nightmare of neoliberal fascism
INTERVIEW OF HENRY A. GIROUX
by
MARK KARLIN
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux
currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at
McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
He is the author of more than 50 books including The Educational
Deficit and the War on Youth and Zombie Politics and
Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. Many of his essays,
including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear on his website
at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing. He was recently named one of
the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate
on education. His most recent book is entitled: Amercican
Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fasicm.
Mark
Karlin founded BuzzFlash.com
in May 2000. He wrote daily commentaries for Truthout
for eight years and was a senior member of the staff.
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YOUR
COMMENTSMARK KARLIN: Why is it important to have an
historical understanding of fascism to shed light on the age
of Trump?
HENRY
A. GIROUX: The conditions leading to fascism do not exist in
some ethereal space outside of history. Nor are they fixed in
a static moment in the past. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, the
protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing
into new forms. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political
and moral witnessing necessary to successfully counter growing
fascism in the United States today. As Richard Evans, the renowned
historian of modern Germany, observes, the Trump administration
may not replicate all the features of Germany and Italy in the
1930s, but the legacy of fascism is important because it echoes
a “warning from history” that cannot be dismissed.
What historians such as Evans, Timothy Snyder and others have
suggested is that it is crucial to examine history in order
to understand what tyranny and authoritarianism look like and
how we can use the past to fight against such forces. While
the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of
Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, passions
and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag
and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism and militarism,
are at the center of power in the Trump administration. When
selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness
and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression,
exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms
of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective,
their understanding of how power works and the ways in which
the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices.
Fascism is not unvarying and expresses its most fundamental
attacks on democracy in different arrangements, which is all
the more reason for people to develop what Timothy Snyder calls
“an active relationship to history” in order to
prevent a normalizing relationship to authoritarian regimes
such as the United States under Trump’s rule. Surely,
a critical understanding of history would go a long way in enabling
the American people to recognize the elements of a fascist discourse
in much of Trump’s racist tweets, speeches and policies.
History
unexpurgated provides us with a vital resource that helps inform
the ethical ground for resistance, an antidote to Trump’s
politics of disinformation, division, diversion and fragmentation.
Moreover, history reminds us that in the face of emerging forms
of authoritarianism, solidarity is essential. If there is one
thing that the important lessons of history in the work of writers
such as George Orwell have taught us, it is that we must refuse
to be complicit in the mockery of truth. This is especially
crucial in the current historical moment, given the way the
Trump administration — along with far-right media giants,
such as Infowars, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Fox News and Breitbart
News Network — work to aggressively propagate a vast disimagination
machine. With the death of historical memory comes the nightmare
we had thought was no longer possible to witness again. The
lessons of history are crucial because they can readily be put
to use in identifying present-day abuses of power and corruption.
History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic
institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories
and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for
any fascist and authoritarian system. This is particularly true
today, given the ideological features and legacies of fascism
that are deeply woven into Trump’s rhetoric of retribution,
intolerance and demonization; its mix of shlock pageantry, coercion,
violence and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism
and racial agitation. Memory as a form of historical consciousness
is essential in repaying our burden to the dead and the current
victims by holding accountable those who … retreat from
any sense of moral responsibility in the face of their reprehensible
actions, if not crimes. Given the danger of right-wing populism
and the incendiary rise of fascism in our time, Hannah Arendt
is useful in reminding us that thinking and judging must be
connected to our actions. Moreover, such thinking must grasp
the underlying causes of the economic and political crisis at
hand while acting collectively to fight neoliberal fascism and
its embrace of white supremacy, social and economic inequality,
and its hatred of democracy. That is why historical memory as
a register of critical thinking is so dangerous to Trump and
his acolytes.
MARK
KARLIN: How are state violence and white nationalism related?
HENRY
A. GIROUX: Under the Trump regime, state violence and white
nationalism are two sides of the same register of white supremacy
and domestic terrorism. Trump’s call to “Make America
Great Again,” his slogan “America First” and
his emphatic call for a “law and order” regime are
shorthand for legitimating state violence against Black people,
Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and those “others”
who do not fit into his racist notion of ultra-nationalism and
his attempts to resuscitate a white public sphere as emblematic
of American white supremacy. Ta-Nehisi Coates is right in stating
that, “Trump’s ideology is white supremacy.”
The merging of state sanctioned racism and state violence is
the ideological signpost that informs Trump’s notion of
white Christian nationalism, which allows him to assemble a
broad coalition of bigots, white supremacists, super-patriots,
apocalyptic populists and militarists. Under Trump, identity
politics has surfaced with a revenge as the Republican Party
unabashedly embraces itself as the white people’s party.
Under such circumstances, Trump’s supportive response
to incidents of violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville,
Virginia, should surprise no one, given the history of racism
in the United States in general, and in the Republican Party
(and Democratic Party as well) in particular. This is a racist
legacy that extends from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
and George W. Bush’s treatment of the Black victims of
Hurricane Katrina, to Clinton’s welfare and “law
and order” policies to current Republican efforts at expanding
the carceral state and suppressing the voting rights of Black
Americans.
Trump
not only embraces white supremacy, he elevates it. How else
to explain his administration’s announcement that it would
no longer “investigate white nationalists, who have been
responsible for a large share of violent hate crimes in the
United States?” How else to explain his willingness to
lift restrictions imposed by the Obama administration on local
police departments’ acquisition of military surplus equipment,
such as armed vehicles, bulletproof vests and grenade launchers?
How do we explain the endless tsunami of racist tweets and comments
that he produces relentlessly with gleeful relish? Clearly,
such actions deliver on Trump’s Jacksonian approach to
“law and order,” escalate racial tensions in cities
that are often treated like combat zones, and reinforce a war
culture and notions of militarism over community-building among
police officers.
Such
behaviors do more than reinforce Trump’s endorsement of
white nationalism; they send a clear message of support for
a system of violence, amounting to acts of domestic terrorism.
Moreover, they indicate a resounding contempt for the rule of
law, and an endorsement not just of racist ideology, but also
of institutional racism and the primacy of the racially-based
incarceration state. Trump’s “law-and-order”
regime represents a form of domestic terrorism because it is
a policy of state violence designed to intimidate, threaten,
harm and instill fear in particular communities. His relentless
rhetoric of bigotry, racism and demonization of selected groups
not only plays to his white nationalist base, it also normalizes
support for state violence and signals an official position
regarding racialized assaults against immigrants, especially
Latin Americans. In addition, Trump’s conduct emboldens
right-wing extremists, giving them the green light to support
profoundly intolerant legislation and ideologies, and in some
cases, engage in acts of violence against those who oppose their
racist views. Trump’s overt racism and militant views
have also inspired a number of overt white supremacists and
neo-Nazis to run for public office. Trump’s overt nod
to right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis is evident in his deportation
policies, his cruel “law and order” policies that
separate children from their immigrant parents, his renewed
call for racial profiling, his silence in the face of voter
suppression in a number of states, and his endorsement of white
nationalists and overt racists running for public office.
MARK
KARLIN: How have we devolved into a nation of civic illiteracy?
HENRY
A. GIROUX: 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 market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all
aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres
are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these
institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative
media to health care centers — there is also a serious
erosion of the discourse of community, justice, equality, public
values and the common good. At the same time, reason and truth
are not simply contested or the subject of informed arguments
as they should be, but wrongly vilified — banished to
Trump’s poisonous world of “fake news.” Under
the Trump administration, language has been pillaged, truth
and reason disparaged, and words and phrases emptied of any
substance or turned into their opposite, all via the endless
production of Trump’s Twitter storms and the ongoing clown
spectacle of Fox News. This grim reality points to 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. What we are witnessing is not simply
a political project to consolidate power in the hands of the
corporate and financial elite, but also a reworking of the very
meaning of literacy and education as crucial to what it means
to create an informed citizenry and democratic society. In an
age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the anti-democratic
forces governing all the commanding economic and cultural institutions
of the United States, truth is viewed as a liability, ignorance
becomes a virtue, and informed judgments and critical thinking
are demeaned and turned into rubble and ashes. 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. Traces of critical thought
appear more and more at the margins of the culture as ignorance
becomes the primary organizing principle of American society.
While
the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of
Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas are at the center
of power in the Trump administration.
Under
the 40-year reign of neoliberalism, civic culture has been commodified,
shared citizenship eroded, self-interest and a survival-of-the-fittest
ethos elevated to a national ideal. In addition, language has
been militarized, handed over to advertisers, and a political
and culturally embarrassing anti-intellectualism sanctioned
by the White House. Couple this with a celebrity culture that
produces an ecosystem of babble, shock and tawdry entertainment.
Add on the cruel and clownish anti-public intellectuals such
as Jordan Peterson who defend inequality and infantile forms
of masculinity, and define ignorance and a warrior mentality
as part of the natural order, all the while dethroning any viable
sense of agency and the political.
The
culture of manufactured illiteracy is also reproduced through
a media apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle
of violence. Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the
norm and education becomes central to a version of neoliberal
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.
In the age of manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work
than simply an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor
can the reign of manufactured illiteracy be solely attributed
to the rise of the new social media, a culture of immediacy
and a society that thrives on instant gratification. On the
contrary, manufactured illiteracy is a political and educational
project central to a right-wing corporatist ideology and set
of policies that work aggressively to depoliticize people and
make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political
and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their
lives . . . There is also the workings of a deeply malicious
form of 21st century fascism and a culture of cruelty in which
language is forced into the service of violence while waging
a relentless attack on the ethical imagination and the notion
of the common good. In the current historical moment, illiteracy
and ignorance offer the pretense of a community in the form
of a right-wing populism, which provides a gift to the cloud
of fascism that has descended upon the United States.
MARK
KARLIN: How does capitalism suppress an educational system that
nurtures a robust democracy?
HENRY
A. GIROUX: Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and
North America have waged a major assault on higher education
and those faculty and students who view it as crucial to producing
the modes of learning and formative cultures necessary in the
struggle for a strong and healthy democracy. For instance, in
the United States, higher education is being defunded, devalued
and privatized while also restricting access to working- and
lower-middle-class students. Those underprivileged students
who do have access to some form of post-secondary education
are too frequently burdened with financial debts. Increasingly,
universities are being turned into accountability factories
designed to mimic the values of casino capitalism. Disciplines
and courses that are not organized around market principles
are either being underfunded, cut or refigured to serve market
values. Disciplines, such as Women’s Studies, Afro-American
Studies, Labor Studies and Latino Studies have lost much of
their funding, have been closed or marginalized, while at the
same time, the humanities and liberal arts increasingly disappear
or are marginalized. The attack on higher education has a long
history. Since the 1980s, the democratic principles of the university
have been under assault by right-wing billionaires such as the
Koch brothers, a select financial elite and big corporations,
“leading to a blurring of the lines between the university
and the corporate world.” Increasingly, the object of
higher education is the individual consumer rather than the
public good.
History
reminds us that in the face of emerging forms of authoritarianism,
solidarity is essential.
Under
such circumstances, power is concentrated in the hands of a
managerial class that too often views education simply through
the lens of a market-driven culture that harnesses matters of
governance, teaching and learning to the instrumental needs
of the economy. Evidence of the corporate takeover of higher
education is manifest in the emergence of governing structures
that mimic the culture of business and modes of leadership defined
almost entirely in entrepreneurial terms. Not only are these
structures hierarchical and disempowering for faculty and students,
but they produce massive levels of inequality among different
faculty, staff and students in regards to salaries, resources
and choices. Everything about education that matters appears
to be absorbed into the discourse of business, metrics and a
reductionist notion of efficiency. Research is increasingly
shaped, valued and rewarded to the degree that it reflects corporate
interests and is defined in measurable terms. Academic rewards,
promotions and access to power are now tied to getting grants
or outside corporate funding. Numerical signifiers and commercial
values shape policies and practices at almost all levels of
university life. For instance, university services are increasingly
outsourced, students are defined as entrepreneurs and the culture
of education morphs into the culture of business. In this instance,
the distinction between knowledge and information, ideas and
data diminish under the economic imperative to value knowledge
in instrumental terms and to devalue ideas that serve the common
good.
In
addition, faculty in public universities have lost much of their
power and autonomy and have been relegated to the role of part-time
laborers, defined largely by the same type of workplace logic
that characterizes Walmart and other service industries. The
latter is designed — as Noam Chomsky points out —
“to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.”
This casualization of faculty also functions to undercut academic
freedom and free expression, as many part-time and adjunct faculty
are rightly afraid to speak out and address important social
issues in and out of their classrooms for fear of being fired.
Judith Butler is right in stating that faculty have increasingly
lost the “financial and institutional support” along
with “the guarantee and the conditions upon which freedom
— both academic freedom and freedom of political expression
— relies.” Many adjunct faculty not only have few
job protections in such a precarious environment, they are also
reduced to wages that in some cases force them to seek welfare
and food assistance. As the university succumbs to an audit
culture, it increasingly weds itself to a market-driven notion
of customer satisfaction, metrics and performance measures that
represses a genuine critical education, not to mention any viable
notion of dissent. As critical education is subordinated to
the task of reproducing and benefiting the corporate order,
education collapses into training and the role of faculty is
instrumentalized and devoid of any democratic vision. The attack
on higher education as a democratic public good and faculty
as public and engaged intellectuals has a long history in the
United States.
Under
this market-driven notion of governance, faculty both lose their
power and autonomy. Under the reign of neoliberalism, students
are often saddled with high tuition rates and a future predicated
on ongoing uncertainty, economic instability and ecological
peril. In addition, as democratic visions are removed from higher
education, they are replaced by an obsession with a narrow notion
of job-readiness and a cost accounting instrumental rationality.
This bespeaks to the rise of what theorists such as the late
Stuart Hall called an “audit” or “corporate”
culture, which serves to demoralize and depoliticize both faculty
and students, often relieving them of any larger values other
than those that reinforce their own self-interest and retreat
from any sense of moral and social responsibility. More specifically,
as higher education both denies and actively abandons its role
as a democratic public sphere, it tends to provide an education
in which the citizen is transformed into a consumer, laying
the foundation for the development of self-seeking agents who
inhabit orbits of privatization and are indifferent to the growth
of despotic power around them. Under such circumstances, education
collapses into training, and the only learning that is valued
is reduced to that which is measurable.
Trump
not only embraces white supremacy, he elevates it.
One
of the challenges facing the current generation of educators,
students and others is the need to address the question of what
is the role and mission of education in a time of tyranny. What
should it attempt to accomplish in a society at a historical
moment when society is slipping over into an abyss of fascism?
Central to such a challenge is the question of what education
should accomplish in a democracy. What will it take for higher
education not to abandon its role as a democratic public sphere?
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? What kind of language is necessary
for higher education to redefine its mission, one that enables
faculty and students to work toward a different future than
one that echoes the present, to confront the unspeakable, to
recognize themselves as agents, not victims, and to muster up
the courage to act in the service of a substantive and inclusive
democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment
of egalitarian and democratic values and impulses, what will
it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge
authority and hold power accountable?
MARK
KARLIN: What is the “culture of cruelty in Trump’s
America” and why is it important to analyze?
HENRY
A. GIROUX: The United States has a long history in which the
culture of cruelty has both undermined and challenged its professed
claims to the democratic principles of equality, freedom, compassion
and justice. The hardening of the culture and the emergence
of a social order driven by a collapse of ethics, an unchecked
celebration of self-interest, and a Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all
have been increasingly nurtured in the last 40 years under the
rise of a neoliberal form of gangster capitalism, more aptly
called neoliberal fascism. Yet, this history of cruelty is not
unique to the Trump administration. The attack on the welfare
state, a numbing social atomization, the rise of a survivalist
ethic and a growing indifference to human suffering have long
been supported by both major political parties. Before Trump’s
election, [the US’s] culture of cruelty resided rhetorically
on the margins of power, hidden under the false rhetoric of
liberal and conservative politicians who benefited from exploiting
the vulnerable in order to further advance the interests of
the rich and their own power.
But
such attacks have taken on a more aggressive and organizing
role under the Trump presidency. This is evident as Trump devotes
an inordinate amount of tyrannical energy to the notion that
the market and state violence are the primary solution to all
social problems and constitute the only legitimate pillars of
governance. This descent into the practice of cruel power, cruelty
and barbarism no longer hides in the shadows and is employed
without apology in most of Trump’s activities since he
was elected. Trump revels in the discourse of bullies. He calls
his critics “losers,” insults world leaders with
belittling language and tacitly supports the violent actions
of white supremacists. He endorses state torture, has remilitarized
the police, relishes representations of violence and in one
instance, tweeted an edited video showing him body-slamming
and punching a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head
during a wrestling match. He has executed policies that bear
the weight of domestic terrorism, which partly include breaking
up immigrant families and separating young children from their
parents while expanding the racially charged reach of the carceral
state under his call for “law and order.” He has
called Latinos “animals,” Mexicans “rapists”
and “drug dealers,” and a number of African nations
“shithole countries,” all of which echoes the dangerous,
racially charged rhetoric of the Nazis in the 1930s.
Neoliberalism
fascism, as a form of extreme capitalism, views democracy as
the enemy.
Trump’s
embrace of the culture of cruelty also drives policies rooted
in an ongoing process of dehumanization, rancor and a racially-inspired
hatred — one that views with disdain basic human emotions,
such as compassion, empathy and care for the other. How else
to explain his $1.3 trillion tax cut for the ultra-rich and
big corporations along with a massive increase in military spending?
This dreadful and harmful legislation accompanies policies that
produce unprecedented cuts in low-income housing, impose punitive
work requirements for those on welfare, eliminate job training
programs, slash food assistance programs for the poor, decrease
quality health care for the poorest populations, cut nutrition
programs for new mothers and their infants, and remove billions
from desperately needed programs such as the Children’s
Health Insurance Program (CHIP). All of these policies serve
to redistribute wealth upward while an alarming 43 percent of
American families cannot afford basic needs, such as housing,
child care, food or even a cell phone, and millions of the most
vulnerable Medicaid recipients risk losing their health care.
Philip Alston, the United Nations monitor on poverty, in an
interview with the Guardian, has warned that Trump is not only
producing policies that reward the ultra-rich, he is also punishing
the poor and most vulnerable as a result of “a systematic
attack on America’s welfare program that is undermining
the social safety net.” And states that by removing “any
sense of government commitment, you quickly move into cruelty.”
It
gets worse. A new level of hatred, exhibition of ferocity and
state-sanctioned cruelty are on full display in Trump’s
willingness to end the Dreamers program, risking the expulsion
of over 700,000 immigrants brought to the country as children.
Moreover, Trump has put in play executive orders that end temporary
protected status for more than 425,000 immigrants, including
86,000 Hondurans and 200,000 people from El Salvador, many of
whom have lived in the US for decades. There is a genocidal
mentality at work here, amplified by a hatred that suggests
a disgust for those who do not fit into Trump’s embrace
of racial purity, white nationalism and a “cleansed”
public space.
This
culture of cruelty has a long history in the United States and
has to be connected with the intensifying and accelerating practices
of a neoliberal fascism, which is more than willing to exercise
cruel power in the interest of accumulating capital and profits
without any consideration of social costs to humanity or the
planet itself. The culture of cruelty is not simply about character
. . . On the contrary, it has to be connected to structural
and ideological forces in the service of a financial elite.
Rather than simply produce moral outrage, the culture of cruelty
should point to a convergence of power, politics and newly emerging
structures of domination that are as unjust as they are cruel.
Gangster capitalism is the root cause of such cruelty because
of its concentration of power, ongoing destruction of democratic
values and ongoing production of a machinery of terminal exclusion,
disposability, social abandonment and social death.
The
current culture of cruelty is both a symptom of the war on democracy
and a mirror that reveals the collapse of the United States
into the abyss of fascism.
Neoliberalism
fascism, as a form of extreme capitalism, views democracy as
the enemy, the market as the exclusive arbiter of freedom, and
the ethical imagination as an object of disdain. It is a form
of zombie politics that produces a ruling elite that represents
a 21st century version of the walking dead. To paraphrase New
York Times film critic A.O. Scott, these zombie politicians
and power-brokers serve as a dystopian “reminder of not
only our fears but [also] what we have become.” The coarsening
of American culture and society has solidified into a state-sanctioned
language in which the tyranny of authoritarian zombies has become
domesticated, if not normalized. What we are now witnessing
is the death of compassion, a repudiation of our obligations
to the most vulnerable, the death of the social and a dishonorable
discharge from the obligations of a democracy. Under neoliberalism’s
form of gangster capitalism, the United States has lost its
sense of decency and collapsed into a society of lawlessness
and moral indifference. Trump is the endpoint of a country that
has become a criminogenic society, one which, as Pankaj Mishra
has written, promotes “a widely sanctioned ruthlessness
. . . that does not make for an understanding of the tangled
roots of human suffering.” The current culture of cruelty
is both a symptom of the war on democracy and a mirror that
reveals the collapse of the United States into the abyss of
fascism.
MARK
KARLIN: In your new book, American Nightmare: Facing the
Challenge of Fascism, you argue that there is a connection
between neoliberalism and fascism. Can you speak to that connection?
HENRY
A. GIROUX: Actually, I bring the two terms together in the phrase
“neoliberal fascism,” which I define as both a project
and a movement. Neoliberalism is an enabling force that weakens,
if not destroys the commanding institutions of a democracy while
undermining its most valuable principles. It is part of what
Sheldon Wolin called a totalitarian imaginary that constitutes
a revolutionary break from democracy. This is a form of fascism
in which state rule is replaced by corporate sovereignty and
a culture of fear, insecurity and precarity reinvigorates executive
power and the rise of the punishing state. Consequently, neoliberalism
as a form of gangster capitalism provides a fertile ground for
the unleashing of the ideological architecture, poisonous values,
and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under fascism.
Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable
and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the
worst excesses of capitalism with fascist ideals: the veneration
of war and a hatred of reason and truth; a populist celebration
of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom
and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles of disparagement
and a demonization of the other; a discourse of decline, brutal
exploitation and ultimately, state violence in heterogeneous
forms. All vestiges of the social are replaced by an idealization
of individualism and all forms of responsibility are reduced
to individual agents. Neoliberalism creates a failed democracy,
and in doing so, opens up the fascists’ use of fear and
terror to transform a state of exception into a state of emergency.
As a project, it destroys all the commanding institutions of
democracy and consolidates power in the hands of a financial
elite. As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic
inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles
essential government agencies and individualizes all social
problems. In addition, it transforms the political state into
the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization
and “law and order” to discredit the critical press
and media, and undermine civil liberties, while ridiculing and
censoring critics. Moreover, what is quite distinctive about
neoliberal fascism is its aggressive war on youth, especially
Black youth, its war on women, and its despoiling of the planet.
After
decades of the neoliberal nightmare, the mobilizing passions
of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen
since the 1930s and 1940s.
In
addition, corporate control of the cultural apparatuses provides
the public with endless spectacles of violence, toxic and banal
illusions, the celebration of market-driven values, and an empty
obsession and worship of celebrity culture. With the collapse
of the social state, the punishing neoliberal fascist state
emerges in full force, criminalizing a range of behaviors that
are in fact expressions of social problems such as homelessness
and poverty. The model of the prison and the state-sanctioned
embrace of violence and lawlessness are now unleashed with impunity
on youth, people of color, undocumented immigrants and all those
others considered disposable. Massive inequality horribly accentuated
by neoliberal policies that destroy basic social services, needed
infrastructures and essential public goods provide a fertile
ground for advancing a sinister turn toward a collective anger
and resentment open to a newly charged populism willing to embrace
white supremacist ideology, state violence and authoritarian
beliefs. Neoliberalism is the face of a new fascism. After decades
of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United States and abroad,
the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike
anything we have seen since the 1930s and 1940s. Extreme capitalism
has destroyed any vestige of a substantive democracy, produced
massive economic suffering, tapped into a combination of fear
and a cathartic cruelty, and emboldened a brutal lawlessness
aimed at those considered “disposable.” It is time
to repudiate the notion that capitalism and democracy are the
same thing, renew faith in the promises of a democratic socialism,
create new political formations around an alliance of diverse
social movements and take seriously the need to make education
central to politics itself. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, fascism
is the product often of failed democracies, and under the reign
of neoliberalism, we are in the midst of not simply a dysfunctional
democracy, but in the grip of an extreme form of gangster capitalism
wedded to unbridled forms of corporate power that produce massive
inequalities in wealth and power, and aggressively wage war
on everything crucial to a vibrant democratic society.
