Noam Chomsky
Mark Kingwell
Naomi Klein Bruce
Bawer
Arundhati Roy
Evelyn Lau
Stephen Lewis
Robert Fisk
Margaret Somerville
Mona Eltahawy
Michael Moore
Julius Grey
Irshad Manji
Richard Rodriguez Navi Pillay
Ernesto Zedillo
Pico Iyer
Edward Said
Jean Baudrillard
Bill Moyers
Barbara Ehrenreich
Leon Wieseltier
Nayan Chanda
Charles Lewis
John Lavery
Tariq Ali
Michael Albert
Rochelle Gurstein
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
unleashed, unbound
CORPORATE POWER
by HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
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.
You
should not honour men more than truth. Plato
Listen to an audio version of this essay:
Moral witnessing
has largely retreated into billboards, podcasts, a commodified
and hate-filled media ecosystem, and relentless gestures
of liberal empathy emptied of consequence. Too few artists,
intellectuals, and cultural workers are willing to risk
their careers by confronting the genocidal wars of our
time and the governments and institutions that sustain
them with weapons, money, and silence. Where are the
voices for the children being slaughtered in Gaza and
for those subjected to the horrors of war, displacement,
and hunger in Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, and elsewhere? Where
is the outrage against the masked thugs patrolling America’s
streets, terrorizing communities, violating the law,
and turning state violence into a spectacle of fear?
Where is the international movement of artists, academics,
and cultural workers willing to organize, strike, and
refuse complicity with the corporate barbarians who
flood the culture with hatred, purchase elections, and
seize control of the commanding institutions of public
life? Where is the collective outrage over what Joel
Whitebook calls “humanity’s headlong race
toward an ecological cliff and the accelerating global
spread of neo-fascist movements”?
Under the
reign of neoliberal trillionaire fascism, the planet
burns, cities are militarized, inequality deepens, war
becomes a governing principle of politics, racism returns
as a celebrated language of power, and young people
are robbed of both a future and a place in history.
Cruelty is normalized, ignorance is weaponized, and
the machinery of death is dressed up in the language
of security, efficiency, and national greatness. Border
madness feeds white nationalism and colonial fantasies.
What once provoked shame is now performed as spectacle.
What once demanded outrage is absorbed into the rhythms
of everyday life.
This collapse
of moral courage is nowhere more visible than among
the liberal establishment of the Democratic Party, whose
fear of an emerging democratic socialism among young
people and an increasingly organized DSA appears at
times more intense than its opposition to the militarized
gangster capitalism of the Trump era. The contempt is
revealing because it exposes what liberal centrism fears
most: not authoritarian power, but a politics willing
to challenge the economic order on which that power
feeds. Even the liberal press often reproduces this
panic, framing the resurgence of democratic socialism
less as a response to grotesque inequality, corporate
rule, and the political exhaustion of neoliberalism
than as a threat to the Democratic Party itself.
The question
posed by Rolling Stone, whether the democratic socialist
surge might “doom the party,” gets the crisis
exactly backward: the more urgent question is whether
a party wedded to corporate power, militarism, and neoliberal
capitalism has already forfeited its capacity to speak
to millions of young people who no longer believe the
existing order has a future. This fear is manufactured
through a sterile self-serving ideological language.
In Rolling Stone, Bernie Sanders becomes a “Trojan
horse” who “infiltrated” the Democratic
Party, democratic socialism is associated with Animal
Farm and a “bitter worldview,” while Trump’s
politics, despite its acknowledged racism and cruelty,
is described as “eminently salable.” Democratic
socialism is treated as a pathology to be contained,
while authoritarian politics is translated into the
bloodless language of electoral viability.
Jon Cowan
and Matt Bennett, co-founders of the centrist group
Third Way, declared in a Washington Post op-ed that
the DSA’s ideas are “electoral poison.”
But what exactly is the poison they fear? A politics
that demands economic equality, universal social protections,
racial justice, democratic control over concentrated
wealth, and an end to a political order in which billionaires
purchase elections while the poor and working class
are abandoned and public life is hollowed out. This
political betrayal runs through the Clinton and Obama
years, when the Democratic establishment made its peace
with neoliberalism, Wall Street, corporate power, and
the permanent war state, leaving it increasingly incapable
of confronting the economic forces that nourish authoritarianism.
What haunts
the party’s centrists is not simply the DSA but
the return of a radical democratic tradition they had
hoped history had buried: the ghosts of Eugene Debs,
Michael Harrington, Stanley Aronowitz, and, more recently,
the insurgent democratic socialist politics associated
with Zohran Mamdani. This tradition invokes a language
the liberal guardians of the existing order find increasingly
intolerable: class power, economic justice, solidarity,
public goods, racial capitalism, and the radical democratization
of wealth and power.
At a moment
when fascism is gathering force and ecological catastrophe
is accelerating, defending capitalism against those
demanding a more just society is not political realism.
It is moral surrender dressed in respectable suits and
cowardice repackaged by the media as common sense. And
nowhere is this moral bankruptcy more grotesque than
in the continued flow of American weapons to Israel
as tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been
killed or wounded in Gaza. The centrists who recoil
at democratic socialism as “electoral poison”
have remarkably little difficulty accommodating themselves
to a political order in which children are bombed, starved,
and buried beneath rubble. Apparently, demanding economic
justice is considered too radical; underwriting mass
death and militarized gangster capitalism is not.
At a moment
when silence has become a form of complicity, where
are the voices willing to make power tremble? Where
are the heirs to W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Miller, James
Baldwin, I. F. Stone, and Angela Davis, alongside contemporary
artists such as Roger Waters and Javier Bardem, who
understand that art and intellectual work surrender
their moral force when they turn away from human suffering?
The question is no longer simply who will speak. It
is who is willing to risk something by speaking, to
refuse the safety of silence, and to transform moral
witnessing into collective resistance and outrage into
organized power. The task is no longer merely to bear
witness to the darkness, but to build the movements
capable of confronting and defeating the forces producing
it.
