Such an excellent piece! Thank you Henry Giroux! His clear voice of truth is a gift that helps me breathe and be inspired to continue to act our behalf of a higher good for us all. Shining this bright light on these dark places is critical. May we all be inspired to embody a fierce commitment to truth and to courageously doing our part in the great struggle to create a just and generous, sane and humane, and compassionate and caring nation and world. — Molly
Henry Giroux: Democracy cannot survive with its current toxic mix of economic inequality, political corruption and institutionalized racism. We need to understand both how dominant power works in all of its manifestations and how to defeat it.... Angela Davis was right in stating, “We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.”
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| Detroit activists march through the city on November 7, 2020. |
The 2020 election was a contest between the centrist elements in the Democratic Party — as embodied by President-elect Joe Biden and his reputed neoliberal policies — and the resurgent fascist politics of an updated party of white supremacists and ultra-nationalists. It is a meaningful, though limited, victory that the crude white supremacist side of capitalism has lost the election, and it would not have happened if not for the hard work of grassroots organizers, who were fighting not for Biden, but against a fascist future.
Still, even amid the celebrations of this step, we must face the threat that the now-empowered centrist elements in the Democratic Party are likely to continue to reverse the legacy of the New Deal and maintain relations of power that sustain if not increase vast inequities in US wealth and power.
In offering voters Biden’s neoliberalism as the only alternative to Trump’s fascistic politics, the election revealed the failure of the Democratic Party to address the economic reality faced by working-class people as a result of the scourge of neoliberalism with its mantra of austerity, privatization and deregulation.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is already participating in downplaying the full urgency of the fascist threat that Trump posed to democracy. In his acceptance speech, Biden claimed that there is no red or blue America but a United States of America — a statement that may be strategic in attempting to gain mass support for the democratic transfer of power in January, but that fails to acknowledge that over 70 million people voted to embrace Trump’s fascist politics with enthusiasm.
Biden’s acceptance speech reiterated the well-worn narratives of centrist politics, including the undying embrace of a mythical American dream waiting to resurrect itself again. Imagine how much more powerful this appeal would be if instead of seeking to win public support for his mandate through these Trump-like statements, Biden sought to offer convincing policies that large swaths of the working class could support, especially those elements of the working class hit hardest by the pandemic.
Instead of offering the public a universal health care plan, huge investments in crucial infrastructure, guaranteed basic income, a moratorium on evictions, support for a Green New Deal, or an updated Marshall Plan for creating millions of jobs, Biden and the party regulars have continued to use empty phrases such as “restoring the soul of America.”
In place of such liberal platitudes, what this country needs right now is a robust agenda that addresses a diverse racial and ethnic working class and prioritizes “the upgrading of schools, clinics, roads, mass transit systems, waterworks, and other public services with good-paying jobs,” as Ralph Nader has argued.
Focusing largely on the important goal of bringing the pandemic under control, Biden overlooked the fact that, for many working-class people, being powerless and viewed as disposable was as threatening as the fear of getting sick or dying from the pandemic. Containing the pandemic was a key issue, and working-class people, particularly people of color, are undoubtedly hardest hit by COVID. However, Biden should have also addressed other core issues impacting millions of working-class people whose incomes have been stagnant for 40 years, who have suffered the humiliation of being evicted from their homes, and who have watched as their jobs dried up and their towns turned into landscapes of despair and dashed hopes.
Missing from Biden’s neoliberal script was the scourge of the carceral state, a call for massively reducing the military budget, the horrible consequences of global capitalism, the financialization of the economy, and the toxic effects of deindustrialization.
Trump’s fascist politics, once again, stepped into this void, feeding off the powerlessness felt by so many Americans, all the while stoking their racial fears and offering fantasies that proved far more effective than the Democrats’ empty neoliberal rhetoric. Trump offered their heightened sense of contempt and resentment of the elite with a script that promised what Mark Danner has called a kind of “imaginary revenge.”
The real issue in this election is not simply the story of winners and losers, but the death of the social sphere, evisceration of the welfare state, the broad appeal of right-wing populism, and the destruction of the formative public institutions and civic culture which produced the crucial democratic values of solidarity, trust, compassion, economic equality, and most of all, a sense of ethical and social responsibility. The limitations of what could be hoped for in this election made clear once again the long legacy of the ongoing assault on meaningful politics and its slow death. A long-simmering racist and fascist culture of lies has shredded any hope of the shared values necessary to give meaning to the relationship between truth and social responsibility, citizenship and compassion. In the current election, the legacy of shared fears, falsehoods, racism and lawlessness came home to roost destroying the values and shared standards necessary to distinguish right from wrong, compassion from expedience, economic activity from social costs.
The United States has become a fortress of militarized ignorance, hate and resentment. The barriers and boarded storefronts that went up before the election may be coming down, but their presence symbolized a deeper reality that will be with the United States for some time to come in the future.
The tsunami of violence, rhetorical and real, now moves beyond the rhetoric of a dictatorial mode of governance into the realm of a heavily polarized country willing “to lock American democracy into an undetermined, perhaps indeterminable, condition.” The current culture of fear began with 9/11, revealed its ugly truth regarding the priority of profits over human needs with the 2008 financial crisis, and the pandemic and current economic crisis made visible the deep-seated racism and white supremacy and white nationalism at the center of power in the United States. Such fears have reached their endpoint in the rise of a fascist politics coupled with those who aid it and those who deny it. While Biden’s win succeeds in ejecting white nationalists like Stephen Miller from the White House, it does not change the fundamental reality that we face: a United States in which overt white supremacy has been emboldened and received mainstream affirmation in chilling new ways. The election did nothing to challenge that. Moreover, it is crucial to acknowledge that Trumpism is vigorously alive in a Republican Party that embraces minority rule and all the toxic policies — voter suppression, packing the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, and other tactical strategies — that both undermine democracy and ensure an embrace of authoritarianism. This is a party for whom only selected voters count (read: white voters) and “the majority can be conjured out of existence.” There is no morality here, only the crude pragmatism of a fascist politics and a large segment of the population along with Trump’s political lackeys who embraced his fascist politics with zeal.
Regardless of Biden’s win, we still live in a world that appears to have descended into Dante’s version of hell. This is a world marked by horrifying political horizons — a world in which authoritarian and medical pandemics merge in what resembles a dystopian nightmare. In this age of uncertainty, time and space have collapsed into a void of shared apprehensions, relentless anxieties and the possibility of a human rights abyss. The terrors of everyday life manifest themselves in the metrics of rising infections, body counts and the daily risk of contamination, sickness or worse.
Amid this collective terror, the architecture of authoritarianism resurfaced under Trump with a vengeance in the form of a waking nightmare with a cast of horrors. Surveillance technologies proliferated; armed militia defended groups refusing to wear protective masks and intimidated those who did; voter suppression was in full swing; conspiracy theories originated or were legitimated by President Trump; immigrant children were forcibly separated from their parents — sometimes disappearing into internment camps with no hope of reuniting with their families. Echoes of a fascist past surfaced in news accounts in which imprisoned female immigrants were victims of forced sterilization; political rallies emboldened the language of hate and violence; and a steady stream of politicians and reactionary media pundits used vitriolic language against almost anyone who criticized Trump’s destructive and death-dealing policies, including Democratic governors and liberal and progressive members of the press.
In this post-election climate, the COVID-19 plague points to more than a medical pandemic and must be understood as part of a more comprehensive narrative. For instance, the disproportionate impact of the virus on poor people of color makes clear that the struggle “for public health, goods, services, social protections, and human rights, with special provisions for the most vulnerable, including the precariat, migrant workers … indigenous peoples” and the elderly cannot be separated from broader struggles for social equality, economic justice and democracy. The horror of the pandemic often overshadows the fact that anti-democratic economic and political forces that have prioritized profits over more urgent human needs have ground away at the social order for the last 50 years. The COVID-19 crisis is deeply rooted in years of neglect by hyper-capitalist governments that denied the importance of public health, the public good and the commons while defunding institutions that made them possible.
At the same time, this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive inequalities in wealth, income and power that grew relentlessly since the 1970s. Nor can it be separated from a crisis of democratic values, critical education and the civic imagination. With respect to the latter, the COVID-19 pandemic is deeply interconnected with the politicization of the social order through the destructive assaults waged by casino capitalism on the welfare state, all manner of social provisions and the ecosystem. Underlying the magnitude of the current pandemic, there is the crucial and demanding question of: What kind of world do we want to live in today and build for in the future?
The pandemic has revealed the ugly and cruel face of an extreme form of capitalism, which has relentlessly attacked the social contract, the public sphere and the common good since the 1970s. I use the term neoliberalism to define this libertarian, market-driven form of capitalism which gained prominence in Chile, under General Pinochet in the 1970s with the help of the University of Chicago Economics Department and Milton Friedman. It was later implemented by U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who infamously stated, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Soon afterwards, President Ronald Reagan argued that, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Of course, these ideas were later embraced with great enthusiasm by Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada. The endpoint here was an attempt to discredit any viable sense of government responsibility.
Implicit in these views is a neoliberal worldview that takes as its central organizing idea the assumption that the market should govern not only the economy, but all aspects of society. In addition, it promotes untrammeled self-interest, indulgent individualism, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a financial elite, and removes economic activity from social costs. Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed hedonism and challenges the very idea of the common good. In this logic, “individual interests are the only reality that matters and those interests are purely monetary.”
In addition, neoliberalism cannot be disconnected from the spectacle of fearmongering, ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist in the U.S., Brazil and a number of other countries as a means of promoting shared anxieties rather than shared responsibilities. Through its destruction of the economy, environment, education and public health care, neoliberal capitalism has created a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.
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