After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing

 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

– James Baldwin

You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.

– Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell

Every day we scroll past photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly, they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten... This is not merely a political development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age. 

We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. 

When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference.

As the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki return once again, they do so largely eclipsed by the Trump administration’s transformation of the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary into a spectacle of militarized patriotism, historical mythmaking, and American triumphalism. The pageantry celebrates a narrative of national innocence while eclipsing one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities committed in its name. 

The more urgent question, therefore, is not simply what happened in August 1945. It is what has become of a society whose formative institutions increasingly educate people to accommodate violence rather than resist it.

The answer lies in more than what Gore Vidal once described as America’s cultivated historical amnesia. Under gangster capitalism, forgetting has become a governing principle of power. We inhabit a regime of organized forgetting that erases bodies from public consciousness even as it erases historical memory itself. It teaches us to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and to consume the suffering of others as another spectacle in an endless cycle of distraction, entertainment, and forgetting. Such regimes are not abstractions. They become visible whenever policies capable of producing immense human suffering disappear beneath the noise of political spectacle—as in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, a policy that recent analyses estimate has already contributed to “an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.”

How else are we to understand a world in which more than sixty-four thousand Palestinian children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023 while their suffering disappears almost as quickly as the headlines that briefly acknowledge it? How else do we explain the reported deaths of more than one hundred children in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, an event that barely registered before it was displaced by the next manufactured spectacle? These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a broader cultural condition in which atrocity is consumed, circulated, and forgotten with astonishing speed.

This is the deepest wound inflicted by authoritarian culture. It does not merely normalize violence; it reorganizes consciousness. It severs suffering from compassion, history from responsibility, and death from mourning. 

When the victims disappear from memory almost as quickly as they disappear from life, power secures one of its greatest triumphs: it destroys not only bodies but the public capacity to recognize their loss. In that moment, forgetting becomes the final act of violence, completing in consciousness what bombs, prisons, armies, and occupations begin in history. 

This cultural condition has been analyzed most powerfully by Robert Jay Lifton.

Robert Jay Lifton gave this condition a name: psychic numbing. He used the phrase to describe the diminished capacity to feel in the face of overwhelming violence. What begins as a psychological defense against unbearable suffering can become a cultural and political condition. Entire societies learn to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and eventually to forget. 

This condition is not merely an individual affliction, or type of “impaired mourning”; it is a form of public pedagogy. It is cultivated by schools emptied of critical thought, historical consciousness, and civic purpose; it is produced by media cultures organized around spectacle, digital platforms that reward distraction, a culture of immediacy, and political narratives that teach us to accommodate cruelty rather than confront it. Against this pedagogy of forgetting stands the difficult and necessarily troubling work of historical memory.

These questions matter because remembrance is not the same as historical memory. Official rituals of remembrance often console us by confining catastrophe safely to the past. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes in America, U.S.A., historical memory performs a very different task. It returns us to unfinished histories whose consequences continue to inhabit the present. It unsettles rather than reassures. It refuses the comfort of distance and insists that the past is never truly past when the conditions that produced it survive in altered forms. Historical memory does not ask us simply to remember what happened. It demands that we recognize how the logics that made catastrophe possible continue to shape the present.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong to precisely this kind of historical memory because they remind us that atrocities begin long before the first bomb falls. They begin when language is removed from moral responsibility, when history is erased or rewritten through the vocabulary of conquest and colonization, and when entire populations are rendered disposable before they are destroyed. Every genocide is first a crisis of language, memory, and moral imagination. 

By the time the machinery of death is set in motion, the deeper work has already been done; compassion has been weakened, historical consciousness has been dismantled, and violence has been normalized as common sense. 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand not only as symbols of unprecedented destruction but also as warnings about the political culture that makes such destruction imaginable. Few have expressed this truth more forcefully than the late Howard Zinn: What means could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? 

And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high as from Moses on the Mount.

The atomic bombings were not merely military events that concluded the Second World War. They inaugurated a new historical formation in which scientific achievement became inseparable from industrialized killing, technological rationality overwhelmed ethical judgment, and civilian annihilation could be justified through the sanitized language of military necessity, national security, and historical inevitability. Long before the bombs incinerated cities, another devastation had already taken place. Human beings had been transformed into abstractions, dehumanized through racist slurs, strategic calculations, and collateral damage.

The bomb exploded first in consciousness. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”  When language is colonized, memory itself becomes vulnerable to conquest—capturing consciousness long before it captures territory. 

Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to ash, language had already been emptied of moral responsibility, memory had been rewritten in the service of empire, and entire populations had been rendered disposable.

That moral rupture did not disappear with the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became embedded in institutions, policies, cultural narratives, and educational practices that normalized militarism while celebrating technological mastery divorced from ethical restraint. The bomb was transformed into a symbol of national virtue rather than a warning about the abyss into which modern civilization had descended. 

As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell observed, American political culture constructed an official narrative that sought not to confront the moral catastrophe of Hiroshima but to redeem it, converting an act of unprecedented destruction into a story of national innocence and salvation. That narrative did more than justify the bomb. It reorganized moral consciousness.

Lifton argued that Hiroshima did not wound only its victims; it also left a profound mark on the American imagination, fostering a culture of denial, moral justification, and emotional numbing. Yet he never regarded Hiroshima solely as a source of despair. He insisted that confronting its moral legacy honestly could foster resilience, renewal, and what he called “survivor wisdom,” restoring the historical memory and moral imagination necessary to resist future catastrophes. That insight is even more urgent today because the habits of denial and indifference he identified have escaped the nuclear age and become defining features of contemporary political culture.

Among survivors of Hiroshima, this diminished capacity to feel initially functioned as a tragic form of psychological survival. Faced with scenes too horrific to absorb, many found themselves emotionally paralyzed, temporarily incapable of responding to the landscape of death surrounding them. But Lifton extended the concept much further. He argued that the same condition also characterized those who designed the bomb, authorized its use, justified its necessity, and later defended its moral legitimacy. What began as an emergency psychological defense gradually became a cultural condition. This insight reaches far beyond Hiroshima. What begins as a defense against unbearable suffering can evolve into a political culture organized around indifference. 

A society that learns not to feel one atrocity gradually acquires the capacity to ignore others. Lifton warned that once Americans constructed what he called a “cordon sanitaire” around Hiroshima—a barrier protecting them from confronting its moral implications—that habit of avoidance spread to other forms of collective suffering. The numbing did not stop with Hiroshima. It became a way of inhabiting the world.

Nothing could better describe our present historical moment. We inhabit societies saturated with images of catastrophe. Yet rather than enlarging our ethical imagination, this relentless exposure often produces exhaustion, indifference, and resignation.

Even more troubling, it feeds a resurgent war culture that glorifies domination, celebrates militarized masculinity, and equates physical strength with moral worth. As Susan Sontag argued in her classic essay on fascist aesthetics, authoritarian culture does more than justify violence; it aestheticizes it. Domination becomes seductive, hierarchy beautiful, submission desirable, and the spectacle of power detached from the suffering it produces. 

Violence no longer appears as a moral catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of strength, discipline, virility, and national renewal. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of militarized masculinity is not simply a political posture; it is the contemporary expression of this fascist aesthetic. 

It transforms domination into virtue, physical force into moral authority, misogyny into masculine authenticity, and violence into the highest expression of citizenship. In doing so, it redefines citizenship itself, replacing democratic responsibility with militarized obedience, civic courage with warrior masculinity, and public life with a theater of force.

In such a culture, violence becomes another genre of entertainment, another spectacle in the economy of distraction. The constant circulation of suffering no longer enlarges compassion; it erodes it, teaching people not simply to witness violence but increasingly to admire, consume, and normalize it.

Lifton anticipated this transformation with extraordinary clarity. As this moral desensitization spreads, he argued, people require ever greater spectacles of violence simply to feel anything at all. Disaster becomes normalized, and ordinary suffering loses its capacity to disturb us.

Here the legacy of Hiroshima converges with the digital culture of the twenty-first century.

Algorithms reward outrage while discouraging reflection. Social media platforms monetize fear, resentment, and humiliation. Corporate news reduces war to spectacle, compressing unbearable histories into disposable images. Artificial intelligence accelerates the circulation of propaganda, conspiracy, and racial mythology while diminishing the time necessary for thoughtful judgment. We increasingly encounter suffering not as fellow human beings but as data, content, or scrolling images. Distance becomes permanent. Responsibility evaporates.

This is not simply a technological crisis. It is a pedagogical one.

Every culture teaches people how to see, what to value, whose lives matter, and whose deaths may be ignored. The most powerful educational institutions today are no longer schools alone. They are digital platforms, corporate media, entertainment industries, and algorithmic systems that organize attention itself. These institutions do more than distribute information. They shape consciousness, organize attention, and cultivate habits of feeling. They manufacture forms of identification while teaching indifference toward others.

Under such conditions, fascism no longer requires spectacular rallies or uniforms to reproduce itself. It works more quietly and, for that reason, often more effectively. It reshapes perception, colonizes language, erodes historical memory, and teaches people to regard entire populations as invaders, parasites, criminals, terrorists, or demographic threats rather than as fellow human beings. By the time the machinery of violence is set in motion, its deepest victory has already been won: the democratic imagination has been hollowed out, compassion has yielded to fear, and disposability has become common sense.

Today this pedagogy of dehumanization is once again becoming normalized. Calls for mass deportation, fantasies of ethnic purification disguised as “remigration,” attacks on immigrants, racial conspiracy theories, and genocidal rhetoric directed at Palestinians all depend upon a prior educational achievement: teaching people to regard certain lives as disposable.

That is why figures such as Elon Musk matter. They matter not because they are uniquely evil but because they occupy commanding positions within the cultural apparatuses that now educate hundreds of millions of people. When racist conspiracies, demographic panic, and authoritarian fantasies are amplified through platforms reaching much of the globe, white supremacist propaganda is transformed into common sense. Hatred becomes normalized precisely because it is repeated, circulated, rewarded, and stripped of its historical genealogy.

As Jamelle Bouie has argued, Musk’s rhetoric is no longer confined to coded insinuations or internet provocation. It increasingly echoes themes drawn from the contemporary white nationalist imagination: affirming slogans such as “First the traitors, then the invaders”; declaring that “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor”; amplifying demographic panic over declining white birthrates; and normalizing the language of racial replacement and ethnic cleansing. 

Bouie also notes the disturbing resonance between this rhetoric and the political imaginary of The Turner Diaries, where “traitors” who defend a multiracial democracy are marked for elimination before the campaign against supposed “invaders” begins. This should not be dismissed merely as inflammatory rhetoric.  Language of this kind does not simply describe the world; it prepares people to inhabit one in which exclusion, racial purification, and political violence appear not only legitimate but necessary.

Yet we should resist the temptation to describe figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Stephen Miller simply as monsters. 

As Jorge Gonzalez Arocha observes, the language of monstrosity may satisfy our moral outrage, but it ultimately obscures the deeper workings of power. Monsters exist outside history. They are imagined as aberrations, exceptions to ordinary life. Fascism is neither. It is produced within history, cultivated through institutions, sustained by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, amplified by media, and normalized through the everyday pedagogies of schools, digital platforms, entertainment industries, and political culture. When we imagine authoritarianism as the work of monsters, we mistake symptoms for causes, overlooking the social relations, institutional arrangements, and cultural forces that make such politics possible.

The enduring lesson of Hiroshima is not that monsters occasionally seize power. It is that educated people, respected institutions, celebrated scientists, compliant journalists, and ordinary citizens can become participants in systems that separate technical intelligence from moral responsibility. The bureaucrats who planned Hiroshima were not monsters. The scientists who perfected the bomb were not monsters. The journalists who celebrated it were not monsters. They were products of institutions that transformed mass death into administrative necessity and moral obligation. The greatest crimes of modernity are rarely committed outside civilization; they are committed in its name.

The political danger of the language of monstrosity is that it individualizes what is fundamentally systemic. It encourages us to search for evil personalities rather than authoritarian cultures, for pathological leaders rather than the pedagogical apparatuses that educate people into accepting cruelty, disposability, and organized forgetting. Remove one authoritarian leader and another will take his place so long as the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, and educational forces that manufacture authoritarian consciousness remain intact. That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it remains the central political lesson of our own time.

History never repeats itself mechanically. Gaza is not Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not Gaza. Their histories are different, their contexts distinct.  But they reveal a recurring political logic: civilian populations rendered disposable, overwhelming violence justified as necessity, bureaucratic language replacing ethical judgment, and technological superiority mistaken for moral legitimacy. Whenever human beings become abstractions rather than persons, the conditions for atrocity are already present.

This is why remembering Nagasaki matters. Historical comparison is valuable not because it erases difference but because it reveals recurring political logics.

Historical memory breaks the spell of moral indifference. It restores the connection between feeling and judgment, conscience and politics. It reminds us that every genocide begins not with the machinery of death but with the pedagogy of dehumanization. Long before bodies are destroyed, language is corrupted, history is erased, compassion is ridiculed, and entire populations are taught to disappear morally before they disappear physically.

Lifton believed that confronting Hiroshima could become a source of renewal because it enabled us to recover our moral imagination, relearn how to feel, and reconnect ourselves to the broader human project. That may be the most important lesson Nagasaki offers today.

The struggle against fascism begins not only by resisting authoritarian institutions but by refusing the moral indifference upon which they depend. Against organized forgetting and manufacture illiteracy and amnesia, we must recover historical memory. Against the politics of disposability, we must insist upon the irreducible dignity of every human life. Against the seductive myths of technological omnipotence and permanent war, we must reclaim a language capable of naming both truth and justice.

The authoritarian abyss is no longer a distant possibility. It has entered the present. It appears wherever democracy yields to militarism, wherever cruelty is celebrated as strength, wherever historical memory is erased, and wherever entire peoples are stripped of their humanity in the name of security, racial purity, or national destiny. The forces that produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not disappeared; they have assumed new languages, new technologies, and new justifications.

The question is no longer whether we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is whether we can recover the moral urgency necessary to prevent their logic from becoming the defining political grammar of the twenty-first century. 

Historical memory is no longer simply an act of remembrance; it has become a condition of survival. To remember is to resist. But memory cannot remain a sanctuary for conscience; it must become a catalyst for collective struggle. Its highest purpose is not simply to preserve the past but to interrupt/rupture/transform the present. Only when remembrance gives rise to solidarity, organized resistance, and the struggle to create a more just world does it honor those whose lives history has tried to erase.

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: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

 

Well, what do we think about president djt?

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you!

President DJT

“One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations ('Complete and Total Control'). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many 'written documents' establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia…”

-The Atlantic

 “[He] wears ill-fitting suites and takes over the Kennedy Center instituting a culture of vulgarity and casually tells Norway he will pursue Greenland because he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. It would be easy to dismiss him as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, creates a Gestapo-like personal police force that is unaccountable, and has elevated staggering levels of inequality and white supremacy into core principles of governance. At the same time, he funds the genocide in Gaza and buddies up with war criminals. He only appears to smile when he is insulting people and inflicting pain and violence. He is symbolic of an ugly ideology dressed in an equally ugly aesthetic. And in ugly times, such symbols are not incidental; they are warnings.” 

-Henry Giroux

Regime Change in Venezuela is the Marriage of Colonialism and Gangster Capitalism

I watched the coverage on CBS and NBC of the U.S. assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and what I witnessed was not journalism but the choreography of propaganda. CBS, in particular, offered thirty uninterrupted minutes of state-sanctioned fantasy, anchored by a fawning interview with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a man implicated in the killing of more than one hundred people at sea, killed without evidence, accountability, or due process. Rather than interrogating power, the networks defaulted to spectacle.

At no point did either network raise the most basic questions of legality, sovereignty, or international law. Instead, both newscasts offered images of people dancing in the streets celebrating what amounts to a spectacularized violation of international and domestic law.  

There was no mention that the attack and abduction were condemned by the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, by international legal scholars, or by a widening circle of global leaders alarmed by the precedent being set. There was no scrutiny of the fabricated claims that Venezuela was plotting an invasion of the United States or serving as the epicenter of drug trafficking, assertions long discredited but endlessly recycled to justify imperial violence. 

Nor , crucially, was there any acknowledgment of Trump’s staggering hypocrisy: while declaring a war on drugs in the name of national security, he pardoned one of the most notorious narcotics traffickers ever prosecuted in the United States, Juan Orlando Hernández, described by prosecutors as a central figure in an eighteen-year operation that flooded the U.S. with more than 400 tons of cocaine.

Absent as well was any critical examination of Trump’s resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine, now stripped of even its earlier pretenses and refashioned as a doctrine of open coercion, colonial entitlement, and gangster capitalism. This silence was not incidental; it functioned to protect the ideological framework that renders imperial violence normal and profitable.

This imperial aggression mirrors the logic of Adolf Hitler’s doctrine of Lebensraum, a racist and expansionist ideology that justified conquest, terror, and annexation in the name of national destiny. History does not repeat itself mechanically, but it does return with new uniforms, new slogans, and the same deadly imperial ambitions.

The danger could not have been clearer when Marco Rubio publicly threatened the governments of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and other nations in the region, warning that they would face retaliation if they failed to submit to the Trump administration’s demands. This was a declaration of imperial intent, a signal that the United States now claims the right to decide which governments may exist and which must be eliminated. 

Equally absent from the broadcast was any reckoning with the toxic reach of neoliberalism itself, despite the fact that Trump openly gloated publicly over Venezuela’s oil reserves and made the astonishing admission that he intended to hand control of those resources to the largest U.S. oil conglomerates. This declaration was an open admission of support for the fusion of state violence, corporate plunder, and imperial entitlement. 

In that moment, conquest was no longer disguised as security policy; it was announced as a business transaction. Such candor would have forced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to append new chapters to their warnings about dictatorship, chapters in which authoritarian power no longer bothers to conceal its motives, and where the extraction of wealth replaces ideology as the naked logic of domination. 

What we are witnessing is fascism unbound, armed with military force and insulated by media silence. When mainstream media abandon their obligation to question power, to name crimes, and to defend democratic norms, they do more than misinform the public. They normalize lawlessness, launder violence, and prepare the population to accept the unthinkable as inevitable. This silence is not neutrality. It is complicity, and in an age of disappearing laws and vanishing lives, it is a complicity that history will recognize for what it is—an updated version of the worst horrors of the past.

-Henry Giroux

Higher Education in the Time of Fascist Plague by Henry Giroux

 

  

The horrors of fascism have returned, not as ghosts, but as a plague, fueled by racial hatred and historical amnesia, infiltrating schools, universities, and the public sphere through state violence, fear, censorship, and manufactured ignorance. Across the globe, fascist forces—emboldened by resurgent colonial logics, neoliberal cruelty, and virulent white nationalism—have transformed universities into battlegrounds for democracy’s future. Dissent against a genocidal war in Gaza is not merely discouraged but criminalized, while political intimidation and extortion directed at major institutions, especially higher education, are recast as the new language of governance.     

In this critical moment, the urgency of defending higher education has never been clearer. As both a site of knowledge production and democratic possibility, higher education must resist becoming a tool of fascist and neoliberal control. Its role in nurturing critical thought, social responsibility, and civic courage is central to the survival of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism.

It is no longer enough to rehearse the familiar language of education’s democratic mission or nostalgically invoke its emancipatory promise. Those ideals must be rethought and radicalized; they must be expanded, sharpened, and reclaimed as ethical and political imperatives equal to the darkness of our times, especially the threat posed by neoliberal fascism. 

In this instance, what is needed is an argument for understanding higher education not as a refuge from politics but as one of its most decisive battlegrounds, a place where public consciousness is shaped, where the struggle over truth and power unfolds, and where the pedagogical conditions for resisting emerging fascism must be forged anew. Such recognition forces us to confront the deeper forces shaping this crisis, to ask what forms of power waging war on education are and what is truly at stake in this escalating assault.

What is at stake, however, is far more than a rejection of gangster capitalism and the global misery it produces. The deeper danger lies in recognizing that education has become the primary battlefield in the cultural and ideological wars waged by authoritarianism. 

Neoliberal capitalism, in its fascist mutation, does not simply impoverish; it seeks to colonize consciousness, to erode the capacity for critical thought, and to replace democratic imagination with the deadening certainties of hierarchy and fear. 

Universities now sit at a dangerous crossroad where truth is contested, civic memory is either erased or preserved, and the formative conditions for democratic life are nourished, or systematically destroyed. To defend higher education, then, is to reclaim its power to cultivate the forms of agency, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to challenge the lies, brutalities, racism, corruption, and manufactured ignorance that sustain authoritarian rule. It is to insist that education remain a crucial site of critique and possibility—one capable of expanding the horizon of the future at a moment when fascism seeks to close it down.

Such a task demands thinking the unthinkable: not merely reforming neoliberal capitalism but abolishing it, and cultivating pedagogical spaces where new modes of agency, solidarity, value, and identity can be forged. Only through such radical reimagining can education become the ground from which democratic life is rebuilt and the struggle for a liberated future renewed.

The threat to American society is not merely external, evident in the lawlessness and militarization that now permeate almost every aspect of public life. It resides in the pedagogical terrain itself, in the ways authoritarian movements mobilize cultural institutions, digital ecosystems, and state power to produce a public consciousness increasingly habituated to cruelty, disposability, white nationalism, and historical amnesia. 

Trump’s educational politics, steeped in racial hatred, ultra-nationalism, and authoritarian contempt for reason, exemplify a broader global project: the transformation of education into a tool for consolidating hierarchy, manufacturing consent, and converting higher education into laboratories of indoctrination.

 To confront this project, it is not enough to criticize his corruption or his embrace of economic exploitation, staggering inequality, unadulterated cruelty, and racial hierarchies. We must expose the cultural fantasies and pedagogical practices that animate these policies, the false promises of belonging they extend, and the forms of political and ethical illiteracy they cultivate.

What is required, then, is the radical reimagining of pedagogy. Higher education must reclaim academic freedom, dissent, critical thought, and democratic governance not as abstract principles but as urgent practices of resistance. This means creating pedagogical conditions that nurture individual and collective agency, reconnect critique with social change, and transform private suffering into shared political consciousness. It means building classrooms and campuses where justice can be named, where inequality can be confronted, and where democratic forms of life can be rehearsed and renewed. It also means forging solidarities among faculty, students, unions, workers, and social movements, nationally and internationally, as part of a broader struggle for equality, justice, and freedom.

The task before us is clear: for higher education to endure as a democratic public good, it must take decisive action. It must recognize that democracy cannot exist without an informed public, that justice requires a language capable of confronting and narrating injustice, and that freedom depends on a pedagogy dedicated to nurturing the fragile yet vital work of civic courage—and the refusal of complicity with the mobilizing passions of fascist politics. 

Stephen Rohde, focusing on Northwestern University, warns that universities must resist succumbing to “Trump’s ongoing campaign, steeped in hypocrisy, self-delusion, bribery, and cowardice…to dismantle the independence of American colleges and universities,” for doing so would make them complicit in cementing the bigoted regime of MAGA. 

In the following, I will explore what this struggle demands and why the fight over higher education is, at its essence, a battle for the very meaning of radical democracy.

Higher Education Under Siege: The Rise of Neoliberal Fascism

Across the world, universities are under siege and democracy itself is approaching a terrifying threshold. From Hungary to India to Turkey, governments are hollowing out the university’s democratic mission, attacking intellectual freedom, weaponizing history, policing critical pedagogy, and stripping away the civic imagination that sustains democratic life. What’s at stake is not just the pursuit of truth but the moral and pedagogical fundamentals of democracy, a delicate balance between knowledge and responsibility, learning and the courage to bear witness. In these darkening times, it is not only knowledge that is being policed but agency itself, as the lifeblood of an informed, critical, and resistant citizenry.

When education is severed from its moral and civic grounding, democracy erodes. Truth becomes suspect, knowledge becomes dangerous, and educators are seen as enemies by those who fear the power of enlightened judgment and the task of holding power accountable. Once the classroom loses its capacity for moral witnessing, critical thinking, and civic courage, the conditions for domination are set. Ignorance becomes virtue, conscience is silenced, and democracy’s fragile bonds begin to fray from civil and legal rights to the institutions meant to protect them. In such a climate, the struggle for education is inseparable from the collective solidarities that make democratic life possible.

Theorists as diverse as Pierre Bourdieu and Thomas Pikety have noted in a number of books and essays how neoliberalism, a predatory form of capitalism, has waged war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and hollowed out the very notion of the common good. Masked by the rhetoric of freedom and efficiency, it elevates market logic into a totalizing ideology, demanding that every domain of life bend to economic imperatives. In doing so, it separates economic practices from social costs, and in doing so disparages any viable notion of social responsibility. 

In practice, it concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite, celebrates ruthless individualism, and commodifies the most sacred dimensions of human existence. The social wreckage it leaves behind, systemic racism, militarism, mass precarity, and staggering inequality, is not an aberration but a defining feature of a politics built on dispossession, domination, and terminal exclusion. Paramjit Singh, wring in the Socialist Project, insightfully sums up neoliberalism bad-faith premises and the wreckage it produces. He is worth quoting at length:

"Across the world, neoliberalism has exhausted the moral and material foundations of the liberal order that once began as a promise of equality, justice, prosperity, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it has produced deep inequality, widespread dispossession, ecological devastation, and the disintegration of collective life. However, neoliberalism’s most enduring damage lies not only in its economic consequences but also in its epistemic effects. It has weakened the categories through which societies understand justice, equality, community, and reason…. In the neoliberal era, both dissent and reason have been profoundly degraded. Decades of globalization, financialization, and privatization have depoliticized everyday life, replacing collective struggle with individualized anxiety. The rhetoric of choice, empowerment, and personal fulfilment has displaced the language of class. Under such conditions, dissent risks becoming spectacle, and reason risks degenerating into strategy, emptying both of their transformative political content. We inhabit a world that protests incessantly, yet rarely challenges the structural roots of crisis."

As neoliberalism decays into an upgraded fascism, its machinery of repression intensifies. No longer able to legitimate itself, it blames its failures on immigrants, Black people, and all those deemed “other.” Dissent is criminalized, social life militarized, immigrants are abducted, and hate is normalized. Under Trump, this assault has crystallized into open warfare, rooted in the belief that critical education poses a direct threat to the authoritarian project.

The Role of Higher Education in Defending Intellectual Freedom

This hostility is echoed at the highest levels of the regime. J.D. Vance, the U.S. Vice President, has called higher education a “hostile institution.” Donald Trump rails against colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” stating that student protesters as “radicals,” “savages” and “jihadists” have been brainwashed by faculty “communists and terrorists.” These poisonous declarations shape policies that transform education into a site of repression, censorship, and laboratories of indoctrination. Moreover, these comments play a powerful role in crushing the critical functions of higher education, which is central to consolidating authoritarian power.

Against this backdrop, as fascist politics surges across the globe, it is crucial for educators to confront a set of urgent and unsettling questions. What does the rise of illiberal regimes mean for higher education in an age of manufactured fear, state terrorism, and state-sponsored lies? What responsibilities fall to universities when the very idea of democracy is under siege? What happens to a society when education is disparaged for its claims on democracy, civic culture withers, and academics are told to look away? What happens when educators are pressured into refusing to speak the unspeakable? 

In Trump’s America, and in countries around the world drifting toward fascism, silence becomes a form of complicity and inaction, a profound moral failure. The university cannot retreat into neutrality when the stakes are this high; its task is to defend the public imagination, nurture democratic agency, and refuse the tyranny that seeks to extinguish both.

Domestic Terrorism and Authoritarian Rule

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 marks not only a political crisis but a profound tragedy for democracy. Under Trump, we face a terrifying new era of state terrorism evident by the erosion of due process, mass abductions, vicious attacks on higher education, and the increasing presence of a police state. America is at war with itself at the same time as it threatens war in Venezuela. Racism and hatred have moved from the shadows to the seat of power, reshaping the political landscape with brutal clarity. ICE operates as a modern Gestapo, patrolling American cities with the explicit aim of terrorizing immigrants and people of color. State violence has become a public spectacle, disinformation has supplanted truth, and the democratic bonds of shared responsibility have withered into a corrosive politics of shared fear.

Trump is unhinged in his gleeful embrace of white supremacy, a malignant worldview that saturates every policy he advances and every cruelty he authorizes. His white nationalist rhetoric has grown so extreme that he publicly indulges in a fascist delirium of racial cleansing, declaring Somali immigrants “garbage,” insisting they “contribute nothing,” and claiming they come “from a country that stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” Such racist invective not only legitimizes cruelty and a politics of disposability as governance; it also fuels his broader assault on higher education. Institutions committed to critical inquiry, dangerous memories, academic freedom, equality, justice, and pluralist imaginaries are now treated as intolerable because they pose a direct threat to the racist hierarchies and exclusionary nationalism that anchor an authoritarian state. 

As The Guardian recently noted, Trump’s driving ideological conviction is that there is not enough racism in either the United States or Europe, a worldview that both fuels and legitimizes his most extreme authoritarian policies.

Trump represents the endpoint of gangster capitalism, the culmination of its violence, disposability, and moral rot. He is the twenty-first-century, hyper-charged incarnation of Patrick Bateman from the film, American Psycho, a figure fashioned through cruelty, unchecked violence, narcissism, and the celebration of domination. Every policy Trump advances radiates this criminogenic logic, from the killing of more than 80 people in small boats in the Caribbean to cutting off life-saving aid through USAID, condemning millions to misery and death. He is the living embodiment of a death-machine, a leader for whom state-sanctioned violence and ruthless governance become  not just a tool of control but a source of perverse pleasure.

The Assault on History: Erasing Memory and Shaping Power

Such hostility inevitably turns toward history, the most dangerous teacher of all. The subversive power of historical understanding, its capacity to illuminate suffering, expose injustice, and nurture democratic hope, is precisely why it has become a target for right-wing forces intent on erasing or sanitizing uncomfortable truths. This is not abstract: it shapes policy. Efforts to censor critical ideas, erase episodes like slavery, and eliminate depictions of systemic racism exemplify this dangerous turn. 

Donald Trump has openly stated that “he would punish schools that teach students accurate U.S. history, including about slavery and racism in the country.” Across the United States, an aggressive campaign is underway by right-wing groups to erase history and transform schools and universities into instruments of ideological control. Books are being banned, professors targeted, gender and ethnic studies eliminated, trans identity vilified, student protests criminalized, and honest historical narratives suppressed. This is not symbolic; it is the blueprint of fascist politics and governance, a state-sanctioned strategy to extinguish the democratic imagination.

If the emerging fascism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere is to be confronted, critical education must again become a vital force in democratic life. Higher education has to be understood not as a problem to be tamed but as an indispensable resource for rebuilding democracies in crisis.  This begins with reclaiming a language capable of exposing lies, dismantling systems of oppression, and illuminating the corrupt relations of power that shape everyday life. 

Hannah Arendt understood that language reveals the hidden “crystallized elements” that make authoritarianism possible. The language of critical pedagogy, rooted in historical memory, justice, and ethical imagination, offers a powerful arsenal for truth-telling, resistance, and the refusal of untruths.

Under such circumstances, one crucial goal of critical pedagogy is to cultivate historical awareness, equipping students to use history as a vital lens for understanding the present. Through the critical act of remembrance, the history of fascism can be illuminated not as a relic of the past but as a persistent threat, its dormant traces capable of reawakening even in the most robust democracies. In this sense, history has to retain its subversive function, drawing on archives, historical sources, and suppressed narratives to challenge conventional wisdom and dominant ideologies.

Higher Education Complicity: Universities as Enablers of Authoritarianism

From Florida to Texas, far-right governors are transforming education into a vehicle for repression. Teachers are threatened with criminal charges for acknowledging gender diversity or reproductive rights. At the national level, student activists, particularly those protesting U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, are being surveilled, detained, and, in some cases, forcibly abducted and held in detention centers without transparency or due process. These actions mark a dangerous escalation in the use of state terrorism to crush dissent and stifle free speech.

Under Trump, the assault on higher education has taken on the character of political extortion. Universities are threatened with funding cuts, targeted investigations, and public humiliation unless they align with the regime’s ideological demands.  Faced with this mafia-like pressure, many institutions, such as Columbia University, Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard,  capitulate: some pay large financial ransoms to keep research programs afloat, submit to monitored or pre-approved syllabuses, push faculty into self-censorship, and watch as entire fields from gender studies to critical race scholarship are eliminated.

Once considered bastions of critical thought and academic freedom, these institutions have now aligned with the very political and ideological forces they should resist, transforming into silent collaborators in the rise of fascist politics. In capitulating, they have not only abandoned the integrity of higher education but become complicit in the creeping authoritarianism that seeks to control not only knowledge but the very language of dissent. 

These once-revered institutions are now incubators of conformity, breeding grounds for a new authoritarian oligarchy and class of billionaires that serves power rather than truth, injustice rather than justice, racial and class hierarchies rather than equality. In the face of this onslaught, they have traded their moral compass for the illusion of survival, surrendering their role as guardians of democracy to become facilitators of its destruction.

Academic freedom becomes a privilege dispensed by administrators rather than a right grounded in democratic life, and universities shrink into obedient service providers, enablers of authoritarianism rather than spaces of critique and possibility. The result is a culture of fear in which marginalized students and critical scholars endure the deepest betrayals, their histories and identities recast as political liabilities. 

This is the university remade by coercion, subject to racial cleansing, drained of its civic responsibility, and stripped of its public purpose. In this punitive vision, neo-fascism on steroids, education is no longer a democratic necessity; it becomes an instrument for policing memory, enforcing obedience, and erasing those who fall outside the boundaries of white nationalist belonging.

Higher Education and the Militarization of Race: Confronting White Nationalism”

The assault on education, then, cannot be separated from the broader pedagogical struggle unfolding across the globe. The current fight against a growing fascist politics is not simply a struggle over state power, it is a fight over the production of historical memory, over who gets to speak, who gets erased, and who is allowed to imagine a future. The horrors of the past, from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa, make clear that the rewriting of history is always tied to the whitening of the nation, to the violent sorting of populations into those who belong and those who do not. 

Universities are central to this battle because they are the institutional guardians of historical memory and critical knowledge. When they are attacked, censored, or hollowed out, the very capacity of a society to learn from its past is imperiled.

These intertwined assaults on education and democracy become even more visible in the racialized militarization of public life. The deployment of troops into cities with large Black and brown populations is not merely a spectacle of state power; it is another expression of white nationalism and racial cleansing, a violent pedagogy that teaches citizens who counts and who is disposable. 

This narrowing of citizenship is not unique to the United States. Across the globe, from India to Hungary, the question of who belongs is being reshaped by religious zealotry and fantasies of racial purity. Viktor Orbán makes this logic unmistakable in his declaration that the aim of his illiberal democracy is to eliminate what he calls “mixed races.” 

As Nicola Bertoldi observes, any struggle for a radical democratic society requires that “the lessons from our dark past [be] learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” for building a post-capitalist future. That task is impossible without institutions, especially schools and universities, that nurture critical memory, cultivate democratic agency, and resist the machinery of erasure.

Confronting the Challenges of Authoritarianism in Education

One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what education should accomplish in a society at a historical moment when it is slipping into the dark night of an emerging fascism.  

What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? What language must higher education reclaim to redefine its mission, to help faculty and students imagine futures beyond the present, see themselves as agents rather than victims or clients, and take responsibility for shaping democratic public life? 

In an age marked by the abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people, and the broader public, to challenge repressive forms of authority and hold power accountable?

In part, this suggests developing educational policies and practices that not only inspire and motivate people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic tendencies under a global tyranny of gangster capitalism. Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals.  

In this view, education becomes something other than an obsession with accountability schemes, market values, imagination-crushing methodologies, or the crude empiricism of a data-driven society. Rather than function as an instrument of pedagogical terrorism and deadening conformity, it should open a space for thinking, translating, acting, and imagining otherwise.

In light of the current assaults on education, what might it mean for educators to take seriously the notion that democracy should be a way of thinking about education,  one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence and learning to modes of agency that embrace the demands of social and economic justice and the virtues of the common good? 

Any meaningful vision of critical pedagogy should have the power to provoke a radical shift in consciousness, a shift that helps us see the world through a lens that confronts the savage realities of geopolitical issues including genocidal violence, mass poverty, the destruction of the planet, and the threat of nuclear war, among other issues. 

Global capitalism thrives on staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that uphold it. A true shift in consciousness is not possible without pedagogical interventions that speak directly to people in ways that resonate with their lives, their struggles, and their experiences.

Education has to help individuals recognize themselves in the issues at hand, understand how their personal suffering is not an isolated event, but part of a broad, systemic crisis. In addition, activism, debate, and critical engagement should be central to a student’s education. Activism is a form of education, a way of guiding students to become both knowledgeable and engaged citizens. In this sense, critical pedagogy must cultivate conditions that empower students not only to think critically, but to act with purpose and conviction.”

There can be no authentic politics without a pedagogy of identification, an education that connects people to the broader forces shaping their lives, an education that not only helps them understand the roots of their oppression but also empowers them to imagine and fight for a world where they are no longer victims but active agents of change. Without this, we risk perpetuating a politics that is disconnected from the lived realities of those it seeks to empower. 

The poet Jorie Graham emphasizes the importance of engaging people through experiences that resonate deeply with their everyday lives. She states that “it takes a visceral connection to experience itself to permit us to even undergo an experience.” For language and appeals to truly matter, they must be anchored in the tangible realities and struggles that shape people’s existence. Only then can communication penetrate consciousness, forging connections between body, mind, and others beyond the poisoned solidarities that sustain hatred, war, and consumerist obsessions.

When teaching loses this visceral, grounded quality, pedagogy risks numbing the mind and body, a condition easily reinforced by a broader culture dominated by screens, virtual spectacles, disconnections, and reductive oversimplifications. To resist this drift into a culture of immediacy and regressive distraction which is never removed from the experiences students bring to the classroom, educators must reclaim their role as public intellectuals, embracing their responsibilities as both critical teachers and active citizens in ways that spark dialogue and mobilize action.

This means speaking to wider publics about urgent social issues, developing a language that links everyday troubles to the systemic forces that produce them, and advancing a politics committed to economic and social justice. It also requires creating conditions in which educators have real agency over their labor and a meaningful voice in university governance. Yet this aspiration is continually undermined by the growing neoliberally produced precarity of academic life: without tenure or secure positions, many are cast into spaces marked by fear, repression, crushing workloads, powerlessness, isolation, and, for some, conditions approaching poverty.

Education should rise to meet these challenges, offering a vision capable of resisting what Mark Fisher called neoliberalism’s “slow cancellation of the future” and helping us imagine a life beyond massive inequality, environmental destruction, and the glorification of war and militarization as national ideals. 

In this context, education cannot surrender to academics who insist there is no room for politics in higher education or the classroom, nor to administrators who claim that universities have a responsibility to remain neutral. This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in its silence over the current far-right politicization of education or the utterly damaging transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporations; it is also a script for depoliticizing schooling as an institution as well as both faculty and students.

Neutrality and the Erosion of Academic Freedom

The call for neutrality in many North American universities is a retreat from social and moral responsibility, masking the reality that these institutions are deeply embedded in power relations. As Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta aptly argue, neutrality “serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate,” obscuring the inherently political nature of university life.  From decisions about enrolment and research funding to event policies and poster placements, every administrative choice reflects a political stance. Neutrality, far from apolitical, is a tool that silences dissent and shields power from accountability.

It is essential for educators to recognize that learning unfolds across a multitude of sites, circulating not only through formal institutions but through the wider currents of everyday life. As Shea Howell warns, this truth carries immense weight in a moment when “controlling public culture is essential to the consolidation of fascist power.” And following Raymond Williams, we are reminded that education must do more than transmit knowledge,  it must be woven into the very fabric of social transformation, for “learning must be a crucial part of the process of social change.”

The most powerful forms of education now operate far beyond schools and universities. In an age of recent technologies, concentrated power, and ubiquitous social media, culture has become a dominant pedagogical force, shaping how people see, feel, and imagine the political world. Democracy is no longer toppled only by coups; it is hollowed out from within, eroded by the ghosts of past tyrannies revived through symbols, digital spectacles, and the relentless machinery of propaganda. What appears as entertainment, distraction, or common sense is increasingly the terrain where political identities are forged and the boundaries of the imaginable enforced.

Beyond Thresholds of Disappearance and the Colonization of the Mind

The current historical moment is defined by what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls “thresholds of disappearance, the proliferation of depoliticized multiplicities,” those institutions and cultural spaces that domesticate power differences, transforming systemic projects of resistance into commodified, private acts of rebellion. 

In this landscape, neoliberal culture and pedagogy form one of the most consequential thresholds of disappearance, draining politics of substance while stripping education of its radical possibilities. At stake is the recognition that education, whether mediated through schools, digital platforms, or the wider culture, has become an urgent site of struggle, a decisive political terrain where agency is fashioned, desires are mobilized, oppression is normalized and hope itself becomes either militarized or rekindled.

This machinery of disappearance is amplified by cultural forces that speak through images laced with bigotry, saturated with violence, and driven by the logics of  cruelty, exclusion, and ethnic cleansing. Culture no longer reflects the past; it erases it, functioning as a pedagogical regime that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues “colonizes the mind.” We inhabit a world saturated with dis-imagination machines, engines of civic stupidity and right-wing narcotization, designed to sever people not only from the material conditions that rob them of rights, agency, and hope, but also from the histories, knowledges, and modes of critical thought that make genuine freedom possible. These apparatuses do more than distort reality; they shrink political imagination, corrode critical thought, and render individuals increasingly susceptible to the authoritarian scripts that shape everyday life.

Fascism thrives in precisely these manufactured silences and curated amnesias. Once the public is habituated to disappearance, to the erasure of histories, the trivialization of suffering, the commodification of dissent, the ground is laid for more overt forms of authoritarian control. Fascist politics feed on this hollowing out of civic memory, replacing the complexities of historical truth with mythologized narratives of purity, grievance, and fear. 

Consider how right-wing movements sanitize the January 6 riot by recasting it as a patriotic uprising: the goal is not merely to distort an event but to reengineer the collective memory that anchors democratic life. What emerges is a political culture in which cruelty becomes a language of belonging, exclusion a measure of citizenship, and forgetting a civic duty. In this sense, the assault on history is never merely symbolic; it is a pedagogical strategy that shapes desires, identities, and the very possibility of democratic agency.

In the era of digital media, platforms like Fox News, Elon Musk’s X and corporate giants such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google have become powerful teaching/propaganda machines, amplifying far-right values and the predatory ethos of gangster capitalism. What we confront is not simply a political failure, it is an educational crisis. 

Fascism no longer announces itself merely through decrees or armed repression. It is a pedagogical project that shapes memory, desire, and the boundaries of the imaginable. Fascism also colonizes memory, determining what needs to be remembered, forgotten, mourned, and   celebrated. It wraps itself in spectacles of cruelty, in a language steeped in hate and terminal exclusion. It operates through laws, yes, but also through habits, images, and the daily language games that dull moral sensibility.

Trump’s most fervent acolytes, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and others, perform Nazi salutes as if rehearsing the dark future they are resolved to summon. Stephen Miller channels Hitlerian rhetoric under the banner of patriotism, insisting that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Trump resurrects Confederate symbols and the mythology of white supremacy, elevating monuments to genocide as emblems of national pride. Under his rule, the culture of fascism is neither subtle nor hidden; it is staged, broadcast, and normalized as the new common sense.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Trump administration’s decision to downgrade the swastika, a symbol of fascism, white supremacy, and mass murder, from a hate emblem to something merely “potentially divisive.” In a move that defies history and moral clarity, the U.S. Coast Guard will soon place the swastika, the noose, and the Confederate flag in the same sanitized category. This moral inversion is not an accident. It aligns seamlessly with Trump’s claim that Europe faces a “civilizational crisis,” a thinly veiled invocation of white replacement theory that casts non-Europeans as existential threats to Western civilization. Such rhetoric, and the policies that follow, reveal an administration committed to the normalization of hatred, the erasure of historical memory, and the legitimization of white supremacist fantasies.

The horror of fascist violence has returned, now draped in AI-guided bombs, ethnic cleansing, and white supremacists who revel in racial purification while dismantling every vestige of decency, human rights, and democratic life. What we are witnessing is not only the death of democracy but the erosion of moral and civic conscience itself.

Education, at its best, is never mere job training, nor should it serve as an indoctrinating machine for white Christian nationalism and its narrow vision of who belongs as a citizen. True education cultivates empowered spaces of grace, rigour and, engagement where students think rigorously and speak freely, where their experiences, aspirations, and dreams can be voiced without fear. It is a courageous and protective site in which students learn to act with agency and critical judgment, and where their voices are heard, valued, and challenged. In such spaces, education becomes a bridge linking school to society, self to other, and theory to practice, urging students to confront the urgent social and political realities of their time while embracing the practice and promise of a radical democratic society.

Furthermore, education should help students cultivate a deeper commitment to justice, equality, community, and freedom. Critical pedagogy, as a rupturing practice, must refuse to equate capitalism with democracy, making it clear that one cannot discuss fascism without addressing capitalism. To be truly transformative, any viable critical pedagogy should be inherently anti-capitalist, reviving the discourse of radical democracy, and creating new political formations beyond the conventional liberal and conservative paradigms.

Neoliberal capitalism strips education of its utopian possibilities and insists that capitalism and democracy are indistinguishable, that to imagine anything beyond its rule is to invite disaster. In an age of resurgent fascism, education must do more than defend reason and critical judgment; it also needs to mobilize organized collective resistance to neoliberal fascism. Critical pedagogy in this context is not a naïve ideal but a radical necessity, a defiant force that urges us to envision possibilities beyond the suffocating confines of the present. It requires confronting the forces that seek to extinguish the radical imagination before it can inspire broader change. This struggle, though daunting, demands relentless urgency and unyielding conviction from educators and the public alike.

Reclaiming Education for Collective Resistance

Effective resistance to the rise of fascist politics in the United States and beyond cannot occur without making education central to political struggle. This begins with recognizing that the transformation of consciousness and the transformation of institutions are deeply interrelated. We must heed Pierre Bourdieu’s warning that the most insidious forms of domination are not only economic; they are also intellectual and pedagogical, rooted in belief and persuasion. This insight calls on academics to recognize that the current battle against emerging fascist politics and white nationalism is not only a contest over economic structures or corporate power. It is equally a battle for ideas, for the very consciousness of society, and for the power to reshape culture itself.

Education is the crucible where agency is forged, where the foundations of subjectivity are laid, and where the very essence of politics takes shape. It is here, in the spaces of learning and dialogue, that the seeds of democracy can either take root or wither away. The struggle to fulfill the promises of democracy cannot thrive in the shadows of deceit, where lies eclipse reason, ignorance erodes critical understanding, and truth is drowned by the seductive chorus of unchecked power. In this battleground of ideas, education should stand as both shield and sword, a force that defends reason and nurtures the capacities of individuals to question, to resist, and to act with the integrity democracy demands.

Amid the current assault on public and higher education, educators must reclaim their role as architects of imagined futures, fostering a language of possibility that aligns education with the broader struggle for democracy. They should consider taking control of the labor process in order to engage in academic freedom and set the conditions for teaching, learning, and policy.  Such a vision of education must reject the neoliberal paradigm of education as a private investment in “human capital” and instead cultivate a critical pedagogy that disturbs complacency, inspires critical thinking, and energizes students to confront the societal forces shaping their lives.

Education’s critical function lies in its power to create informed, engaged citizens who possess the civic courage to challenge injustice. This necessitates teaching students to think intersectionally, historically, and relationally. In a world dominated by fragmented knowledge, staggering levels of inequality, and the tyranny of metrics, students must be educated to become border crossers, fluent in multiple literacies, print, visual, and digital, capable not only of consuming culture but producing it as cultural critics and creators.

Critical pedagogy should be defended as the search for truth. It is a pedagogy that empowers students to act from a position of agency, equipping them to unsettle power, challenge common sense, and take risks in pursuit of justice and mutual respect. Educators must inspire students to think dangerously, imagining futures where democracy, equality, and freedom are not only values but achievable goals. This involves confronting injustice as an ongoing struggle and recognizing that the fight for justice is never fully complete.

In a society where democracy is under siege and fascism casts a growing shadow, educators should recognize that alternative futures are not only possible but that acting on this belief is essential to achieving social change. This urgent political and pedagogical mission demands both a language of critique and a language of possibility. Critique exposes abuses of power, unmasks deceit, and holds authority accountable, while a vision of educated hope dares us to imagine new horizons, empowering us to think and act beyond the confines of the present. It calls on us to reject the inevitability of injustice, to defy the predatory forces shaping our future, and to summon the courage to envision a world grounded in justice, equity, and freedom, a world we must actively strive to build.

At stake is the courage to confront the world we want to build, the world we owe to future generations. The great novelist and critic James Baldwin understood with unmatched clarity that a society’s fate is sealed the moment it abandons its responsibility to those who have not yet arrived. In Nothing Personal, he warned that when we break faith with one another, we forfeit the very possibility of a shared world. Today, that warning is no longer metaphor, it is the condition of our times.

As authoritarianism weaponizes ignorance, as cruelty becomes a governing principle, and as whole populations are written out of the category of the human, the struggle for the future falls squarely on the shoulders of educators and cultural workers. 

Our task is nothing less than to disrupt the pedagogy of fascism: to nurture forms of critical memory that cannot be erased, solidarities that cannot be bought off, imaginations that refuse to be colonized. If we fail, the future will be engineered by those who thrive on amnesia and revel in disposability. But if we rise to the challenge, insisting on truth, defending the vulnerable, and widening the moral vocabulary of democracy, we create the conditions under which new generations can breathe, speak, and begin again. Resistance, then, is not an option; it is the only means by which the future survives.

In these dark times, hope may be wounded, but it is not lost. Resistance and the promise of collective struggle endure, for power is never absolute, and domination cannot extinguish the will to fight back. The global rise of fascism casts a long shadow, marked by state violence, silenced dissent, and the assault on critical thought. Yet history is not a closed book; it is a call to action, a space for possibility. Now, more than ever, we must dare to think boldly, act courageously, and forge the democratic futures that justice demands and humanity deserves.

-CounterPunch

-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: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.