The fear of disposability has created a new ecology of insecurity and despair that murders dreams, squelches any sense of an alternative future and depoliticizes people. Under such circumstances, the habits of oligarchy and authoritarianism become normalized.

Traditional liberal and progressive discourses about our current political quagmire are not wrong. They are simply incomplete, and they do not grasp a major shift that has taken place in the United States since the late 1970s. That shift is organized around what Bauman, Stanley Aronowitz, Saskia Sassen and Brad Evans have called a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are considered disposable, refuse, excess and consigned to fend for themselves.

Evidence of such expulsions and social homelessness, whether referring to poor African-Americans, Mexican immigrants, Muslims or Syrian refugees, constitute a new and accelerated level of oppression under casino capitalism. Moreover, buttressed by a hyper-market-driven appeal to a radical individualism, a distrust of all social bonds, a survival-of-the-fittest ethic and a willingness to separate economic activity from social costs, neoliberal policies are now enacted in which public services are underfunded, bad schools become the norm, health care as a social provision is abandoned, child care is viewed as an individual responsibility and social assistance is viewed with disdain. Evil now appears not merely in the overt oppression of the state but as a widespread refusal on the part of many Americans to react to the suffering of others, which is all too often viewed as self-inflicted.

Under this new regime of massive cruelty and disappearance, the social state is hollowed out and the punishing state becomes the primary template or model for addressing social problems. Appeals to character as a way to explain the suffering and immiseration many people experience are now supplemented by the protocols of the security state and a culture of fear.

The ethical imagination and moral evaluation are viewed by the new authoritarians in power as objects of contempt, making it easier for the Trump administration to accelerate the dynamics and reach of the punishing state. Everyday behaviors such as jaywalking, panhandling, “walking while black” or violating a dress code in school are increasingly criminalized. Schools have become feeders into the criminal-prison-industrial complex for many young people, especially youth of color. State terrorism rains down with greater intensity on immigrants and minorities of color, religion and class. The official state message is to catch, punish and imprison excess populations — to treat them as criminals rather than lives to be saved.

The “carceral state” and a culture of fear have become the foundational elements that drive the new politics of authoritarianism and disposability. What the new health bill proposal makes clear is that the net of expulsions is widening under what could be called an accelerated politics of disposability. In the absence of a social contract and a massive shift in wealth and power to the upper 1 percent, vast elements of the population are now subject to a kind of zombie politics in which the status of the living dead is conferred upon them.

One important example is the massive indifference, if not cruelty, exhibited by the Trump administration to the opioid crisis that is ravaging more and more communities throughout the United States. The New York Times has reported that more than 59,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, the largest year-over-year increase ever recorded. The Senate health care proposal cuts funds for programs meant to address this epidemic. The end result is that more people will die and more will be forced to live as if they were the walking dead.

A politics of disposability thrives on distractions — the perpetual game show of American politics — as well as what might be called a politics of disappearance. That is, a politics enforced daily in the mainstream media, which functions as a “disimagination machine,” and renders invisible deindustrialized communities, decaying schools, neighborhoods that resemble slums in the developing world, millions of incarcerated people of color and elderly people locked in understaffed nursing homes.

We live in an age that Brad Evans and I have called an age of multiple expulsions, suggesting that once something is expelled it becomes invisible. In the current age of disposability, the systemic edges of authoritarianism have moved to the center of politics, just as politics is now an extension of state violence. Moreover, in the age of disposability, what was once considered extreme and unfortunate has now become normalized, whether we are talking about policies that actually kill people or that strip away the humanity and dignity of millions.

Disposability is not new in American history, but its more extreme predatory formations are back in new forms. Moreover, what is unique about the contemporary politics of disposability is how it has become official policy, normalized in the discourse of the market, democracy, freedom and a right-wing contempt for human life, if not the planet itself. The moral and social sanctions for greed and avarice that emerged during the Reagan presidency now proliferate unapologetically, if not with glee.

Cruelty is now hardened into a new language in which the unimaginable has become domesticated and “lives with a weight and a sense of importance unmatched in modern times,” in the words of Peter Bacon Hales. With the rise of the new authoritarianism dressed up in the language of freedom and choice, the state no longer feels obligated to provide a safety net or any measures to prevent human suffering, hardship and death.

Freedom in this limited ideological sense generally means freedom from government interference, which translates into a call for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of the marketplace. This right-wing reduction of freedom to a limited notion of personal liberty is perfectly suited to mobilizing a notion of personal injury largely based on the fear of others. What it does not do is expand the notion of fear from the personal to the social, thus ignoring a broader notion: Freedom from want, misery and poverty. This is a damaged notion of freedom divorced from social and economic rights.

Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of addressing how class, power, exclusion, austerity, racism and inequality are part of a more comprehensive politics of disposability in America, one that makes possible what Robert Jay Lifton once called a “death-saturated age.” This suggests the need for a new political language capable of analyzing how this new dystopian politics of exclusion is buttressed by the values of a harsh form of casino capitalism that both legitimates and contributes to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the traditional working and middle classes, and also by a wide range of groups now considered redundant — young people, poor people of color, immigrants, refugees, religious minorities, the elderly and others.

We are not simply talking about a politics that removes the protective shell of the state from daily life, but a new form of politics that creates a window on our current authoritarian dystopia. The discourse and politics of disposability offers new challenges in addressing and challenging the underlying causes of poverty, class domination, environmental destruction and a resurgent racism — not as a call for reform but as a project of radical reconstruction aimed at the creation of a new political and economic social order.

Such a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power, making clear that in the current historical moment the battleground of ideas is as crucial as the battle over resources, institutions and power. What is crucial to remember is that casino capitalism or global neoliberalism has created, in Naomi Klein’s terms, “armies of locked out people whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘backward,’ whose basic needs are unmet.”

This more expansive level of global repression and intensification of state violence negates and exposes the compromising discourse of liberalism, while reproducing new levels of systemic violence. Effective struggle against such repression would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering all workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, a politics dedicated to providing decent education, housing and health care to all residents of the United States. The discourse of disposability points to another register of expulsion — one with a more progressive valence. In this case, it means refusing to equate capitalism with democracy and struggling to create a mass movement that embraces a radical democratic future.

Source:

A New American Revolution: Can We Break Out of Our Nation’s Culture of Cruelty?

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A new American revolution: Can we find the language — and build a movement — to break out of our nation’s culture of cruelty?

Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

The health care reform bills proposed by Republicans in the House and Senate have generated heated discussions across a vast ideological and political spectrum. On the right, senators such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have endorsed a new level of cruelty – one that has a long history among the radical right — by arguing that the current Senate bill does not cut enough social services and provisions for the poor, children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups and needs to be even more friendly to corporate interests by providing massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Among right-wing pundits, the message is similar. For instance, Fox News commentator Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, in a discussion about the Senate bill, stated without apparent irony that rising public concerns over the suffering, misery and death that would result from this policy bordered on “hysteria” since “we are all going to die anyway.” Montgomery’s ignorance about the relationship between access to health care and lower mortality rates is about more than ignorance. It is about a culture of cruelty that is buttressed by a moral coma.

On the other side of the ideological and political divide, liberals such as Robert Reich have rightly stated that the bill is not only cruel and inhumane, it is essentially a tax reform bill for the 1 percent and a boondoggle that benefits the vampire-like insurance companies. Others, such as Laila Lalami of the Nation, have reasoned that what we are witnessing with such policies is another example of political contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable on the part of right-wing politicians and pundits. These arguments are only partly right and do not go far enough in their criticisms of the new political dynamics and mode of authoritarianism that have overtaken the United States. Put more bluntly, they suffer from limited political horizons.

What we do know about both the proposed Republican Party federal budget and health care policies, in whatever form, is that they will lay waste to crucial elements of the social contract while causing huge amounts of suffering and misery. For instance, the Senate bill will lead to massive reductions in Medicaid spending. Medicaid covers 20 percent of all Americans or 15 million people, along with 49 percent of all births, 60 percent of all children with disabilities, and 64 percent of all nursing home residents, many of whom may be left homeless without this support.

Under this bill, 22 million people will lose their health insurance coverage, to accompany massive cuts proposed to food-stamp programs that benefit at least 43 million people. The Senate health care bill allows insurance companies to charge more money from the most vulnerable. It cuts maternity care and phases out coverage for emergency services. Moreover, as Lalami points out, “this bill includes nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts, about half of which will flow to those who make more than $1 million per year.” The latter figure is significant when measured against the fact that Medicaid would see a $772 billion cut in the next 10 years.

It gets worse. The Senate bill will drastically decrease social services and health care in rural America, and one clear consequence will be rising mortality rates. In addition, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has estimated that if health insurance is taken away from 22 million people, “it raises … death rates by between 3 and 29 percent. And the math on that is that if you take health insurance away from 22 million people, about 29,000 of them will die every year, annually, as a result.”

Leftists and other progressives need a new language to understand the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and the inhumane and cruel policies it is producing. I want to argue that the discourse of single issues, whether aimed at regressive tax cuts, police violence or environmental destruction, is not enough. Nor is the traditional Marxist discourse of exploitation and accumulation by dispossession adequate for understanding the current historical conjuncture.

he health care reform bills proposed by Republicans in the House and Senate have generated heated discussions across a vast ideological and political spectrum. On the right, senators such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have endorsed a new level of cruelty – one that has a long history among the radical right — by arguing that the current Senate bill does not cut enough social services and provisions for the poor, children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups and needs to be even more friendly to corporate interests by providing massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Among right-wing pundits, the message is similar. For instance, Fox News commentator Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, in a discussion about the Senate bill, stated without apparent irony that rising public concerns over the suffering, misery and death that would result from this policy bordered on “hysteria” since “we are all going to die anyway.” Montgomery’s ignorance about the relationship between access to health care and lower mortality rates is about more than ignorance. It is about a culture of cruelty that is buttressed by a moral coma.

On the other side of the ideological and political divide, liberals such as Robert Reich have rightly stated that the bill is not only cruel and inhumane, it is essentially a tax reform bill for the 1 percent and a boondoggle that benefits the vampire-like insurance companies. Others, such as Laila Lalami of the Nation, have reasoned that what we are witnessing with such policies is another example of political contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable on the part of right-wing politicians and pundits. These arguments are only partly right and do not go far enough in their criticisms of the new political dynamics and mode of authoritarianism that have overtaken the United States. Put more bluntly, they suffer from limited political horizons.

What we do know about both the proposed Republican Party federal budget and health care policies, in whatever form, is that they will lay waste to crucial elements of the social contract while causing huge amounts of suffering and misery. For instance, the Senate bill will lead to massive reductions in Medicaid spending. Medicaid covers 20 percent of all Americans or 15 million people, along with 49 percent of all births, 60 percent of all children with disabilities, and 64 percent of all nursing home residents, many of whom may be left homeless without this support.

Under this bill, 22 million people will lose their health insurance coverage, to accompany massive cuts proposed to food-stamp programs that benefit at least 43 million people. The Senate health care bill allows insurance companies to charge more money from the most vulnerable. It cuts maternity care and phases out coverage for emergency services. Moreover, as Lalami points out, “this bill includes nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts, about half of which will flow to those who make more than $1 million per year.” The latter figure is significant when measured against the fact that Medicaid would see a $772 billion cut in the next 10 years.

It gets worse. The Senate bill will drastically decrease social services and health care in rural America, and one clear consequence will be rising mortality rates. In addition, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has estimated that if health insurance is taken away from 22 million people, “it raises … death rates by between 3 and 29 percent. And the math on that is that if you take health insurance away from 22 million people, about 29,000 of them will die every year, annually, as a result.”

Leftists and other progressives need a new language to understand the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and the inhumane and cruel policies it is producing. I want to argue that the discourse of single issues, whether aimed at regressive tax cuts, police violence or environmental destruction, is not enough. Nor is the traditional Marxist discourse of exploitation and accumulation by dispossession adequate for understanding the current historical conjuncture.

The ethical imagination and moral evaluation are viewed by the new authoritarians in power as objects of contempt, making it easier for the Trump administration to accelerate the dynamics and reach of the punishing state. Everyday behaviors such as jaywalking, panhandling, “walking while black” or violating a dress code in school are increasingly criminalized. Schools have become feeders into the criminal-prison-industrial complex for many young people, especially youth of color. State terrorism rains down with greater intensity on immigrants and minorities of color, religion and class. The official state message is to catch, punish and imprison excess populations — to treat them as criminals rather than lives to be saved.

The “carceral state” and a culture of fear have become the foundational elements that drive the new politics of authoritarianism and disposability. What the new health bill proposal makes clear is that the net of expulsions is widening under what could be called an accelerated politics of disposability. In the absence of a social contract and a massive shift in wealth and power to the upper 1 percent, vast elements of the population are now subject to a kind of zombie politics in which the status of the living dead is conferred upon them.

One important example is the massive indifference, if not cruelty, exhibited by the Trump administration to the opioid crisis that is ravaging more and more communities throughout the United States. The New York Times has reported that more than 59,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, the largest year-over-year increase ever recorded. The Senate health care proposal cuts funds for programs meant to address this epidemic. The end result is that more people will die and more will be forced to live as if they were the walking dead.

A politics of disposability thrives on distractions — the perpetual game show of American politics — as well as what might be called a politics of disappearance. That is, a politics enforced daily in the mainstream media, which functions as a “disimagination machine,” and renders invisible deindustrialized communities, decaying schools, neighborhoods that resemble slums in the developing world, millions of incarcerated people of color, and elderly people locked in understaffed nursing homes.

We live in an age that Brad Evans and I have called an age of multiple expulsions, suggesting that once something is expelled it becomes invisible. In the current age of disposability, the systemic edges of authoritarianism have moved to the center of politics, just as politics is now an extension of state violence. Moreover, in the age of disposability, what was once considered extreme and unfortunate has now become normalized, whether we are talking about policies that actually kill people or that strip away the humanity and dignity of millions.

Disposability is not new in American history, but its more extreme predatory formations are back in new forms. Moreover, what is unique about the contemporary politics of disposability is how it has become official policy, normalized in the discourse of the market, democracy, freedom and a right-wing contempt for human life, if not the planet itself. The moral and social sanctions for greed and avarice that emerged during the Reagan presidency now proliferate unapologetically, if not with glee.

Cruelty is now hardened into a new language in which the unimaginable has become domesticated and “lives with a weight and a sense of importance unmatched in modern times,” in the words of Peter Bacon Hales. With the rise of the new authoritarianism dressed up in the language of freedom and choice, the state no longer feels obligated to provide a safety net or any measures to prevent human suffering, hardship and death.

Freedom in this limited ideological sense generally means freedom from government interference, which translates into a call for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of the marketplace. This right-wing reduction of freedom to a limited notion of personal liberty is perfectly suited to mobilizing a notion of personal injury largely based on the fear of others. What it does not do is expand the notion of fear from the personal to the social, thus ignoring a broader notion: Freedom from want, misery and poverty. This is a damaged notion of freedom divorced from social and economic rights.  

Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of addressing how class, power, exclusion, austerity, racism and inequality are part of a more comprehensive politics of disposability in America, one that makes possible what Robert Jay Lifton once called a “death-saturated age.” This suggests the need for a new political language capable of analyzing how this new dystopian politics of exclusion is buttressed by the values of a harsh form of casino capitalism that both legitimates and contributes to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the traditional working and middle classes, and also by a wide range of groups now considered redundant — young people, poor people of color, immigrants, refugees, religious minorities, the elderly and others.

We are not simply talking about a politics that removes the protective shell of the state from daily life, but a new form of politics that creates a window on our current authoritarian dystopia. The discourse and politics of disposability offers new challenges in addressing and challenging the underlying causes of poverty, class domination, environmental destruction and a resurgent racism — not as a call for reform but as a project of radical reconstruction aimed at the creation of a new political and economic social order.

Such a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power, making clear that in the current historical moment the battleground of ideas is as crucial as the battle over resources, institutions and power. What is crucial to remember is that casino capitalism or global neoliberalism has created, in Naomi Klein’s terms, “armies of locked out people whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘backward,’ whose basic needs are unmet.”

This more expansive level of global repression and intensification of state violence negates and exposes the compromising discourse of liberalism, while reproducing new levels of systemic violence. Effective struggle against such repression would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering all workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, a politics dedicated to providing decent education, housing and health care to all residents of the United States. The discourse of disposability points to another register of expulsion — one with a more progressive valence. In this case, it means refusing to equate capitalism with democracy and struggling to create a mass movement that embraces a radical democratic future.

* Henry A. Giroux is University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University. He is the author of numerous books, including «America at War With Itself» and «Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism.»

Source:

http://www.salon.com/2017/07/04/a-new-american-revolution-can-we-find-the-language-and-build-a-movement-to-break-out-of-our-nations-culture-of-cruelty/#.WVvMCLkJ7PE.email

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