“Peter
Thiel, the silicon billionaire and one of the six ultra-rich financial elite to
speak at the Republican National Convention once wrote that he did not ‘believe that freedom and
democracy were compatible.’ This blatant anti-democratic mindset has emerged
once again, without apology, as a major organizing principle of the Republican
Party under Donald Trump. In addition to expressing a hatred of Muslims,
Mexicans, women, journalists, dissidents, and others whom he views as outside
the pale of what constitutes a true American, Trump appears to harbor a core
disdain for democracy, bringing back Theodor Adorno's warning that ‘the true
danger [of fascism] lay in the traces of the fascist mentality within the
democratic political system’ (a warning quoted in Prismatic Thought).
“What has become clear is that the
current political crisis represents a return to ideologies, values and policies
based upon a poisonous mix of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, opening up
a politics that ‘could lead back to political totalitarianism.’
“Throughout
the 2016 Republican National Convention the hateful discourse of red-faced
anger and unbridled fear-mongering added up to more than an appeal to protect
America and make it safe again. Such weakly coded invocations also echoed the
days of Jim Crow, the undoing of civil rights, forced expulsions and forms of
state terrorism sanctioned in the strident calls for safety and law-and-order.
“Commenting on Trump's speech, columnist Eugene Robinson argued that his talk added up to what few
journalists were willing to acknowledge – ‘a notorious white supremacist
account.’ What is shocking is the refusal in many mainstream media circles to
examine the role that white supremacy has played in creating the conditions for
Trump to emerge as the head of the Republican Party. This structured silence is
completely at odds with Trump's longstanding legacy of discrimination, including his recent and
relentless derogatory remarks concerning President Obama, his race-based
attacks on US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel (who is trying a case against Trump
University), his denunciation of Muslims as terrorists and his attempt to paint
Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists…
“One
consequence is that the public spheres that produce a critically engaged
citizenry and make a democracy possible are under siege and in rapid retreat.
Economic stagnation, massive inequality, the rise of religious fundamentalism
and growing forms of ultra-nationalism now aim to put democratic nations to
rest. Echoes of the right-wing movements in Europe have come home with a
vengeance.
“Demagogues wrapped in xenophobia, white supremacy and the false
appeal to a lost past echo a brutally familiar fascism, with slogans similar to
Donald Trump's call to ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Make America Safe Again.’
These are barely coded messages that call for forms of racial and social
cleansing. They are on the march, spewing hatred, embracing forms of anti-semitism
and white supremacy, and showing a deep-seated disdain for any form of justice
on the side of democracy. As Peter Foster points out in The Telegraph, ‘The toxic
combination of the most prolonged period of economic stagnation and the worst
refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War has seen the far-Right
surging across the continent, from Athens to Amsterdam and many points in
between.’
Trump
and the Culture of Cruelty:
“Nicholas Confessore rightly argues that Trump's ‘anti-other
language’ and denigration of Mexican immigrants as ‘criminal rapists, murderers
and drug dealers’ has ‘electrified the world of white nationalists,’ who up
until the Trump campaign had been relegated to the fringe of American politics.
No longer. All manner of white nationalist groups, news sites (The Daily
Stormer) and individuals, such as Jared Tayler (a self-described ‘race realist’)
and David Duke (a racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana lawmaker and talk show
host) have embraced Trump as a presidential candidate. And in a
less-than-subtle way, Trump has embraced them. He has repeatedly tweeted
messages that first appeared on racist or ultra-nationalist neo-Nazi Twitter
accounts and when asked about such tweets has refused to disavow them directly.
“In
short, this emerging American neo-fascism in its various forms is largely about
social and racial cleansing and its end point is the construction of prisons,
detention centers, enclosures, walls, and all the other varieties of murderous
apparatus that accompany the discourse of national greatness and racial purity.
Americans have lived through 40 years of the dismantling of the welfare state,
the elimination of democratic public spheres, such as schools and libraries,
and the attack on public goods and social provisions. In their place, we have
the rise of the punishing state with its support for a range of criminogenic institutions,
extending from banks and hedge funds to state governments and militarized
police departments that depend on extortion to meet their budgets.
“Where
are the institutions that do not support a rabid individualism, a culture of
cruelty and a society based on social combat -- that refuse to militarize
social problems and reject the white supremacist laws and practices spreading
throughout the United States? What happens when a society is shaped by a
poisonous neoliberalism that separates economic and individual economic actions
from social costs, when privatization becomes the only sanctioned orbit for
agency, when values are entirely reduced to exchange values?
“How
do we talk about the way in which language is transformed into a tool of
violence, as recently happened at the Republican National Convention? Moreover,
how does language act in the service of violence -- less through an overt
discourse of hate and bigotry than through its complicity with all manner of
symbolic and real violence? What happens to a society when moral witnessing is
hollowed out by a shameless entertainment industry that is willing to produce
and distribute spectacles of extreme violence on a massive scale? What happens
to a society when music is used as a method of torture (as it was at
Guantanamo) and when a fascist politics of torture and disappearance are
endorsed by a presidential candidate and many of his supporters?
“Instead of
addressing these questions -- as well as the state-sanctioned torture and
lynching that form the backdrop for this violence -- we have been hearing a lot
of talk about violence waged against police. This is not to suggest that the
recent isolated acts of violence against police are justified -- of course,
they are not -- but the real question is why we don't see much more of such
violence, given how rampant police violence has long been in the service of
white supremacy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates observes, the killing of police officers
cannot be addressed outside the historical legacy of discrimination,
harassment, and violence against Black people…
Differences
between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump:
“What
cannot be ignored is that Hillary Clinton has supported a war machine that has
resulted in the death of millions, while also supporting a neoliberal economy
that has produced massive amounts of suffering and created a mass incarceration
state. Yet, all of that is forgotten as the mainstream press focuses on stories
about Clinton's emails and the details of her electoral run for the presidency.
It is crucial to note that Clinton hides her crimes in the discourse of freedom
and appeals to democracy while Trump overtly disdains such a discourse. In the
end, state and domestic violence saturate American society and the only time
this fact gets noticed is when the beatings and murders of Black men are caught
on camera and spread through social media…
“Much
of the American public appears to have forgotten that totalitarian and white
supremacist societies are too often legitimated by a supplicant mainstream
media, cowardly politicians, right-wing and liberal pundits, academics and
other cultural workers who either overlook or support the hateful bigotry of
demagogues, such as Trump. What is also forgotten by many is the racist legacy
of policies implemented by the Democratic Party that have resulted in a
punitive culture of criminalization, incarceration and shooting of untold
numbers of Black people.
“Rather
than engage in the masochistic practice of supporting Trump's nativism,
ignorance and bigotry, and his warlike fantasies of what it will take to make
America great again, white workers who have been driven to despair by the
ravaging policies of the financial elite and their shameless political and
corporate allies should be in the streets protesting -- not only against what
is called establishment politics, but also the rise of an unvarnished neo-Nazi
demagogue…
“Does
it matter that Trump supports violence with a wink of the eye and is
unapologetic about his huge following of neo-Nazis who are enthusiastic about
waging a war against Black and Brown people? How is it possible to forget that,
overall, Trump is a demagogue, misogynist, racist and bigot who is
unequivocally dangerous to the promises and ideals of a democracy? Apparently,
it is possible. Yes, the fascists and Nazis were also efficient, particularly
in the end when it came to building a war machine and committing acts of
genocide. So much for pragmatism without a conscience.
“Trump
is a real danger to the species, the country and the world in general. His
views on war and climate change -- along with the promise of violence against
his enemies and his unapologetic racism, bigotry and hatred of constitutional
rights -- pose some of the greatest dangers to democracy and freedom the US has
ever faced.
“As
Adam Gopnik says in an excellent article in The New Yorker,
democracies do not simply commit suicide, they are killed by murderers, by
people like Trump. Most expressions of support for Trump vastly underestimate
the immediate danger Trump poses to the world and minorities of class, race and
ethnicity. In contrast, while Hillary Clinton is a warmonger, a cheerleader for
neoliberalism and a high-ranking member of the Democratic Party establishment,
she is not threatening to take an immediate set of actions that would throw
people of color, immigrants and working-class people under the bus.
“Instead, if
she wins the election, she should be viewed as part of a corrupt financial and
political system that should be overthrown. While posing danger on a number of
economic, political and foreign fronts, Clinton would also expose by her
actions and policies the mythological nature of the idea that democracy and
capitalism are the same thing. Hopefully, all those young people who followed
the dead-end of a Bernie Sanders movement -- and the false suggestion that a
political revolution can be achieved by reforming the Democratic Party -- would
seize on this contradiction. Sanders revitalized the discourse about
inequality, injustice and the need to break down the financial monopolies, but
he failed in choosing a political avenue in which such real and systemic change
can come about.
Fighting
for a Democratic Future:
“We
live in a time in which people are diverted into a politics that celebrates
saviors, denigrates democratic relations of power and policy, and provides a
mode of escape in which heartfelt trauma and pain are used to mobilize people
not into democratic movements but into venting their anger by blaming others
who are equally oppressed. This signals a politics that kills both empathy and
the imagination, a politics that uses pain to inflict further pain on others...
“Americans
need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established
political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a
radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in
a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the
widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass
incarceration state. With hope, these important social movements will continue
to break new ground in experimenting with new ways to come together and form
broad-based coalitions between fragmented subgroups.
“In
the end, it's vital to foster anti-fascist, pro-radical democracy movements
that understand short-term and long-term strategies. Short-term strategies
include participating in an electoral process to make sure a fascist or
religious fundamentalist does not control a school board or gain leadership
roles regarding public governance. Such practices do not represent a sellout
but a strategic effort to make immediate progressive gains on the way to
tearing down the entire system. Strategies built on the divide of being in or
out of the system are too simplistic...
“If
we are to fight for a democratic future that matters, progressives and the left
need to ask how we would go forward if the looming authoritarian nightmare
succeeds in descending upon the United States. What can we learn about the
costs of allowing our society to become lawless in its modes of governance and
to lose its historical understanding of the legacy of slavery, lynching and
bigotry that have given rise to mass incarceration and the punishing state?
What does it mean when money rules and corrupts politics, disavows economic
actions from social costs, and wages war against public trust, values and
goods? These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed in order
to break free from a neoliberal system that spells the death-knell for
democracy. All societies contain new beginnings -- we need desperately to find
one on the side of justice and democracy...”
Henry
A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the
Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical
Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University.
His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City
Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism
(Routledge, 2015) and coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures:
The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015).
Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
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