YOUR
COMMENTSThe brutalizing horrors
of a fascist past are with us once again. This is most evident
in the growing support for bigotry and white nationalism among
Republicans and their base, buttressed by the increased presence
of armed militia and an increasingly well-armed populace. Within
the current abysmal historical moment, a mix of aggrieved agency,
a tsunami of conspiracy theories and an expanding culture of
lies fuel a massive political effort to legitimate and normalize
white minority rule.
Underlying this authoritarian political
project is a massive ideological scaffolding reproducing the
lethal workings of repressive power and a formative culture
solidifying the identities and agents willing to embrace a
political landscape of fascist agitation and violence. This
is a pedagogical effort to refute elements of the past as
a site of injustice, all the while enabling a machinery of
exclusion and disposability wedded to the logic of white supremacy
and what Kimberly Williams Crenshaw calls "The Unmattering
of Black Lives."
Talk of civil war has emerged at a
time when violence becomes a powerful force for shaping language,
addressing social problems and emerging as a central organizing
principle of politics. Central to this brutalizing of civic
culture and the social imagination is the need to acknowledge
that long before violence becomes normalized in society, politics
descends into what John Berger once called ethicide —
a formative culture composed of "agents [who] kill ethics
and therefore any notion of history and justice."
At work here is a collective disavowal
of social responsibility and the removal of political, discursive
and economic actions from any sense of the social costs involved.
Central to the turn towards ethicide is a Republican Party
waging a counterrevolution against the foundations of democratic
rule. This is a right-wing political party wedded to a politics
of dehumanization, social abandonment and terminal exclusion,
which accelerate the death of the unwanted. This amounts to
a politics of ethicide in which ethical boundaries disappear,
language is emptied of ethical referents, zones of social
abandonment become normalized, racial purity is embraced,
historical amnesia is celebrated and a culture of cruelty
becomes commonplace.
Toni Morrison remarked that the prevailing
formative culture of neoliberalism and its underlying fascist
politics "is recognizable by its need to purge, [and]
its terror of democratic agendas." It "produces
perfect capitalists," defined largely as consumers, indifferent
to ethics and more than willing to criminalize and pathologize
the enemy, reward mindlessness, and maintain, at all costs,
silence." Morrison's insights are all the more relevant
in an age when the lines between democracy and authoritarianism
are collapsing. Her warning necessitates a heightened critical
vigilance at a moment when the culture is shifting, new political
formations are emerging and new identities are being produced.
This is particularly true given the
regressive formative culture that has been at work in producing
the agents involved in the current attacks on democratic institutions,
policies and laws. This is a formative culture rooted in hate,
bigotry, cruelty, infused with a spirit of vigilante violence.
Far removed from democratic values, it has provided the language
and political signposts to support the attack on the Capitol,
women's reproductive rights, voting rights and racial justice
as part of a broader effort to successfully display its affirmation
and merging of politics, white nationalism, imperialism and
violence. In addition to these policies, this emerging formative
culture has forecasted the "bald political calculus"
of a rising unique American authoritarianism.
The coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021,
was a death-dealing expression of mass violence that has a
deep resonance with the past that has once again manifested
itself as an organizing force of the present. This contemporary
expression of violence has a long history grounded in what
Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics, or the politics of
death — an upgraded species of fascist politics that
defines whose lives are worthy of human value, citizenship
and occupying the public sphere and, more specifically, who
is considered disposable and excess.
American legal scholar Laurence Tribe observes that Trump's
Republican Party not only "embraced the violence of 6
January," they also supported a governing form "that
almost always comes wrapped in violence" and is endemic
to fascism. How else to explain the threats and "murderous
violence" by Trump's followers aimed at school board
members who support pupils wearing masks, medical personnel
who support lockdowns, election officials who refuse the lie
of fraudulent elections and politicians who dare to disagree
with Trump's policies?
Political scientist Robert A. Pape
argues that a new politically violent mass movement has developed
to restore the Trump presidency. This includes "21 million
adamant supporters of insurrection [who] have the dangerous
potential for violent mobilization" and are willing to
shed bloodshed for their cause. What are we to make, for that
matter, of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing
legislation "that gives legal protections to people who
drive their cars into protesters in the street," and
defines individuals as criminal felons if in the midst of
the protests they break windows or engages in other alleged
illegal activity? These are just a few of the many signposts
indicating that the revival of fascist conditions that led
to Jan. 6 are not only still with us but are becoming normalized
and reinvented every day.
Violence in its spectacularized forms
tends to produce a shock value that hides the often "slow
violence" of everyday life. This is evident in the border
violence waged against undocumented immigrants, the homeless
deprived of the most basic social provisions, poor people
of color whose culture is equated with criminality and fill
America's prisons. It is also evident in poor housing conditions,
people struggling to put food on the table, support payments
for the poor that tie them to a politics of mere survival
and "bare life." One element of fascism that has
returned with a vengeance is the relationship between fascism
and big business. Not only is this evident in the numerous
examples of how the financial elite sponsor voter suppression
laws, provide millions to push their economic and political
interests through lobbying efforts, control the media and
attack government policies that enhance the welfare state
and extend government policies that benefit the common good,
but also in their hoarding of wealth and power.
Necropolitics finds its most powerful
expression not in isolated attacks on the government or in
plans to kidnap and kill politicians, however horrible such
acts are, but in producing and normalizing forms of massive
economic and political inequality that kill. For instance,
in a new report by Oxfam, it is estimated that "inequality
is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people a day,
or one person every four seconds." At the same time,
"The world's ten richest men more than doubled their
fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion — at a rate
of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day — during
the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes
of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people
forced into poverty."
Oxfam makes clear that extreme inequality
kills, inflicts violence on the vast majority of people on
the globe and "has unleashed this economic violence particularly
acutely across racialized, marginalized and gendered lines."
Moreover, this greedy financial elite is killing the planet
as "the richest 1 percent emit more than twice as much
CO2 as the bottom 50 percent of the world, driving climate
change [which contributes] to wildfires, floods, tornadoes,
crop failures and hunger." Predatory capitalists such
as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg amass huge profits
while trafficking in death and misery, all the while paying
little in taxes. Oxfam recommends clawing back the tax gains
that have been given to the rich and reversing the attack
on workers' rights, unions and the welfare state. These are
not insignificant demands, but they say nothing about the
relationship between capitalism and fascism, nor do they associate
a murderous inequality with a call to end neoliberal capitalism.
It is impossible to separate the breakdown
of civic culture, the collapse of language and a rise in insurrectionist
violence in the United States from the plague of gangster
capitalism. Under a regime of privatized utopias, hyper-individualism
and ego-centered values, human beings are reduced to self-sufficient
atoms of self-interest, removed from relations of mutual dependency.
A neoliberal market-driven society has given rise to a culture
of fear, uncertainty and danger that numbs many people just
as it wipes out the creative faculties of imagination, memory
and critical thought. Rather than live in a historical period
that awakens the critical faculties, Americans now occupy
a social order that freezes and numbs the capacity for informed
judgment. Turning away from the collapse of reason, justice
and democracy appears to have become habitual for most Trump
supporters.
As democracy is increasingly viewed
with contempt by large segments of the public, the moral mechanisms
of language, meaning and morality collapse. What emerges is
a cruel indifference that takes over diverse modes of communication
and exchange — a singular register of the rise of a
fascist politics with its scorn for democratic values, identities
and social relations. Surely this is obvious today as all
vestiges of the social contract, social responsibility and
modes of solidarity that get people working together give
way to a form of social Darwinism with its emphasis on violence,
privatization, ruthlessness, cruelty, war, modes of hyper-masculinity
and a disdain for those considered weak, dependent, alien
or economically unproductive.
While it has become increasingly clear
that democracy is under siege, little has been said about
something inherent in the unfolding of a savage and ruthless
capitalism and its embrace of an updated form of fascist politics.
Lost here were the workings of neoliberal machinery with its
massive inequalities in wealth and private power, its comfortable
alliance with structural racism and a political system driven
by money and the concentrated control of the ultra-rich and
corrupt financial institutions. This is an economic system
with profound malignancies, one that has given rise to pernicious
relations of power that have transformed the Republican Party
into a force that, as Noam Chomsky states, "is driving
organized human society to suicide." He goes further
and argues that however weak democracy is in the U.S., it
"is intolerable to the GOP wreckers." He writes:
Narrowing the debate about the attack
on democracy to the attack on the Capitol and spectacularized
forms of violence creates the conditions for cynicism, despair
and a politics that sabotages itself by virtue of its narrow
focus. Moreover, by isolating these events, history disappears
and with it the ability to learn from the past in ways that
allow us to further understand the long-standing forces and
patterns that work to dissolve the line between democracy
and authoritarianism. Under such circumstances, remembrance
no longer functions as an activity of interrogation, criticism
and renewal dedicated to the promise of freedom; on the contrary,
it now functions as an "organized structure of misrecognition."
What is under attack by conservative forces is what Tony Morrison
described in her novel Beloved as "rememory"
— a way of thinking memory afresh. As Gabrielle Bellot
observes, this takes place in spite of the fact that
the terrors of the past still live
in the present. [As can be seen] in an age when Republicans
in Texas and Idaho, among other states have approved legislation
prescribing how current events are taught in the classroom
severely curtailing discussions of Black American history,
and when it is all too common for conservatives to dismiss
the existence of systemic racism or the relevance of historical
acts of anti-Black violence. In an era when it is still all
too common to see Black bodies under the heel of white cops.
Memory has become a site of repression.
Its underlying project is the creation of a history without
an individual and collective democratic subject. Systemic
violence, racial injustice and political corruption have now
disappeared from history. In part, this whitewashing of history
takes place through both increasing acts of censorship in
the schools and through the efforts of Republicans in Congress
and their allies in right-wing media to rewrite history by
invoking the horrors of 1930s fascist regimes to criticize
health workers and policymakers trying to save lives in the
midst of the pandemic crisis. This type of moral nihilism
is displayed by Tucker Carlson, a white supremacist and Fox
News host who has compared Biden's vaccine mandates to Nazi
medical practices, and Fox News contributor Lara Logan, who
has compared Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden's chief medical
adviser, to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who was known as
the "Angel of Death" for experimenting on Jews in
the concentration camps.
These propagandistic efforts to induce
a climate of fear along with a moral and political coma are
meant to turn reality on its head, all of which is part of
the Republican Party's dangerous efforts to produce a public
consciousness trapped in the fog of historical amnesia and
unchecked ignorance. The current assortment of Republican
zombies are not merely reactionaries for a new age. On the
contrary, to paraphrase Raoul Vaneigem, they are people who
have a corpse in their mouths.
The violent attack waged by the armed
loyalists to Donald Trump on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,
constituted a major political and constitutional crisis in
the making. But recognition of the seriousness of the attack
did not lead to a deeper understanding of its underlying historical,
political and economic causes. Largely ignored in the mainstream
media was the growing threat of authoritarianism accelerated
through the merging of white supremacy ideology and the savage
mechanisms of a neoliberal economy, both of which were powerful
forces in creating the conditions for the insurrection. The
underlying necropolitics driving the surge of right-wing populism
and the attack on the Capitol was largely decoupled from neoliberal
capitalism and its related institutions of violence: white
supremacy, inequality, the prison-industrial complex, unequal
humanity, disposability, militarization, colonialism and its
propagandistic cultural apparatuses, what C. Wright Mills
called "the observation posts, the interpretation centers,
the presentation depots." Underlying this attack was
a counterrevolutionary politics whose aim was the elevation
of white nationalist rule and a politics of disposability.
In this instance, politics turned deadly with the rise of
an authoritarian narrative, in which, as Mbembe states in
a different context, those who do not matter are relegated
to "death worlds . . . forms of social existence in which
vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring
upon them the status of living dead."
None of this appears out of the ordinary
in the current historical moment, suggesting that, as Coco
Das points out, America has a "Nazi problem." At
the same time, it is crucial to stress that I am not suggesting
that the former Trump administration was a precise replica
of Hitler's Nazi Germany. Yet as Churchwell and a number of
historians, writers and critics have argued, there are important
parallels that cannot be ignored. Fascism has deep roots in
American history, and its basic elements can crystallize in
different forms under unique historical circumstances. Rather
than being a precise replica of the past, fascism should be
viewed as a series of patterns that emerge out of different
conditions that produce what Hannah Arendt called totalitarian
forms.
As the late Daniel Guerin, one of
the more authoritative experts on fascism, made clear, there
is no one single version of fascism, and indeed "there
are many fascisms." Fascism is not interred strictly
in a specific history, and its different histories are crucial
to understand because it mutates, evolves and often lies dormant,
but it never goes away. The potential for fascism exists in
every society, and what its histor(ies) teach us is that there
is much to lose if we fail to learn its lessons. In the current
era, there is no perfect fit between 1930s Germany and Trump
and his followers, but there are alarming echoes of history.
The threat of fascism is especially
acute under neoliberalism, which exacerbates the worst elements
of gangster capitalism. This includes, most emphatically,
the widening of the scourge of inequality, a contempt for
social responsibility, promotion of racial hatred, the acceleration
of a politics of disposability, a corrupt alignment with big
business and a belief in the necessity of a heroic leader.
Peter Dolack is right to argue that while "militarism,
extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats"
are basic elements of a fascist politics, "the most critical
component is a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises
panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions
under the cover of a phony populism." He concludes by
stating that "As long as capitalism exist, the threat
of fascism exists." This may be an understatement. If
anything, the United States may be well beyond the threat.
If a form of mass resistance is to
take place to avoid a fascist coup in the future, it is essential
to develop a new language for equating freedom and democracy.
This necessitates challenging the basic tenets of neoliberal
capitalism and connecting the push for civic literacy. The
latter is fundamental to creating a mass movement dedicated
to the principles of democratic socialism. Real substantive
and lasting change will not come without the existence of
mass movement in America. Angela Davis has long advocated
that mass movements coupled with a radical shift in consciousness
about what kind of world we want are the key to radical change.
She is worth quoting at length:
Rather than wage war against neoliberal
capitalism in the abstract, it is crucial to wage an educational
campaign in which activists speak to people in a language
they understand, one that makes visible the problems they
face and provides them with a moment of recognition capable
of altering their commonsense assumptions about how they deal
with the problems they experience. This means addressing fundamental
concrete problems such as the threat to social security, funding
public education, abolishing student debt, providing free
child care, implementing universal health care, providing
a social wage for everyone, eliminating homelessness, dismantling
the prison-industrial complex, curbing gun violence, making
neighborhoods safe, massively curbing military budgets in
order to expand programs to eliminate poverty, homelessness,
food insecurity and decaying infrastructures, among other
issues. These deeply rooted issues begin not with abstractions
about predatory capitalism but with a language in which people
can recognize themselves.
In addition, there is a crucial need
to wage a political and educational campaign to defend schools
and other institutions that provide the conditions for people
to think critically, question authority, learn the tools for
making informed judgments and embrace what it means to be
moral witnesses and engaged citizens. Making education central
to politics demands a new language, a different regime of
desires, new forms of identification and a struggle to create
new modes of thinking, subjectivity and agency. It is important
to stress that direct action, cultural politics and political
education are crucial tools to mobilize public attention as
part of a broader campaign both to inform a wider public and
create the conditions for mass struggle.
The United States is in the midst
of a cultural war infused by a counterrevolutionary movement
that is waging a full-scale attack against ideas, truth, rationality,
ethics and justice. This is a site of contestation and struggle
over minds, emotions and modes of agency; it takes place in
diverse cultural apparatuses that must be challenged, redefined
and appropriated as sites of resistance. Fascism removes the
language of aggrieved identity, pain and rage from the structures
of capitalism while undermining the ideals and promises of
a socialist democracy. In part, this is done through a cultural
politics that produces civic illiteracy, manufactured ignorance,
moral decay and historical amnesia, all the while promoting
apocalyptic fears that feed off an exaggerated discourse of
alleged catastrophe facing white civilization.
Against this regressive educational
and cultural project, a new anti-capitalist politics must
arise. Such a struggle needs a new vision, one that merges
the power of critique in multiple sites with "a positive,
forward-looking program for real change." Only then will
a mass movement arise infused with a language of both critique
and hope, willing to engage in the long struggle against fascism
and the battle for a future in which matters of justice, freedom
and equality become foundational in the struggle for a democratic
socialist society. Democracy is under siege in America as
the result of a counterrevolutionary movement and criminal
conspiracy being waged by right-wing extremists at the highest
levels of power and government. There is no room for balance,
compromise and indifference, only mass resistance.
Pandering
to racist fears and white racial anxiety, Youngkin also stated
he would ban from schools what the right wing is inaccurately
describing as “critical race theory,” a term which
actually refers to a body of legal scholarship, but which
right-wingers like Youngkin are using as a catch-all to describe
any discussion of systemic racism in the U.S. And Youngkin
made the boldface and dangerous assertion that educators are
destroying America. Days later, Youngkin received 50.6 percent
of the vote, defeating Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Youngkin’s
attack on Virginia teachers’ ability to discuss structural
racism are just one example of the GOP’s ongoing attack
on public and higher education — an attack that is closely
aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds
power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters
liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the
right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure.
The Republican
Party makes clear that educational practices that inform,
liberate, empower and address systemic problems that undermine
democracy are both a threat to its politics and a deserving
object of disdain.
The Republican
Party’s view of “patriotic education” draws
directly from the playbook of previous dictatorships with
their hatred of reason, truth, science, evidence and the willingness
to use language as a source of dehumanization and violence.
This is a language that operates in the interests of manufactured
fear while producing a void filled with despair. This is a
form of apartheid pedagogy that embraces the cult of manufactured
ignorance, freezes the moral imagination, erases unsettling
forms of historical memory and works to discredit dissent
among individuals and institutions that call attention to
social problems.
The attacks
on suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern
civil war. This is a war against reason and racial injustice
that reproduces itself through the production of, as Toni
Morrison herself notes, “cultivated ignorance, enforced
silence, and metastasizing lies.”
Matters
of conscience, social responsibility and equity have been
purged from a Republican Party that feeds off the ghosts of
an authoritarian past. Its disdain for justice and civic responsibility
is also evident in its defense of the January 6 attack on
the U.S. Capitol, its refusal to accept the election of Joe
Biden as president and its immersion in a culture of lies.
The spirit
of the Confederacy is obvious in the GOP’s voter suppression
laws and its support of white nationalism and white supremacy.
The spirit of U.S. authoritarianism is also alive in the Republican
Party’s efforts to capture the machinery of state power
in order to invalidate state elections along with attempts
to suppress the votes of people of color. Such actions are
frighteningly similar to attacks on Black voters during Reconstruction.
The legacy
of Jim Crow and an updated version of the Southern Strategy
are the driving forces in the Republican Party’s attempts
to remove from public and higher education, if not history
itself, any reference to slavery, racism and the teaching
of other unpleasant truths. In this instance, white racial
fears are activated, functioning like a coma to enlist the
public in increasing acts of censorship, surveillance, and
other practices that deaden the moral imagination and sense
of civic justice.
The current
policing of education in the United States cannot be abstracted
from a larger strategy to identify the institutions and individuals
who “make trouble” by uncovering the truth, resisting
the warmongers, and exposing the violence at work by those
politicians who invite the public “to become vigilantes,
bounty hunters and snitches.” Drawing on the work of
Russell Banks, I believe that the current attacks on educators
who teach about the history and contemporary realities of
racism are part of a broader attempt to silence those “committed
to a life of opposition, of speaking truth to power, of challenging
and overthrowing received wisdom and disregarding the official
version of everything.”
Authoritarianism
and education now inform each other as the Republican Party
in numerous states mobilizes education as a vehicle for white
supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision and support for
curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism
and a brutal policy of racial exclusion. Republican legislators
now use the law to turn public education into white nationalist
factories and spaces of indoctrination and conformity. Republican
state legislators have put policies into place that erase
and whitewash history, and attack any reference to race, diversity
and equity while also deskilling teachers and undermining
their attempts to exercise control over their teaching, knowledge
and the curriculum.
Horrified
over the possibility of young people learning about the history
of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have
resisted long-standing forms of oppression, the Republican
Party subscribes to a politics of denial and disappearance.
Science, racism, truth, climate change and dissent are now
relegated to a politics of terminal exclusion and social abandonment.
Attacking discussions of racism in public schools and higher
education, they have made clear that “the ancient lie
of white supremacy remains lethal.” History now repeats
itself with a vengeance given that the Republican Party has
a long legacy of pandering to racial resentment and white
supremacy. This is a legacy that extends from Richard Nixon’s
war on Black people and Ronald Reagan’s racist use of
the myth of the welfare queen to Donald Trump’s birther
arguments and the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, Black
journalists and athletes, and the reference to Haiti and African
nations as “shithole” countries.
Horrified
over the possibility of young people learning about the history
of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have
resisted long-standing forms of oppression, the Republican
Party subscribes to a politics of denial and disappearance.
As part of the ongoing culture wars, various Republican governors
have banned the teaching of what they are inaccurately deeming
“critical race theory” in public schools, and
have also threatened to cut back state funding for public
universities that introduce anti-racist issues to students,
including a great deal of the founding literature of Black
Studies and other sources that provoke discussions that offer
a remedy to racial injustice. At the core of these attacks
is a totalizing attack on critical thinking, informed judgments,
truth and the core values that inform a critical notion of
citizenship.
Henry Louis
Gates Jr. has eloquently argued that what is at stake here
is the freedom to write and bear witness, the freedom to learn
that liberation and civic literacy inform each other, and
to recognize that the freedom to teach and learn is under
siege in a culture that is being policed by the new authoritarians.
How else to explain that Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth),
the chair of the House General Investigating Committee, required
that Texas school districts provide a list of over 800 books
used in classrooms and libraries.
Not surprisingly,
all of these books address important social problems. Krause
also asked schools to report whether his designated list of
books might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish,
or any other form of psychological distress because of their
race or sex.” Karen Attiah notes that, “looking
at Krause’s list, it’s hard not to conjure up
images of totalitarian regimes and violent groups that have
gone after books throughout history, from Nazi attacks on
works considered ‘un-German’ in 1933 to al-Qaeda
destroying precious manuscripts in Timbuktu. A gander at Krause’s
list reveals an almost exclusive focus on race and racism,
sex and sexuality, LGBT issues, abortion and — gasp
— even puberty.”
It gets
worse. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators want to banish
certain words, such as “white supremacy,” “structural
bias,” “structural racism,” “whiteness,”
“multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.”
For the Republican Party, words are dangerous, especially
those that encourage critical interpretations, expand human
agency and produce sentences that open the possibilities for
self-determination and a more democratic social order. Banning
words and books constitutes a pedagogy of unlearning and disappearance,
particularly with respect to care, empathy for the suffering
of others, solidarity and the courage needed to confront injustices.
Banning books and words injects ignorance into the public
sphere, making reason toxic and justice irrelevant. Banning
books and words is tantamount to a totalitarian dictatorship
of illiteracy and politics of elimination. Even more, it both
erases the genocidal brutality that such practices produced
in the past and normalizes the possibility of their appearing
again in the future.
In Wisconsin,
Republican legislators want to banish certain words such as
“white supremacy,” “structural bias,”
“structural racism,” “whiteness,”
“multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.”
Words and books that offer oppressed people the opportunity
to gain self-representation and the ability to narrate themselves
are now viewed by many Republicans as unpatriotic. Words that
unfold in books that speak to a critical engagement with history,
engage the possibilities at work in the unfolding of the human
condition, and “bear witness to the full range of our
humanity” are increasingly subject to an updated form
of repression that prefigures authoritarian models of governance.
Words that
encompass the far reaches of human intelligibility, offering
an emancipated notion of individual and public agency are
now examined with a heightened racial frenzy produced by a
Republican Party and its acolytes who support the toxic principles
of white supremacy and a politics of disposability. In this
discourse, language functions to suppress any sense of racial
justice, moral decency and democratic values. It is indebted
to a politics of erasure and manufactured ignorance, and it
wages a major assault on reason and justice. Moreover, it
turns lethal by paving the way for a rebranded form of fascism.
As part of its attack on and whitewashing of history, memory
is trapped in a present that is wedded to a form of historical
amnesia. Under such circumstances, words, language and thought
itself are being erased or misrepresented so as to operate
in an educational climate marked by what Richard Rodriguez
once called “an astonishing vacancy.”
Fears about
banishing books feature prominently in a number of dystopian
novels that provide alarming examples of future authoritarian
societies. Such lessons appear lost on a sizeable portion
of the general public for whom the current historical moment
imitates the horrifying fictional narratives explored in dystopian
novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where
books are outlawed or relegated to memory holes connected
to incinerators used to destroy them.
American
authoritarianism is alive and well. The Republican Party and
its allies are waging an aggressive onslaught against any
institution, policy and ideal that upholds democracy. In a
startling statement that resonates with the previous horrors
of history and the war on critical intellectuals, academics
and journalists, Republican J.D. Vance, who is running for
the Senate in Ohio, stated that “The Professors are
the Enemy.”
This deadly
contempt for academics is present not only in the ways in
which the neoliberal university has stripped them of ownership
over their working conditions and modes of governance, but
also in its utter disregard for their role as citizen scholars
and public intellectuals. This disregard was unabashedly visible
when the University of Florida prohibited four university
professors from providing expert testimony in lawsuits challenging
state policies endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.In this
blatant act of censorship, possibly a signal of what is to
come, the University of Florida administration decided that
it would look to the Republican governor to decide how to
regulate university speech and the public activities of its
faculty. As Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor, pointed
out,
The university
does not exist to protect the governor. It exists to serve
the public. It is an independent institution to serve the
public good, and nothing could be more to the public good
than a professor telling the truth to the public under oath.
Fortunately,
this blatant assault against freedom of expression and academic
freedom was reversed as a result of mounting public and legal
outrage.
The ominous
shadows of history are once again flooding the United States.
Historical memory serves us well in making clear that the
banishing of words, ideas and books is the precondition for
the horrors that produced the fascist politics of the 1930s
in Europe and later in the 1970s and ‘80s in authoritarian
regimes in Latin America. Republican J.D. Vance’s attack
on academics mirrors a statement made by Gen. Millán
Astray, a firm supporter of Francisco Franco, who on October
12, 1936, while attending a speech given by the Dean of Salamanca
University in Spain, shouted, “Long live death . . .
death to the intellectuals!! Down with Intelligence.”
This grotesque utterance occurred in the midst of a civil
war in which intellectuals were tortured, murdered and sent
into exile. The terror it both evokes and legitimizes has
now become an organizing principle of the Republican Party.
The banning
of books also has historical precedents that speak powerfully
to the dangerous authoritarian spirit that now animates Republican
Party politics. On the evening of May 10, 1933, over 40,000
people gathered in Berlin in what was then known as the Opernplatz.
At the urging of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,
more than 25,000 books labeled as “un-German”
were burned. Soon afterward, book burnings took place across
Germany in a variety of university towns. The purpose of the
book burnings was to “cleanse” Germany of the
literature of “racial impurity” and dissent and
“purify” the German spirit. There was more at
work here than what the novelist Andrew Motion called a monumental
“manifestation of intolerance;” there was also
a forecasting of the killings, mass murders, disappearances
and genocide that would follow this symbolic act of racial
hatred and purification.
The banning
of books in the United States, which bears a dangerous resemblance
to the Nazi book burning, represents a startling vision of
the Republican Party’s disdain for democracy and its
willingness to resurrect totalitarian practices linked to
earlier periods of censorship, repression, terror and state
violence. In this case, as the great 19th-century German poet
Heinrich Heine observed rightly, “Where they burn books,
they will, in the end, also burn people.” The banning
of books and the dehumanizing of the writers who produce them
is one step away from habituating the wider public into accepting
the transition from censorship to more overt criminal acts
on the part of the state. Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole
perfectly captures the implications such actions have for
developing into a full-fledged form of authoritarianism. He
writes:
As a society
the American people are being habituated into accepting cruelty
on a wide scale. Americans are being taught not to see other
people as human beings whose lives are as important as their
own. Once that line has been crossed … then we know
where that all leads, what the ultimate destination is. There
is no mystery about it. We know what happens when a government
and its leaders dehumanize large numbers of people.
The Republican
Party is not calling for the burning of books or the imprisonment
of authors they target as “un-American,” (at least
not yet) but the spirit that animates their calls for censorship,
historical cleansing, so-called racial purity, disposability
and politics is alarming and a precondition for something
much worse. The Nazi assertion and threat proclaiming, “The
state has been conquered but not the universities” could
very well be viewed as a central feature of the Republican
Party’s war on critical race theory, the banning of
books and its all-out war on higher education as a democratic
public sphere.
The attacks
on critical modes of thinking in the United States are at
the center of a looming civil war in which the horrifying
phantoms of the past have been re-energized and now threaten
to appear once again. Beneath the spectacle of the MAGA hats,
the criminal assault on the Capitol and an expanding culture
of lies, there is a reactionary cultural politics financed
by corporate interests and legitimized by powerful social
media platforms, conservative foundations and other cultural
apparatuses whose endpoint is the death of democracy.
At the current
moment in the United States, manufactured fear is now coupled
with the mass production of ignorance and the surging political
power of U.S.-bred authoritarianism. These forces work in
tandem in order to destroy higher education, which is one
of the few public spaces left where truth and justice can
be taught, and resistance can be cultivated against the looming
danger of normalizing white supremacy and an updated form
of American fascism.
It would
be wise for educators and others to heed Toni Morrison’s
warning, so prophetically accurate at the present moment:
“If the university does not take seriously and rigorously
its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator
of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and
preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other
regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of
us, and without us.”
Clearly,
faculty, students, and others who take democracy seriously
must work together to make higher education take on the responsibility
of addressing the authoritarian cracks that have appeared
in U.S. society. Critical education helps us to remember that
justice and what it takes to be human are inextricably connected
and cannot be removed from a politics of solidarity. Justice
is on hold in the United States, and, in part, this suggests
that educators and those who refuse to live in a fascist world
need to rethink the meaning of education and how it works
as an instrument of empowerment, resistance and possibility.
Fascist mythologies, racist social practices, misogynist governing
structures and the prioritization of market values must be
removed from higher education. Moreover, new structures of
power must be enacted, and education must be reclaimed as
a civic practice rather than as a series of commercial exchanges.
Only then will it be possible for higher education to operate
as a democratic public sphere that takes seriously the notion
that democracy requires an informed citizenry and education
is the foundation for that to happen.
Repressive
forms of political education saturate everyday life and produce
both a reactionary shift in mass consciousness and a crisis
of civic imagination. In part, this is due to an attack on
democratic modes of education and public understanding in
a variety of cultural apparatuses, extending from public and
higher education to social media. Heightened racial hysteria
has become normalized and needs to be challenged in all the
cultural sites in which it appears. The pedagogical apparatuses
of culture have turned repressive and dangerous, and need
to be uncovered, resisted and overcome. The threat they expose
to democracy should be foregrounded, and, in part, this is
a role that higher education needs to address.
As Toni
Morrison has observed, colleges and universities need to embrace
“powerful visionary thinking about how the life of the
moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in
a context” of tyranny. In part, this means constructing
liberating pedagogies that address the dangers of white nationalism,
white supremacy, political corruption and fascist politics.
It also means educating students and providing faculty with
the tools, time and space to create widespread forms of resistance
in conjunction with other groups outside the university in
order to fight against the authoritarian attacks that constitute
what amounts to a new civil war.
As Toni
Morrison has observed, colleges and universities need to embrace
“powerful visionary thinking about how the life of the
moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in
a context” of tyranny. The struggle over education is
too crucial to ignore or lose. The stakes involve not just
the struggle over history, knowledge and values, but also
over the truth, justice, power and the social conditions that
make democratic modes of agency, identity and dignity possible.
The danger democracy faces in the U.S. is almost unthinkable
given the impending threat of fascism. Given the seriousness
of this impending danger, historian Robin D. G. Kelley rightly
observes, “We have no choice but to fight.”
One entry
into such a struggle is to recognize that democracy and capitalism
are diametrically opposed to each other. The current racist
attacks on higher education cannot be successful in the long
run if capitalism remains in place. Not only is there a need
for critical educators to do everything possible to develop
forms of popular education and a cultural politics that challenges
the corporatization of the university, but they must also
produce an anti-capitalist consciousness central to any viable
notion of equality, freedom, justice and social change. Predatory
capitalism is incompatible with democracy given the staggering
inequalities it produces in wealth, income and power. David
Harvey is right in asserting that “The fundamental problems
are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we
are going to go anywhere without a very strong anti-capitalist
movement.” What needs to be addressed is that the most
powerful big lie in the United States is not that Trump won
the 2020 election, but the normalized claim that capitalism
and democracy are synonymous.
The struggle
for a radical democracy suggests the need to develop a new
language that enables people to think in terms of broader
solidarities, necessary for overcoming a fractured political
landscape. This should be a language that touches people’s
lives, provides a comprehensive understanding of politics,
offers a concrete program for social change and lays the foundation
for a broad-based movement that will unite around a society
steeped in the principles of democratic socialism.
Democracy
and education have been pathologized under neoliberal capitalism
and have drifted into a space that mimics the ineffable terrors
of the past. Higher education in a time of growing authoritarianism
must address the question of what its role is in a democracy
and whether it is willing to define and defend itself as a
democratic public sphere and protective space of critique
and possibility.
As Hannah
Arendt once put it in her seminal essay, “The Crisis
in Education:” “Education is the point at which
we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility
for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which,
except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young,
would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide
whether we love our children enough not to expel them from
our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike
from their hands their chance of undertaking something new,
something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance
for the task of renewing a common world.”
The struggle
over education must be seen as part of a crucial struggle
for democracy itself. As Primo Levy warned us, “Every
age has its own fascism.” His words are more prophetic
than ever given the current collapse of conscience and the
willingness, if not glee, of the Republican Party to embrace
an American-style fascism.
As Amartya
Sen once argued, it is time “to think big about society”
— to move beyond the despair, isolation, theoretical
abysses and political silos that stand in the way of developing
a strong anti-capitalist movement. The danger facing the United
States is real and must be met with the utmost resistance
by a mass movement of workers, young people, academics, teachers,
feminists and others who believe that making education central
to politics is an urgent political necessity.
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