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| The 2017 White Supramicist Torch March in Charlottesville, Virginia |
~ History Holds the Antidote to Trump’s Fascist Politics ~
JUL 16, 2019 OPINION | TD ORIGINALS
Politics
History Holds the Antidote to Trump’s Fascist Politics by Henry Giroux
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” —James Baldwin
America is in a state of crisis that touches every aspect of public life, extending from a crisis of economics produced by massive inequality to a crisis of ideas, agency, memory and politics, aided and abetted by controlling apparatuses that induce ubiquitous forms of historical amnesia. We are in a new historical period, one in which everything is transformed and corrupted by the neoliberal tools of financialization, deregulation and austerity. Within this new nexus of power, anti-democratic principles have become normalized, weakening society’s democratic defenses. Egregious degrees of exploitation and unchecked militarism are now matched by a politics of disposability and terminal exclusion, in which human beings are viewed as the embodiment of human waste, reinforced, if not propelled, by an ethos of white nationalism and white supremacy. As historian Paul Gilroy has noted, the motion of history and the production of politics are now being read “through racialized categories.”
Fascist principles, or one version of what journalist Natasha Lennard calls microfascism, now operate at so many levels of everyday society that it is difficult to recognize them, especially as they have the imprimatur of the president of the United States. Fascist practices and desires work through diverse social media platforms and mainstream and right-wing cultural apparatuses in multiple ways. They largely function ideologically and politically to objectify people, promote spectacles of violence, endorse consumerism as the only viable way of life, legitimate a murderous nationalism, construct psychological borders in people’s minds in order to privilege certain groups, promote mindlessness through the ubiquity of celebrity culture, normalize the discourse of hate in everyday exchanges, and produce endless “practices of authoritarianism and domination and exploitation that form us.” In the fog of social and historical amnesia, moral boundaries disappear, people become more accepting of extreme acts of cruelty and the propaganda machines that create alternative thoughts, and view any viable critique of power as fake news, all the while disconnecting toxic language and policies from their social costs. Writer Fintan O’Toole may be right in arguing that such actions constitute a trial run for fascism:
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
Under the reign of neoliberalism, the dark plague of fascism engulfs American society as the history of concentration camps disappear, the killing of intellectuals is forgotten and the terror of fascist violence evaporates in the spectacles of violence accompanied by anti-intellectual blabber and a rampant culture of forgetting. What must be remembered here is that we are not only moral and political subjects, but also historical subjects capable of both understanding and changing the world. And it is precisely this relationship between historical consciousness and political action that points to new possibilities for change. And while historical consciousness can be both informative and emancipatory, it can also lead to “malicious interpretations of the present,” as well as elements of history that are difficult to accept. At the same time, historical awareness can uncover dangerous memories and narratives of those whose voices have been drowned out by those who have the power to write history to serve their narrow and reactionary interests. It is precisely in the use of “critical” history to offer the resources to challenge the ideological, educational and militant tools deployed by emerging right-wing and fascist groups that their toxic use of history and the present can be challenged. In this instance, any radical social movement needs a historically informed notion of struggle that is solidly on the side of a strong anti-capitalist movement. Resistance is no longer an option, given that both the humanity and the life of the planet are at stake.
American society has turned lethal, as is evident in its assaults upon poor children, undocumented immigrants and those considered disposable by virtue of their race, ethnicity, religion and color. In an age when historical memory either disappears or is rewritten in the language of erasure and misrepresentation, too many people look away and become complicitous with diverse forms of fascism emerging across the globe. Regimes of fear destroy standards of truth, creating easy paths for warmongers, racists, misogynists and nativists to take advantage of a comatose public. Neoliberal fascism, a new social and political formation that combines the savage consequences of economic inequality and a politics of survival with the dictates of ultranationalism and white supremacy, took hold in the 1970s and has become a powerful engine of violence and cruelty, both in the United States and in an increasing number of other countries. Neoliberal fascism is the enemy of revisionist forms of history, because it disdains any resource that can be used to hold power accountable and translate past events into a form of moral witnessing in the present.
In its upgraded forms, any viable resistance to fascism needs new narratives, a new understanding of politics, power and resistance in order to counter violence and state terrorism while reviving historical memory as a forum for critically interrogating the unsettling and unspeakable, as well as a critical engagement with a culture of real, visceral and symbolic violence. Politics here takes on an ethical necessity and ambition. Most importantly, we need a politics in which education becomes central, a politics in which it is recognized that the populist moment in the service of neoliberal capitalism is, at its core, a crisis of identity, memory and agency, if not democracy itself. As capital is liberated from all constraints, historical memory and the institutions that support it wither, along with the democratic ideals of equality, popular sovereignty and the freedom from basic social needs. Scholar Nancy Fraser has argued that the upsurge of populism in the United States is partly fueled by a revolt against the political elites, the false promises of liberal democracy, and “blockages” caused by neoliberal modes of governance. She writes:
In the United States, those blockages include the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective system wide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony.
In this instance, populism emerges as a form of politics in which any gesture toward giving a real voice and power to people is substituted for the power of demagogues who claim to speak on their behalf. Right-wing populism begins as a revolt against a neoliberal winner-take-all society and is quickly appropriated by demagogues such as Donald Trump to address a mix of economic anxiety, existential uncertainty and the fear of undocumented immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Instead of learning from a past filled with genocidal wars waged in the name of difference, the emerging fascist tyrants have enshrined a form of unlearning that privileges moral comas and recounts endless narratives of hate that vilify immigrants, refugees and undocumented children as chosen enemies of the paragons of racial cleansing.
Something sinister and horrifying is happening to alleged liberal democracies all over the globe. Democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, the welfare state and public and higher education are under siege worldwide. Public media are underfunded, schools are privatized or modeled after prisons, the funds for social provisions disappear as military budgets balloon, and the legal system is increasingly positioned as an engine of racial discrimination and the default institution for criminalizing a range of behaviors. The echoes of a fascist past are with us once again, resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultranationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. Right-wing extremist parties have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through an apocalyptic populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by the dynamics of neoliberalism. Under such circumstances, the promises of a liberal democracy are receding as present-day reactionaries work to subvert language, values, civic courage, history and a critical consciousness. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, for instance, has pledged to rid his country’s educational system of all references to the work of radical educator Paulo Freire. In the United States, Trump accelerates his work on public and higher education by cutting budgets and appointing Betsy DeVos, a billionaire and sworn enemy of public education and advocate of school choice and charter schools, as the secretary of education. In addition, education in many parts of the globe has increasingly become a tool of domination, as market fundamentalists and reactionary politicians imprison intellectuals, close down schools, undercut progressive curriculum, attack teacher unions and impose pedagogies of repression, often killing the imaginative and creative capacities of students while turning public schools into a conveyer belt that propels students marginalized by class and color into a life of poverty or worse—the criminal justice system and prison.
We live at a time in which two worlds are colliding. First, there is the world of neoliberal globalization, which is in crisis mode because it can no longer deliver on its promises or contain its own ruthlessness. Hence, there is a worldwide revolt against global capitalism that operates mostly to fuel forms of right-wing populism and a systemic war on democracy itself. Power is now enamored with amassing profits and capital and is increasingly addicted to a politics of social sorting and racial cleansing. Second, there is a genuine series of democratic revolts and struggles, which is growing, especially among young people, and is rewriting and revising an updated script for democratic socialism, a script that can both challenge the neoliberal world of finance capital while rethinking the meaning of politics, if not democracy itself.
What is not in doubt is that all across the world, the global thrust toward democratization that emerged after World War II is giving way, once again, to tyrannies. As alarming as the signs may be, the public cannot ignore or allow a fascist politics to take root in the United States. Such a threat has been exacerbated as a mode of consciousness and at a time when academic discipline has lost favor with the American public. One consequence is that historical consciousness has been replaced by a form of social and historical amnesia. No longer a required course in most institutions of higher education, history in its various registers and genealogies has declined into near oblivion at a time when forms of public knowledge and civic literacy have accelerated exponentially. Moreover, “fewer than 2 percent of male undergraduates and fewer than 1 percent of females major in history, compared with more than 6 percent and nearly 5 percent, respectively in the late 1960s.” Some colleges have threated to abolish their history departments. Ironically, this is happening at a time when an increasing number of Americans are ignorant of the past, making them vulnerable to the simplistic appeals of demagogues. Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice.
James Baldwin was right in issuing his stern warning in “No Name in the Street”: “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” As is well known, Trump’s real and pretended ignorance lights up the Twitter landscape almost every day. He denies climate change, along with the dangers that it poses to humanity; he shuts down the government because he cannot get the funds for his border wall—a grotesque symbol of nativism; and he mangles history with his ignorance of the past. For instance, he once implied in a speech that Frederick Douglass is still alive and is only now getting the recognition he deserved. Trump’s ignorance is legendary, if not shameful, but what he models is dangerous, because presidential historical ignorance suggests that the problems suffering people face, they face alone. That is, in their social atomization and isolation, they are unaware that history’s great liberating force is that “having a sense of history is knowing that whatever happens to us or to our world we are not alone. It has happened in some form before.”
This lethal form of ignorance now fuses with a reckless use of state power that holds both human life and the planet hostage. Historian David Bright claims that Trump’s “ignorance of history, of policy, of political processes [and] the Constitution,” rather than his authoritarianism, is “the greatest threat to our democracy.” According to Bright, Trump’s grasp of history operates at a level of understanding one would expect from a fifth-grader or younger. However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of ignorance and the shrinking of historical horizons. Trump not only distorts history, but also makes it, and in doing so suggests a contempt for knowledge, which he manipulates for political purposes. Ignorance in high places is a boon to history deniers and legitimates the authoritarian assumption that history is only made by strong men. What we are witnessing is the corruption of politics, coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and a “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.” How else to explain the current separation of children from their parents at the southern border in the United States, and the creation of internment centers that have been exposed as an assault on civil rights and human dignity?
It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for making education central to politics. If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to develop a collective language that rewrites the traditional notion of politics. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions for a collective international resistance against Trump’s efforts to forge what Noam Chomsky calls a global reactionary alliance under the U.S. aegis, including the “illiberal democracies” of Eastern Europe and Brazil’s grotesque Bolsonaro. Such a movement is important in order to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that are descending upon the United States, Brazil and a number of other countries in Europe plagued by the rise of neo-Nazi parties. In an age when the only obligation of citizenship is shopping and a culture of compassion has given way to a culture of cruelty, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without informed and critically engaged citizens.
Education, both in its symbolic and institutional forms, has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of fascist cultures, mythic historical narratives and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, as fascists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultranationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, particularly in the United States, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, hatred and the suppression of dissent. Oppression is no longer defined simply through economic structures. A neoliberal culture of precarity and uncertainty has resulted in job insecurity, declining wages, the slashing of retirement funds and the weakening of the welfare state, all of which are largely addressed through right-wing cultural apparatuses that frame such conditions pedagogically as part of a broader politics of fear, hatred and bigotry. Education, particularly in the social media, operates with great influence as a sounding board for right-wing nihilism and white supremacy groups and has become a powerful portal for circulating fascist ideas, legitimating hate-fueled violence and promoting ugly racist rhetoric that undermines democratic ideals. Yet education is not simply about domination, and it reaches far beyond the classroom, and while often imperceptible, is crucial in using the new media to challenge and resist the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.
Against a numbing indifference, despair and withdrawal into the private orbits of the isolated self, there is a need to create those formative cultures that are humanizing, foster the capacity to hear others, sustain complex thoughts and engage in solving social problems. We have no other choice if we are to resist the increasing destabilization of democratic institutions, the assault on reason, the collapse of the distinction between fact and fiction, and the taste for brutality that now spreads across a number of countries, including the U.S., like a plague. The pedagogical lesson here is that fascism begins with hateful words and the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals and the emergence of the carceral state and the horrors of detention jails and camps. As historian Jon Nixon suggests, pedagogy as a form of critical education “provides us with a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion: a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing, to understand what it means to ‘assume responsibility.'”
This is even more reason for educators and others to address important social issues and defend public and higher education as democratic public spheres. It is all the more reason to defend the teaching of history as a protected space within which to teach students to think against the grain, hold power accountable, embrace a sense of citizenship and civic courage, and to “learn about the world beyond the confines of their home towns, and to try to understand where they might fit in.” We live in a world in which everything is now privatized, transformed into what authors Michael Silk and David Andrews call “spectacular spaces of consumption” and subject to the vicissitudes of the military-security state, all the while accompanied by the rise of a fascist politics rooted in the mobilizing passions of ultranationalism, racism and an apocalyptic populism. One consequence is the emergence of what the late historian Tony Judt called an “eviscerated society”—“one that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found” in any viable democracy. This grim reality has been called a “failed sociality”—a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and the promises of a radical democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals.
Trump’s presidency may only be symptomatic of the long decline of liberal democracy in the United States into a corrupt political and economic oligarchy, but its presence signifies one of the gravest challenges, if not dangers, the country has faced in over a century. A formative culture of lies, ignorance, corruption and violence is now fueled by a range of orthodoxies shaping American life, including social conservatism, market fundamentalism, apocalyptic nationalism, religious extremism and unchecked racism—all of which occupy the centers of power at the highest levels of government. Historical memory and moral witnessing have given way to a bankrupt nostalgia that celebrates the most regressive moments in U.S. history.
Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the heart of a U.S. social order that has turned lethal, evident in the militarizing of schools and public spaces and the centrality of a war culture as an organized mode of governance. This is a dystopian social order marked by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain. What we are witnessing is an abandonment of democratic institutions, however flawed, coupled with a full-scale attack on dissent, thoughtful reasoning and the social imagination. Trump has degraded the office of the president and has elevated the ethos of political corruption, hypermasculinity and lying to a level that leaves many people numb and exhausted. He has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible. Under such circumstances, the United States is moving into the dark shadows of a present that bears a horrifying resemblance to an earlier period of fascism with its language of racial purification, hatred of dissent, systemic violence, intolerance and the Trump’s administration’s “glorification of aggressive and violent solutions to complex social problems.”
The history of fascism offers an early warning system and teaches us that language, which operates in the service of violence, desperation and the troubled landscapes of hatred, carries the potential for resurrecting the darkest moments of history. It erodes our humanity and makes many people numb and silent under the glare of ideologies and practices that mimic and legitimate hideous and atrocious acts. This is a language that eliminates the space of plurality, glorifies walls and borders, hates differences that do not mimic a white public sphere, and makes vulnerable populations—even poor young children—superfluous as human beings. Trump’s language, like that which characterized older fascist regimes, mutilates contemporary politics, disdains empathy and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power. His toxic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, a supercharged masculinity, the rise of public anti-intellectuals and a resurgent white supremacy. However, this shift toward a fascist politics cannot be laid exclusively at Trump’s feet. The language of putrid values of a nascent fascism have been brewing in the United States for some time. It is a language that is comfortable viewing the world as a combat zone, a world that exists to be plundered, and one that views those deemed different because of their class, race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation as a threat to be feared, if not eliminated. When Trump uses a toxic rhetoric that portrays undocumented immigrants as criminals, rapists and drug dealers, he is doing more than using ugly epithets—he is also materializing such discourse into policies that rip children from their mother’s arms, put the lives of immigrants at risk and impose cruel and inhumane practices that assault the body, mind and human dignity.
While it is fruitless to believe that there is perfect mirror for measuring a resurgent fascism, it is crucial to recognize how the crystalized elements of an updated fascism have emerged in new forms in the shape of a U.S.-style authoritarianism. Yet, too many intellectuals, historians and media pundits deny the presence of fascist politics in the United States. In part, this may be because history is written by the winners, but also because a form of serious historical analysis operates from a weak position in a culture of instant gratification and immediacy propelled by the need for instant pleasure. In the age of selfies and tweet storms, time is reduced to short bursts of attention as the slowing down of time necessary for focused analytical thought and imaginative contemplation withers. Author Leon Wieseltier is on target in arguing that we live in an era in which “words cannot wait for thoughts [and] patience is a … liability.” In the current age of instant gratification, history has become a burden, treated like a discarded relic that no longer deserves respect. The past is now either too dangerous to contemplate, relegated to the abyss of willful ignorance, or rewritten and appropriated in the interests of the anti-democratic forces of ultranationalism, nativism and social Darwinism, as is taking place in countries such as Poland and Hungary. However frightening and seemingly impossible in a liberal democracy, neither history nor the obvious signs of a fascist politics can be easily dismissed, especially with the claim that demagogues such as Trump have not created concentration camps or engineered plans for genocidal acts. Echoes of a fascist past are strikingly evident in degrading and inhumane conditions in the migrant detention sites, many of which hold children as young as 5 months old.
According to the Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the conditions in the detention centers holding immigrants and refugees were “undignified” and “alarming.” Her accusations were confirmed by a Department of Homeland Security report on detention centers on the southern border:
[P]oor conditions include overcrowding, flu outbreaks, and lack of clean clothing. The report also detailed horrific incidents—such as overuse of solitary confinement, and reports of nooses in detainee cells—that signal violations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention standards and infringements on detainee rights.
It gets worse, especially in regard to the caging of children in prisonlike detention centers. The New York Times has reported that many of the children are suffering from hunger, are housed in cramped cinder-block cells with only one toilet, are sleeping on cement floors and are subject to a number of illnesses, including scabies, shingles and chicken pox. According to the Times, lawyers who visited the Clint, Texas, detention center described seeing:
… children in filthy clothes, often lacking diapers and with no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste, or soap. … Warren Binford, director of the clinical law program in Willamette University in Oregon, said that in all her years of visiting detention and shelter facilities, she had never encountered conditions so bad—351 children crammed into what she described as [a] prisonlike environment.
Fascist politics, in its more recent, updated capitalist formation, has a long history of covering up its crimes against humanity, especially the most egregious acts of genocide. Trump and his top immigration officials may not be perpetuating overt acts of genocide with his nativist policies and acts of unimaginable cruelty in incarcerating immigrants, especially children. Nevertheless, he is following a fascist script in denying “reports that migrant children were being held in horrific conditions in federal detention facilities,” even as the accounts of disease, hunger and overcrowding have multiplied in recent days. Moreover, like his counterparts in NATO and the EU, there is silence about who creates these refugee populations across the globe. Lying in the service of egregious forms of evil has a long history among demagogues. What is different with Trump is that he lies even in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. In this instance, Trump’s lies and attempted cover-ups function as a form of depoliticization. That is, lying performs as a tool of power, promoting forms of manufactured ignorance in which it becomes difficult for the public to separate fact from fiction in order to recognize the violence and injustices imposed by the Trump administration on those populations it considers disposable. Given Trump’s embrace of an upgraded version of Hannah Arendt’s notions of thoughtlessness, cruelty and the banality of evil as central elements of totalitarianism, it is difficult to argue that fascism is a relic of the past.
Simply because the Trump administration may not be replicating in an exact fashion the sordid practices of violence and genocide reminiscent of fascist states in the 1930s does not mean that it has no resemblance to such a history. In fact, the legacy of fascism becomes even more important at a time when the language, policies and authoritarian ideology of the Trump administration echo a dangerous warning from history that cannot be ignored. Fascism does not disappear because it does not surface as a mirror image of the past. Fascism is not static, and the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms. Fascism in its contemporary forms is a particular response to a range of capitalist crises that include the rise of massive inequality, a culture of fear, precarious employment, ruthless austerity policies that destroy the social contract, the rise of the carceral state and the erosion of white privilege, among other issues.
Fascism is also obvious by its hatred of the public good, by what author Toni Morrison calls its “desire to purge democracy of all of its ideals,” and by its willingness to privilege power over human needs and render racial difference as an organizing principle of society. The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, the horrors of the past should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice and collective courage in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy. What must be remembered in this time of tyranny is that historical consciousness is a crucial tool for unraveling the layers of meaning, suffering, the search for community, the overcoming of despair and the momentum of dramatic change, however unpleasant this may be at times. No act of the past can be deemed too horrible or hideous to contemplate if we are going to enlarge scope of our imaginations and the reach of social justice, both of which might prevent us from looking away, indifferent to the suffering around us. This suggests the need for rethinking the importance of historical memory, civic literacy and critical pedagogy as central to an informed and critical mode of agency. Rather than dismiss the notion that the organizing principles and fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us, a more appropriate response to Trump’s rise to power is to raise questions about what elements of his government signal the emergence of a fascism suited to a contemporary and distinctively updated political, economic and cultural landscape.
