Peter Thiel, the silicon billionaire and one of the six ultra-rich financial elite to speak at the Republican National Convention once wrote that he did not "believe that freedom and democracy were compatible." This blatant anti-democratic mindset has emerged once again, without apology, as a major organizing principle of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. In addition to expressing a hatred of Muslims, Mexicans, women, journalists, dissidents, and others whom he views as outside the pale of what constitutes a true American, Trump appears to harbor a core disdain for democracy, bringing back Theodor Adorno's warning that "the true danger [of fascism] lay in the traces of the fascist mentality within the democratic political system" (a warning quoted in Prismatic Thought). What has become clear is that the current political crisis represents a return to ideologies, values and policies based upon a poisonous mix of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, opening up a politics that "could lead back to political totalitarianism."
Throughout the 2016 Republican National Convention the
hateful discourse of red-faced anger and unbridled fear-mongering added up to
more than an appeal to protect America and make it safe again. Such weakly
coded invocations also echoed the days of Jim Crow, the undoing of civil
rights, forced expulsions and forms of state terrorism sanctioned in the
strident calls for safety and law-and-order. Commenting on Trump's speech,
columnist Eugene Robinson argued that his talk added up to what few journalists
were willing to acknowledge -- "a notorious white supremacist
account." What is shocking is the refusal in many mainstream media circles
to examine the role that white supremacy has played in creating the conditions
for Trump to emerge as the head of the Republican Party. This structured
silence is completely at odds with Trump's longstanding legacy of
discrimination, including his recent and relentless derogatory remarks
concerning President Obama, his race-based attacks on US District Judge Gonzalo
Curiel (who is trying a case against Trump University), his denunciation of
Muslims as terrorists and his attempt to paint Mexican immigrants as criminals,
drug dealers and rapists.
Neo-Fascism in the US
The visibility of such racist accounts and the deep
investments in the ongoing mobilization of fear by political extremists in the
United States surely has its roots in a number of factors, including dire
economic conditions that have left millions suffering and proliferated zones of
social abandonment. These economic conditions have resulted in an exponential
increase in the individuals and groups condemned to live under machineries of
inscription, punishment and disposability. The current mobilization of fear
also has its roots, rarely mentioned by those critical of Trump, in a legacy of
white supremacy that is used to divert anger over dire economic and political
conditions into the diversionary cesspool of racial hatred. Racial amnesia was
one consequence of the heralding of what David Theo Goldberg has called in his
book Are We All Postracial Yet?, a "postracial" era in American
history after the first Black president was elected to office in 2008. This
collective racial amnesia (coded as postracialism) was momentarily disrupted by
the execution of Troy Davis, the shootings of Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin and
others, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, even today, in
spite of the cell phone videos that have made visible an endless array of Black
men being killed by police, much of the American public (and particularly, the
white American public) seems immune to communications of the reach, depth and
scope of institutional racism in America. As Nathanial Rich observes:
Today, like sixty years ago, much of the public rhetoric about
race is devoted to explaining to an incurious white public, in rudimentary
terms, the contours of institutional racism. It must be spelled out, as if for
the first time, that police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to
providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail
the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents; but outbreaks
of a chronic national disease. Nebulous, bureaucratic terms like "white
privilege" have been substituted for "white supremacy," or
"micro-aggressions" for "casual racism."
Across the globe, fascism and white supremacy in their
diverse forms are on the rise. In Greece, France, Poland, Austria and Germany,
among other nations, right-wing extremists have used the hateful discourse of
racism, xenophobia and white nationalism to demonize immigrants and undermine
democratic modes of rule and policies. As Chris Hedges observes, much of the
right-wing, racist rhetoric coming out of these countries mimics what Trump and
his followers are saying in the United States.
One consequence is that the public spheres that produce a
critically engaged citizenry and make a democracy possible are under siege and
in rapid retreat. Economic stagnation, massive inequality, the rise of
religious fundamentalism and growing forms of ultra-nationalism now aim to put
democratic nations to rest. Echoes of the right-wing movements in Europe have
come home with a vengeance. Demagogues wrapped in xenophobia, white supremacy
and the false appeal to a lost past echo a brutally familiar fascism, with
slogans similar to Donald Trump's call to "Make America Great Again"
and "Make America Safe Again." These are barely coded messages that
call for forms of racial and social cleansing. They are on the march, spewing
hatred, embracing forms of anti-semitism and white supremacy, and showing a
deep-seated disdain for any form of justice on the side of democracy. AsPeter
Foster points out in The Telegraph, "The toxic combination of the most
prolonged period of economic stagnation and the worst refugee crisis since the
end of the Second World War has seen the far-Right surging across the
continent, from Athens to Amsterdam and many points in between."
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors
in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
State-manufactured lawlessness has become normalized and
extends from the ongoing and often brutalizing and murderous police violence
against Black people and other vulnerable groups to a criminogenic market-based
system run by a financial elite that strips everyone but the upper 1% of a
future, not only by stealing their possessions but also by condemning them to a
life in which the only available option is to fall back on one's individual
resources in order to barely survive.
Fear is the reigning ideology and war its operative mode of
action, pitting different groups against each other, shutting down the
possibilities of shared responsibilities, and legitimating the growth of a
paramilitary police force that kills Black people with impunity.
State-manufactured fear offers up new forms of domestic terrorism embodied in
the rise of a surveillance state while providing a powerful platform for
militarizing many aspects of society. One consequence is that, as Charles
Derber argues, America has become a warrior society whose "culture and
institutions... program civilians for violence at home as well as abroad."
And, as Zygmunt Bauman argues in his book Liquid Fear, in a society saturated
in violence and hate, "human relations are a source of anxiety" and
everyone is viewed with mistrust. Compassion gives way to suspicion and a
celebration of fear and revulsion accorded to those others who allegedly have
the potential to become monsters, criminals, or even worse, murderous
terrorists. Under such circumstance, the bonds of trust dissolve, while hating
the other becomes normalized and lawlessness is elevated to a matter of
commonsense.
Politics is now a form of warfare creating and producing an
expanding geography of combat zones that hold entire cities, such as Ferguson,
Missouri, hostage to forms of extortion, violence lock downs and domestic
terrorism -- something I have demonstrated in detail in my book America at War
with Itself. These are cities where most of those targeted are Black. Within
these zones of racial violence, Black people are often terrified by the
presence of the police and subject to endless forms of domestic terrorism.
Hannah Arendt once wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism. She
was right and we are witnessing the dystopian visions of the new authoritarians
who now trade in terror, fear, hatred, demonization, violence and racism.
Trump and his neo-Nazi bulldogs are no longer on the fringe
of political life and they have no interests in instilling values that will
make America great. On the contrary, they are deeply concerned with creating
expanding constellations of force and fear, while inculcating convictions that
will destroy the ability to form critical capacities and modes of civic courage
that offer a glimmer of resistance and justice.
Trump and the Culture of Cruelty
Nicholas Confessore rightly argues that Trump's
"anti-other language" and denigration of Mexican immigrants as
"criminal rapists, murderers and drug dealers" has "electrified
the world of white nationalists," who up until the Trump campaign had been
relegated to the fringe of American politics. No longer. All manner of white
nationalist groups, news sites (The Daily Stormer) and individuals, such as
Jared Tayler (a self-described "race realist") and David Duke (a
racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana lawmaker and talk show host) have embraced
Trump as a presidential candidate. And in a less-than-subtle way, Trump has
embraced them. He has repeatedly tweeted messages that first appeared on racist
or ultra-nationalist neo-Nazi Twitter accounts and when asked about such tweets
has refused to disavow them directly.
Where are the institutions that do not support a rabid
individualism, a culture of cruelty and a society based on social combat --
that refuse to militarize social problems and reject the white supremacist laws
and practices spreading throughout the United States? What happens when a
society is shaped by a poisonous neoliberalism that separates economic and
individual economic actions from social costs, when privatization becomes the
only sanctioned orbit for agency, when values are entirely reduced to exchange
values?
How do we talk about the way in which language is
transformed into a tool of violence, as recently happened at the Republican
National Convention? Moreover, how does language act in the service of violence
-- less through an overt discourse of hate and bigotry than through its
complicity with all manner of symbolic and real violence? What happens to a
society when moral witnessing is hollowed out by a shameless entertainment
industry that is willing to produce and distribute spectacles of extreme
violence on a massive scale? What happens to a society when music is used as a
method of torture (as it was at Guantanamo) and when a fascist politics of torture
and disappearance are endorsed by a presidential candidate and many of his
supporters? Instead of addressing these questions -- as well as the
state-sanctioned torture and lynching that form the backdrop for this violence
-- we have been hearing a lot of talk about violence waged against police. This
is not to suggest that the recent isolated acts of violence against police are
justified -- of course, they are not -- but the real question is why we don't
see much more of such violence, given how rampant police violence has long been
in the service of white supremacy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates observes, the killing of
police officers cannot be addressed outside the historical legacy of
discrimination, harassment, and violence against Black people. He writes:
When the law shoots down 12-year-old children, or beats down
old women on traffic islands, or chokes people to death over cigarettes; when
the law shoots people over compact discs, traffic stops, drivers' licenses,
loud conversation, or car trouble; when the law auctions off its monopoly on
lethal violence to bemused civilians, when these civilians then kill, and when
their victims are mocked in their death throes; when people stand up to defend
police as officers of the state, and when these defenders are killed by these
very same officers; when much of this is recorded, uploaded, live-streamed,
tweeted, and broadcast; and when government seems powerless, or unwilling, to
stop any of it, then it ceases, in the eyes of citizens, to be any sort of
respectable law at all. It simply becomes "force."
The call for even more "law and order" feeds even
more police violence rather than addressing how it can be eliminated. What is
often forgotten by such calls is that, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Brad
Evans point out, "When human beings are valued as less than human,
violence begins to emerge as the only response." Under such circumstances,
as Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin argue, the call for law and order is in
actuality a call to sanction even more state violence while telling white
people that their country is spiralling out of control and that they yearn for
a leader who will take aggressive, even extreme, actions to protect them. But
the consequences of hate are marked or covered over with well-intentioned but
misguided calls for love and empathy. These are empty calls when they do not
address the root causes of violence and when they ignore a ruthless climate and
culture of cruelty that calls poor people moochers; a culture that's
increasingly militarized, that increasingly criminalizes and marginalizes
people and social problems, and where a discourse of hate is normalized by the
Republican Party and covered up by the Democratic Party.
-Henry Giroux
Seriously, i could have centered in bold type this entire
article.
No comments :
Post a Comment