America on the Road to Fascism Can Be Stopped

 

The election of Trump not only attempts to legitimate an upgraded form of fascism, it raises the question of how Trump as a symptom of fascism was able to rise out of the dread, fear and anxieties fueled by a savage gangster capitalism neoliberalism combined with a culture of hate and racism to cancel out the authoritarian impulses, past and present that point to Trump's victory.

I don't want to underestimate how American society changed with the election of Reagan and the rise of the corrupt billionaire elite, but at the same time liberals aligned themselves with the Goldman Sachs crowd and implemented elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class. From Clinton's racist policies to Obama's centrist liberalism and unyielding believe in the ugly spirit of the financial elite, to Biden's death-driven foreign policy, a culture was put in place that made Trump possible.

But perhaps the most significant failure of liberalism, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering a collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but about forgetting, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion.

Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of democratic societies. In addition, they have taken advantage of the fact that matters of subjectivity, critical literacy, and education are fundamental to resistance and emancipation. Being far removed from any viable movement for social change, Trump and his Brown shirts filled the void with hatred, fear, anxiety, and spectacles not unlike those at Nuremberg in the 1930s.

If we are to confront this fascistic momentum, we must urgently return to the tools necessary to rebuild a mass consciousness as a precondition for a mass movement—one that can use strikes and other forms of direct action to prevent this new fascist regime from governing. We need to stop this machinery of death from enacting the mass suffering, misery, violence, and power that gives it both a sense of pleasure and reason for enduring.

American citizens have voted for a fascist regime that will transfer wealth to the ultra-rich, destroy the welfare state, ruthlessly deport millions of immigrants, and destroy as much as possible all institutions that hold power accountable and support critical thinking, conditions that create informed citizens, and struggle to expand the boundaries of a radical democracy.

In the shadow of fascism's rise, Seyla Benhabib echoing Adorno and Arendt, raises a profound question: “What does it mean to go on thinking, which suggests the urgent need to learn theory, politics, struggle, education, anew in “learning to think anew.” This challenges us to radically reconsider how we address, understand, and resist a culture that has, once again, paved the way for fascism.

Now, more than ever, we must reimagine theory, education, and the transformative potential of learning to ignite a truly working-class mass movement that is deeply anti-capitalist and fiercely democratic in its vision and practices.

-Henry Giroux