If only his wish could be fulfilled.
Miriam
Truthdig
Shutting Down American-Style Authoritarianism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/toward_politics_ungovernability_american
-style_authoritarianism_20170418/
Posted on Apr 22, 2017
By Henry A. Giroux
A protest outside Trump International Hotel in Chicago. (Rob Walsh / CC
2.0 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/53556792@N07/32450752541) )
Editor's note: A shorter version of this piece appeared in CounterPunch
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/17/toward-a-politics-of-ungovernability
-shutting-down-american-style-authoritarianism/) .
It is impossible to imagine the damage Trump and his white nationalists,
economic fundamentalists, and white supremacists friends will do to civil
liberties, the social contract, the planet, and life itself in the next few
years.
Rather than address climate change, the threat of nuclear war, galloping
inequality, the elimination of public goods, Trump and his vicious acolytes
have accelerated the threats faced by these growing dangers. Moreover, the
authoritarian steam roller just keeps bulldozing through every social
protection and policy put in place, however insufficient, in the last few
years in order to benefit the poor, vulnerable, and the environment.
A neo-fascist politics of emotional brutality, militant bigotry, and social
abandonment has reached new heights in the United States. Think about the
Republican Party call to eliminate essential health benefits such as mental
health coverage, guaranteed health insurance for people with pre-existing
conditions, and the elimination of Meals on Wheels program that benefit the
poor and elderly.
As the Trump regime continues to hollow out the welfare state, it builds on
Obama's efforts to expand the surveillance state but with a new and deadly
twist. This is particularly clear given the Congressional Republicans'
decision to advance a bill that would overturn privacy protections
(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/senate_passes_resolution_to_rol
l_back_fcc_privacy_rules_20170323) for Internet users, allow corporations
to monitor, sell, and use everything that users put on the Internet,
including their browsing history, app usage and financial and medical
information.
This is the Orwellian side of Trump's administration, which not only makes
it easier for the surveillance state to access information, but also sells
out the American public to corporate demagogues who view everything in terms
of markets and the accumulation of capital.
On the other side of the authoritarian coin is the merging of the punishing
society and permanent warfare state with a culture of fear and cruelty
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_culture_of_cruelty_in_trumps_americ
a_20170322) . Under these circumstances, everyone is viewed as either a
potential terrorist or narcissistic consumer making it easier for the Trump
machine to elevate the use of force to the most venerable national ideal
while opening up lucrative markets for defense and security industries and
the growing private prison behemoth.
At the level of everyday life, the merging of corporate and political
brutalism into a war culture were on full display in the savage beating of a
United Airlines passenger who refused to give up his seat because the
airlines over booked. Couple this with the Star War spectacle of the United
States dropping a 21,600 pound non-nuclear bomb
(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/us_drops_mother_of_all_bombs_in
_afghanistan_20170413) on the Achin district in Afghanistan, which has a
population of around 95,000 people. Nobody on the plane came to the aid of
the passenger as he was being assaulted
(http://abc7.com/travel/doctor-dragged-off-united-flight-suffered-concussion
-broken-nose/1869113/) and dragged from his seat as if he were a dangerous
criminal suggesting that brutality, fear, and powerlessness have become
normalized in America.
Moreover, the relative silence of the American public in the face its
government dropping the "Mother of All Bombs" in Afghanistan and unloading
endless weapons of death and destruction in Syria testify to the amnesiac
state of the country and the moral coma which has settled like a dense fog
on so many of its inhabitants. As historical memory is erased, public
spheres and cultural spaces are saturated with violence and the endless
spectacles of civic illiteracy. Pedagogies of repression now enable the
suffering produced by those most vulnerable, who disappear amidst the
endless trivialization produced by the mainstream media, which anxiously
awaits for Trump's next tweet in order to increase their ratings and fuel
the bottom line.
The government propaganda machine has turned into a comic version of a
failed Reality TV series. Witness the daily spectacle produced by the
hapless Sean Spicer. Spicer dreams about and longs for the trappings of
Orwell's dystopia in which he would be able to use his position as a second
rate Joseph Goebbels to produce, legitimate, and dictate lies rather than be
in the uncomfortable scenario, in which he now finds himself, of having to
defend endlessly Trump's fabrications. For Spicer, the dream of the safety
of Orwell's dystopia has given way to the nightmare of him being reduced to
the leading character in the Gong Show. Actually, maybe he is the confused
front man for our stand-in-president who increasingly resembles the
psychopath on steroids, Patrick Bateman, from the film, American
Psycho-truly a symbol for our times. Ignorance is a terrible wound, when it
is the result of systemic constraints or self-inflicted, but it is a
pathology and plague when it is willful-the active refusal to know- and
translates into power. Trump and his mostly incompetent and ignorant
government appointees are not just stupid and offensive in their ideological
smugness, they are a threat to the very act of thinking and its crucial
connection to memory, justice and truth.
Neo-fascist policies and practices now feed a war culture and demand more
than a political and moral outrage. At the very least, it must be recognized
that neo-fascism must be restored as Paul Gilroy has argued
(http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674006690&content=reviews)
"to its proper place in the discussions of the moral and political limits of
what is acceptable." This would suggest making visible not only the elements
of neo-fascism that animate the new policies and political formations being
produced in the Trump administration, but also unveiling how power is
reproduced through those architects, managers, and intellectuals and
institutions for hire that legitimate this distinctively American
neoliberal-military machine.
The supine response of the mainstream press
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporate_media_and_dc_politicians_prai
se_trumps_airstrikes_20170407) and the general public to ongoing acts of
state and corporate violence is a flagrant and horrifying indication of the
extent to which the United States government has merged the corporate state
with the military state to create a regime of brutality, sadism, aggression,
and cruelty. State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty.
All the while, militarized ignorance expands a culture awash in public
stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat making
it all the more difficult to recognizes how authoritarianism appears in new
forms.
The established political parties and politicians are nothing more than
crude lobbyists and shock troops for the financial elite who believe
everything is for sale. The boundaries of humanity are now inscribed and
defined exclusively through the metrics of the twin logic of commercial
transactions and the politics of disposability. The horrors unfolding under
the Trump administration are not only abetted by white supremacists,
religious evangelicals, but also by liberals who still believe that
capitalism and democracy are synonymous, and who appear to delight and rush
to support any military intervention or act of aggression the United States
wages against a foreign power. Liberals are affronted over alleged charges
of Russian spying but say nothing about their own country which does far
more than spy on other countries it disagrees with, it overthrows them
through either illegal means or military force.
Trump's brand of authoritarianism is a combination of the savagery of
neoliberalism and civic illiteracy on steroids. This legacy of neo-fascism
represents more than a crisis of civic literacy and courage, it is a crisis
of civic culture, if not politics itself. As civic culture wanes, a market
based ideology increases its grip on the American public. This militant
ideology of sadism and cruelty is all too familiar and is marked by
unbridled individualism, a disdain for the welfare state, the elevation of
unchecked self-interest to an organizing principle of society, the
glorification of militarism, and a systemic erosion of any viable notion of
citizenship.
This ideology has produced over the last forty years an agency killing form
of depoliticization that paved the way for the election of Donald Trump and
an updated version of American authoritarianism. This homegrown and new
edition of neo-fascism cannot be abstracted from the cultural spectacles
that now dominate American society and extend from the trivializing
influence of celebrity culture and the militarism of video game culture to
the spectacles of violence that dominate Hollywood and the mainstream media.
The new technologies increasingly lock people into orbits of isolation and
privatization while the wholesale deformation of the formative cultures and
public spheres that make a democracy possible disappear at a terrifying
pace. Neo-fascism feeds on the spectacle, a misplaced populism, and a "mood
economy" that reduces all problems to matters of self-blame and defective
character. Under such circumstances, the militarization of society expands
more readily to reaches deeply into everyday life producing militarized
subjects, exalting military-style discipline, criminalizing an increasing
range of social behaviors, transforming local police into paramilitarized
soldiers, and normalizing war and violence. Rather than viewing war and
militarization as a source of alarm, they become sources of national pride
(https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/04/16/dan-rather-condemns-media-cal
ling-trump-presidential-dropping-bombs-and-having-missile-strikes/216042) .
The curse of the theatrical performance so endemic to fascism has been
updated with the Internet and new digital technologies and allows the
legacies of fascism to live on in a distinctively American modality.
The war culture must be stopped and hopefully more and more efforts will be
made in the name of collective struggle to think anew what an effective form
of resistance might look like. Any struggle that matters must acknowledge
(https://thenewinquiry.com/this-is-going-to-hurt/) "that eradicating racial
oppression ultimately requires struggle against oppression in all of its
forms. [especially] restructuring America's economic system."
There is no shortage of diverse movements operating in multiple spheres that
extend from the local to national levels. Some aim at winning general
elections, conduct sit-ins, or engage in direct action such as blocking the
vehicles of immigration officers. Others provide support for sanctuary
movements that include institutions that range from churches to institutions
of higher education. Many of these movements do not call for a qualitative
change in fundamental institutions of power, especially in the economic
realm, and as such offer no long term solutions. But, no viable form of
collective struggle will succeed if it fails to link resistance efforts
among the local, state, federal, and international spheres.
There are a wealth of strategies
(https://georgelakoff.com/2017/02/10/ten-points-for-democracy-activists/)
available that contain the possibility of become more radical
(https://josephinedemocrats.org/political-activist-says-resistance-is-not-en
ough/) , capable of merging with other sites of resistance, all of which
look beyond tactics as diverse as organizing massive protests, direct
resistance
(https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/02/22/ten-examples-direct-resistanc
e-stop-government-raids) , and rebuilding the labor movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech at the Riverside Church spoke
eloquently to what it meant to use non-violent, direct action as part of a
broader struggle to connect racism, militarism, and war. His call to
address
(http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm) a
"society gone mad on war" and the need to "address the fierce of urgency of
now" was rooted in an intersectional politics, one that recognized a
comprehensive view of oppression, struggle, and politics itself. Racism,
poverty, and disposability could not be abstracted from the issue of
militarism and how these modes of oppression informed each other.
This was particularly clear in a program
(https://www.amazon.com/Power-People-World-Black-Panthers/dp/1419722409)
put forth by The Black Panther Party, which called for "equality in
education, housing, employment and civil rights" and produced a 10 Point
Plan
(https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm)
to achieve its political goals. A more recent example of a comprehensive
notion of politics and can be found
(http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/From-BlackLivesMatter-to-Black-Liberation)
in the Black Lives Matter movement's call to connect police violence against
wider forms of state violence, allowing such a strategy to move from a
single-issue protest movement into a full-fledged social movement.
Such struggles at best must be about both educating people and creating
broad-based social movements dedicated not merely to reforms but
transforming the ideological, economic, and political structures of the
existing society. Social transformation has to be reconnected
(https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/joan-pedro-cara-ana-simona
-rentea/glimpse-into-key-party-debate-deciding-future-o) with institutional
change. This means rejecting the notion that global capitalism cannot be
challenged successfully at any of these levels alone, especially if such
resistance, however crucial, is not connected to a comprehensive
understanding of the reach of global power. Lacino Hamilton is right in
arguing (https://thenewinquiry.com/this-is-going-to-hurt/) that
"institutional patterns and practices will not change unless protesters go
beyond rallying, marching, and what usually amounts to empty slogans. "The
function of activists," he writes, "is to translate protest into organized
action, which has the chance to develop and to transcend immediate needs and
aspirations toward a radical reconstruction of society."
Clearly, resistance to this impending and ongoing reality of neo-fascism is
more urgent than ever and necessitates challenging not only the commanding
structures of economic power but also those powerful cultural apparatus that
trade in the currency of ideas. A formidable resistance movement must work
hard to create a formative culture that empowers and brings together the
most vulnerable along with those who inhabit single issues movement.
The power of such a broad-based movement could draw inspiration from the
historically relevant anti-war, anti-racist, and civil rights movements of
the sixties and the ACT UP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_UP) movement
of the late eighties. At the same time, current social movements such as
Podemos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podemos_(Spanish_political_party))
in Spain also offer the possibility of creating new political formations
that are anti-fascist and fiercely determined to both challenge
authoritarian regimes such as the Trump regime and dismantle the economic,
ideological, and cultural structures that produce them. What all of these
movements revealed was that diverse issues ranging from the war abroad to
the racist and homophobic wars at home were symptomatic of a more profound
illness and deeper malady that demanded a new understanding of theory,
politics, and oppression.
There is certainly something to be learned from older proven tactics
(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/40239-trump-a-symptom-of-what-a-radic
al-message-from-a-half-century-ago) such as using education to create a
revolution in consciousness and values along with broad-based alliances to
create the conditions for mass disruptions such as the use of the general
strike. Such tactics combine theory, consciousness and practice as part of a
strategy to paralyze the working of this death dealing machinery of casino
capitalism and its recent incarnation in the Trump administration.
One of the most powerful tools of oppression is convincing people that the
conditions of oppression they experienced are both normal and cannot be
changed. At the same time, this oppressive ideology of normalization
prevents any understanding of the larger systemic forces of oppression by
insisting that all problems are individually based and ultimately a matter
of individual character and responsibility. Dominant ideology spread its
message through a range of cultural apparatuses extending from the schools
to the mainstream media. The message was generally the same in that it
insisted that there are no structures of domination only flawed individuals
solely responsible for the problems they experience and that the system of
capitalism as a whole was organized for their own good. The sixties produced
a range of critical thinkers who challenged this central element of
oppression, and included Herbert Marcuse, Malcom X, W. E. B. Du Bois, James
Baldwin, Robin Morgan, and Susan Willis to brilliant theorists such as
Stanley Aronowitz, Mary Daly, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt
Bauman, and many others. For them structures of domination were rooted in
both subjectivity itself as well as in larger economic apparatuses.
Those who believe in a radical democracy have got to find a way to make this
regime ungovernable. Planting seeds and local actions are important, but
there is a more urgent need to educate and mobilize through a comprehensive
vision and politics that is capable of generating massive teach-ins all over
the United States so as to enable a collective struggle aimed at producing
powerful events such as a nation-wide boycott, sit-ins, and a general strike
in order to bring the country to a halt.
The promise of such resistance must be rooted in the creation of a new
political party of democratic socialists, one whose power is rooted in the
organization of unions, educators, workers, young people, religious groups,
and others who constitute a popular progressive base. There will be no
resistance without a vision of a new society and new mechanisms of
resistance. In this instance, resistance registers as a form of total
paralysis for the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, and
neo-conservative warmongers. In doing so, it gives birth to what we might
term a politics of ungovernability.
America now chokes on its claim to innocence. Up until now, it has been
successful in both evading that fact and covering up its lies-lies about its
history, about social mobility, about freedom, about justice, about the end
of racism, about the value of meritocracy, about spreading democracy abroad,
and so it goes. The era of hiding behind this mythical innocence has passed.
In the age of Trump, the raw brutality of casino capitalism, with its highly
visible acts of violence against all aspects of ethical and political
decency, is enacted without apology.
A moral political coma now drives an authoritarian society that embraces
greed, racism, hatred, inequality, stupidity, disposability, and
lawlessness, all of which are celebrated as national virtues. The dark
present is now the endpoint of a history of violence and barbarism that can
no longer be camouflaged, in part, because it is unapologetic about the
viciousness of its practices and the savagery of its effects. I want to hope
that this moment of unmitigated violence, this period of punitiveness, and
era of unimaginable cruelty will provoke people to wake up from the
nightmare that has befallen the American public. Hopefully, in that
wakefulness, in a resurgent act of witnessing and moral outrage will grow
and provide the basis for a new kind of politics, a fierce wind of
resistance, and a struggle too powerful to be defeated.
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