"We No Longer Live in a Democracy": Henry Giroux on a United States at War With Itself

Sunday, 25 September 2016 00:00By Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview 

To transform our society into a democracy, we first have to dismantle the myth of democracy as currently defined. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)

"Too many people today accept the notion that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces," writes cultural critic and theorist Henry A. Giroux, in his new book, America at War with Itself. "This much promoted ideology, favored by the rich, suggests that human relations boil down to competition and combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of economic relations in which the only obligation is to fight for one's own self-interest." This troubling trend is not only profoundly anti-democratic, but also works to eliminate structural, systemic and social concerns from public discourse, creatingwhat Giroux has described as "organized powerlessness."

In the following interview, Giroux -- a professor for scholarship in the public interest at McMaster University and a member of Truthout's board -- explains the background to the war metaphor and deconstructs its everyday use in the US. Finally, he evokes a politics of possibility which begins by making visible the linkages among a vast array of issues that undermine democracy.

Leslie Thatcher: Henry, could you give a brief list of the many ways America is at war with itself and the most recent battles or campaigns of that war?

Henry Giroux: FDR once said, "A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself." This is happening in the United States in the most literal sense, given that our political and economic system are wedded to a market-driven system willing to destroy the planet, while relentlessly undermining those institutions that make a democracy possible. What this suggests and the book takes up in multiple ways is that the United States is at war with its own idealism, democratic institutions, the working and middle classes, minority youth, Muslims, immigrants and all of those populations considered disposable.

War has taken on an existential quality in that we are not simply at war; rather, as Étienne Balibar insists, "we are in war," inhabiting a war culture that touches every aspect of society. War is no longer an instrument to be used by political powers, but a form of rule, a general condition of the social order itself -- a permanent social relation and organizing principle that affects all aspects of the social order. In fact, the US has moved from a welfare state in the last forty years to a warfare state, and war has now become the foundation for politics, wedded to a misguided war on terror, the militarization of everyday life, and a culture of fear, which have become its most important regulative functions. Politics has become a comprehensive war machine that aggressively assaults anything that does not comply with its underlying economic, religious, educative and political fundamentalisms.

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