Part I of this article ran in the November-December, 2018, issue of ER.
By Henry A. Giroux, Social Project, The Bullet, August 20, 2018
What is crucial to understand is that neoliberalism is not only a more extreme element of capitalism, it has also enabled the emergence of a radical restructuring of power, the state and politics, and in doing so converges with a style of fascism suited to the American context. Political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in his book Democracy Incorporated, was one of the first to analyze the transformation of a capitalist democracy into what he called an inverted form of totalitarianism. According to Wolin, the political state was replaced by a corporate state that exploits all but the ruling classes, empties politics of any substance through rigged elections, uses the power of capital to define citizens largely as consumers of products, and applies the power of the corporate state as a battering ram to push through policies that strengthen the power of capital.
For Wolin, neoliberalism was the endpoint of a long process “to transform ev-erything – every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet – in its image.”1He believed that this new political formation and form of sovereignty in which economics dominated politics was hostile to both social spending and the welfare state. Wolin rightly argued that under neoliberalism, political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance.
The dire consequence, as David Harvey points out, is that “raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances of democratic governance.”2 Policy is now fashioned by lobbyists representing big businesses such as the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, going so far in the case of the drug companies to drive the opioid crisis to increase their profits.3
Under neoliberalism, the welfare state has been largely dismantled, while the power of a punishing apparatus of an emerging police state has been expanded, buttressed by a pervasive culture of fear that exempts itself from the legalities and constitutional obligations of a democracy, however neutered. Wolin was keenly aware of the ruthlessness of corporate culture in its willingness to produce striking inequalities in an epical war on the promise and ideals of a substantive democracy.
Wolin’s great contribution to theories of totalitarianism lies in his ability to lay bare the authoritarian economic tendencies in neoliberalism and its threat to democracy. What he did not do is associate neoliberalism and its enervating effects closely enough with certain legacies of fascism. In this absence, he was unable to predict the resurgence of strongman politics in the United States and the ascendant fascist investments in white supremacy, racial sorting, ultranationalism, a war on youth, women’s reproductive rights and a raceinspired, eliminationist politics of disposability. What he underemphasized was that neoliberalism impoverished not only society economically while serving the interests of the rich, but it also created a powerful narrative that normalizes political inaction as it shifted the weight and responsibility of all social problems onto the individual rather than the society.4
In the age of neoliberal myth-making, systemic deficiencies such as poverty, homelessness and precarious employment are now relegated to individual failures, char-acter deficits and moral turpitude. Correspondingly, notions of the social, systemic and public disappear, serving to expand the base of those who feel voiceless and powerless, opening them up to the crude and simplistic emotional appeals of authoritarian figures such as Trump. In truly demagogic fashion, Trump promises a new world order that will be fashioned out of the rhetorical bombast of dehumanization, bigotry and a weaponized appeal to fear and hate. As the poor and discarded vanish from the political discourse of democracy, they become susceptible to a “volatility and the fury that [mutilates] contemporary politics that thrives on an appetite for authoritarian and fascistic impulses.”5
Fascism by Trial in the Age of Trump
In a thoughtful analysis, the Irish journalist O’Toole asserts neoliberalism creates the conditions for enabling what he calls a trial run for a full-blown state of contemporary fascism:
“To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialed is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget ‘post-fascist’ – what we are living with is pre-fascism. Rather than overthrow democracy in one full swipe, it has to be undermined through rigged elections, the creation of tribal identities, and legitimated through a ‘propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities….’ Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from, and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.”6
Ultra-nationalist and contemporary versions of fascism are gaining traction across the globe in countries such as Greece (Golden Dawn), Hungary (Jobbik), India (Bharatiya Janata Party), and Italy (the League) and countless others. Needless to say, they have been emboldened by Trump, who has displayed a close admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping. He recently praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for his “intellect and personality” and without irony stated “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”7
Trump also has used his power to pardon people such as rightwing pundit Dinesh D’Souza and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who defied court orders to stop racially profiling Latinos. He has publicly accused Democrats in Congress for not standing following his State of the Union address and has conducted a foreign policy that trashes Western allies while celebrating authoritarian strongmen.
In addition, Trump consistently promotes extremist policies and surrounds himself with far- right-wing ideologues such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Adviser John Bolton and senior adviser Stephen Miller – all hard-liners on just about every issue. Steve Bannon’s early presence in the Trump administration was symbolic of the extremism Trump brought to the White House. Bannon, who served as former senior counselor to the president, ran Breitbart, a white nationalist tabloid. Now freelancing, Bannon continues to normalize white supremacist ideas in his endless speeches and public appearances. Trump shares Bannon’s allegiance to white supremacy and has relentlessly catered to the racial fears and economic anxieties of an abandoned white working class. Moreover, he has created a new synergy between his authoritarian demagoguery and an array of fascist groups that include the alt-right, white nationalists, militia groups and others who embrace his militarism, race-based law and order agenda and his overt contempt of undocumented immigrants and Muslims.8
Trump has elevated himself as the patron saint of a ruthless neoliberalism. This is evident in the various miracles he has performed for the rich and powerful. He has systemically deregulated regulations that extend from environmental protections to worker safety rules. He has enacted a $1.5 trillion tax policy that amounts to a huge gift to the financial elite and all the while maintaining his “man of the people” pos-ture. He has appointed a range of neoliberal fundamentalists to head major government posts designed to serve the public. Most, like Scott Pruitt, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Betsy DeVos, the secretary of Education, have proved to be either corrupt, incompetent, or often both. Along with the Republican Congress, Trump has vastly increased the military budget to $717 billion, creating huge financial profits for the military-in-dustrial-defense complex while instituting policies that eviscerate the welfare state and further expand a war machine that generates mass suffering and death.
Trump has reduced food assistance for those who are forced to choose between eating and taking medicine, and his policies have prevented millions from getting adequate health care.9 Last but not least, he has become a cheerleader for the gun and security industries going so far as to call for the arming of teachers as a way to redress mass shootings in the nation’s schools. All of these policies serve to unleash the anti-liberal and anti-democratic passions, fears, anxieties and anger necessary to mainstream fascism.
Trump’s Politics of Disposability
Trump’s neoliberalism aligns with fascism particularly through his embrace of white supremacy and his commitment to an expanding notion of disposability. Trump’s view of disposability takes on a double register. First, he produces economic policies that support the neoliberal conviction that human beings without economic value, those who make no contribution to the market, are refuse, waste and excess, and have no possible social use. In neoliberal-ism’s survival-of-the-fittest ethos, which amounts to a form of econocide, redundancy becomes code for disposability in economic terms. The only relations that matter are those compatible with economic decision making and the imperatives of capital. As Anis Shivani observes, “Anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market,” who presents a burden to the state, or refuses “to invest in their own future…will be subject to discipline and refused recognition as [a] human being.”10
Trump extends the logic of redundancy and disposability beyond economic categories to all those others who cannot fit into a white nationalist script. This is the language of the police state – one fashioned by the history of US apartheid. The endpoint of the language of white supremacy via a regressive crime policy is a form of social death, or even worse. What is frightening about Trump’s racist vocabulary is that it registers a move from the coded language of benign neglect to policies marked by malignant cruelty that legitimates state violence.
Trump’s allegiance to white supremacy is hard to miss, though many deny it by focusing more on his economic policies rather than his white supremacist agenda. Ta-Nehisi Coates offers an insightful analysis of Trump’s white supremacist ideology:
“It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true – his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power…. His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the US government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against ‘lazy’ black employees…. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican ‘rapists,’ only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself…. In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own.”11
Author John Feffer goes further and argues Trump’s hatred of immigrants is clear not only in his push for “extreme measures to keep them out of the United States: a wall, a travel ban, a zero-tolerance family-separation policy” but also signifies his view of them as a “threat that transcends the political. It’s a matter of blood and soil, the touchstones of extreme nationalism.”12What Feffer fails to acknowledge is that Trump’s view of ethnic sorting is also reminiscent of a central policy of earlier forms of fascism. Under Trump’s “zero-tolerance” border crackdown, immigrant families in the language of a fascist past disappear, are lost or categorized as “deleted family units.”13
The United States is in a dangerous moment in its history, which makes it all the more crucial to understand how a distinctive form of neoliberal fascism now bears down on the present and threatens to usher in a period of unprecedented barbarism in the not too distant future. In an attempt to address this new political conjuncture, I want to suggest that rather than view fascism simply as a repetition of the past, it is crucial to forge a new vocabulary and politics to grasp how neoliberal fascism has become a uniquely American model for the present. One way to address this challenge is to rethink what lessons can be learned by interrogating how matters of language and memory can be used to illuminate the dark forces connecting the past and present as part of the new hybridized political nightmare.
The Language of Fascism
Fascism begins not with violence, police assaults or mass killings, but with language. Trump reminded us of this in 2015 while announcing his candidacy for president. He stated, without irony or shame, that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people….”14 This is more than the language of polarization or a strategic dog whistle, it is an overt discourse and theatrical performance in the service of white supremacy and racist violence, a logic largely missed by the mainstream press at the time. This initial blast of racist invective served to forecast how Trump’s campaign and presidency would appeal to white nationalists, the alt-right and other neo-Nazi groups.
The language of fascist violence takes many forms, and Trump provided another disturbing example of his use of language as a tool of power and domination that expands what earlier fascist regimes had done. Early in his presidency, Trump had his administration prohibit officials at the Centers for Disease Control from using words such as “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”15 Banning words such as “vulnerable,” “diversity” and “fetus” signals Trump’s war on empathy, equality and women’s reproductive rights. Soon afterward, the Trump administration started erasing all references to climate change and greenhouse gases from government websites as well as information about LGBTQ Americans.16
Such actions share a legacy of state cen-sorship, the repression of dissent by banishing freedom of speech and book burning, all of which were part of the playbook of fascist regimes. Author Ruth Ben-Ghiat is right in stating that each of the words on Trump’s censorship list “is part of an ongoing war about the future of our democratic rights to speak and research freely, to control our own bodies and identities, and to live without fear of being targeted by the state because of our faith, skin color, or sexual orientation.”17
It is worth noting that words are not just about the production of meaning but also about how they generate consequences, especially in light of how such meanings – buttressed by state-sanctioned relations of power – function in a larger context. Some meanings have a force that others don’t, especially because power confers authority and can set in motion a range of effects. This is particularly clear in light of how Trump uses the power of the presidency at times when reacting to critics, especially those who garner some public attention through their criticism of him or his policies. His attempts to squelch dissent takes on a rather ruthless register as he often publicly humiliates those who criticize him, threatens their livelihood and uses language that functions to incite violence against his critics. We have seen too many instances in which Trump’s followers have beaten critics, attacked journalists and shouted down any form of critique aimed at Trump’s policies – to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals and journalists critical of the administration.
As a tool of state repression, language holds the potential to open the door to fas-cism. As Rose Sydney Parfitt observed, “The language, symbols and logic of fascism are being deployed today more overtly than at any time since the early 1940s.”18 Trump uses language that dehumanizes and makes it more acceptable for individuals to ratio-nalize racist beliefs and practices. Under the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” and later in the Clinton, Bush and Obama admin-istrations, racism was either coded in dog-whistle discourses or rendered unspeakable in the language of color blindness. Trump discarded such formalities by making racist language overt, shockingly deployed as a badge of honor, and pragmatically used as a nod to his base of support.
Reminiscent of Nazi tactics to dehumanize enemies, he has called some undocumented immigrants “animals” and “criminals,” and has used the word “infest” in referring to immigrants on the southern border. Columnist and author Aviya Kushner asserted Trump’s tweet claiming that immigrants will “infest our country” bears an alarming resemblance to the Nazi claim that Jews were carriers of disease.19 In response to Trump’s use of the term “animal” to refer to some immigrants, Juan Cole argues the Nazis used the term as a “technical term, ‘Untermensch’ or underman, subhuman” in referring to “Jews, gypsies, gays, and other groups as well as the slaughter of Russian boys at the Eastern Front.”20 Making them appear as less than human paved the way “toward permitting their elimination.”21 A convergence between Trump’s language and the race-based ideology of Holocaustera Nazis was clearly heard when Trump implied a moral equivalency between the violence perpetrated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and the presence of peaceful protesters demonstrating for the removal of a Confederate statue. Trump’s scapegoating rhetoric of demonization and bigotry not only dehumanizes racialized others, it also prepares the ground for encouraging hate groups and an intensification of hate crimes.
The FBI has reported that since the 2016 election, hate crimes have increased; there have been a disturbing number of stories that include Nazi swastikas being painted on school walls, synagogues being firebombed and a spike in violent attacks on Muslims and foreigners.22 Trump’s use of dehumanizing language invites comparisons with the insidious rhetoric of fascism’s past. Not only have his crassness, vulgarity and humiliating tweets upended traditional standards of presidential comportment (to say nothing of governance), he has also revived a language of malign violence that echoes “the early warning signs of potential genocide and other atrocity crimes.”23
Fascism, History and Memory Work
Neoliberal fascism converges with an earlier form of fascism in its commitment to a language of erasure and a politics of disposability. In the fascist script, historical memory becomes a liability, even dangerous, when it functions pedagogically to inform our political and social imagination. This is especially true when memory acts to identify forms of social injustice and enables critical reflection on the histories of repressed others. This was certainly true given the embarrassing backlash that occurred when Ben Carson, the US secretary of Housing and Urban Development, claimed slaves were immigrants, and when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stated black colleges and universities were “pioneers of school choice.”24
Unsurprisingly, historical memory as a form of enlightenment and demystification is surely at odds with Trump’s abuse of history as a form of social amnesia and political camouflage. For instance, Trump’s use of the 1930s-era slogan “America First” marks a regressive return to a time when nativism, misogyny and xenophobia defined the American experience. This inchoate nostalgia rewrites history in the warm glow and “belief in an essential American innocence, in the utter exceptionality, the ethical singularity and manifest destiny of the United States.”25 Philip Roth aptly characterizes this gratuitous form of nostalgia in his “American Pastoral” as the “undetonated past.” Innocence in this script is the stuff of mythologies that distort history and erase the political significance of moral witnessing and historical memory as a way of reading, translating and interrogating the past as it impacts, and sometimes explodes, the present.
Under Trump, language and memory are disabled as words are emptied of substantive content and the space of a shared reality crucial to any democracy is eviscerated. History and language in this contemporary fascist script are paralyzed in the immediacy of tweeted experience, the thrill of the moment and the comfort of a cathartic emotional discharge. The danger, as history has taught us, is when words are systemically used to cover up lies, falsehoods and the capacity to think critically.
In such instances, the public spheres essential to a democracy wither and die, opening the door to fascist ideas, values and social relations: Trump has sanctioned torture, ripped babies from their parents’ arms, imprisoned thousands of young immigrant children, and declared the media along with entire races and religions to be the enemy of the American people. In doing so, he speaks to and legitimates a history in which state violence becomes an organizing principle of governance and perversely a potentially cathartic experience for his followers.
At the same time, the corruption of language is often followed by the corruption of memory, morality and the eventual disappearance of books, ideas and human beings. Prominent German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer have made clear that for fascist dictators, the dynamics of state censorship and repression had an endpoint in a politics of disappearance, extermination and the death camps.
Trump’s language of disappearance, dehumanization and censorship is an echo and erasure of the horrors and barbarism of another time. His regressive use of language and denial of history must be challenged so the emancipatory energies and compelling narratives of resistance can be recalled to find new ways of challenging the ideologies and power relations that put them into play. Trump’s distortion of language and public memory are part of a larger authoritarian politics of ethnic and racial cleansing that eliminates the genocidal violence waged on Native Americans, black slaves and African-Americans.
Indifferent to the historical footprints that mark expressions of state violence, the Trump administration uses historical amnesia as a weapon of (mis)education, power and politics, allowing public memory to wither and the architecture of fascism to go unchallenged. What is under siege in the present moment is the critical need to keep watch over the repressed narratives of memory work. The fight against a fascist erasure of history must begin with an acute understanding that memory always makes a demand upon the present, refusing to accept ignorance as innocence.
As reality collapses into fake news, moral witnessing disappears into the hollow spectacles of right-wing media machine, which is state-sanctioned weaponry aimed to distort the truth, suppress dissent and attack the critical media. Trump uses Twitter as a public relations blitzkrieg to attack everyone from his political enemies to celebrities who have criticized him.26 The merging of journalism as entertainment with a culture addicted to speed, brevity and the pornographic exposure that digitization affords has emptied speech of any substance and further legitimates the unspeakable. Language no longer expands the reach of history, ethics and justice. On the contrary, it now operates in the service of slogans, bigotry and violence. Words are now turned into an undifferentiated mass of ashes, critical discourse reduced to rubble, and informed judgments a distant radioactive horizon.
Under the Trump presidency, neoliberal fascism has restructured civic life that valorizes ignorance, avarice and willful forgetting. In the current Trumpian moment, shouting replaces the pedagogical imperative to listen and reinforces the stories neoliberal fascism tells us about ourselves, our relations to others and the larger world. Under such circumstances, monstrous deeds are committed under the increasing normalization of civic and historical modes of illiteracy. One consequence is that comparisons to the Nazi past can whither in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books. In an age marked by a war on terror, a culture of fear and the normalization of uncertainty, social amnesia has become a power tool for dismantling democracy. Indeed, in this age of forgetfulness, American society appears to revel in what it should be ashamed of and alarmed over.
Even with the insight of history, comparisons between the older orders of fascism and Trump’s regime of brutality, aggression and cruelty are considered by commentators to be too extreme. There is a cost to such caution. As writer Jonathan Freedland points out in The Guardian, “If the Nazi era is placed off limits, seen as so far outside the realm of regular human experience that it might as well have happened on a distant planet – Planet Auschwitz – then we risk failure to learn its lessons.”27 Knowing how others successfully fought against elected demagogues such as Trump is crucial to a political strategy that reverses impending global catastrophe.
The story of a fascist past needs to be retold not to simply make comparisons to the present, though that is not an unworthy project, but to be able to imagine a new politics in which new knowledge will be built, and as Arendt states, “new insights…new knowledge…new memories, [and] new deeds, [will] take their point of departure.”28 This is not to suggest that history is a citadel of truth that can be easily mined. History offers no guarantees and it can be used in the interest of violence as well as for emancipation. For instance, as writer Ariel Dorfman observes, when the white supremacist and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville: “[They carried torches] to evoke memories of terror, of past parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany. The organizers wanted to issue a warning to those watching: that past violence, perpetrated in defense of the ‘blood and soil’ of the white race, would once again be harnessed and deployed in Donald Trump’s America.”29
Trump’s selective appropriation of history wages war on the past, choosing to celebrate rather than question fascist horrors. The past in this case is a script that must be followed rather than interrogated. Trump’s view of history is at once “ugly and revealing.”30 Such narratives undermine moral witnessing, transform agency into a weapon of violence, and use history as a tool of propaganda. All the more reason why, with the rise of neoliberal fascism, there is a need for modes of historical inquiry and stories that challenge the distortions of the past, transcend private interests and enable the American public to connect private issues to broader historical and political contexts.
The production of new narratives accompanied by critical inquiries into the past would help explain why people participated in the horrors of fascism and what it might take to prevent such complicity from unfolding again. Comparing Trump’s ideology, policies and language to a fascist past offers the possibility to learn what is old and new in the dark times that have descended upon the United States. The pressing relevance of the 1930s is crucial to address how fascist ideas and practices originate and adapt to new conditions, and how people capitulate and resist them as well.
The Disappearing Socia
Since the 1970s, the social structure has been under relentless attack by an assemblage of political, economic and educational forces of organized neoliberal agendas. All the commanding institutions of corporate capitalism have enshrined a notion of citizenship that reduces individuals to consumers while promoting regressive notions of freedom and choice defined primarily through the practice of commercial exchange. Freedom, in the neoliberal edition, has been transformed into an obsession with selfinterest, part of a war culture that ruthlessly pits individuals against each other while condoning a culture of indifference, violence and cruelty that rejects any sense of political and moral responsibility. This often takes the form of the freedom to be a racist, homophobe and sexist, to experience the liberty to hate and demonize others and to inflict violence and emotional harm under the guise of freedom of speech. Such values also mock any form of dependency, empathy and compassion for others.
Atomization, fear and anxiety are the breeding ground of fascism. Not only do such forces undercut the radical imagination and collective resistance, they situate language and memory in the vise of a politics of depoliticization. Neoliberal fascism insists that everything, including human beings, are to be made over in the image of the market. Everyone is now subject to a paralyzing language of individual responsibility and a disciplinary apparatus that revises downward the American dream of social mobility. Time is now a burden for most people and the lesson to draw from this punishing neoliberal ideology is that everyone is alone in navigating their own fate.
At work here is a neoliberal project to reduce people to human capital and rede fine human agency beyond the bonds of sociality, equality, belonging and obligation. All problems and their solutions are now defined exclusively within the purview of the individual. This is a depoliticizing discourse that champions mythic notions of self-reliance and individual character to promote the tearing up of social solidarities and the public spheres that support them.
All aspects of the social and public are now considered suspect, including social space, social provisions, social protections and social dependency, especially for those who are poor and vulnerable. According to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the subjects in a “neoliberal economy do not constitute a we that is capable of collective action. The mounting egoization and atomization of society is shrinking the space for collective action. As such, it blocks the formation of a counter power that might be able to put the capitalist order in question.”31
At the core of neoliberal fascism is a view of subjectivity that celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates with a near sociopathic lack of interest in others with whom it shares a globe on the brink of catastrophe. This project is wedded to a politics that produces a high threshold of disappearance and serves to disconnect the material moorings and wreckage of neoliberal fascism from its underlying power relations.
Neoliberal fascism thrives on producing subjects that internalize its values, corroding their ability to imagine an alternative world. Under such conditions, not only is agency depoliticized, but the political is emptied of any real substance and unable to challenge neoliberalism’s belief in extreme inequality and social abandonment. This fosters fascism’s deep-rooted investment ultra-nationalism, racial purity and the politics of terminal exclusion.
We live at a time in which the social is individualized and at odds with a notion of solidarity once described by Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse as “the refusal to let one’s happiness coexist with the suffering of others.”32 Marcuse invokes a forgotten notion of the social in which one is willing not only to make sacrifices for others but also “to engage in joint struggle against the cause of suffering or against a common adversary.”33
One step toward fighting and overcoming the criminogenic machinery of terminal exclusion and social death endemic to neoliberal fascism is to make education central to a politics that changes the way people think, desire, hope and act. How might language and history adopt modes of persuasion that anchor democratic life in a commitment to economic equality, social justice and a broad shared vision? The challenge we face under a fascism buoyed by a savage neoliberalism is to ask and act on what language, memory and education as the practice of freedom might mean in a democracy. What work can they perform, how can hope be nourished by collective action and the ongoing struggle to create a broadbased democratic socialist movement? What work has to be done to “imagine a politics in which empowerment can grow and public freedom thrive without violence?”34 What institutions have to be defended and fought for if the spirit of a radical democracy is to return to view and survive?
This article first published on the TruthDig.com website.
Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
