Writing for me
represents the seemingly contradictory impulses of drawing blood and breathing
fresh air. I have been struggling for months with a new article titled
Neoliberal Fascism and the Politics of the Disconnected Present. An excerpt:
Language has been hollowed out, transformed into a consumer
advertising pitch, wedded to the spectacle of game shows, made dumb by
celebrity culture, weaponized as part of a war on social responsibility, and
censored in schools by right-wing propagandists who are wedded to using
violence to achieve political goals.
Violence is now
facilitated by a glut of manufactured ignorance, accelerated through the
degradation of language. In the age of dwindling attention spans, language
succumbs to a mediated culture of immediacy, tweets, and a degrading commercial
culture that limits the imagination, politics, civic life, and democracy
itself.
Under an emerging
fascist politics, violence is no longer hidden behind a wall of silence, it is
now worn like an honorary badge by far-right extremists in the Republican Party
along with their supporters.
Learned helplessness
in America has morphed into learned cruelty and a retreat from the discourse of
compassion, care, and truthfulness. Social bonds disappear in a neoliberal
world of dwindling interconnections, atomized subjects, fractured communities,
and civic disintegration.
-Henry Giroux
For the Republican Party, reality is not an objective fact to be
acknowledged. Today’s Republicans aim to reduce the range of thought through
doublespeak, denial and deceit. Their language is stripped of reason and raped
by propaganda. Power is not a means for them; it is an end for them—power for
its own sake. With today’s social media and promulgation of falsehood, reality
is no longer something to be known and experienced. It has been fabricated and
transformed.
We have witnessed Republican propagation of lies, the ongoing Republican subversion of elections, the Republican attempt to rigged the voting system in their favor,
the Republican focus on voting in partisan supervisors for elections, Republican gerrymandering, Republican legislator purges, Republican sabotage of the U.S.
mail system, Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security, Republican
obstruction of serious gun control legislation, Republican (or theocratic)
takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Republican
Party's ignoration of Donald J. Trump’s treasonous and seditious attacks on the past election and the Constitution of the United States.
We have witnessed this trumped-up transformation and its
exacerbation these past years. Narcissistic Trump is an authoritarian inhibited by no laws
or moral consideration, and there are others who are willing to subvert the Rule of Law for power and are dangerous and
depraved: Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, Mark Meadows,
Jeffrey Clark, Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, Scott Perry, John Eastman, Roger
Stone, Steve Bannon, Mo Brooks, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt
Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Charles Grassley, Ralph Norman, Rick Scott, Marco Rubio,
Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, John Neeley Kennedy, Ron Johnson, Louie Gohmert, Barry
Moore, Ron DeSantis,
Greg Abbott, Jeanne Herman, Doug Mastriano, Matthew DePerno, Mark Finchem, Brian Zahra, Tucker Carlson....
The destruction of America's fragile democracy will be the
result of our failure to respond to those among us who choose to repudiate
empirical truth and falsify reality for power and greed.
-Glen Brown
“…Republican politicians on the ground have stopped even pretending to hold or promote the values that were traditionally the mother’s milk of campaigning:
ReplyDelete Mitch McConnell long ago gave up on principle or ethics; he’s been all about pure power since Obama was elected.
The party that has long proclaimed itself the champion of “family values” can’t even muster a dozen votes to extend the child tax credit or support free pre-school.
The “party of morality” that spent three years going after Bill Clinton for getting a BJ from a consenting adult no longer even bothers to justify Trump’s 20+ charges of rape and sexual assault.
The “law and order party” has declared that assaulting over 140 police so severely they had to be hospitalized, smearing feces on the walls of the US Capitol, and trying to overthrow our government are “legitimate political discourse.”
Republicans always claimed to be the best at economics but have embraced tax cuts since 1981 that have created a $30 trillion national debt.
The party of “one nation, under God” has embraced open racism in its attacks on teaching Black history.
Patriotism and honor were values the GOP has used for decades to woo voters, but since Trump the party doesn’t even bother.
Even science is no longer something Republicans feel comfortable with, from Covid to sex-ed to evolution and climate change.
And don’t even think about honest history: Republicans across the nation are trying to ban the stories of the struggles of Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native Americans.
Republicans used to performatively embrace kindness (kissing babies was always big) but now they openly promote assault weapons and militias that are simply this generation’s brutal version of the Klan.
“The current Republican Party situation is unsustainable: the public is both exhausted and increasingly sickened by the recurrent panics and, outside of those, the GOP offers little by way of plans and policies to rebuild an America gutted by 40 years of Reagan’s neoliberalism…” -Thom Hartmann
You are the best 👌🏽
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