Education and Politics

Trump, guns and the warnings of history

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald J. Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children have more moral courage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:

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

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

Henry Giroux

By Henry Giroux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Disposability in the Age of Disasters: From Dreamers and Puerto Rico to Violence in Las Vegas

Henry Giroux

By: Henry A. Giroux

Under the reign of Donald Trump, politics has become an extension of war and death has become a permanent attribute of everyday life. Witness the US’s plunge into a dystopian world that bears the menacing markings of what presents itself as an endless series of isolated catastrophes. All of these are inevitably treated as unrelated incidents; victims subject to the toxic blows of fate. Mass misery and mass violence that result from the refusal of a government to address such pervasive and permanent crises are now reinforced by the popular neoliberal assumption that people are completely on their own, solely responsible for the ill fortune they experience. This ideological assumption is reinforced by undermining any critical attention to the conditions produced by stepped-up systemic state violence, or the harsh consequences of a capricious and cruel head of state.

«Progress» and dystopia have become synonymous, just as state-endorsed social provisions and government responsibility are exiled by the neoliberal authorization of freedom as the unbridled promotion of self-interest: a narrow celebration of limitless «choice,» and an emphasis on individual responsibility that ignores broader systemic structures and socially produced problems. Existential security no longer rests on collective foundations, but on privatized solutions and facile appeals to moral character.

Under Trump, a politics of disposability has merged with an ascendant authoritarianism in the United States in which the government’s response to such disparate issues as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) crisis, the devastation of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria and the mass shooting in Las Vegas are met uniformly with state-sanctioned and state-promoted violence.

In an age when market values render democratic values moot, a war culture drives disposability politics. Indeed, the politics of disposability has a long legacy in the United States, and extends from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery, to the increasing criminalization of everyday behaviors and the creation of a mass incarceration state.

In the 1970s, the politics of disposability, guided by the growing financialization of a neoliberal economy, manifested itself primarily in the form of legislation that undermined the welfare state, social provisions and public goods, while expanding the carceral state. This was part of the soft war waged against democracy — mostly hidden and wrapped in the discourse of austerity, «law and order» and market-based freedoms.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of politics of death, the effects of which extend from the racist response to Hurricane Katrina to the lead poisoning of thousands of children in Flint, Michigan, and dozens of other cities. This is a politics in which entire populations are considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. This is a politics that now merges with aggressive and violent efforts to silence dissent, analysis and the very conditions of critical thought. People who are Black, Brown, poor, disabled or otherwise marginalized are now excluded from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic, removed from the syntax of suffering, and left to fend for themselves in the face of natural or human-made disasters. And their efforts to mobilize have been met with murderous police crackdowns and deportations.

With the election of Trump, the politics of disposability and the war against democracy have taken on a much harder and crueler edge, with the president urging the police to «take the gloves off» and the attorney general calling for a regressive «law and order» campaign steeped in racism.

Under 21st century neoliberal capitalism, and especially under the Trump regime, there has been an acceleration of the mechanisms by which vulnerable populations are rendered unknowable, undesirable, unthinkable, considered an excess cost and stripped of their humanity. Relegated to zones of social abandonment and political exclusion, targeted populations become incomprehensible, civil rights disappear, hardship and suffering are normalized, and human lives are targeted and negated by diverse machineries of violence as dangerous, pathological and redundant. For those populations rendered disposable, ethical questions go unasked as the mechanisms of dispossession, forced homelessness and forms of social death feed corrupt political systems and forms of corporate power removed from any sense of civic and social responsibility. In many ways, the Trump administration is the new face of a politics of disposability that thrives on the energies of the vulnerable and powerless. Under such conditions, power is defined by the degree to which it is abstracted from any sense of responsibility or critical analysis.

This type of disposability is especially visible under Trump, not only because of his discourse of humiliation, bigotry and objectification, but also in his policies, which are blatantly designed to punish those populations who are the most vulnerable. These include the victims in Puerto Rico of Hurricane Maria, immigrant children no longer protected by DACA, and a push to expand the armed forces and the para-militarization of local police forces throughout the country as part of a race-based «law and order» policy. Trump is the endpoint of a new dystopian model of disposability, and has become a window on the growing embrace of violence and white supremacy at the highest levels of power, as both a practice and ideological legitimation for increasing a culture of fear. Fear, in this context, is framed mostly within a discourse of threats to personal safety, serving to increase the criminalization of a wide range of everyday behaviors while buttressing the current administration’s racist call for «law and order.» This culture of fear threatens to make more and more individuals and groups inconsequential and expendable.

Under such circumstances, the US’s dystopian impulses not only produce harsh and dire political changes, but also a failure to address a continuous series of economic, ecological and social crises. At the same time, the machinery of disposability and death rolls on, conferring upon entire populations the status of the living dead. The death-dealing logic of disposability has been updated and now parades in the name of freedom, choice, efficiency, security, progress and, ironically, democracy. Disposability has become so normalized that it is difficult to recognize it as a distinctive if not overriding organizing principle of the new American authoritarianism.

While the politics of disposability has a long legacy in the United States, Trump has given it a new and powerful impetus. This era differs from the recent past both in terms of its unapologetic embrace of the ideology of white supremacy and its willingness to expand state-sanctioned violence and death as part of a wider project of the US’s descent into authoritarianism.

Running through these events is a governmental response that has abandoned a social contract designed, however tepidly, to prevent hardship, suffering and death. Large groups of people have been catapulted out of the range of human beings for whom the government has limited, if any, responsibility. Such populations, inclusive of such disparate groups as the residents of Puerto Rico and the Dreamers, are left to fend for themselves in the face of disasters. They are treated as collateral damage in the construction of a neoliberal order in which those marginalized by race and class become the objects of a violent form of social engineering relegating its victims to what Richard Sennett has termed a «specter of uselessness,» whose outcomes are both tragic and devastating.

A politics of disposability provides a theoretical and political narrative that connects the crisis produced in Puerto Rico after the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria to the crisis surrounding Trump’s revoking of the DACA program. Trump’s support of state-sanctioned violence normalizes a culture and spectacle of violence, one not unrelated to the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas.

First, let’s examine the crisis in Puerto Rico as a systemic example of both state violence and a politics of disposability and social abandonment.

Puerto Rico as a Zone of Abandonment

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, slammed into and devastated the island of Puerto Rico. In the aftermath of a slow government response to the massive destruction, conditions in Puerto Rico have reached unprecedented and unacceptable levels of misery, hardship and suffering. As of October 19, over 1 million people were without drinking water, 80 percent of the island lacked electricity, and ongoing reports by medical staff and other respondents indicate that more and more people were dying. Thousands of people are living in shelters, lack phone service, and have to bear the burden of a health care system in shambles.

Such social immiseration is complicated by the fact that the island is home to 21 hazardous superfund sites, which pose deadly risks to human health and the environment. Lois Marie Gibbs ominously reports that waterborne illnesses are spreading, just as hospitals are running low on medicines. Caitlin Dickerson observed that the «the Environmental Protection Agency cited reports of residents trying to obtain drinking water from wells at hazardous Superfund sites.» These are wells that were once sealed to avoid exposure to deadly toxins. The governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, warned that a number of people have died from Leptospirosis, a bacterial disease spread by animal urine.

The Trump administration’s response has been unforgivably slow, with conditions worsening. Given the accelerating crisis, the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, made a direct appeal to President Trump for aid, stating with an acute sense of urgency, «We are dying.» Trump responded by lashing out at her personally by telling her to stop complaining. Cruz became emotional when referring to elderly and ill victims of Maria that she could not reach and who were «still at great risk in places where relief supplies and medical help had yet to arrive.» Cruz said the situation for many of these people was «like a slow death.» Stories began to emerge in the press that validated Cruz’s concerns. Many seriously ill dialysis patients either had their much-needed treatments reduced or could not get access to health care facilities. Because of the lack of electricity, Harry Figueroa, a teacher, «went a week without the oxygen that helped him breathe» and eventually died at 58. «His body went unrefrigerated for so long that the funeral director could not embalm his badly decomposed corpse.»

Scholar Lauren Berlant has used the term «slow death» in her own work to refer «to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.» Slow death captures the colonial backdrop of global regimes of ideological and structural oppression deeply etched in Puerto Rico’s history. The scale of suffering and devastation was so great that Robert P. Kadlec, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for preparedness and response stated that «The devastation I saw, I thought was equivalent to a nuclear detonation.»

Puerto Rico’s tragic and ruinous problems brought on by Hurricane Maria are amplified both by its $74 billion debt burden, an ongoing economic crisis, and the legacy of its colonial status and lack of political power in fighting for its sovereign and economic rights in Washington. With no federal representation and lacking the power to vote in presidential elections, it is difficult for Puerto Ricans to get their voices heard, secure the same rights as US citizens and put pressure on the Trump administration to address many of its longstanding problems. The latter include a poverty rate of 46 percent, a household median income of $19,350 [compared to the US median of $55,775], and a crippling debt. In fact, the debt burden is so overwhelming that «pre-Maria Puerto Rico was spending more on debt service than on education, health, or security. Results included the shuttering of 150 schools, the gutting of health care, increased taxes, splitting of families between the island and the mainland, and increased food insecurity.» Amy Davidson Sorkin was right in arguing that «Indeed, the crisis in Puerto Rico is a case study of what happens when people with little political capital need the help of their government.»

Not only did Trump allow three weeks to lapse before asking Congress to provide financial aid to the island, but his request reeked of heartless indifference to Puerto Rico’s economic hardships. Instead of asking for grants, he asked for loans. Throughout the crisis, Trump released a series of tweets in which he suggested that the plight of the Puerto Rican people was their own fault, lambasted local officials for supposedly not doing enough, and threatened to cut off aid from government services. Adding insult to injury, he also said that they were «throwing the government’s budget out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.»

Trump also suggested that the crisis in Puerto Rico was not a real crisis when compared to Hurricane Katrina. Trump’s view of Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens was exposed repeatedly in an ongoing string of tweets and comments that extended from the insulting notion that «they want everything to be done for them» to the visual image of Trump throwing paper towel rolls into a crowd as if he were on a public relations tour. Throughout the crisis, Trump has repeatedly congratulated himself on the government response to Puerto Rico, falsely stating that everybody thinks we are doing «an amazing job.» A month after the crisis, Trump insisted, without irony or a shred of self-reflection, that he would give himself a «perfect ten.»

These responses suggest more than a callous expression of self-delusion and indifference to the suffering of others. Trump’s callous misrecognition of the magnitude of the crisis in Puerto Rico and extent of the island’s misery and suffering, coupled with his insults and demeaning tweets, demonstrate the perpetuation of race and class oppressions through his governance. There is more at work here than a disconnection from the poor; there is also a white supremacist ideology that registers race as a central part of both Trump’s politics and a wider politics of disposability. It is difficult to miss the racist logic of reckless disregard for the safety and lives of Puerto Rican citizens, bordering on criminal negligence, which simmers just beneath the surface of Trump’s rhetoric and actions. Hurricane Maria exposed a long history of racism that confirms the structural abandonment of those who are poor, sick, elderly — and Black or Brown.

Trump embodies the commitments of a neoliberal authoritarian government that not only fails to protect its citizens, but reveals without apology the full spectrum of mechanisms to expand poverty, racism and hierarchies of class, making some lives disposable, redundant and excessive while others appear privileged and secure. Trump’s utterly failed response to the disaster in Puerto Rico reinforces Ta-Nehisi Coates’s claim that the spectacle of bigotry that shapes Trump’s presidency has «moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.» What has happened in Puerto Rico also reveals the frightening marker of a politics of disposability in which any appeal to democracy loses its claim and becomes hard to imagine, let alone enact without the threat of violent retaliation.

Revoking DACA and the Killing of the Dream

Trump’s penchant for cruelty in the face of great hardship and human suffering is also strikingly visible in the racial bigotry that has shaped his cancellation of the DACA program, instituted in 2012 by President Obama. Under the program, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 were allowed to live, study and work in the United States without fear of deportation. The program permitted these young people, known as Dreamers, to have access to Social Security cards, drivers’ licenses, and to advance their education, start small businesses and to be fully integrated into the fabric of American society. Seventy-six percent of Americans believe that Dreamers should be granted resident status or citizenship. In revoking the program, Trump has made clear his willingness to deport individuals who came to the US as children and who know the United States as their only home.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was called upon to be the front man in announcing the cancellation of DACA. In barely concealed racist tones, Sessions argued that DACA had to end because «The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences … denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens» and had to be rescinded because «failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism.» None of these charges is true.

Rather than taking jobs from American workers, Dreamers add an enormous benefit to the economy and «it is estimated that the loss of the Dreamers’ output will reduce the GDP by several hundred billion dollars over a decade.» Sessions’s claim that DACA contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors at the border is an outright lie, given that the surge began in 2008, four years before DACA was announced, and it was largely due, as Mark Joseph Stern points out, «to escalating gang violence in Central America, as well as drug cartels’ willingness to target and recruit children in Mexico … [A] study published in International Migration … found that DACA was not one of these factors.»

Trump’s rescinding of DACA is politically indefensible and heartless. Only 12 percent of Americans want the Dreamers deported and this support is drawn mostly from Trump’s base of ideological extremists, religious conservatives and far-right nationalists. This would include former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who left the White House and now heads, once again, Breitbart, the right-wing news outlet. Bannon is a leading figure of the right-wing extremists influencing Trump and is largely responsible for bringing white supremacist and ultranationalist ideology from the fringes of society to the center of power. On a recent segment of the TV series «60 Minutes,» Bannon told Charlie Rose that the DACA program shouldn’t be codified, adding «As the work permits run out, they self deport…. There’s no path to citizenship, no path to a green card and no amnesty. Amnesty is non-negotiable.» Bannon’s comments are cruel but predictable given his support for the uniformly bigoted policies Trump has pushed before and after his election.

The call to end DACA is part of a broader racist anti-immigration agenda aimed at making America white again. The current backlash against people of color, immigrant youth and those others marked by the registers of race and class are not only heartless and cruel, they also invoke a throwback to the days of state-sponsored lynching and the imposed terror of the Ku Klux Klan. Additionally, they offer up an eerie resonance to the violent and repressive racist policies of the totalitarian governments that emerged in Germany in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1970s.

Las Vegas and the Politics of Violence

On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock, ensconced on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, opened fire on a crowd of country and western concertgoers below, killing 58 and wounding over 500. While the venues for such shootings differ, the results are always predictable. People die or are wounded, and the corporate media and politicians weigh in on the cause of the violence. If the assailant is a person of color or a Muslim, they are labeled a «terrorist,» but if they are white, they are often labeled as «mentally disturbed.» Paddock was immediately branded by President Trump as a «sick» and «deranged man» who had committed an act of «radical evil.»

Trump’s characterizing of the shooting as an act of radical evil is more mystifying than assuring, and it did little to explain how such an egregious act of brutality fits into a broader pattern of civic decline, cultural decay, political corruption and systemic violence. It also erases the role of state-sanctioned violence in perpetuating individual acts of brutality. Corporate media trade in isolated spectacles, and generally fail to connect these dots. Rarely is there a connection made in the mainstream media, for instance, between the fact that the US is the largest arms manufacturer with the biggest military budget in the world and the almost unimaginable fact that there are more than 300 million people who own guns in the United States, which amounts to «112 guns per 100 people.» While the Trump administration is not directly responsible for the bloodbath in Las Vegas, it does feed a culture of violence in the United States.

Many Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, reinforced the lack of civic and ethical courage that emerged in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre by arguing that it was «particularly inappropriate» to talk about gun reform or politics in general after a mass shooting. By eliminating the issue of politics from the discussion, figures like McConnell erased some basic realities, such as the power of gun manufacturers to flood the country with guns, and the power of lobbyists to ensure that gun-safety measures do not become part of a wider national conversation. This depoliticizing logic also enabled any discussion about Paddock to be centered on his actions as an aberration, as opposed to a manifestation of forces in the larger culture.

The corporate press, with few exceptions, was unwilling to address how and why mass shootings have become routine in the United States and how everyday violence benefits a broader industry of death that gets rich through profits made by the defense industry, the arms manufacturers and corrupt gun lobbyists. There was no reference to how young children are groomed for violence by educational programs sponsored by the gun industries, how video games and other aspects of a militarized culture are used to teach youth to be insensitive to the horrors of real-life violence, how the military-industrial complex «makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.» Nor did much of the media address how war propaganda provided by the Pentagon influences not only pro-sports events and Hollywood blockbuster movies, but also reality TV shows, such as «American Idol» and «The X-Factor.»

In the aftermath of mass shootings, the hidden structures of violence disappear in the discourses of personal sorrow, the call for prayers and the insipid argument that such events should not be subject to political analysis. Trump’s dismissive comments on the Vegas shooting as an act of radical evil misses the fact that what is evil is the pervasive presence of violence throughout American history and the current emergence of extreme violence and mass shootings on college campuses, in elementary schools, at concerts and in diverse workplaces. Mass shootings may have become routine in the US, but the larger issue to be addressed is that violence is central to how the American experience is lived daily.

Militant Neoliberalism in an Armed USA

Militarized responses have become the primary medium for addressing all social problems, rendering critical thought less and less probable, less and less relevant. The lethal mix of anti-intellectualism, ideological fundamentalism and retreat from the ethical imagination that has grown stronger under Trump provides the perfect storm for what can be labeled a war culture, one that trades democratic values for a machinery of social abandonment, misery and death.

War as an extension of politics fuels a spectacle of violence that has overtaken popular culture while normalizing concrete acts of gun violence that kill 93 Americans every day. Traumatic events such as the termination of DACA or the refusal on the part of the government to quickly and effectively respond to the hardships experienced by the people of Puerto Rico no longer appear to represent an ethical dilemma to those in power. Instead, they represent the natural consequences of rendering whole populations disposable.

What is distinctive about the politics of disposability — especially when coupled with the transformation of governance into a wholesale legitimation of violence and cruelty under Trump — is that it has both expanded a culture of extreme violence and has become a defining feature of American life. The state increasingly chooses violence as a primary mode of engagement. Such choices imprison people rather than educate them, and legitimate the militarizing of every major public institutions from schools to airports. The carceral state now provides the template for interacting with others in a society governed by persistent rituals of violence.

Democracy is becoming all the more irrelevant in the United States under the Trump administration, especially in light of what Robert Weissman, the president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, calls «a total corporate takeover of the US government on a scale we have never seen in American history.» Corporate governance and economic sovereignty have reached new heights, just as illiberal democracy has become a populist flashpoint in reconfiguring much of Europe and normalizing the rise of populist bigotry and state-sanctioned violence aimed at immigrants and refugees fleeing from war and poverty. Democratic values and civic culture are under attack by a class of political extremists who embrace without reservation the cynical instrumental reason of the market, while producing on a global level widespread mayhem, suffering and violence. How else to explain the fact that over 70 percent of Trump’s picks for top administration jobs have corporate ties or work for major corporations? Almost all of these people represent interests diametrically opposed to the agencies for whom they now lead and are against almost any notion of the public good.

Hence, under the Trump regime, we have witnessed a slew of rollbacks and deregulations that will result in an increase in pollution, endangering children, the elderly and others who might be exposed to hazardous toxins. The New York Times has reported that one EPA appointee, Nancy Beck, a former executive at the American Chemistry Council, has initiated changes to make it more difficult to track and regulate the chemical perflourooctanoic acid, which has been linked to «kidney cancer, birth defects, immune system disorders and other serious health problems.»

The sense of collective belonging that underpins the civic vigor of a democracy is being replaced by a lethal survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and a desperate need to promote the narrow interests of capital and racist exclusion, regardless of the cost. At the heart of this collective ethos is a war culture stoked by fear and anxiety, one that feeds on dehumanization, condemns the so-called «losers,» and revels in violence as a source of pleasure and retribution. The link between violence and authoritarianism increasingly finds expression not only in endless government and populist assaults on vulnerable groups, but also in a popular culture that turns representations of extreme violence into entertainment.

The US has become a society organized both for the production of violence and the creation of a culture brimming with fear, paranoia and a social atomization. Under such circumstances, the murderous aggression associated with authoritarian states becomes more common in the United States and is mirrored in the everyday actions of citizens. If the government’s responses to crises that enveloped DACA and Puerto Rico point to a culture of state-sanctioned violence and cruelty, the mass shooting in Las Vegas represents the endpoint of a culture newly aligned with the rise of authoritarianism. The shooting in Las Vegas does more than point to a record-setting death toll for vigilante violence; it also provides a signpost about a terrifying new political and cultural horizon in the relationship between violence and everyday life. All of these incidents must be understood as a surface manifestation of a much larger set of issues endemic to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States.

These three indices of violence offer pointed and alarming examples of how inequality, systemic exclusion and a culture of cruelty define American society, even, and especially, as they destroy it. Each offers a snapshot of how war culture and violence merge. As part of a broader category indicting the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, they make visible the pervasiveness of violence as an organizing principle of American life. While it is easy to condemn the violence at work in each of these specific examples, it is crucial to address the larger economic, political and structural forces that create these conditions.

There is an urgent need for a broader awareness of the scope, range and effects of violence in the US, as well as the relationship between politics and disposability. Only then will the US be able to address the need for a radical restructuring of its politics, economics and institutions. Violence in the US has to be understood as part of a crisis of a politics and culture defined by meaninglessness, helplessness, neglect and disposability. Resistance to such violence, then, should produce widespread thoughtful, informed and collective action over the fate of democracy itself. This suggests the need for a shared vision of economic, racial and gender justice — one that offers the promise of a new understanding of politics and the need for creating a powerful coalition among existing social movements, youth groups, workers, intellectuals, teachers and other progressives. This is especially true under the Trump administration, since politics and democracy are now defined by a threshold of dysfunction that points not only to their demise, but to the ascendancy of American-style authoritarianism.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42450-disposability-in-the-age-of-disasters-from-dreamers-and-puerto-rico-to-violence-in-las-vegas

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France ponders phone ban in schools

Noticias

Europa/Francia/AFP

Reseña: El ministro francés de Educación, Jean-Michel Blanquer, ha iniciado un debate público sobre la prohibición de los teléfonos en las escuelas, mientras busca implementar una promesa de campaña del presidente Emmanuel Macron. En una entrevista con la revista Express, el ministro sugirió que se pida a los alumnos que depositen sus teléfonos en cajas seguras cuando lleguen a la escuela o para las clases. «En nuestras reuniones del gabinete, dejamos caer nuestros teléfonos en los armarios antes de sentarnos juntos, me parece que esto debería ser posible para cualquier grupo humano, incluyendo clases», dijo en la entrevista publicada el martes. Macron, un centrista de 39 años, prohibió los teléfonos móviles de todas las escuelas primarias y secundarias en su manifiesto antes de su victoria electoral en mayo. Expertos y sindicatos han señalado que el uso de teléfonos móviles en clase ya está prohibido en Francia, a pesar de que la investigación muestra que muchos alumnos confiesan haber roto las reglas. Algunos maestros ven los teléfonos como una fuente de distracción e indisciplina que pueden ser utilizados para el acoso cibernético en la escuela, mientras que otros creen que pueden ser aprovechados para fines educativos bajo estricto control. Uno de los mayores grupos que representan a los padres de los escolares franceses, conocido como Peep, dijo que era escéptico que una prohibición pudiera ser implementada. «No creemos que sea posible en este momento», dijo el miércoles el director de Peep, Gerard Pommier. «Imagínense una escuela secundaria con 600 alumnos, ¿pondrán todos sus teléfonos en una caja, cómo los guardarán y los devolverán al final?».

In an interview with Express magazine, the minister suggested that pupils might be asked to deposit their phones in secure boxes when arriving at school or for classes.

«At our cabinet meetings, we drop our phones in lockers before sitting down together. It seems to me that this should be possible for any human group, including classes,» he said in the interview published Tuesday.

Macron, a 39-year-old centrist, put banishing mobile phones from all primary and secondary schools in his manifesto ahead of his election victory in May.

Experts and trade unions have pointed out that using mobile phones in class is already outlawed in France, even though research shows that many pupils confess to having broken the rules.

Some teachers view phones as a source of a distraction and indiscipline which can be used for cyberbullying at school, while others believe they can be harnessed for educational purposes — under strict control.

One of the biggest groups representing parents of French school children, known as Peep, said it was sceptical that a ban could be implemented.

«We don’t think it’s possible at the moment,» the head of Peep, Gerard Pommier, told reporters on Wednesday.

«Imagine a secondary school with 600 pupils. Are they going to put all their phones in a box? How do you store them? And give them back at the end?»

Fuente: https://www.yahoo.com/news/france-ponders-phone-ban-schools-134643833.html

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EEUU: Illinois budget gives temporary fix for public universities

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EEUU/ July 18, 2017/Source: http://www.heraldonline.com

A new Illinois budget will give public universities funding for the 2017-18 school year.

This is the first time in two years that the state’s 12 public universities will receive funding, the Chicago Tribune (http://trib.in/2v60l95 ) reported.

In 2015, universities received more than $1.2 billion from the state’s spending plan. But the budget impasse prompted campus shutdowns, layoffs and program cuts.

The Illinois Board of Higher Education said the new budget will provide universities with about $1.1 billion for the 2017-18 academic year, a 10 percent decline from 2015.

University leaders caution that while it’s a relief to have one year’s funding, the budget doesn’t fully resolve the schools’ financial issues.

«You don’t get one year’s funding and have people say, ‘Oh, Illinois is totally fixed now,’ » said Rachel Lindsey, interim president of Chicago State University.»I don’t think it would be in our best interest to think of ourselves as out of the woods just yet.»

Universities went almost an entire year without funding from the state for the 2015-16 year.

Since then, schools such as the University of Illinois that’s in debt for $467 million in its operations are now trying to recover.

«We are still advocating for the restoration for the (fiscal year) 2016 budget,» UI President Tim Killeen said. «Obviously the chances of that happening are diminishing over time.»

For Southern Illinois University in Carbondale finances became so dire that school’s administration lent the campus funds from its Edwardsville site to keep it running.

President Randy Dunn said intra-system borrowing is no longer needed but Carbondale needs to continue with its plan to cut $19 million, which officials said includes eliminating dozens of staff and faculty. Despite receiving funds for the 2017-18 school year from the state, Carbondale is still in $37.8 million debt for 2017.

Source:
Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/news/business/article161768078.html#storylink=cpy
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A new American revolution: Can we find the language — and build a movement — to break out of our nation’s culture of cruelty?

Henry Giroux

By: Henry Giroux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:

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

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Thinking Dangerously: The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times

Henry Giroux

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

What happens to democracy when the president of the United States labels critical media outlets as «enemies of the people» and disparages the search for truth with the blanket term «fake news»? What happens to democracy when individuals and groups are demonized on the basis of their religion? What happens to a society when critical thinking becomes an object of contempt? What happens to a social order ruled by an economics of contempt that blames the poor for their condition and subjects them to a culture of shaming? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and becomes indifferent to the use of language deployed in the service of a panicked rage — language that stokes anger but ignores issues that matter? What happens to a social order when it treats millions of undocumented immigrants as disposable, potential terrorists and «criminals»? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of its society are violence and ignorance?

What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal and as a reality.

In the present moment, it becomes particularly important for educators and concerned citizens all over the world to protect and enlarge the critical formative educational cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible. Alternative newspapers, progressive media, screen culture, online media and other educational sites and spaces in which public pedagogies are produced constitute the political and educational elements of a vibrant, critical formative culture within a wide range of public spheres. Critical formative cultures are crucial in producing the knowledge, values, social relations and visions that help nurture and sustain the possibility to think critically, engage in political dissent, organize collectively and inhabit public spaces in which alternative and critical theories can be developed.

At the core of thinking dangerously is the recognition that education is central to politics and that a democracy cannot survive without informed citizens.

Authoritarian societies do more than censor; they punish those who engage in what might be called dangerous thinking. At the core of thinking dangerously is the recognition that education is central to politics and that a democracy cannot survive without informed citizens. Critical and dangerous thinking is the precondition for nurturing the ethical imagination that enables engaged citizens to learn how to govern rather than be governed. Thinking with courage is fundamental to a notion of civic literacy that views knowledge as central to the pursuit of economic and political justice. Such thinking incorporates a set of values that enables a polity to deal critically with the use and effects of power, particularly through a developed sense of compassion for others and the planet. Thinking dangerously is the basis for a formative and educational culture of questioning that takes seriously how imagination is key to the practice of freedom. Thinking dangerously is not only the cornerstone of critical agency and engaged citizenship, it’s also the foundation for a working democracy.

Education and the Struggle for Liberation

Any viable attempt at developing a democratic politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy as central to politics itself. Education is also vital to the creation of individuals capable of becoming critical social agents willing to struggle against injustices and develop the institutions that are crucial to the functioning of a substantive democracy. One way to begin such a project is to address the meaning and role of higher education (and education in general) as part of the broader struggle for freedom.

The reach of education extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses, such as the mainstream media, alternative screen cultures and the expanding digital screen culture. Far more than a teaching method, education is a moral and political practice actively involved not only in the production of knowledge, skills and values but also in the construction of identities, modes of identification, and forms of individual and social agency. Accordingly, education is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives.

Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using the educational system to reproduce a culture of privatization, deregulation and commercialization while waging an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, higher education, unions, reproductive rights and civil liberties. All the while, these forces are undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.

This grim reality was described by Axel Honneth in his book Pathologies of Reason as a «failed sociality» characteristic of an increasing number of societies in which democracy is waning — a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice: a practice that can act directly upon the conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary.

As Chandra Mohanty points out:

At its most ambitious, [critical] pedagogy is an attempt to get students to think critically about their place in relation to the knowledge they gain and to transform their world view fundamentally by taking the politics of knowledge seriously. It is a pedagogy that attempts to link knowledge, social responsibility, and collective struggle. And it does so by emphasizing the risks that education involves, the struggles for institutional change, and the strategies for challenging forms of domination and by creating more equitable and just public spheres within and outside of educational institutions.

At its core, critical pedagogy raises issues of how education might be understood as a moral and political practice, and not simply a technical one. At stake here is the issue of meaning and purpose in which educators put into place the pedagogical conditions for creating a public sphere of citizens who are able to exercise power over their own lives. Critical pedagogy is organized around the struggle over agency, values and social relations within diverse contexts, resources and histories. Its aim is producing students who can think critically, be considerate of others, take risks, think dangerously and imagine a future that extends and deepens what it means to be an engaged citizen capable of living in a substantive democracy.

What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? This is a particularly important issue at a time when higher education is being defunded and students are being punished with huge tuition hikes and financial debts, while being subjected to a pedagogy of repression that has taken hold under the banner of reactionary and oppressive educational reforms pushed by right-wing billionaires and hedge fund managers. Addressing education as a democratic public sphere is also crucial as a theoretical tool and political resource for fighting against neoliberal modes of governance that have reduced faculty all over the United States to adjuncts and part-time workers with few or no benefits. These workers bear the brunt of a labor process that is as exploitative as it is disempowering.

Educators Need a New Language for the Current Era

Given the crisis of education, agency and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts of a world in which an unprecedented convergence of resources — financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological — is increasingly used to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be self-reflective and directive without being dogmatic, and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about what Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham describe as «that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.» At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied.

In part, this suggests developing educational practices that not only inspire and energize people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies under the global tyranny of casino capitalism. Such a vision demands that we imagine a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and the elevation of war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes and the bearer of an audit culture (a culture characterized by a call to be objective and an unbridled emphasis on empiricism). Audit cultures support conservative educational policies driven by market values and an unreflective immersion in the crude rationality of a data-obsessed market-driven society; as such, they are at odds with any viable notion of a democratically inspired education and critical pedagogy. In addition, viewing public and higher education as democratic public spheres necessitates rejecting the notion that they should be reduced to sites for training students for the workforce — a reductive vision now being imposed on public education by high-tech companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Google, which want to encourage what they call the entrepreneurial mission of education, which is code for collapsing education into training.

Education can all too easily become a form of symbolic and intellectual violence that assaults rather than educates. Examples of such violence can be seen in the forms of an audit culture and empirically-driven teaching that dominates higher education. These educational projects amount to pedagogies of repression and serve primarily to numb the mind and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. These are pedagogies that are largely disciplinary and have little regard for contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding what it means for students to be critically engaged agents. Of course, the ongoing corporatization of the university is driven by modes of assessment that often undercut teacher autonomy and treat knowledge as a commodity and students as customers, imposing brutalizing structures of governance on higher education. Under such circumstances, education defaults on its democratic obligations and becomes a tool of control and powerlessness, thereby deadening the imagination.

The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of an emerging authoritarianism worldwide is to create those public spaces for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them not only to be well-informed and knowledgeable across a number of traditions and disciplines, but also to be able to invest in the reality of a substantive democracy. In this context, students learn to recognize anti-democratic forms of power. They also learn to fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities.

Education in this sense speaks to the recognition that any pedagogical practice presupposes some notion of the future, prioritizes some forms of identification over others and values some modes of knowing over others. (Think about how business schools are held in high esteem while schools of education are often disparaged.) Moreover, such an education does not offer guarantees. Instead, it recognizes that its own policies, ideology and values are grounded in particular modes of authority, values and ethical principles that must be constantly debated for the ways in which they both open up and close down democratic relations, values and identities.

The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education and pedagogy do not exist outside of ideology, values and politics. Ethics, when it comes to education, demand an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a «politics of possibility» through a continual critical engagement with texts, images, events and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into pedagogical practices both within and outside of the classroom. Education is never innocent: It is always implicated in relations of power and specific visions of the present and future. This suggests the need for educators to rethink the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to each educational encounter. It also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and politically accountable and self-reflective for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Education in this sense is not an antidote to politics, nor is it a nostalgic yearning for a better time or for some «inconceivably alternative future.» Instead, it is what Terry Eagleton describes in his book The Idea of Culture as an «attempt to find a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the present which are potentially able to transform it.»

One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, faculty and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people to be critical agents and engaged citizens.

Reviving the Social Imagination

Educators, students and others concerned about the fate of higher education need to mount a spirited attack against the managerial takeover of the university that began in the late 1970s with the emergence of a market-driven ideology, what can be called neoliberalism, which argues that market principles should govern not just the economy but all of social life, including education. Central to such a recognition is the need to struggle against a university system developed around the reduction in faculty and student power, the replacement of a culture of cooperation and collegiality with a shark-like culture of competition, the rise of an audit culture that has produced a very limited notion of regulation and evaluation, and the narrow and harmful view that students are clients and colleges «should operate more like private firms than public institutions, with an onus on income generation,» as Australian scholar Richard Hill puts it in his Arena article «Against the Neoliberal University.» In addition, there is an urgent need for guarantees of full-time employment and protections for faculty while viewing knowledge as a public asset and the university as a public good.

In any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement. Educators need to produce a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a public good.

With these issues in mind, let me conclude by pointing to six further considerations for change.

First, there is a need for what can be called a revival of the social imagination and the defense of the public good, especially in regard to higher education, in order to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic impulses. This revival would be part of a larger project to, as Stanley Aronowitz writes in Tikkun, «reinvent democracy in the wake of the evidence that, at the national level, there is no democracy — if by ‘democracy’ we mean effective popular participation in the crucial decisions affecting the community.» One step in this direction would be for young people, intellectuals, scholars and others to go on the offensive against what Gene R. Nichol has described as the conservative-led campaign «to end higher education’s democratizing influence on the nation.» Higher education should be harnessed neither to the demands of the warfare state nor to the instrumental needs of corporations. Clearly, in any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement. Educators need to produce a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a public good and the classroom as a site of engaged inquiry and critical thinking, a site that makes a claim on the radical imagination and builds a sense of civic courage. At the same time, the discourse on defining higher education as a democratic public sphere would provide the platform for moving on to the larger issue of developing a social movement in defense of public goods.

Second, I believe that educators need to consider defining pedagogy, if not education itself, as central to producing those democratic public spheres that foster an informed citizenry. Pedagogically, this points to modes of teaching and learning capable of enacting and sustaining a culture of questioning, and enabling the advancement of what Kristen Case calls «moments of classroom grace.» Moments of grace in this context are understood as moments that enable a classroom to become a place to think critically, ask troubling questions and take risks, even though that may mean transgressing established norms and bureaucratic procedures.

Pedagogies of classroom grace should provide the conditions for students and others to reflect critically on commonsense understandings of the world and begin to question their own sense of agency, relationships to others, and relationships to the larger world. This can be linked to broader pedagogical imperatives that ask why we have wars, massive inequality, and a surveillance state. There is also the issue of how everything has become commodified, along with the withering of a politics of translation that prevents the collapse of the public into the private. This is not merely a methodical consideration but also a moral and political practice because it presupposes the development of critically engaged students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom and democracy matter.

Such pedagogical practices are rich with possibilities for understanding the classroom as a space that ruptures, engages, unsettles and inspires. Education as democratic public space cannot exist under modes of governance dominated by a business model, especially one that subjects faculty to a Walmart model of labor relations designed «to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility,» as Noam Chomsky writes. In the US, over 70 percent of faculty occupy nontenured and part-time positions, many without benefits and with salaries so low that they qualify for food stamps. Faculty need to be given more security, full-time jobs, autonomy and the support they need to function as professionals. While many other countries do not emulate this model of faculty servility, it is part of a neoliberal legacy that is increasingly gaining traction across the globe.

Third, educators need to develop a comprehensive educational program that would include teaching students how to live in a world marked by multiple overlapping modes of literacy extending from print to visual culture and screen cultures. What is crucial to recognize here is that it is not enough to teach students to be able to interrogate critically screen culture and other forms of aural, video and visual representation. They must also learn how to be cultural producers. This suggests developing alternative public spheres, such as online journals, television shows, newspapers, zines and any other platform in which different modes of representation can be developed. Such tasks can be done by mobilizing the technological resources and platforms that many students are already familiar with.

Teaching cultural production also means working with one foot in existing cultural apparatuses in order to promote unorthodox ideas and views that would challenge the affective and ideological spaces produced by the financial elite who control the commanding institutions of public pedagogy in North America. What is often lost by many educators and progressives is that popular culture is a powerful form of education for many young people, and yet it is rarely addressed as a serious source of knowledge. As Stanley Aronowitz has observed in his book Against Schooling, «theorists and researchers need to link their knowledge of popular culture, and culture in the anthropological sense — that is, everyday life, with the politics of education.»

Fourth, academics, students, community activists, young people and parents must engage in an ongoing struggle for the right of students to be given a free formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values, and for young people to have a say in the shaping of their education and what it means to expand and deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. College and university education, if taken seriously as a public good, should be virtually tuition-free, at least for the poor, and utterly affordable for everyone else. This is not a radical demand; countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland and Brazil already provide this service for young people.

Accessibility to higher education is especially crucial at a time when young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. They often lack jobs, a decent education, hope and any semblance of a future better than the one their parents inherited. Facing what Richard Sennett calls the «specter of uselessness,» they are a reminder of how finance capital has abandoned any viable vision of the future, including one that would support future generations. This is a mode of politics and capital that eats its own children and throws their fate to the vagaries of the market. The ecology of finance capital only believes in short-term investments because they provide quick returns. Under such circumstances, young people who need long-term investments are considered a liability.

Fifth, educators need to enable students to develop a comprehensive vision of society that extends beyond single issues. It is only through an understanding of the wider relations and connections of power that young people and others can overcome uninformed practice, isolated struggles, and modes of singular politics that become insular and self-sabotaging. In short, moving beyond a single-issue orientation means developing modes of analyses that connect the dots historically and relationally. It also means developing a more comprehensive vision of politics and change. The key here is the notion of translation — that is, the need to translate private troubles into broader public issues.

Sixth, another serious challenge facing educators who believe that colleges and universities should function as democratic public spheres is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility, or what I have called a discourse of educated hope. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Critique is crucial to break the hold of commonsense assumptions that legitimate a wide range of injustices. But critique is not enough. Without a simultaneous discourse of hope, it can lead to an immobilizing despair or, even worse, a pernicious cynicism. Reason, justice and change cannot blossom without hope. Hope speaks to imagining a life beyond capitalism, and combines a realistic sense of limits with a lofty vision of demanding the impossible. 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. I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of hope, but to a notion of informed hope that faces the concrete obstacles and realities of domination but continues the ongoing task of what Andrew Benjamin describes as «holding the present open and thus unfinished.»

The discourse of possibility looks for productive solutions and is crucial in defending those public spheres in which civic values, public scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic courage. Democracy should encourage, even require, a way of thinking critically about education — one that connects equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.

History is open. It is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

My friend, the late Howard Zinn, rightly insisted that hope is the willingness «to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.» To add to this eloquent plea, I would say that history is open. It is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if as educators we want to imagine and fight for alternative futures and horizons of possibility.

HENRY A. GIROUX

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016) and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017). He is also a contributing editor to a number of journals, including Tikkun, the Journal of Wild Culture and Ragazine. Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41058-thinking-dangerously-the-role-of-higher-education-in-authoritarian-times

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