Authoritarianism

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Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator/Artist as a Public Intellectual

Henry Giroux

By: Dr. Henry Giroux

Introduction By: Jaroslav Anděl

This first roundtable in the series What Education Do We Need? comprises two parts. Part one features a lead essay by Henry A. Giroux titled “Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator/Artist as a Public Intellectual”; the second part includes four responses by thinkers from different backgrounds: Nicolas Buchoud and Lan-Phuong Phan (France and Vietnam), Yaacov Hecht (Israel), Thomas Krüger (Germany), and Helena Singer (Brazil).

Education impacts everything else and makes us who we are as individuals, communities, and society. Exclusion in education impoverishes the human mind and diminishes humanity. To quote Comenius, the father of modern education: “The school is the manufactory of humanity… the whole is not the whole if any part is lacking… whoever then does not wish to appear a half-wit or evil-minded, must wish good to all men, and not only to himself, or only to his own near ones, or only to his own nation.”

While we have deemed those tenets self-evident, various leaders and movements have recently emerged who wish good firstly to themselves, or only to their near ones, or only to their own nation. The first roundtable on Democracy and Education opens with Henry Giroux’s essay, in which he addresses this particular challenge personified by the presidency of Donald Trump.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology.

Giroux situates Trump’s presidency in a broader socio-political context of neoliberal ideology that has instrumentalized education and art by turning them into commodity. He emphasizes the necessity of reclaiming the primary mission of pedagogy as a political and moral practice, as educated hope that provides a counterweight and resistance to a growing authoritarianism.

Pedagogy is not a method but a moral and political practice, one that recognizes the relationship between knowledge and power, and at the same time realizes that central to all pedagogical practices is a struggle over agency, power, politics, and the formative cultures that make a radical democracy possible. This view of pedagogy does not mold, but inspires, and at the same time it is directive, capable of imagining a better world, the unfinished nature of agency, and the need to consistently reimagine a democracy that is never finished.

In its closing section, Giroux is challenging artists and educators to engage in a practice that addresses the possibility of interpretation as intervention in the world. He demands to reposition “pedagogy as a central category of politics itself,” and hence defines the artist and educator as a public intellectual who understands pedagogy as central to politics. He points out that when progressive artists and activists present “what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression,” they fail to address the crises of imagination and agency. In the last paragraph, Giroux outlines a series of tasks that educators and artists as public intellectuals face today:

Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on critical pedagogy, public pedagogy, and the public spheres in which they take place. For instance, public and higher education are being defunded, turned into accountability factories, and now largely serve as adjuncts of an instrumental logic that mimics the values of the market. But, of course, this is not only true for spaces in which formal schooling takes place, it is also true for those public spheres and cultural apparatuses actively engaged in producing knowledge, values, subjectivities, and identities through a range of media and sites. This applies to a range of creative spaces including art galleries, museums, diverse sites that make up screen culture, and various elements of mainstream media.[1] What the apostles of neoliberalism have learned is that artistic production and its modes of public pedagogy can change how people view the world, and that pedagogy can be dangerous because it holds the potential for not only creating critically engaged students, intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the capacity of the imagination to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, hold power accountable, and imagine the unimaginable.

Pedagogies of repression…further a modern-day pandemic of loneliness and alienation.

Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.

Pedagogies of repression do more than impose punishing forms of discipline on students and deaden their ability to think critically, they also further a modern-day pandemic of loneliness and alienation. Such pedagogies emphasize aggressive competition, unchecked individualism, and cancel out empathy for an exaggerated notion of self-interest. Solidarity and sharing are the enemy of these pedagogical practices, which are driven by a withdrawal from sustaining public values, trust, and goods and serve largely to cancel out a democratic future for young people. This poses a particular challenge for educators and other cultural workers who want to take up the role of engaged public intellectuals because it speaks less to the role of the intellectual as a celebrity than it does to the kind of pedagogical work in which they engage.

At stake here is the need for artists, educators, and others to create pedagogical practices that create militant dreamers, people capable of envisioning a more just and democratic world and are willing to struggle for it. In this instance, pedagogy becomes not only central to politics but also a practice dedicated to creating a sense of belonging, community, empathy, and practices that address changing the way people think and navigate conflicts emotionally—practices that awaken passion and energize forms of identification that speak to the conditions in which people find themselves. In the shark-like world of neoliberal-driven values, excessive competition, uncertainty, and deep-seated fears of the other, there is no room for empathetic conversations that focus on the common good, democratic values, or the pedagogical conditions that would further critical dialogue and the potential for students to learn how to hold power accountable.

Critical pedagogy…should be cosmopolitan and imaginative…

Domination is at its most powerful when its mechanisms of control and subjugation hide in the discourses of common sense, and its elements of power are made to appear invisible. Public intellectuals can take up the challenge of not only relating their specialties and modes of cultural production to the intricacies of everyday life but also to rethinking how politics works, and how power is central to such a task. Bruce Robbins articulates the challenge well in both his defense of the intellectual and his reference to how other theorists such as Michel Foucault provide a model for such work. He writes:

But I also thought that intellectuals should be trying, like Foucault, to relate our specialized knowledge to things in general. We could not just become activists focused on particular struggles or editors striving to help little magazines make ends meet. We also had a different kind of role to play: thinking hard, as Foucault did, about how best to understand the ways power worked in our time. Foucault, like Sartre and Sontag and Said, was an intellectual, even at some points despite himself. He helped us understand the world in newly critical and imaginative ways. He offered us new lines of reasoning while also engaging in activism and political position-taking. Why, then, is there so much discomfort with using the term “intellectual” as an honorific?[3]

But power is not just a theoretical abstraction, it shapes the spaces in which everyday life takes place and touches peoples’ lives at multiple registers, all of which represent in part a struggle over their identities, values, and views of others and the larger world. Critical pedagogy must be meaningful in order to be critical and transformative. That is, it should be cosmopolitan and imaginative—a public affirming pedagogy that demands a critical and engaged interaction with the world we live in, mediated by a responsibility for challenging structures of domination and for alleviating human suffering. This is a pedagogy that addresses the needs of multiple publics. As an ethical and political practice, a public pedagogy of wakefulness rejects modes of education removed from political or social concerns, divorced from history and matters of injury and injustice. This is a pedagogy that includes “lifting complex ideas into the public space,” recognizing human injury inside and outside of the academy and using theory as a form of criticism to change things.[4] This is a pedagogy in which artists, educators, and other cultural workers are neither afraid of controversy nor a willingness to make connections between private issues and broader elements of society’s problems that are otherwise hidden. Nor are they afraid of using their work to address the challenges of the day.

As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that artists, educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire, and energize a vast array of individuals and publics. Critical pedagogy comes with the responsibility to view intellectual and artistic work as public, assuming a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness, making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view, and reminding “the audience of the moral questions that may be hidden in the clamor and din of the public debate.”[5]

…our responsibilities as cultural workers cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer…

Pedagogy is not a method but a moral and political practice, one that recognizes the relationship between knowledge and power, and at the same time realizes that central to all pedagogical practices is a struggle over agency, power, politics, and the formative cultures that make a radical democracy possible. This view of pedagogy does not mould, but inspires, and at the same time it is directive, capable of imagining a better world, the unfinished nature of agency, and the need to consistently reimagine a democracy that is never finished. In this sense, critical pedagogy is a form of educated hope committed to producing young people capable and willing to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think the “world” critically, “to imagine something other than their own well-being,” to serve the public good, take risks, and struggle for a substantive democracy that is now in a state of acute crisis as the dark clouds of totalitarianism are increasingly threatening to destroy democracy itself on a global scale.[6]

Pedagogy is always the outcome of struggles, especially in terms of how pedagogical practices produce particular notions of citizenship and an inclusive democracy. Pedagogy looms large in this instance not as a technique or a prioriset of methods but as a political and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy illuminates the relationship among power, knowledge, and ideology, while self-consciously, if not self-critically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral practice, pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it means to invest in public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse.

The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibilities as cultural workers cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, that teaching in classrooms or in any other public sphere should not only simply honor the experiences people bring to such sites, including the classroom, but should also connect their experiences to specific problems that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday life. Pedagogy in this sense becomes performative in that it is not merely about deconstructing texts but about situating politics itself within a broader set of relations that addresses what it might mean to create modes of individual and social agency that enables rather than shuts down democratic values, practices, and social relations. Such a project recognizes not only the political nature of pedagogy, but also situates it within a call for artists, intellectuals, and others to assume responsibility for their actions, to link their teachings to those moral principles that allow us to do something about human suffering, as Susan Sontag once suggested.[7] Part of this task necessitates that cultural workers anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing and radically incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theory can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. Yet, any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of good society. I think Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that “If there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves.”[8]

“left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.”

Artists and other cultural workers should consider being more forceful, if not committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just enough, and such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating and shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. At stake here is the task, as Jacques Derrida insists, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise, a possibility rooted in an ongoing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[9] Democracy in this instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends. Such a project is based on the realization that a democracy that is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches the limits of justice.

Theorists such as Raymond Williams and Cornelius Castoriadis recognized that the crisis of democracy was not only about the crisis of culture but also the crisis of pedagogy and education. Cultural workers would do well to take account of the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central category of politics itself. Pierre Bourdieu was right when he stated that cultural workers have too often “underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”[10] He goes on to say in a later conversation with Gunter Grass that “left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. Important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination.”[11] These are important pedagogical interventions and imply rightly that critical pedagogy in the broadest sense is not just about understanding, however critical, but also provides the conditions, ideals, and practices necessary for assuming the responsibilities we have as citizens to expose human misery and to eliminate the conditions that produce it. Matters of responsibility, social action, and political intervention do not simply develop out of social critique but also forms of self-critique. The relationship between knowledge and power, on the one hand, and creativity and politics, on the other, should always be self-reflexive about its effects, how it relates to the larger world, whether or not it is open to new understandings, and what it might mean pedagogically to take seriously matters of individual and social responsibility. In short, this project points to the need for cultural workers to address critical pedagogy not only as a mode of educated hope and a crucial element of an insurrectional educational project, but also as a practice that addresses the possibility of interpretation as intervention in the world.

Graziela Kunsch, Escolas [Schools], 2016. Video, 3:45, 1920 x 1080, 16:9, NTSC, color, no sound. Courtesy of the artist and featured in the exhibition, Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy at the Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA.

Critical pedagogy can neither be reduced to a method nor is it non-directive in the manner of a spontaneous conversation with friends over coffee. As public intellectuals, authority must be reconfigured not as a way to stifle the curiosity and deaden the imagination, but as a platform that provided the conditions for students to learn the knowledge, skills, values, and social relationships that enhance their capacities to assume authority over the forces that shape their lives both in and out of schools. Power and authority are always related, but such a relationship must never operate in the service of domination or the stifling of autonomy but in the service of what I have called the practice of freedom. The notion that authority is always on the side of repression and that pedagogy should never be directive is for all practical purposes a political and theoretical flight from the educator assuming a sense of moral and political responsibility. For artists and educators to be voiceless, renounce the knowledge that gives them a sense of authority, and to assume that a wider public does not need to be exposed to modes of knowledge, histories, and values outside of their immediate experience is to forget that pedagogy is always about the struggle over knowledge, desire, identity, values, agency, and a vision of the future. Critical pedagogy for public intellectuals must always be attentive to addressing the democratic potential of engaging how experience, knowledge, and power are shaped in the classroom in different and often unequal contexts, and how teacher authority might be mobilized against dominant pedagogical practices as part of the practice of freedom, particularly those practices that erase any trace of subaltern histories, historical legacies of class struggles, and the ever persistent historical traces and current structures of racial and gender inequalities and injustices. In this sense, teacher authority must be linked both to a never-ending sense of historical memory, existing inequities, and a “hopeful version of democracy where the outcome is a more just, equitable society that works toward the end of oppression and suffering of all.”[12] As I have said elsewhere:

Authority in this perspective is not simply on the side of oppression, but is used to intervene and shape the space of teaching and learning to provide students with a range of possibilities for challenging a society’s commonsense assumptions, and for analyzing the interface between their own everyday lives and those broader social formations that bear down on them. Authority, at best, becomes both a referent for legitimating a commitment to a particular vision of pedagogy and a critical referent for a kind of autocritique.[13]

Any viable understanding of the artist and educator as a public intellectual must begin with the recognition that democracy begins to fail and civic life becomes impoverished when pedagogy is no longer viewed as central to politics. This is clearly the case as made visible in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s claim that he loves the uneducated appears to have paid off for him just as his victory makes clear that ignorance rather than reason, emotion rather than informed judgment, and the threat of violence rather than critical exchange appear to have more currency in the age of Trump. In part, this political tragedy signifies the failure of the American public to recognize the educative nature of how agency is constructed, to address the necessity for moral witnessing, and the need to create a formative culture that produces critically engaged and socially responsible citizens. Such a failure empties democracy of any meaning. Such actions represent more than a flight from political and social responsibility; they also represent a surrender to the dark forces of authoritarianism. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education in a variety of spheres and practices, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of the public good.[14] The question regarding what role education and pedagogy should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march all over the globe. Public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of education are under siege. As such, the discourses of hate, humiliation, rabid self-interest, and greed are exercising a poisonous influence in many Western societies. This is most evident at the present moment in the discourse of the right-wing extremists vying to consolidate their authority within a Trump presidency, all of whom sanction a war on immigrants, women, young people, poor Black youth, and so it goes. Under such circumstances, democracy is on life support. Yet rather than being a rationale for cynicism, radical democracy as both a pedagogical project and unfinished ideal should create an individual and collective sense of moral and political outrage, a new understanding of politics, and the pedagogical projects needed to allow democracy to breathe once again.

If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of colour, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency. What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a longstanding series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial. This is a challenge that artists, educators, and others must address. While mass civil demonstrations have and continue to erupt over Trump’s election, what is more crucial to understand is that something more serious needs to be addressed. We have to acknowledge that at this particular moment in American history the real issue is not simply about resisting Donald Trump’s insidious values and anti-democratic policies but whether a political system can be reclaimed in which democracy is not on trial but is deepened, strengthened and sustained. This will not happen unless new modes of representation challenge the aesthetics, culture, and discourse of neo-fascism. Yet, under a Trump presidency, it will be more difficult to sustain, construct, and nurture those public spheres that sustain critique, informed dialogue, and a work to expand the radical imagination. If democracy is to prevail in and through the threat of “dark times,” it is crucial that the avenues of critique and possibility become central to any new understanding of politics. If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance. That is, on the one hand, it must move towards developing analyses that address the existing state of authoritarianism through a totalizing lens that brings together the diverse registers of oppression and how they are both connected and mutually reinforce each other. On the other hand, such a politics must, as Robin D.G. Kelley has noted, “move beyond stopgap alliances”[15] and work to unite single issue movements into a more comprehensive and broad-based social movement that can make a viable claim to a resistance that is as integrated as it is powerful. For too long progressive cultural workers and activists have adhered to a narrative about domination that relies mostly on remaking economic structures and presenting to the public what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression. What they have ignored is that people also internalize oppression and that domination is about not only the crisis of economics, images that deaden the imagination, and the misrepresentation of reality, but also about the crisis of agency, identification, meaning, and desire.

The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society in that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom, limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics in which the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth and its discourse of plundering the earth’s resources, coupled with a rabid individualism marked largely by its pathological disdain for community and public values, has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency. This collapse of democratic politics points to an absence in progressive movements and among various types of public intellectuals about how to address the importance of emotional connections among the masses, take seriously how to connect with others through pedagogical tools that demand respect, empathy, a willingness to listen to other stories, and to think seriously about how to change consciousness as an educative task. The latter is particularly important because it speaks to the necessity politically address the challenge of awakening modes of identification coupled with the use of language not merely to demystify but to persuade people that the issues that matter have something to do with their lived realities and daily lives. Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

[1] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

[2] On this issue, see Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education(Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2014); Susan Searls Giroux, “On the Civic Function of Intellectuals Today,” in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds. Education as Civic Engagement: Toward a More Democratic Society (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), pp. ix-xvii.

[3] Bruce Robbins, “A Starting Point for Politics,” The Nation, (October 22, 2016). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-radical-life-of-stuart-hall

[4] Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000) p. 7.

[5] Edward Said, “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Reflections On Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 504.

[6] See, especially, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

[7] Susan Sontag, “Courage and Resistance,” The Nation (May 5, 2003), pp. 11-14.

[8] Zygmunt Bauman, Society under Siege (Malden, MA: Blackwell: 2002), p. 170.

[9] Jacques Derrida, “Intellectual Courage: An Interview,” trans. Peter Krapp, Culture Machine, Volume 2 (2000), pp. 1-15.

[10] Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 11.

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

[12] Richard Voelz, “Reconsidering the Image of Preacher-Teacher: Intersections between Henry Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy and Homiletics,” Practical Matters (Spring 2014), p. 79.

[13] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011) p.81.

[14] Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism(New York: Routledge, 2015).

[15] Robin D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” Boston Review (November 15, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back

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Henry A. Giroux on Developing a Language of Liberation for Radical Transformation

Entrevistas

By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

What are the longer-term trends that gave rise to the presidency of Donald Trump? What will be the national and global impacts? And what do we need to do to resist? Henry A. Giroux tackles these questions in The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism. «This courageous and timely book is the first and best book on Trump’s neo-fascism in the making,» says Cornel West. To order your copy, click here and make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout now!

Confronted with the rise of an authoritarian society affecting all institutions and individuals, there is a need for resistance based on radical transformation, says Henry A. Giroux in this interview about The Public in Peril. This resistance is embodied in mass action and a vision to achieve the hope of a life beyond capitalism.

Mark Karlin: What is the impact of domestic terrorism and authoritarianism on young people?

Henry A. Giroux: Under the authoritarian reign of Donald Trump, finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, regardless of the talk in the mainstream media about the need to not burden future generations with heavy tuition debt and a future of low-wage jobs. American society has declared war on its children, offering a disturbing index of a social order in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis. Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Young people are not only written out of the future … but are now considered a threat to the future.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Zygmunt Bauman has argued, «the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.» It is little wonder that «these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future,» and Zero expectations. Youth have become the new precariat, whose future has been sacrificed to the commands of capital and the financial elite. Moreover, as the social state is decimated, youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are also subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behavior being criminalized in the schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation aimed at removing crucial social provisions. At the same time, undocumented immigrant youth called Dreamers, brought to the United States by their parents as children, are now being threatened by legislation designed to expel them from the United States, the only home they have known since early childhood.

Henry A. Giroux. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

Henry A. Giroux. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a society that fails to provide for its youth, the symbolic and real violence waged against many young people bespeaks to nothing less than a perverse collective death-wish — especially visible when youth protest their conditions. We live in an era in which there is near zero tolerance for peaceful demonstrations on the part of young and a willingness by the government to overlook the crimes of bankers, hedge fund managers, and other members of the corporate elite who steal untold amounts of wealth, affecting the lives of millions. How else to explain the fact that at least 25 states are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime that carries a huge fine or subjects young people to possible felony charges?

The Trump administration needs education to fail because it fears the possibility of educated citizens developing the capacities necessary to meet the challenges of authoritarianism.

If youth were once the repository of society’s dreams, that is no longer true. Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare. Many youth live in a post-9/11 social order that positions them as a prime target of its governing through [the] crime complex. This is made obvious by the many «get tough» policies that now render young people as criminals, while depriving them of basic health care, education and social services. Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities for mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order, all too evident by the upsurge of zero tolerance laws along with the expanding reach of the punishing state. When the criminalization of social problems becomes a mode of governance and war its default strategy, youth are reduced to soldiers or targets — not social investments. Young people are not only written out of the future … but are now considered a threat to the future. Too many youth are now removed from any discourse about democracy and increasingly fall prey to what I call the «war on youth.» The war on youth can best be understood through two concepts: the soft war and the hard war, [both] of which have been intensified under Trump’s presidency.

The soft war involves the temptation and manufactured seductions of desire, and refers to the unyielding depoliticization and commodification of youth, waged through the unrelenting expansion of a global market society. Partnered with a massive advertising machinery, the soft war targets all children and youth, treating them as yet another «market» to be commodified and exploited, and conscripting them into the system through relentless attempts to create a new generation of hyper-consumers. In this instance, young people are not only viewed as consumers but also as embodied brands. Caught in the intrusive new technologies of advertising and public relations, there is no space for young people to be free of the commercial carpet-bombing they are forced to endure. Hence, their subjectivity, desires and ways of relating to others are endlessly commodified so that their presence in the world is marked by the fact that they are either selling a product (which they inhabit) or buying one. The soft war is rooted in neoliberal disimagination zones, which makes it more difficult for young people to find public spheres where they can locate themselves and translate metaphors of hope into meaningful action. The dystopian dreamscapes that make up a neoliberal society are built on the promises of uncomplicated consumption, an assumption that is both dehumanizing and central to the war waged by an authoritarian society on critical agency, the radical imagination, and visions of a more just society. Agency and self-renewal are increasingly limited to a sphere of raw consumption and change to the empty vocabulary of fashion and lifestyles. In a society of mass consumption, shallowness becomes a strength and the mythology of American innocence becomes a blinding storm.

Under Donald Trump, the ideology and violence associated with white supremacy has been moved from the margins to the center of power in the United States.

The hard war is about coercion and is a more serious and dangerous development for young people, especially those who are marginalized by their ethnicity, race and class. The hard war refers to the harshest elements of a growing youth-crime-control complex that operates through a logic of punishment, surveillance and repression. The young people targeted by its punitive measures are often poor minority youth who are considered failed consumers and who can only afford to live on the margins of a commercial culture that excludes anyone who lacks money, resources and leisure time to spare. Or they are youth considered uneducable and unemployable, therefore troublesome. The imprint of the youth-crime-control complex can be traced to the increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary practices that subject students to constant surveillance through high-tech security devices while imposing on them harsh, and often thoughtless, zero-tolerance policies that closely resemble measures used currently by the criminal [legal] system. In this instance, poor and minority youth become objects of a new mode of governance based on decisions made by a visionless managerial elite. Punished if they don’t show up at school, and punished even if they do attend school, many of these students are funneled into what has been ominously called the «school-to-prison pipeline.» If middle- and upper-class kids are subject to the seductions of market-driven public relations, working class youth are caught in the crosshairs between the arousal of commercial desire and the harsh impositions of securitization, surveillance and policing.

How does neoliberalism affect higher education?

Higher education in our politically desperate age is threatened by a legacy that it does not dare to name and that legacy with its eerie resonance with an authoritarian past asserts itself, in part, with the claim that education is failing and democracy is an excess. The Trump administration needs education to fail in a very particular way, because it fears the possibility of educated citizens developing the capacities, intellectual and ethical, necessary to meet the challenges of authoritarianism. Hostile to its role as a public good and democratic sphere, it is attempting to reshape education according to the market-driven logic of neoliberalism with its emphasis on privatization, commodification, deregulation, fear and managerialism. Under neoliberalism, the market becomes a template for all of social life and not just the economy. Commercial values are the only values that matter, and the only stories that matter are written in the language of finance, profit and the economy. Under such circumstances, higher education is threatened for its potential role as a public sphere capable of educating students as informed, critical thinkers capable of not only holding power accountable but also fulfilling the role of critical agents who can act against injustice and resist diverse forms of oppression. The criminogenic machinery of power has now reached the highest levels of the US government, and in doing so, it is changing not just the language of educational reform, but also making it difficult for faculty and students to resist their own erasure from modes of self-governance and a critical education.

The killing of people abroad based on race is paralleled by (and connected with) the killing of Black people at home.

New forms of exclusion, unbridled commodification, and exclusion rooted in a retreat from ethics, the social imagination, and democracy itself weakens the role higher education might take in an age of increasing tyranny. Against the force of a highly militarized mode of casino capitalism in which violence is at the center of power, higher education is being weakened in its ability to resist the authoritarian machinery of social death now shaping American society. Neoliberalism views higher education in strictly economic terms and rejects any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere — as a space in which education enables students to be critical thinkers, learn how to take risks, hold power accountable, and develop a sense of moral and political agency through which they learn to respect the rights and perspectives of others. Under the regime of neoliberalism in the United States and in many other countries, many of the problems facing higher education can be linked to eviscerated funding models, the domination of these institutions by market mechanisms, the rise of for-profit colleges, the rise of charter schools, the intrusion of the national security state, and the slow demise of faculty self-governance, all of which make a mockery of the meaning and mission of the university as a democratic public sphere. With the onslaught of neoliberal austerity measures, the mission of higher education has been transformed from educating citizens to training students for the workforce. Students are viewed as clients and customers, and the culture of business replaces any vestige of democratic governance. At the same time, faculty are reduced to degrading labor practices and part-time contracts, administrators are reduced to a visionless managerial class, the college and university presidents inhabit the role of CEOs.

Rather than enlarge the moral imagination and critical capacities of students, too many universities are now wedded to producing would-be hedge fund managers and depoliticized workers, and creating modes of education that promote a «technically trained docility.» Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities are now driven principally by vocational, military and economic considerations while increasingly removing academic knowledge production from democratic values and projects. The ideals of higher education as a place to think, to promote critical dialogue and teach students to cultivate their ethical relation with others are viewed as a threat to neoliberal modes of governance. At the same time, education is seen by the apostles of market fundamentalism as a space for producing profits and educating a supine and fearful labor force that will exhibit the obedience demanded by the corporate order. The modern loss of faith in the marriage of education and democracy needs to be reclaimed, but that will only happen if the long legacy of struggle over education is once again brought to life as part of a more comprehensive understanding of education as being central to politics, and learning as a vital component of social change.

What has been the impact of the political triumph of white supremacism and racial cleansing?

Under Donald Trump, the ideology and violence associated with white supremacy has been moved from the margins to the center of power in the United States. Trump not only courts the favor of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, militiamen and other right-wing racist groups, he panders to them as central elements of his base. How else to explain his racist travel bans, his unremitting attacks on Black athletes and his constant equating of Black communities with the culture of violence and criminality? Or, for that matter, Trump’s ramping up of the police state and his ongoing assertion that his presidency strongly endorses a platform of law and order. The current mobilization of fear and moral panics has its roots in and feeds off of a legacy of white supremacy that is used to divert anger over dire economic and political conditions into the diversionary cesspool of racial hatred. It might be best to understand Trump’s racism as part of a broader movement of white supremacy across the globe, with its attack on immigrants and its emulation of fascist ideology and social relations. Throughout Europe, fascism and white supremacy in their diverse forms are on the rise. In Greece, France, Poland, Austria and Germany, among other nations, right-wing extremists have used the hateful discourse of racism, xenophobia and white nationalism to demonize immigrants and undermine democratic modes of rule and policies.

Much of the right-wing, racist rhetoric coming out of these countries mimics what Trump and his followers are saying in the United States. One outcome is that the public spheres that produce a critically engaged citizenry and make a democracy possible are under siege and in rapid retreat. Economic stagnation, massive inequality, the rise of religious fundamentalism and growing forms of ultra-nationalism now aim to put democratic nations to rest. Echoes of the right-wing movements in Europe have come home with a vengeance. Demagogues wrapped in xenophobia, white supremacy and the false appeal to a lost past echo a brutally familiar fascism, with slogans similar to Donald Trump’s call to «Make America Great Again» and «Make America Safe Again.»

Fascism in its various forms is about social and racial cleansing.

Trump’s insistence on racial profiling echoes increasing calls among European right-wing extremists to legitimate a police state where refugees and others are viewed as a threat, unwanted and disposable. How else to explain Trump’s insistence on reintroducing nationwide «stop and frisk policies» after the demonstrations in Charlottesville, North Carolina over the police killing of an African American, Keith Lamont Scott, in September of 2016? Trump willingly reproduces similar right-wing ideologies such as those condemning and demonizing Syrian and other immigrants trying to reach Europe. He does so by producing panic-ridden taunts, tweets and executive orders whose aim is to generate mass anxiety and legitimate policies that mimic forms of ethnic and social cleansing. Trump joins a growing global movement of racial exclusion, one that is on the march spewing hatred, embracing forms of anti-Semitism, white supremacy and a deep-seated disdain for any form of justice on the side of democracy.

State-manufactured lawlessness has become normalized and extends from the ongoing and often brutalizing, and sometimes lethal, police violence against Black people and other vulnerable groups to a criminogenic market-based system run by a financial elite that strips everyone but the upper 1 percent of a future by stealing not only their possessions but also by condemning them to a life in which the only available option is to fall back on one’s individual resources in order to barely survive. At the national level, lawlessness now drives a militarized foreign policy intent on assassinating alleged enemies rather than using traditional forms of interrogation, arrest and conviction. The killing of people abroad based on race is paralleled by (and connected with) the killing of Black people at home. Trump is now a major player in shaping a world that has become a battlefield driven by racism and a stark celebration of apocalyptic nationalism — a zone of social abandonment where lethal violence replaces the protocols of justice, civil rights and democracy.

Fear is the reigning ideology, and war its operative mode of action, pitting different groups against each other, shutting down the possibilities of shared responsibilities, and legitimating the growth of a paramilitary police force that kills Black people with impunity. State-manufactured fear offers up new forms of domestic terrorism embodied in the rise of a surveillance state while providing a powerful platform for militarizing many aspects of society. One result is that [the US] has become a warrior society in which the state and civil society are organized through the practice of violence. One consequence is that Trump’s white supremacist attitudes have emboldened violence against minorities … and has given new life to neo-Nazi groups throughout the United States. As the culture of fear is racialized, compassion gives way to suspicion and a demonstration of revulsion accorded to those others who are demonized as monsters, criminals, or even worse, bloodthirsty terrorists. Under such circumstance, the bonds of trust dissolve, while hating the other becomes normalized and lawlessness is elevated to a matter of common sense.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism. She was right, and we are now witnessing the dystopian visions of the new authoritarians who trade in terror, fear, hatred, demonization, violence and racism. Trump and his neo-Nazi bulldogs are no longer on the fringe of political life and they have no interests in instilling values that will «make America great» (code for white). On the contrary, they are deeply concerned with creating expanding constellations of force and fear, while inculcating convictions that will destroy the ability to form the formative cultures that make a democracy possible. Fascism in its various forms is about social and racial cleansing, and its end point is the prison, gated communities, walls and all the murderous detritus that accompanies the discourse of national greatness and racial purity. This will be Trump’s legacy.

What is the impact of a war culture on society?

War culture has been transformed in American culture — moving from a source of alarm to a celebrated source of pride and national identity. War has been redefined in the United States in the age of global neoliberal capitalism. No longer defined exclusively as a military issue, it has replaced democratic idealism and expanded its boundaries, shaping all aspects of society. Evidence of a war culture can be seen in the war on civil liberties, youth, voting rights, civic institutions, the poor, immigrants, Muslims and poor Black communities. The distinction between war and peace, the military and civil society, soldiers and the police, criminal behavior and military transgression, internal and external security, and violence and entertainment are collapsing.

As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief and death, the US has morphed into a war culture and reached a point where politics becomes an extension of war and war culture the foundation for politics itself. The violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the production of violence at home and abroad. Militarism now pervades American society and increasingly organizes civil society mostly for the production of violence. Entrenched militarism now exercises a powerful influence on schools, an expanding police state, airports, a ballooning military budget and a foreign policy saturated in war and violence. Even universities are now intimately linked through research with the military.

What Steve Martinot calls a «political culture of hyper punitiveness» serves not only to legitimate a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, but also a racist system of mass incarceration that functions as a default welfare program and the chief mechanism to «institutionalize obedience.» It should come as no surprise that many states, including California, spend more on prison construction than on higher education. The police state increasingly targets poor people of color, turning their neighborhoods into war zones, all the while serving a corporate state that has no concern whatsoever for the social costs inflicted on millions because of its predatory policies and practices.

At a policy level, a defense and arms industry fuels violence abroad, while domestically, a toxic gun culture profits from the endless maiming and deaths of individuals at home. Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart in the growth of a carceral state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the United States. At the current moment, the United States is circling the globe with air bases and using its military power to bully and threaten other nations. War culture is the new normal, especially under Trump, and is sustained by media apparatuses that spectacularize the violence of a war culture while turning it into the defining feature of mass entertainment. At the same time, the extreme violence produced by a gun culture no longer becomes a source of alarm but is privileged as a source of profit for arms manufactures and the entertainment industries which extend from Hollywood films to the selling of violent video games to teenagers.

The US has morphed into a war culture and reached a point where politics becomes an extension of war and war culture the foundation for politics itself.

Americans are terrified by the threat of terrorism and its ensuing violence; yet, they are more than willing to protect laws that privilege the largely unchecked circulation of guns and the toxic militarized culture of violence that amounts to «58 people who die a day because of firearms.» Moreover, as the important distinctions between war and civil society collapse, contemporary institutions become more militarized. For instance, the prison becomes a model for other institutions in which the boundaries disappear between the innocent and guilty, and public safety is defined increasingly as a police matter. At the same time, policies are militarized so as to suggest that state violence is the most important way to address an increasing range of problems extending from drug addiction and homelessness to school truancy. The police are militarized and now function as soldiers; students are viewed as criminals; and cities are transformed into combat zones. Under a war culture, neoliberal society not only creates numerous spaces of repression, insecurity and violence, it also functions as a kind of delegated vigilantism policing both bodies of the Other and boundaries of thought, while limiting questions that can be raised about the use of power in the United States and its role in expanding the reach of a punishing state and domestic violence.

What do you recommend to instill courage in people who are dismayed and dejected in an age of full-blown state violence?

It is easy to despair in times of tyranny, but it is much more productive to be politically and morally outraged and to draw upon such anger as a source of hope and action. Without hope, even in the most dire of times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent and struggle. A critical consciousness is the prerequisite for informed agency and hope is the basis for individual and collective resistance. Moreover, when combined with collective action, hope translates into a dynamic sense of possibility, enabling one to join with others for the long haul of fighting systemic forms of domination. Courage in the face of tyranny is a necessity and not an option, and we can learn both from the past and the present about resistance movements and the power of civic courage and collective struggle, and how such modes of resistance are emerging among a number of groups across a wide variety of landscapes. What is crucial is the need not to face such struggles alone, not allow ourselves to feel defeated in our isolation, and to refuse a crippling neoliberal survival-of-the-fittest ethos that dominates everyday relations.

Radical politics begins when one refuses to face one’s fate alone, learns about the workings and mechanisms of power, and rejects the dominant mantra of social isolation. There is strength in numbers. One of the most important things we can do to sustain a sense of courage and dignity is to imagine a new social order. That is, we must constantly work to revive the radical imagination by talking with others in order to rethink politics anew, imagine what a new politics and society would look like, one that is fundamentally anti-capitalist, and dedicated to creating the conditions for new democratic political and social formations. This suggests contending with and struggling against the forces that gave rise to Trump, particularly those that suggest that totalitarian forms are still with us. Rethinking politics anew also suggests the possibility of building broad-based alliances in order to create a robust economic and political agenda that connects democracy with a serious effort to interrogate the sources and structures of inequality, racism and authoritarianism that now plague the United States. This points to opening up new lines of understanding, dialogue and radical empathy. It means, as the philosopher George Yancy suggests, «learning how to love with courage.» A nonviolent movement for democratic socialism does not need vanguards, political purity or the seductions of ideological orthodoxy. On the contrary, it needs a politics without guarantees, one that is open to new ideas, self-reflection and understanding. Instead of ideologies of certainty, unchecked moralism and a politics of shaming, we need to understand the conditions that make it possible for people to internalize forms of domination, and that means interrogating forgotten histories and existing pedagogies of oppression. Recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Americans say this is the lowest point in American politics that they can recall. Such despair offers the possibility of a pedagogical intervention, one that provides a political opening to create a massive movement for resistance in the United States.

Rebecca Solnit has rightly argued that while we live in an age of despair, hope is a gift that we cannot surrender because it amplifies the power of alternative visions, offers up stories in which we can imagine the unimaginable, enables people to «move from depression to outrage,» and positions people to take seriously what they are for and what they are against. This suggests trying to understand how the very processes of learning constitute the political mechanisms through which identities — individual and collective — are shaped, desired, mobilized and take on the worldly practices of autonomy, self-reflection and self-determination as part of a larger struggle for economic and social justice.

How do we develop a new «language of liberation»?

First, it is crucial to develop a language in which it becomes possible to both imagine a future much different from the present. Second, it is crucial to develop a discourse of critique and possibility that refuses both to normalize existing relations of domination and control, and rejects the notion that capitalism and democracy are viewed as synonymous. It would be wise to heed the words of National Book Award winner Ursula K. Le Guin when she says, «We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.» Third, it is imperative to reject the notion that all problems are individual issues and can only be solved as a matter of individual action and responsibility. All three of these assumptions serve to depoliticize people and erase both what it means to make power visible and to organize collectively to address such problems. Fourth, there is a need, I believe, for a discourse that is historical, relational and comprehensive. Memory matters both in terms of reclaiming lost narratives of struggle and for assessing visions, strategies and tactics that still hold enormous possibilities in the present.

Developing a relational discourse means connecting the dots around issues that are often viewed in isolated terms. For instance, one cannot study the attack on public schools and higher education as sutured internal issues that focus exclusively on the teaching methods and strategies. What is needed are analyses that link such attacks to the broader issue of inequality, the dynamics of casino capitalism and the pervasive racism active in promoting new forms of segregation both within and outside of schools. A comprehensive politics is one that does at least two things. On the one hand, it tries to understand a plethora of problems, from massive poverty to the despoiling of the planet, within a broader understanding of politics. That is, it connects the dots among diverse forms of oppression. In this instance, the focus is on the totality of politics, one that focuses on the power relations of global capitalism, the rise of illiberal democracy, the archives of authoritarianism and the rise of financial capital. A totalizing view of oppression allows the development of a language that is capable of making visible the ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work in the United States and across the globe. On the other hand, such a comprehensive understanding of politics makes it possible to bring together a range of crucial issues and movements so as to expand the range of oppressions, while at the same time, providing a common ground for these diverse groups to be able to work together in the interest of the common good and a broad struggle for democratic socialism.

Finally, any viable language of emancipation needs to develop a discourse of educated hope. Naming what is wrong in a society is important, but it is not enough, because such criticism can sometimes be overpowering and lead to a paralyzing despair or, even worse, a crippling cynicism. Hope speaks to imagining a life beyond capitalism, and combines a realistic sense of limits with a lofty vision of demanding the impossible. As Ariel Dorfman has argued, progressives need a language that is missing from our political vocabulary, one that insists that «alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.» Reason, justice and change cannot blossom without hope because educated hope taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.

 

MARK KARLIN

Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010. BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed «war on drugs» to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout’s Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.

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Rethinking Higher Education in a Time of Tyranny

Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

What kind of democracy is possible when the institutions that are crucial to a vibrant civil society are vanishing?

Many of the great peace activists of the 20th century, extending from Mahatma Gandhi and Paulo Freire to Jane Addams and Martin Luther King Jr., shared a passion for education as an important part of the democratic project. Refusing to view education as neutral or reducing it to the instrumental practice of training, they sought to reclaim education as a practice of freedom, part of a wider struggle to deepen and extend the values, social relations and institutions of a substantive democracy.

They understood that tyranny and authoritarianism are not just the product of state violence and repression; they also thrive on popular docility, mass apathy and a flight from moral responsibility. They argued passionately that education could not be removed from the demand for justice and progressive social change. In doing so, they recognized the value of education and its ability to transform how people understand themselves, their relations to others and the larger world. In the face of massive injustice and indignity, these prophetic voices refused to look away from human suffering, and embraced the possibility for resistance fueled by courage, compassion and the ability to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

Let us hope that in the midst of our witness to the current revolt against democracy, higher education will neither remain silent nor be too late.

One of Martin Luther King’s great insights was his recognition that education provided a bulwark against both ignorance and indifference in the face of injustice. Like Gandhi, he warned people over and over again not to remain silent in the face of racism, militarism and extreme materialism, and argued that “he who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Of the civil rights era, King warned that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.… In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”1

Advocates of civic courage and compassion reflected in their words and actions what King called the “fierce urgency of now,” reminding us that “tomorrow is today” and that “there is such a thing as being too late.”2 Let us hope that in the midst of our witness to the current revolt against democracy, higher education will neither remain silent nor be too late.

Echoing King’s belief that American innocence was neither tenable nor forgivable, the great novelist James Baldwin filled in the missing language of fear and terrorism at the heart of a racist society. His famed “Talk to Teachers” began with an impassioned warning about the times in which he lived, a warning more relevant now than it was when he delivered the speech in 1963. He said:

Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced… from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible — and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people — must be prepared to “go for broke.”3

In the context of a worldwide rebellion currently taking place against democracy, dissent, human rights and justice, I think we need to “go for broke.” Authoritarianism is on the rise once again, emerging in countries in which such a politics, in light of the past, has appeared unthinkable. In Hungary, Russia, India, Turkey and Poland, democracy is being voted down and aggressively dismantled. In addition, a new and dangerous moment has emerged in the United States as it becomes clear that an American-style authoritarianism is no longer the stuff of fantasy, fiction or hysterical paranoia.

In the context of a worldwide rebellion currently taking place against democracy, dissent, human rights and justice, I think we need to ‘go for broke.’

This summer in Charlottesville, hundreds of neo-Nazis marched brandishing torches reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany while shouting white nationalist slogans such as “Heil Trump,” and later unleashing an orgy of violence that led to the deaths of three people. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, stated there were good people on both sides of that rally as if good people march with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who revel in hate and offer no apologies for mimicking the actions that resulted in the slaughter of millions during the fascist nightmare of the 1930s and 1940s.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency speaks not only to a profound political crisis but also to a tragedy for democracy.4 His rise to power echoes not only a moral blind spot in the collective American psyche, but also a refusal to recognize how past totalitarian ideas can and have reappeared in different forms in the present. The return of a demagogue who couples the language of fear, decline and hate with illusions of national grandiosity have found their apotheosis in the figure of Donald Trump. He is the living symbol and embodiment of a growing culture of unbridled and naked selfishness, the collapse of civic institutions, and a ruinous anti-intellectualism that supports a corrupt political system and a toxic form of white supremacy that has been decades in the making. There is nothing natural or inevitable about these changes. They are learned behaviors. As shared fears replace any sense of shared responsibility, the American public is witnessing how a politics of racism and hate creates a society plagued by fear and divisiveness.

As shared fears replace any sense of shared responsibility, the American public is witnessing how a politics of racism and hate creates a society plagued by fear and divisiveness.

While numerous forces have led to the election of Donald Trump, it is crucial to ask how a poisonous form of education developed in the larger society, one that has contributed to the toxic culture that both legitimated Trump and encouraged so many millions of people to follow him. Part of the answer lies in the right-wing media with its vast propaganda machines, the rise of conservative foundations such as the Koch brothers’ various institutes, the ongoing production of anti-public intellectuals and a visual culture increasingly dominated by the spectacle of violence and reality TV. On a more political note, it is crucial to ask how the educative force of this toxic culture goes unchallenged in creating a public that embraced Trump’s bigotry, narcissism, lies, public history of sexual groping and racism, all the while transforming the citizen as a critical political agent into a consumer of hate and anti-intellectualism.

News morphs into entertainment as thoughtlessness increases ratings, violence feeds the spectacle and serious journalism is replaced by empty cosmetic stenographers. Language is pillaged as meaningful ideas are replaced “by information broken into bits and bytes [along with] the growing emphasis on immediacy and real time responses.”5 In the face of this dumbing down, critical thinking and the institutions that promote a thoughtful and informed polity disappear into the vast abyss of what might be called a disimagination machine. Nuance is transformed into state-sanctioned vulgarity. How else to explain the popularity and credibility of terms such post-truth, fake news and alternative facts? Masha Gessen is right in arguing that in the Trump era, language that is used to lie and “validate incomprehensible drivel” not only destroys any vestige of civic literacy, it also “threatens the basic survival of the public sphere.”6

We live in a moment of digital time, a time of relentless immediacy, when experience no longer has the chance to crystalize into mature and informed thought. Communication is now reduced to a form of public relations and a political rhetoric that is overheated and overexaggerated and always over the top. Opinion and sanctioned illiteracy now undermine reason and evidence-based arguments. News becomes spectacle and echoes demagoguery rather than questioning it. Thinking is disdained and is viewed as dangerous. The mainstream media, with few exceptions, has become an adjunct to power rather than a force for holding it accountable. The obsession with the bottom line and ratings has brought much of the media into line with Trump’s disimagination machine wedded to producing endless spectacles and the mind-numbing investment in the cult of celebrity and reality TV.7 What kind of democracy is possible when the institutions that are crucial to a vibrant civil society and the notion of the social are vanishing?

What kind of democracy is possible when the institutions that are crucial to a vibrant civil society and the notion of the social are vanishing?

Institutions that work to free and strengthen the imagination and the capacity to think critically have been under assault in the United States long before the rise of Donald Trump. Over the last 50 years, critical public institutions from public radio to public schools have been defunded, commercialized and privatized transforming them from spheres of critical analysis to dumbed-down workstations for a deregulated and commodified culture.

Lacking public funds, many institutions of higher education have been left to mimic the private sector, transforming knowledge into a commodity, eliminating those courses and departments that do not align themselves with a robust bottom line. In addition, faculty are increasingly treated like Walmart workers with labor relations increasingly designed “to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.”8 Under this market-driven governance, students are often relegated to the status of customers, saddled with high tuition rates and a future predicated on ongoing political uncertainty, economic instability and ecological peril.

This dystopian view feeds an obsession with a narrow notion of job readiness and a cost-accounting rationality. This bespeaks to the rise of what theorists such as the late Stuart Hall called an audit or corporate culture, which serves to demoralize and depoliticize both faculty and students, often relieving them of any larger values other than those that reinforce their own self-interest and retreat from any sense of moral and social responsibility.

As higher education increasingly subordinates itself to market-driven values, there is a greater emphasis on research that benefits the corporate world, the military and rich conservative ideologues such as the Koch brothers, who have pumped over $200 million into higher education activities since the 1980s to shape faculty hires, promote academic research centers, and shape courses that reinforce a conservative market-driven ideological and value system.9 One consequence is what David V. Johnson calls the return of universities to “the patron-client model of the Renaissance” which undermines “the very foundation of higher education in the United States.”10

Under such circumstances, commercial values replace public values, unbridled self-interest becomes more important than the common good and sensation seeking and a culture of immediacy becomes more important than compassion and long term investments in others, especially youth. As Paul Gilroy has pointed out, one foundation for a fascist society is that “the motif of withdrawal — civic and interpersonal —” becomes the template for all of social life.11

Democracy and politics itself are impoverished in the absence of those conditions under which students and others use the knowledge they gain both to critique the world in which they live and, when necessary, to intervene in socially responsible ways in order to change it. What might it mean for educators to take seriously the notion that democracy should be a way of thinking about education — one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good?

Higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good. Educators need to initiate a national conversation in which the classroom is defended as a place of deliberative inquiry and critical thinking, a place that makes a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage.

Second, educators need to place ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility and compassion at the forefront of learning. Students need to learn how power works across cultural and political institutions so that they can learn how to govern rather than merely be governed. Education should be a process where students emerge as critically engaged and informed citizens contributing not simply to their own self-interest but to the well-being of society as a whole.

Third, higher education needs to be viewed as a right, as it is in many countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland and Brazil, rather than a privilege for a limited few, as it is in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rather than burden young people with almost insurmountable debt, it should call people to think, question, doubt and be willing to engage in dialogue that is both unsettling to common sense and supportive of a culture of questioning.

In addition, it should shift not only the way people think but also encourage them to help shape for the better the world in which they find themselves. Teaching should not be confused with therapy or reduced to zones of emotional safety. The classroom should be a space that disturbs, a space of difficulty — a space that challenges complacent thinking. Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate commonsense understandings of the world, take risks in their thinking, however troubling, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, mutual respect and civic values in the pursuit of social justice.

Students need to learn how to think dangerously, or as Baldwin argued, go for broke, in order to push at the frontiers of knowledge while recognizing that the search for justice is never finished and that no society is ever just enough. These are not merely methodical considerations but also moral and political practices because they presuppose the creation of students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom, and democracy matter and are attainable.

Fourth, in a world driven by data, metrics and an overabundance of information, educators need to enable students to express themselves in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. They need to become border crossers who can think dialectically, and learn not only how to consume culture but also produce it. At stake here is the ability to perform a crucial act of thinking, that is, the ability to translate private issues into larger systemic concerns.

Fifth, there is a plague haunting higher education, especially in the United States, which has become the model for its unjust treatment of faculty. Seventy percent of all part- and full-time instructional positions are filled with contingent or nontenure-track faculty. Many of these faculty barely make enough money to afford basic necessities, have no or little health insurance and are reluctant to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Many adjuncts are part of what are called the working poor. This is an abomination and one consequence of the increasing corporatization of higher education. These faculty positions must be transferred into full-time positions with a path toward tenure and full benefits and security.

Sixth, while critical analysis is necessary to reveal the workings and effects of oppressive and unequal relations of power, critique without hope is a prescription for cynicism, despair and civic fatigue. Students also need to stretch their imagination to be able to think beyond the limits of their own experience, and the disparaging notion that the future is nothing more than a mirror image of the present. In this instance, I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of hope. Hope means living without illusions and being fully aware of the practical difficulties and risks involved in meaningful struggles for real change, while at the same time being radically optimistic. The political challenge of hope is to recognize that history is open and that the ethical job of education, as the poet Robert Hass has argued, is “to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time.”12

The late world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman insisted 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 which reacts angrily to any case of injustice and promptly sets about correcting it.”13 It is precisely such a collective spirit informing a resurgent politics that is being rewritten by many young people today in the discourses of critique and hope, emancipation and transformation. The inimitable James Baldwin captures the depth which both burdens hope and inspires it. In The Fire Next Time, he writes: “The impossible is the least that one can demand. …Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them…. the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”14 It is one of tasks of educators and higher education to keep the lights burning with a feverish intensity.

 

 

1. Cited in Marybeth Gasman, “Martin Luther King Jr. and Silence,” The Chronicle of Higher Education [Jan. 16, 2011]. ↩

2. Rev. Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” (April 4, 1967) American Rhetoric ↩

3. James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-85, (New York: Saint Martins, 1985), 325. ↩

4. I take this up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2018). ↩

5. Michiko Kakutani, “Texts Without Context” The New York Times, (March 21, 2010), p. AR1 ↩

6. Masha Gessen, “The Autocrat’s Language,” The New York Review of Books, [May 13, 2017]. ↩

7. Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights, 2016). ↩

8. Noam Chomsky, “The Death of American Universities,” Reader Supported News (March 30, 2015). ↩

9. The definitive source on this issue is Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 2017). ↩

10. David V. Johnson, “Academe on the Auction Block,” The Baffler [Issue No. 36 2017] ↩

11. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 216. ↩

12. Cited in Sarah Pollock, “Robert Hass,” Mother Jones (March/April 1997). ↩

13. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (London: Polity Press, 2001), p. 19. ↩

14. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1992) p. 104. ↩

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Rethinking Higher Education in a Time of Tyranny

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Rethinking Higher Education in a Time of Tyranny

Henry Giroux

Dr. Henry Giroux

What kind of democracy is possible when the institutions that are crucial to a vibrant civil society are vanishing?

Many of the great peace activists of the 20th century, extending from Mahatma Gandhi and Paulo Freire to Jane Addams and Martin Luther King Jr., shared a passion for education as an important part of the democratic project. Refusing to view education as neutral or reducing it to the instrumental practice of training, they sought to reclaim education as a practice of freedom, part of a wider struggle to deepen and extend the values, social relations and institutions of a substantive democracy.

They understood that tyranny and authoritarianism are not just the product of state violence and repression; they also thrive on popular docility, mass apathy and a flight from moral responsibility. They argued passionately that education could not be removed from the demand for justice and progressive social change. In doing so, they recognized the value of education and its ability to transform how people understand themselves, their relations to others and the larger world. In the face of massive injustice and indignity, these prophetic voices refused to look away from human suffering, and embraced the possibility for resistance fueled by courage, compassion and the ability to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

Let us hope that in the midst of our witness to the current revolt against democracy, higher education will neither remain silent nor be too late.

One of Martin Luther King’s great insights was his recognition that education provided a bulwark against both ignorance and indifference in the face of injustice. Like Gandhi, he warned people over and over again not to remain silent in the face of racism, militarism and extreme materialism, and argued that “he who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Of the civil rights era, King warned that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.… In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”1

Advocates of civic courage and compassion reflected in their words and actions what King called the “fierce urgency of now,” reminding us that “tomorrow is today” and that “there is such a thing as being too late.”2 Let us hope that in the midst of our witness to the current revolt against democracy, higher education will neither remain silent nor be too late.

Echoing King’s belief that American innocence was neither tenable nor forgivable, the great novelist James Baldwin filled in the missing language of fear and terrorism at the heart of a racist society. His famed “Talk to Teachers” began with an impassioned warning about the times in which he lived, a warning more relevant now than it was when he delivered the speech in 1963. He said:

Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced… from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible — and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people — must be prepared to “go for broke.”3

In the context of a worldwide rebellion currently taking place against democracy, dissent, human rights and justice, I think we need to “go for broke.” Authoritarianism is on the rise once again, emerging in countries in which such a politics, in light of the past, has appeared unthinkable. In Hungary, Russia, India, Turkey and Poland, democracy is being voted down and aggressively dismantled. In addition, a new and dangerous moment has emerged in the United States as it becomes clear that an American-style authoritarianism is no longer the stuff of fantasy, fiction or hysterical paranoia.

In the context of a worldwide rebellion currently taking place against democracy, dissent, human rights and justice, I think we need to ‘go for broke.’

This summer in Charlottesville, hundreds of neo-Nazis marched brandishing torches reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany while shouting white nationalist slogans such as “Heil Trump,” and later unleashing an orgy of violence that led to the deaths of three people. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, stated there were good people on both sides of that rally as if good people march with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who revel in hate and offer no apologies for mimicking the actions that resulted in the slaughter of millions during the fascist nightmare of the 1930s and 1940s.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency speaks not only to a profound political crisis but also to a tragedy for democracy.4 His rise to power echoes not only a moral blind spot in the collective American psyche, but also a refusal to recognize how past totalitarian ideas can and have reappeared in different forms in the present. The return of a demagogue who couples the language of fear, decline and hate with illusions of national grandiosity have found their apotheosis in the figure of Donald Trump. He is the living symbol and embodiment of a growing culture of unbridled and naked selfishness, the collapse of civic institutions, and a ruinous anti-intellectualism that supports a corrupt political system and a toxic form of white supremacy that has been decades in the making. There is nothing natural or inevitable about these changes. They are learned behaviors. As shared fears replace any sense of shared responsibility, the American public is witnessing how a politics of racism and hate creates a society plagued by fear and divisiveness.

As shared fears replace any sense of shared responsibility, the American public is witnessing how a politics of racism and hate creates a society plagued by fear and divisiveness.

While numerous forces have led to the election of Donald Trump, it is crucial to ask how a poisonous form of education developed in the larger society, one that has contributed to the toxic culture that both legitimated Trump and encouraged so many millions of people to follow him. Part of the answer lies in the right-wing media with its vast propaganda machines, the rise of conservative foundations such as the Koch brothers’ various institutes, the ongoing production of anti-public intellectuals and a visual culture increasingly dominated by the spectacle of violence and reality TV. On a more political note, it is crucial to ask how the educative force of this toxic culture goes unchallenged in creating a public that embraced Trump’s bigotry, narcissism, lies, public history of sexual groping and racism, all the while transforming the citizen as a critical political agent into a consumer of hate and anti-intellectualism.

News morphs into entertainment as thoughtlessness increases ratings, violence feeds the spectacle and serious journalism is replaced by empty cosmetic stenographers. Language is pillaged as meaningful ideas are replaced “by information broken into bits and bytes [along with] the growing emphasis on immediacy and real time responses.”5 In the face of this dumbing down, critical thinking and the institutions that promote a thoughtful and informed polity disappear into the vast abyss of what might be called a disimagination machine. Nuance is transformed into state-sanctioned vulgarity. How else to explain the popularity and credibility of terms such post-truth, fake news and alternative facts? Masha Gessen is right in arguing that in the Trump era, language that is used to lie and “validate incomprehensible drivel” not only destroys any vestige of civic literacy, it also “threatens the basic survival of the public sphere.”6

We live in a moment of digital time, a time of relentless immediacy, when experience no longer has the chance to crystalize into mature and informed thought. Communication is now reduced to a form of public relations and a political rhetoric that is overheated and overexaggerated and always over the top. Opinion and sanctioned illiteracy now undermine reason and evidence-based arguments. News becomes spectacle and echoes demagoguery rather than questioning it. Thinking is disdained and is viewed as dangerous. The mainstream media, with few exceptions, has become an adjunct to power rather than a force for holding it accountable. The obsession with the bottom line and ratings has brought much of the media into line with Trump’s disimagination machine wedded to producing endless spectacles and the mind-numbing investment in the cult of celebrity and reality TV.7 What kind of democracy is possible when the institutions that are crucial to a vibrant civil society and the notion of the social are vanishing?

What kind of democracy is possible when the institutions that are crucial to a vibrant civil society and the notion of the social are vanishing?

Institutions that work to free and strengthen the imagination and the capacity to think critically have been under assault in the United States long before the rise of Donald Trump. Over the last 50 years, critical public institutions from public radio to public schools have been defunded, commercialized and privatized transforming them from spheres of critical analysis to dumbed-down workstations for a deregulated and commodified culture.

Lacking public funds, many institutions of higher education have been left to mimic the private sector, transforming knowledge into a commodity, eliminating those courses and departments that do not align themselves with a robust bottom line. In addition, faculty are increasingly treated like Walmart workers with labor relations increasingly designed “to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.”8 Under this market-driven governance, students are often relegated to the status of customers, saddled with high tuition rates and a future predicated on ongoing political uncertainty, economic instability and ecological peril.

This dystopian view feeds an obsession with a narrow notion of job readiness and a cost-accounting rationality. This bespeaks to the rise of what theorists such as the late Stuart Hall called an audit or corporate culture, which serves to demoralize and depoliticize both faculty and students, often relieving them of any larger values other than those that reinforce their own self-interest and retreat from any sense of moral and social responsibility.

As higher education increasingly subordinates itself to market-driven values, there is a greater emphasis on research that benefits the corporate world, the military and rich conservative ideologues such as the Koch brothers, who have pumped over $200 million into higher education activities since the 1980s to shape faculty hires, promote academic research centers, and shape courses that reinforce a conservative market-driven ideological and value system.9 One consequence is what David V. Johnson calls the return of universities to “the patron-client model of the Renaissance” which undermines “the very foundation of higher education in the United States.”10

Under such circumstances, commercial values replace public values, unbridled self-interest becomes more important than the common good and sensation seeking and a culture of immediacy becomes more important than compassion and long term investments in others, especially youth. As Paul Gilroy has pointed out, one foundation for a fascist society is that “the motif of withdrawal — civic and interpersonal —” becomes the template for all of social life.11

Democracy and politics itself are impoverished in the absence of those conditions under which students and others use the knowledge they gain both to critique the world in which they live and, when necessary, to intervene in socially responsible ways in order to change it. What might it mean for educators to take seriously the notion that democracy should be a way of thinking about education — one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good?

Higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good. Educators need to initiate a national conversation in which the classroom is defended as a place of deliberative inquiry and critical thinking, a place that makes a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage.

Second, educators need to place ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility and compassion at the forefront of learning. Students need to learn how power works across cultural and political institutions so that they can learn how to govern rather than merely be governed. Education should be a process where students emerge as critically engaged and informed citizens contributing not simply to their own self-interest but to the well-being of society as a whole.

Third, higher education needs to be viewed as a right, as it is in many countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland and Brazil, rather than a privilege for a limited few, as it is in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rather than burden young people with almost insurmountable debt, it should call people to think, question, doubt and be willing to engage in dialogue that is both unsettling to common sense and supportive of a culture of questioning.

In addition, it should shift not only the way people think but also encourage them to help shape for the better the world in which they find themselves. Teaching should not be confused with therapy or reduced to zones of emotional safety. The classroom should be a space that disturbs, a space of difficulty — a space that challenges complacent thinking. Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate commonsense understandings of the world, take risks in their thinking, however troubling, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, mutual respect and civic values in the pursuit of social justice.

Students need to learn how to think dangerously, or as Baldwin argued, go for broke, in order to push at the frontiers of knowledge while recognizing that the search for justice is never finished and that no society is ever just enough. These are not merely methodical considerations but also moral and political practices because they presuppose the creation of students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom, and democracy matter and are attainable.

Fourth, in a world driven by data, metrics and an overabundance of information, educators need to enable students to express themselves in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. They need to become border crossers who can think dialectically, and learn not only how to consume culture but also produce it. At stake here is the ability to perform a crucial act of thinking, that is, the ability to translate private issues into larger systemic concerns.

Fifth, there is a plague haunting higher education, especially in the United States, which has become the model for its unjust treatment of faculty. Seventy percent of all part- and full-time instructional positions are filled with contingent or nontenure-track faculty. Many of these faculty barely make enough money to afford basic necessities, have no or little health insurance and are reluctant to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Many adjuncts are part of what are called the working poor. This is an abomination and one consequence of the increasing corporatization of higher education. These faculty positions must be transferred into full-time positions with a path toward tenure and full benefits and security.

Sixth, while critical analysis is necessary to reveal the workings and effects of oppressive and unequal relations of power, critique without hope is a prescription for cynicism, despair and civic fatigue. Students also need to stretch their imagination to be able to think beyond the limits of their own experience, and the disparaging notion that the future is nothing more than a mirror image of the present. In this instance, I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of hope. Hope means living without illusions and being fully aware of the practical difficulties and risks involved in meaningful struggles for real change, while at the same time being radically optimistic. The political challenge of hope is to recognize that history is open and that the ethical job of education, as the poet Robert Hass has argued, is “to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time.”12

The late world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman insisted 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 which reacts angrily to any case of injustice and promptly sets about correcting it.”13 It is precisely such a collective spirit informing a resurgent politics that is being rewritten by many young people today in the discourses of critique and hope, emancipation and transformation. The inimitable James Baldwin captures the depth which both burdens hope and inspires it. In The Fire Next Time, he writes: “The impossible is the least that one can demand. …Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them…. the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”14 It is one of tasks of educators and higher education to keep the lights burning with a feverish intensity.

 

1. Cited in Marybeth Gasman, “Martin Luther King Jr. and Silence,” The Chronicle of Higher Education [Jan. 16, 2011]. ↩

2. Rev. Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” (April 4, 1967) American Rhetoric ↩

3. James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-85, (New York: Saint Martins, 1985), 325. ↩

4. I take this up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2018). ↩

5. Michiko Kakutani, “Texts Without Context” The New York Times, (March 21, 2010), p. AR1 ↩

6. Masha Gessen, “The Autocrat’s Language,” The New York Review of Books, [May 13, 2017]. ↩

7. Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights, 2016). ↩

8. Noam Chomsky, “The Death of American Universities,” Reader Supported News (March 30, 2015). ↩

9. The definitive source on this issue is Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 2017). ↩

10. David V. Johnson, “Academe on the Auction Block,” The Baffler [Issue No. 36 2017] ↩

11. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 216. ↩

12. Cited in Sarah Pollock, “Robert Hass,” Mother Jones (March/April 1997). ↩

13. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (London: Polity Press, 2001), p. 19. ↩

14. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1992) p. 104. ↩

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Rethinking Higher Education in a Time of Tyranny

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Donald Trump’s Addiction to Violence

Henry Giroux

BY HENRY GIROUX

The president has normalized violence by emboldening the idea that it is the only viable political response to social problems.

Donald Trump is addicted to violence. It is the principal force that shapes his language, politics and policies. He revels in a public discourse that threatens, humiliates, bullies and inflicts violence. He has used language as a weapon to humiliate women, a reporter with a disability, Pope Francis and any political opponent who criticizes him. He has publicly humiliated and waged symbolic violence on members of his own Cabinet, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, not to mention the insults and lies he perpetrated against former FBI Director James Comey after firing him.1 He has humiliated world leaders with a discourse that in its infantilism uses language to insult and belittle. In the case of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he has not only insulted him with the war-like moniker “Rocket Man,” he has appeared before the United Nations and blithely threatened to address the nuclear standoff with North Korea by wiping out its 25 million inhabitants.2 He has emboldened and indirectly supported the violent actions of white supremacists, and during the presidential campaign encouraged right-wing thugs to attack dissenters — especially people of color.

During his presidential campaign, he endorsed state torture and pandered to the spectacle of violence that his adoring crowds treated like theater as they shouted and screamed for more. As Sasha Abramsky observes in The Nation, Trump’s embrace of torture made clear that he not only was willing to normalize the unspeakable, but was more than willing to turn the American government into a criminal organization. She writes:

Torture …in the campaign, [became] Trump’s leitmotif — and he did far more than applaud the waterboarding sanctioned by George W. Bush’s administration, as if that weren’t bad enough. Time and again, Trump urged his crowds of supporters on by dangling before them the prospect of violence for violence’s sake. Time and again, he flaunted his contempt for international norms by embracing torture — the word, for so long taboo, as much as the deed — as an official policy of state.3

Under such circumstances, violence for Trump became performative, used to draw attention to himself as the ultimate tough guy while signaling his embrace of a criminogenic ethic that allowed him to act as a mafia figure willing to engage in violence as an act of vengeance and retribution aimed at those who refused to buy into his retrograde nationalism, regressive militarism and nihilistic sadism. The endless call to “lock her up” signaled more than an attack on Hillary Clinton; he endorsed the making of a police state where the call to law and order become the foundation for Trump’s descent into authoritarianism.

On a policy level, he has instituted directives to remilitarize the police by providing them with all manner of Army surplus weapons — especially those local police forces dealing with issues of racism and poverty. While addressing a crowd of police officers in Long Island, New York, he endorsed and condoned police brutality.4 During his presidential campaign he stated that he would pay the legal costs of a thug who attacked a black protester. These are typical examples of many ways in which Trump repeatedly gives license to his base and others to commit acts of violence. He also appears to revel in producing representations of violence suggesting it is the medium by which to deal with news media, or the “fake news” crowd, that hold him accountable for his actions and policies. For instance, he tweeted an edited video showing him, body-slamming and punching a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head during a wrestling match.5

This adulation of violence is mimicked in many of Trump’s domestic policies, which bear the weight of a form of domestic terrorism — a term I’m using in this case to describe an act of violence intended not only to harm or kill but also to instill fear through intimidation and coercion in specific populations. For instance, Trump’s call to deport 800,000 individuals brought to the United States as illegal immigrants through no intention of their own and who know no other country than the United States reflects more than a savage act of a white nationalism. It also suggests the underlying state violence inherent in embracing a politics of disappearance and disposability. Couple this cruel and inhumane policy with Trump’s pardon of the vile Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former Arizona sheriff and notorious racist who was renowned by white supremacists and bigots for his hatred of undocumented immigrants and his abuse and mistreatment of prisoners in his tent city jail. This marriage of a culture of cruelty and Trump’s backing of a sadistic racist offers support for a society of violence in the United States that before Trump’s election resided on the margins of power rather than as it does now, at the center of power.

This adulation of violence is mimicked in many of Trump’s domestic policies, which bear the weight of a form of domestic terrorism.

What Wendy Brown calls Trump’s “apocalyptic populism” has reinforced a savage form of neoliberalism that, as Pope Francis has pointed out, produces an economy that kills.6 Trump’s militarized disregard for human life is evident in a range of policies that extend from withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change and slashing jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency to gutting teen pregnancy prevention programs and ending funds to fight white supremacy and other hate-producing, right-wing groups. At the same time, Trump has called for a $52 billion increase in the military budget while arguing for a revised health care bill being sponsored by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that would cut $4 trillion in health care over 20 years while allowing 32 million to lose health coverage by 2027. These figures speak clearly to Trump’s passion for violence, but his embrace of this form of domestic terrorism cannot be captured fully in critical commentaries about his ruthless domestic and foreign policies. The real measure of such policies must begin as Brad Evans argues in “the raw realities of suffering” and the terrible price many young, old and vulnerable populations pay with their lives.7

For instance, Trump has added a new dimension of cruelty to the policies that affect children, especially the poor. He has supported cutting food stamp programs (SNAP) to the tune of $193 billion; slashing $610 billion over 10 years from Medicaid, which aids 37 million children; slashing $5.8 billion from the budget of the Children’s Health Insurance Program which serves 9 million kids; defunding public schools by $9.2 billion; and eliminating a number of community assisted programs for the poor and young people. Trump’s proposed 2018 budget is an act of unbridled cruelty given its draconian cuts in programs that benefit poor children. As Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund observes:

Our nation’s budget should reflect our nation’s professed values, but President Trump’s 2018 Federal Budget, “A New Foundation for America’s Greatness,” radically does the opposite. This immoral budget declares war on America’s children, our most vulnerable group, and the foundation of our nation’s current and future economic, military and leadership security. It cruelly dismantles and shreds America’s safety net laboriously woven over the past half century to help and give hope to the 14.5 million children struggling today in a sea of poverty, hunger, sickness, miseducation, homelessness and disabilities. It slashes trillions of dollars from health care, nutrition and other critical programs that give poor babies and children a decent foundation in life to assure trillions of dollars in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and powerful corporations who do not deserve massive doses of government support. The cruel Trump budget invests more in our military — already the most costly in the world — but denies vulnerable children and youths the income, health care, food, housing and education supports they need to become strong future soldiers to defend our country.

These draconian and cruel cuts merge with the ruthlessness of a punishing state that under Trump and Attorney General Sessions is poised to implement a vicious law and order campaign that criminalizes the behavior of the poor. It gets worse. At the same time, Trump supports policies that pollute the planet and increase health risks to the most vulnerable and powerless.

Violence runs through the United States like an electric current and has become the primary tool both for entertaining people and addressing social problems while also working to destroy the civic institutions and other institutions that make a democracy possible. Needless to say, Trump is not the sole reason for this more visible expression of extreme violence on the domestic and foreign fronts. On the contrary, he is the endpoint of a series of anti-democratic practices, policies and values that have been gaining ground since the emergence of the political and economic counterrevolution that gained full force with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, along with the rule of financial capital and the embrace of a culture of precarity. At one level, Trump is the unbridled legitimator-in-chief of a gun culture, police brutality, a war machine, a culture of violent hypermasculinity and a political and social order that expands the boundaries of social abandonment and the politics of disposability — especially for those marginalized by race and class. Trump has emboldened the idea that violence is the only viable political response to social problems and in doing so normalizes violence in its multiple expressions.

Violence that once seemed unthinkable has become central to how Trump’s understanding of American society now defines itself.

Violence that once seemed unthinkable has become central to how Trump’s understanding of American society now defines itself. Violence in its multiple hard and soft forms has become the very condition of our existence, both as a powerful structural force and an ideology wedded to the reproduction of human suffering. Language in the service of violence has a long history in the United States, and in the current historical moment has succumbed to what I have called the violence of organized forgetting. As memory recedes, violence as a toxin morphs into entertainment, policy and world views that embrace it less as a regime and practice of terror than as a template to guide all of social life.

What is different about Trump is that he relishes in the use of violence and warmongering brutality to inflict humiliation and pain on people; he pulls the curtains away from a systemic culture of cruelty, a racially inflected mass incarceration state, and in doing so refuses to hide his own sadistic investment in violence as a source of pleasure. Jeffrey St. Clair has argued that Trump is the great reveller who pulls back “the curtains on the cesspool of American politics for the inspection of all but the most timid” while going further by insisting that Trump is the bully-in-chief, a sadistic troll who has pushed the country — without any sense of ethical and social responsibility — deep into the abyss of authoritarianism and a culture of violence and cruelty that is as unchecked as it is poisonous and dangerous to human life and democracy itself.8

At the current moment, it may seem impossible to offer any resistance to this authoritarian order without talking about violence, how it works, who benefits from it, whom it affects and why it has become so normalized. This does not have to be the case once it is recognized that the scourge of American violence is as much an educational issue as it is a political concern. The challenge here, in part, for progressives is to address how people might be educated about violence through rigorous and accessible historical, social, relational analysis and narratives that provide a comprehensive understanding of how the different registers of violence are connected to new modes of American authoritarianism. This means making power and its connection to violence visible through the exposure of larger structural and systemic economic forces. It means illustrating with great care and detail how violence is reproduced and legitimated through the manufacture of mass illiteracy and the reproduction of dead zones of the imagination. It means moving away from analyzing violence as an abstraction by showing how it works concretely at the level of everyday life to inflict massive human suffering and despair.

The American public needs a new understanding of how civic institutions collapse under the force of state violence, how language coarsens in the service of carnage, how a culture hardens in a market society so as to foster contempt for compassion while exalting a culture of cruelty. How does neoliberal capitalism work to spread the celebration of violence through its commanding cultural apparatuses and social media? How does war culture come to dominate civic life and become the most honored ideal in American society? Unless Americans can begin to address these issues as part of a broader discourse committed to resisting the existent authoritarianism in America, the plague of mass violence will continue and the promise of a radical democracy will become nothing more than a relic of history.

 

 

1. Henry A. Giroux, “Trump vs. Comey: The Politics of Lawlessness, Lying and Fake News,” Ragazine (June 10, 2017). ↩

[2] Harriet Alexander, “Donald Trump says US may have to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea,” The Telegraph (Sept. 19, 2017).↩

[3] Sasha Abramsky, “How Trump Has Normalized the Unspeakable,” The Nation (Sept. 20, 2017).↩

[4] Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “Trump’s Call for Police Brutality is No Joke,” DemocracyNow (Aug. 3, 2017). ↩

[5] Michael M. Grynbaum, “Trump Tweets a Video of Him Wrestling ‘CNN’ to the Ground,” The New York Times (July 2, 2017). ↩

[6] Wendy Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism,” Eurozine, (Sept. 5, 2017).↩

[7]7 Brad Evans, “Remembering the 43,” Los Angeles Review Blog (Sept. 9, 2017). ↩

[8] Jeffrey St. Clair, “To See or to Nazi: Trump’s Moral Blindspot is America’s.” CounterPunch, (Aug. 18, 2017). 

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Trump and the Politics of Nihilism

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

Ignorance is a terrible wound when it is self-inflicted, but it becomes a dangerous plague when the active refusal to know combines with power. President Trump’s lies, lack of credibility, woefully deficient knowledge of the world, and unbridled narcissism have suggested for some time that he lacks the intelligence, judgment and capacity for critical thought necessary to occupy the presidency of the United States. But when coupled with his childish temperament, his volatile impetuousness and his Manichaean conception of a world—a reductionist binary that only views the world in term of friends and enemies, loyalists and traitors—his ignorance translates into a confrontational style that puts lives, if not the entire planet, at risk.

Trump’s seemingly frozen and dangerous fundamentalism, paired with his damaged ethical sensibility, suggests that we are dealing with a form of nihilistic politics in which the relationship between the search for truth and justice on the one hand and moral responsibility and civic courage on the other has disappeared. For the past few decades, as historian Richard Hofstadter and others have reminded us, politics has been disconnected not only from reason but also from any viable notion of meaning and civic literacy. Government now runs on willful ignorance as the planet heats up, pollution increases and people die. Evidence is detached from argument. Science is a subspecies of “fake news,” and alternative facts are as important as the truth. Violence becomes both the catalyst and the result of the purposeful effort to empty language of any meaning. Under such circumstances, Trump gives credence to the notion that lying is now a central feature of leadership and should be normalized, and this serves as an enabling force for violence.

For Trump, words no longer bind. Moreover, his revolting masculinity now stands in for dialogue and his lack of an ethical imagination. Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of democracy and has put into play a culture and mode of politics that kill empathy, revel in cruelty and fear and mutilate democratic ideals. Trump’s worldview is shaped by Fox News and daily flattering and sycophantic news clips, compiled by his staff, that boost his deranged need for emotional validation.

All of this relieves him of the need to think and empathize with others. He inhabits a privatized and self-indulgent world in which tweets are perfectly suited to colonizing public space and attention with his temper tantrums, ill-timed provocations, and incendiary vocabulary. His call for loyalty is shorthand for developing a following of stooges who offer him a false and egregiously grotesque sense of community—one defined by a laughable display of ignorance and a willingness to eliminate any vestige of human dignity.

Anyone who communicates intelligently is now part of the “fake news” world that Trump has invented. Language is now forced into the service of violence. Impetuousness and erratic judgment have become central to Trump’s leadership, one that is as ill-informed as it is unstable. Trump has ushered in a kind of anti-politics and mode of governance in which any vestige of informed judgment and thought is banished as soon as it appears. His rigid, warlike mentality has created an atmosphere in the United States in which dialogue is viewed as a weakness and compromise understood as personal failing.

As Hofstadter argued more than 50 years ago, fundamentalist thinking is predicated on an anti-intellectualism and the refusal to engage other points of view. The “other” is not confronted as someone worthy of respect but as an enemy, a threatening presence that must be utterly vanquished—and in Trump’s case, humiliated and then destroyed.

Philosopher Michel Foucault elucidated the idea that fundamentalists do not confront the other as “a partner in the search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. … There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one’s killer instinct as possible.”

Trump is missing a necessity in his fundamentalist toolbox: self-reflection coupled with informed judgment. He lacks the ability to think critically about the inevitable limitations of his own arguments, and he is not held morally accountable to the social costs of harboring racist ideologies and pushing policies that serve to deepen racist exclusions, mobilize fear and legitimize a growing government apparatus of punishment and imprisonment. What connects the moral bankruptcy of right-wing ideologues such as Trump and his acolytes—who embrace violent imagery to mobilize their followers with the mindset of religious and political extremists—is that they share a deep romanticization of violence that is valorized by old and new fundamentalisms.

The current crisis with North Korea represents not only the possibility of a nuclear war triggered by the irrational outburst of an unhinged leader, but also a death-dealing blow to the welfare state, young people, immigrants, Muslims and others deemed dangerous and therefore “disposable.”

Trump has replaced politics with the theater and poison of nihilism. His politics combines spectacle with vengeance, violence and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s impetuous and badly informed comments about North Korea represent more than a rash, thoughtless outburst. Rather, they contribute to rising tensions and the increased possibility of a major military conflict. Trump’s dangerous rhetoric is symptomatic of the death of historical consciousness, public memory, critical thinking and political agency itself at the highest levels of governance. Under such circumstances, politics degenerates into dogma coupled with a game-show mentality symptomatic of a perpetual form of political theater that has morphed into a new kind of mass mediated barbarism. This is how democracy ends, with a bang and a whimper.

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Trump and the Politics of Nihilism

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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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