Reflections On the Roots Of and the Antidotes To These Dangerously Polarizing Times

Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain

These are profoundly polarizing times. There is so much dehumanization and anger and outrage and lashing out at the Other. Despair and fear drives many of our understandably painful reactions. As does the divisive and relentless propaganda of corporate funded mainstream media and the powerful within both major political parties which strive to shrink our realities down to the Democratic Party is bad and the Republican Party is good or vice versa. And I hear this anger and outrage. Deeply. And I also understand.

Following the horrors and devastation of the Bush Neocon Era, I went through my own very painful time early on during Obama’s first presidency. I’d worked to get him elected and believed 100%  in Obama and the promises he made. And then I blamed republicans for what I believed was their thwarting of his plans. It was all the republicans! I was angry!

And then some of those who I respect and trust and who I’ve been aware are more deeply informed than I am began challenging my beliefs, my truths, my reality. That’s when I first became introduced to neoliberalism, something that I’d never heard of before.

Over time I read and listened to and watched excellent films like this short documentary:

And the world as I knew it was falling apart. Again. And again. And for the first time I was clearly seeing the shadow side of the Democratic Party and the Neoliberalism that has been infecting most of those in positions of power within the Democratic Party for many years — and all of us here in the United States and beyond. 

Most Americans, like what was once true for me, do not know what neoliberalism is. And that is comparable to living in Russia and not knowing what communism is. It is the waters in which we swim. This time of lifting more of the the veils of the fog I'd unknowingly been in was deeply painful, disturbing, disillusioning, and humbling. And ultimately these experiences grew to be empowering for me as I came to recognize, understand, absorb, and be radically changed and transformed by the new information that I was learning.

Today what I am very aware of is that it is not just the Republican Party that holds responsibility for the nightmare of today. Yes, they are the political party that has become so toxic that it’s now fully embracing fascism. That said, everything doesn’t all boil down to Trump, who is a symptom of a much, much larger picture.

And while, yes, there are indeed corporate democrats who are calling out Trump, this is only occurring to a limited degree. What is being left out — by those democrats who are in the pockets of their wealthy donors — is the crucial role that their neoliberalism has played in ushering us into this horrifying Fascist Era. There is no deep dive into the reality and the roots of the profound despair of millions that has been driven and fueled by the policies and practices of both major political parties for decades.

The truth is that the roots of the peril that we are in today is not all on republicans. It isn't. It’s also on the corporate funded democrats who are aligned with and in the pockets of Wall Street and the Big Banks, the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, Netanyahu and AIPAC, and on and on. They are doing the bidding of their corporate donors rather than acting on behalf of We the People, our shared world, and the Planet.

There are those like Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges and many others who’ve been warning us for decades about what happening and what is coming. Henry Giroux, who wrote this piece that I will share below, is among the great worldwide recognized public intellectuals of our times. And Pulitzer Prize winning author, activist, independent journalist, and professor Chris Hedges has been offering us the deeper truths and larger pictures for decades. Their books line my bookshelves along with countless others who have helped me to shed layer after layer of my indoctrination and ignorance.

It takes what Chris calls “a profound commitment to truth” and a great deal of courage and support to root into the humbling process of replacing our illusions with truth. At least this has certainly been my experience. But as James Baldwin wisely stated, nothing will change until it is faced.

There is an imperative, I believe, that we take a deep dive and look deeper and deeper into the shadow side of our country. Please consider reading this piece that I posted by Chris Hedges right after the heartbreaking and horrifying election: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2024/11/excellent-chris-hedges-politics-of.html.

In addition, there are many other excellent documentaries which trace the roots and threads of what has brought us to where we are today. This is yet another deeply important, informative, and exemplary documentary: 

All of this is to lay the grounding for reading and absorbing this excellent piece I'm sharing below by Henry Giroux. There’s such a deep need for us to understand where we are and how we got here and a vision of a radically transformed nation and world.

As Pema Chödrön has also wisely said, "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." And there is so much that we individually and collectively need to know that will ultimately pierce through our ignorance and despair, our justifications to dehumanize other human beings, and all of our flailing about unskillfully when it is the deep and sacred wisdom of our hearts and souls that is so deeply needed.

So the time for illusions is indeed over. Another world is possible and it begins with each and every one of us. May courage, integrity, solidarity, and a profound commitment to truth be contagious! We are truly all in this together. 

Bless us all,

Molly

* * * * *

The Democratic Party: Architects 

of Cowardice, Accomplices to Fascism

By Henry Giroux

The Democratic Party has forfeited every claim to moral and political credibility. It is not a bulwark against fascism but an accomplice to it, a party of cowardice and complicity that props up the most barbaric features of gangster capitalism-extending from staggering levels of inequality to its refusal to support national health care. Its leadership, craven, visionless, and drunk on Wall Street money, has become a machinery of war and despair. It is wedded to the military-industrial complex and normalizes through its silence a culture of war, misery, and cruelty. It sends billions in weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, fully aware those arms sustain a machinery of occupation and repression. With one act, fighting to cut off the flow of weapons, the Democrats could help end this slaughter. Instead, when Netanyahu recently visited the White House, they shook his bloodstained hand and smiled for the cameras, their shamelessness captured in a widely circulated, obscene photograph. This betrayal abroad mirrors the Party’s collapse at home. The Party’s cowardice is written into its very DNA.

 It is a party of whiners, trapped in ideological smugness and a flaccid discourse of compromise.  Given its political and ethical weakness, it is ironic that on occasion it drapes itself in the hollow language of “resisting Trump’s authoritarianism.” This becomes more obvious when it advocates, on occasion,  working with the regime, even as it props up authoritarians abroad and tightens the screws of neoliberal cruelty at home. Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian is right in stating that the Democratic Party is the party of self-sabotage, that is, it has a vision of American politics in which (they] have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own.” Its neoliberal policies have hollowed out working-class communities, shredded social protections, remained largely moot in calling out Trump’s regime as a criminogenic organization, and left despair in their wake, conditions that became the breeding ground for Trump’s authoritarian ascent. They created the void that fascism fills, and now they tremble before the monster they helped unleash.

The racist bile and fascist rhetoric spewed by Trump’s loyal sycophants, especially Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, receives far less outrage than the criticism directed at progressive voices like Zohran Mamdani, now running for mayor of New York City. When Miller brands the Democratic Party not only a domestic extremist organization but “an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists,” the silence from Democratic leaders is deafening. No effort is made to expose such language as rooted in the poisonous legacies of fascism and white supremacy, or  for that matter call for his resignation. Yet there can be no doubt that Miller’s discourse, and his influence in shaping Trump’s militarized immigration, education, and policing policies, is a five-alarm fire for democracy, one that demands unrelenting opposition. There is no effort on the part of the Democratic Party leadership to acknowledge that the Department of Homeland Security has become not only a domestic terrorist organization but a “white nationalist content, mill churning out bigoted, jingoistic schlock.” 

This cowardice abroad is matched by their silence in the face of fascism at home. Matters of moral witnessing, addressing war crimes, calling out massive violations of human rights at home and abroad are rarely acknowledged by the Democratic Party leadership. This is especially true with respect to the genocide taking place in Gaza. Not only is it morally indefensibly silent about its own complicity in arming Israel, it also reveals itself too timid to confront Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, where more than two million people have been reduced to conditions resembling a “vast Ground Zero.” As a party wedded to Wall Street, it is too timid to challenge the predatory capitalism that now mutates into one of the most destructive and exploitative economic systems on the planet, an order that thrives on the obliteration of human needs, elevates profit as its only sacrament, and transforms the state into a corrupt crime syndicate.

At home, the Democratic leadership refuses to lift a finger for candidates who represent genuine hope. Their refusal to support Zohran Mamdani in New York is not an oversight but a betrayal. Schumer and Jeffries embody the Party’s moral bankruptcy: Schumer the coward, Jeffries the gutless tactician, both locked in servitude to corporate power, both content to preside over a politics of endless war, mass incarceration, obscene inequality, and the normalization of state terrorism. They are the pallbearers of democracy, not its defenders. Commenting on the fact that Jeffries and Schumer have so far refused to endorse Mamdani, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a Wednesday column for The Guardian, “If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.” Mehdi only gets it partly right: these two politicians embody not individual cowardice, but a party that supports genocide in Gaza, refuses to stand up to the military-industrial-academic complex, and could not care less about the future they are destroying for young people. 

The American people deserve more than these moral zombies. What is needed is a new party, one unafraid to fight for radical democracy and the dignity of all. A party that calls for the end of staggering inequality, a universal wage, free health care, free quality education for all, housing for everyone, strict gun restrictions, the abolition of poverty, and the dismantling of the warfare state. A party that will slash the bloated defense budget and redirect those trillions into schools, hospitals, homes, and the expansion of social rights. A party that will name criminalized  capitalism for what it is: a death-dealing order of greed, violence, corruption, and disposability.

Fascism does not arrive fully formed; it is cultivated in the soil of despair, in the immiseration engineered by Trump’s cruelty and the Democrats’ cowardice. Left unchallenged, it corrodes everyday life until cruelty appears normal and democracy becomes little more than a corpse draped in patriotic slogans of hate, disappearance, and lawlessness. The Democratic Party cannot halt this descent. It is too compromised by its allegiance to corporate power, too wedded to the financiers of misery, and too invested in the politics of fear to offer anything resembling resistance.

The time for illusions is over. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed, nor can it be trusted to halt the march of authoritarianism. What is required is not the rehabilitation of a party of cowardice, but the creation of a new political formation, one that does not tremble before fascism but confronts it head-on. A movement that refuses to confuse capitalism with democracy, that rejects the barbarism of endless war and the plunder of Wall Street, that refuses to sacrifice children in Gaza or in America’s streets on the altar of profit and power. Such a movement must be rooted in the struggles of ordinary people, grounded in solidarity and sustained by collective courage.

The future belongs to those who can imagine and fight for a radically different order: a socialist democracy grounded in solidarity, justice, and care. It belongs to those who demand free health care and education, who insist on housing and dignity for all, who struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, and who reject the culture of disposability that treats lives as expendable. It belongs to those willing to rise up, organize, and fight for a world where freedom, justice, and equality are not a privilege of the few, but the common inheritance of all.

If fascism grows in the soil of despair, then resistance must grow in the soil of hope. Against a politics of fear, we must summon a politics of courage. Against the machinery of death, we must build a mass working-class movement with the power to imagine and fight for a future in which socialist democracy is not an empty slogan but a hard-won reality, hammered out in struggle, sustained by solidarity, and carried forward by those who refuse to be ruled by fear. Democracy will not be saved by the cowards of compromise or the apostles of war, but by those in the struggles of workers and the oppressed who risk everything for justice, equality, and hope.

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.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/08/the-democratic-party-architects-of-cowardice-accomplices-to-fascism/