Fascism
first begins with linguistic violence and then gains momentum as an organizing
force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate violence against
entire groups — Black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims and others considered
“disposable.” In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains” and
“enemies,” describes immigrants as “losers” and “criminals,” and has become a
national mouthpiece for violent nationalists and a myriad of extremists who
trade in hate and violence. Using a rhetoric of hate as a performance strategy
to whip up his base, Trump employs endless rhetorical tropes of hate and
demonization that set the tone for real violence.
Trump
appears utterly unconcerned by the accusation that his highly charged rhetoric
of racial hatred, xenophobia and virulent nationalism both legitimates and
fuels acts of violence. He proceeds without concern about the consequences of
lending his voice to conspiracy theorists claiming that
George Soros is funding the caravan of migrant workers, calling
Maxine Waters a “low IQ person,” or
referring to former CIA director John Brennan as a “total lowlife” and
a “very bad guy.” Meanwhile, this inflammatory invective promotes violence from
the numerous fascist groups that support him.
Trump
thrives on promoting social divisions and often references violence as a means
of addressing them. His praise of Montana congressman Greg Gianforte for body slamming a
Guardian reporter in 2017 speaks for itself, as does his remark
that the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were “very fine people.” No
wonder Trump is praised by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, and
by the Proud Boys (a vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brownshirts).
Needless to say, as Karen Garcia
notes, Trump’s “frenzied Nuremberg-style rallies” are a cauldron of
race baiting and anti-Semitic demagoguery.
We
have seen before this collapse of language into a form of coded militarism and
racism — the anti-Semitism couched in critiques of globalization, the call for
racial and social cleansing couched in the discourse of borders and walls. The
emerging discourse of state terrorism in the US alarmingly resembles that of
Europe in the 1930s. Edward Luce
rightly reminds us that we have heard this language before. He
writes: “Eighty-five years ago on Thursday, Heinrich Himmler opened the Nazi’s
first concentrating camp at Dachau. History does not repeat itself. But it is
laced with warnings.”
In
an age when civic literacy and efforts to hold the powerful accountable for
their actions is dismissed as “fake news,” ignorance becomes the breeding
ground not just for hate, but for a culture that represses historical memory,
shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, refuses to make
tolerance a nonnegotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful to
weaponize everyday discourse.
Trump’s
language is neither harmless, nor merely a form of infantilized theater. It is
toxic, steeped in a racist nationalist ardor that stirs up and emboldens
extremist elements of his base. It adds fuel to a culture capable of horrific consequences,
as we have seen with the recent killing of
two Black people in a grocery store near Louisville, Kentucky; the sending of pipe
bombs to a number of high-profile Democrats; and the mass murder in a
Pittsburgh synagogue. It is also the language of silence, moral
irresponsibility and a willingness to look away in the face of violence and
human suffering. This is the worldview of fascist politics and a dangerous
nihilism — one that reinforces a contempt for human rights in the name of
financial expediency and the cynical pursuit of political power.
How
can Trump and his lemming-like supporters support the white supremacists and
neo-Nazis who have become increasingly emboldened in the United States? How can
they engage in racist and anti-Semitic attacks repeatedly, and at the same
time, overlook how they have become democracy’s gravediggers? How can Trump
call for national unity and denounce anti-Semitism when he engages in what his
critics have described as unapologetic “demagoguery
against racial minorities, foreigners and prominent Jewish political figures“?
How can they deny that the symbolic violence they endorse endlessly as a
central feature of politics creates a climate that produces hate and
legitimates violence? Trump does not merely trade in hate, he also works hard
in his rhetoric and policies to get Americans to hate each other.
How
can they gloss over the connection between the recent explosive devices mailed
to George Soros and the Republican attack ads that accused Soros of paying for
protesters at Trump’s rallies or claimed that he was the head of some global
financial cabal and worldwide conspiracy? These are familiar anti-Semitic slurs
used by a number of demagogues including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
There is more at work here than referring to Trump’s language as condoning and
encouraging extremism and violence. There is also a worldview that comes out of
a fascist playbook. Referring to the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in
Pittsburgh, Bari Weiss captures the relationship between Trump’s language and
the violence and anti-Semitism that is ballooning in the US as one register of
rising extremism. She writes:
“We
are living in an age when anti-Semitism is on the rise here at home. You need
only think of last year’s chants of 'Jews will not replace us' in
Charlottesville, or the president’s constant attacks on 'globalists,' 'international bankers' and 'the corrupt media,' all of which are commonly
associated with Jews in the minds of anti-Semites. It isn’t at all surprising
that these rhetorical tropes have translated into acts of violence — according
to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents rose by 57 percent in
2017 …”
We
have seen too many instances where Trump’s followers have beaten critics,
attacked journalists, and shouted down any form of critique aimed at Trump’s
policies — to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals and
journalists critical of the administration. Last week, a few weeks prior to the
2018 midterm elections, a number of Trump’s outspoken critics, all of whom have
been belittled and verbally attacked by Trump, were sent homemade pipe bombs in
the mail. Cesar Sayoc — the man who was charged in connection with the bombings
— is a strong Trump fan whose Twitter feed is littered with right-wing
conspiracy theories along with an assortment of “apocalyptic,
right-wing dystopian fantasies.”
Without
a care as to how his own vicious and aggressive rhetoric has legitimated and
galvanized acts of violence by an assortment of members of the “alt-right,”
neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Trump responded to the pipe bomb threats by
claiming it was the fault of the mainstream media, which he labeled as “fake
news.” Trump appears clueless and incapable of empathy regarding the suffering
of others, all while displaying great hypocrisy. For instance, he claims
political opponents should not be compared to historical villains and then
proceeds to villainize his political rivals when he speaks to his base. The
most obvious instance is when he whips up his base by encouraging chants aimed
at Hillary Clinton such as “lock her up” or when he claims at his
rallies that the Democrats are funding the caravan from Central
America that is making its way to the United States border.
He
ignored the plea of a number of progressive Jewish leaders not to visit the
Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh until he was willing to denounce white
nationalism. Instead he stated, once again, that if the synagogue had adequate
security the mass murder might have been avoided. Understandably, members of
the Jewish community were deeply offended by this suggestion that the
victims were to blame
for their own deaths. Once again, Trump turned his back on the
victims of white nationalist hate and gave a nod to people who should be
labeled as a threat to democracy by refusing to address the role they play in
fomenting a fascist politics and in posing a threat to both human life and
democracy.
Trump
remains silent about the fringe groups he has incited with his vicious attacks
on the press, the judiciary and his political opponents. That is, he refuses to
criticize them while shoring up their support by claiming he is a “nationalist”
who is fighting a global conspiracy. Violent fantasies are Trump’s
trademark, whether expressed in his support for ruthless dictators or in his
urging to “knock the crap out of” protesters. We have seen this celebration of
violence in the past with its infantile appeal to a hyper-masculinity.
Within
a week after the pipe bombs were sent to high-profile critics of Trump, a mass
shooting took place at a Pittsburgh synagogue in which 11 people were killed
and six were wounded. The charged suspect, Robert Bowers, opened fire on a
Saturday morning during baby-naming services. As he entered the Tree of Life
synagogue and began gunning people down, Bowers shouted,
“All Jews must die.” Trump responded to the tragedy by claiming,
“This wicked act of mass murder is pure evil, hard to believe, and frankly,
something that is unimaginable.”
Surely, there is nothing unimaginable about
the rising acts of violence in the United States given the degree to which
Trump’s highly charged rhetoric baits people to follow through on his
demonizing and poisonous calls to punish his alleged critics and those he
describes as “enemies of the American people.” While Trump’s attacks on
Muslims, undocumented immigrants and Mexicans are part of the script that
launched his investigation and have become a central feature of his racist
political appeals, his more recent attacks have broadened the objects of his
assault in ways that conjure up echoes of a fascist past. Trump now applies
fuel to a conflagration that is in tune with the winds of illiberal democracy
spreading around the globe. Max Boot summarizes well this expanding demagogic
language of disposability and demonization. He writes:
“Trump
calls Democrats 'evil' and 'crazy.' He accuses them of being 'treasonous' and 'un-American.' He claims they are in league with MS-13 gang members. He says
they are trying to open our borders to criminals and to turn America into
Venezuela…. He applauds a congressman who assaulted a reporter and calls for
his political opponent to be locked up. He singles out minorities such as [Rep.
Maxine] Waters for opprobrium, and he promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
that hold George Soros responsible for everything from the Central American
caravan to protests against Brett M. Kavanaugh. When Trump talks about 'globalists,' the far right hears 'Jews.' When Trump says there were 'fine
people' on both sides in Charlottesville, the far right hears official
approval…. And Trump continues his incendiary rhetoric even after the tragic
consequences have become clear.”
When
confronted with the rising acts of hate-inspired violence in the United States
and the question of whether his incendiary language serves to inflame such
violence, Trump responded in his usually crude and ethically irresponsible way
by stating he
was going to “tone up” his rhetoric rather than tone it down. His moral
indifference to threats of violence as well as to acts of real violence was on
further display when Trump tweeted that the “bomb stuff” was a distraction that
was slowing Republican momentum in the polls. Removed from any sense of moral
and political responsibility, Trump refuses to acknowledge that words matter
and that they feed the violent fantasies of right-wing extremists.
Some
high-profile Republicans dismissed the attempted assassinations as fraudulent
or blamed the Democrats. For Trump, as well as his Vichy-Republican allies and
many of his followers, facts or morality appear to never get in the way of
acknowledging the degree to which Trumpism has normalized violence as a tool to
squelch dissent by threatening journalists and others critical of Trump’s
fascist politics. The rhetoric of violence, hate and intolerance has morphed
into the service of fashioning Trump into the symbolic leader of the fascist
effort to criminalize all those individuals and groups considered disposable
and outside of the ultra-nationalist notion of the US as a white-public sphere.
Under
Trump, violence defines the political sphere, if not politics itself, and has
become a mythic force in which all meaning, desire, relations and actions are
reduced to a friend/enemy divide. This is the worldview of the demagogue and
points alarmingly to a resurgence of a fascist ideology updated for the 21st
century. Trump’s rhetoric of hate resembles the Nazi obsession with the discourse
of pollution, ritualistic acts aimed at purging critical thought and
undermining informed judgment.
This is the discourse of vicious cruelty and a
petri dish for nourishing the virus of a fascist politics. It is also the
outgrowth of a form of neoliberal fascism that has been emerging in the United
States since the late 1970s. What we are witnessing with the rise of fascism in
the United States and in many other countries gives credence to the warning
made by Theodor Adorno in his essay “The Meaning of
Working Through the Past“: “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing
that the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”
Trump
is the endpoint of a malady that has been growing for decades. What is
different about Trump is that he basks in his role, as George Scialabba puts it
in Slouching Toward
Utopia, as a “famous social parasite.” He is unapologetic about
the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him) and by
megacorporations. He embodies with unchecked bravado the sorts of sadistic
impulses that could condemn generations of children to a future of misery. He
loves people who believe that politics is undermined by anyone who has a
conscience, and he promotes and thrives in a culture of violence and cruelty.
He is not refiguring the character of democracy, he is destroying it, and in
doing so, resurrecting all the elements of a fascist politics that many people
thought would never re-emerge after the horrors and death inflicted on millions
by fascist dictators. As Gil Scott-Heron once noted in the title of his studio
album, it is “Winter in America.” Actually, it is worse: It is winter in
fascist America.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University
Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical
Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher
Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New
Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly
Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights,
2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge,
2018) and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights,
2018). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.