By HENRY GIROUX
Marx
was certainly right in arguing that the point is not to understand the world
but to change it, but what he underemphasized was that the world cannot be
transformed if one does not understand what is to be changed. As Terry Eagleton
rightly notes “Nobody can change a world they didn’t understand.”[1] Moreover,
the lack of mass resistance to oppression signals more than apathy or
indifference, it also suggests that we don’t have an informed and energizing vision
of the world for which we want to struggle.[2] Political
struggle is dependent on the political will to change, which is central to any
notion of informed agency willing to address the radical and pragmatic issues
of our time. In addition to understanding the world, an informed public must
connect what they know and learn to the central task of bringing their ideas to
bear on society as a whole. This means that a critical consciousness must be
matched by a fervent willingness to take risks, and challenge the destructive
narratives that are seeping into the public realm and becoming normalized.
Any
dissatisfaction with injustice necessitates combining the demands of moral witnessing
with the pedagogical power of persuasion and the call to address the tasks of
emancipation. We need individuals and social movements willing to disturb the
normalization of a fascist politics, oppose racist, sexist, and neoliberal
orthodoxy.
As
Robin D. G. Kelley observes we cannot confuse catharsis and momentary outrage
for revolution.[3] In
a time of increasing tyranny, resistance in many quarters appears to have lost
its usefulness as a call to action. At the same time, the pedagogical
force of civic ignorance and illiteracy has morphed into a national ideal.
Tyranny and ignorance feed each other in a theater of corporate controlled
media ecosystems and function more as a tool of domination than as a
pedagogical outlet in pursuit of justice and the practice of freedom. Under
such circumstances, when education is not viewed as central to politics itself,
resistance withers in the faux language of privatized struggles and fashionable
slogans. [4]
For
instance the novelist Teju Cole has argued that “‘resistance’ is back in vogue,
and it describes something rather different now. The holy word has become
unexceptional. Faced with a vulgar, manic and cruel regime, birds of many
different feathers are eager to proclaim themselves members of the Resistance.
It is the most popular game in town.”[5] Cole’s
critique appears to be born out by the fact that the most unscrupulous of
liberal and conservative politicians such as Madeline Albright, Hilary Clinton,
and even James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, are now
claiming that they have joined the resistance against Trump’s fascist politics.
Even Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W.
Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a
proto-fascist. Writing in the New York Times, Hayden, ironically, chastised
Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy
Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that “Post-Truth is
pre-fascism.”[6]The
irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush’s illegal National
Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while the head of the NSA, he
also lied repeatedly about his role in Bush’s sanction and implementation of
state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This
tsunami of banal resistance and its pedagogical architecture was on full
display when an anonymous member of the Trump’s inner circle published an op-ed
in the New
York Timesclaiming
that he/she and other senior officials were part of “the resistance within the
Trump administration.”[7] The
author was quick to qualify the statement by insisting such resistance had
nothing to do with “the popular ‘resistance’ of the left.” To prove the point,
it was noted by the author that the members of this insider resistance liked
some of Trump’s policies such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform,
a more robust military and more.”[8]
Combining resistance with the endorsements of such reactionary policies reads
like fodder for late-night comics.
The
Democratic Party now defines itself as the most powerful political force
opposing Trump’s fascist politics. What it has forgotten is the role it has
played under the Clinton and Obama presidencies in creating the economic,
political, and social conditions for Trump’s election in 2016. Such historical
and political amnesia allows them to make the specious claim that they are now
the party of resistance. Resistance in these instances has little to do with
civic courage, a defense of human dignity, and the willingness to not just bear
witness to the current injustices but to struggle to overcome them. Of course,
the issue is not to disavow resistance as much as to redefine it as inseparable
from fundamental change that calls for the overthrow of capitalism itself.
Neoliberalism has now adopted unapologetically the language of racial
cleansing, white supremacy, white nationalism, and fascist politics.
Unapologetic for the widespread horrors, gaping inequality, destruction of
public goods, and re-energizing of the discourse of hate and culture of
cruelty, neoliberalism has joined hands with a toxic fascist politics painted
in the hyper-patriotic colors of red, white, and blue. As I have noted
elsewhere:
Neoliberalism’s hatred of democracy, the common good, and the social contract has unleashed generic elements of a fascist past in which white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, rabid misogyny and immigrant fervor come together in a toxic mix of militarism, state violence, and a politics of disposability. Modes of fascist expression adapt variously to different political historical contexts assuring racial apartheid-like forms in the post-bellum U.S. and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany. Fascism with its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful strongman, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and th superiority of a select ethnic or national group has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, economic orthodoxy, and ethical somnambulance a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.
While
the call to resist neoliberal fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be
interrogated rather than aligned with individuals and ideological forces that
helped put in place the racist, economic, religious, and educational forces
that helped produce it. What many liberals and conservative calls to resistance
have in common is an opposition to Trump rather than to the conditions that
created him. In some cases, liberal critics such as Christopher R. Browning,
Yascha Mounk, and Cass R. Sunstein document insightfully America’s
descent into fascism but are too cautious in refusing to conclude that we are
living under a fascist political regime.[9] This
is more than a retreat from political courage, it is a refusal to name how
liberalism itself with its addiction to the financial elite has helped create
the conditions that make a fascist politics possible.[10]
Trump’s
election and the Kavanaugh affair make clear that what is needed is not only a
resistance to the established order of neoliberal capitalism but a radical
restructuring of society itself. That is not about resisting oppression in its
diverse forms but overcoming it—in short, changing it.[11] The
Kavanaugh hearings and the liberal response was a telling example of what might
be called a politics of disconnection.
While
it is crucial to condemn the Kavanaugh hearings for its blatant disregard for
the Constitution, expressed hatred of women, and its symbolic expression and
embrace of white privilege and power, it is necessary to enlarge our criticism
to include the system that made the Kavanaugh appointment possible. Kavanaugh
represents not only the deep seated rot of misogyny but also as Grace Lee
Boggs, has stated “a government of, by, and for corporate power.”[12] We
need to see beyond the white nationalists and neo-Nazis demonstrating in the
streets in order to recognize the terror of the unforeseen, the terror that is
state sanctioned, and hides in the shadows of power. Such a struggle means more
than engaging material relations of power or the economic architecture of neoliberal
fascism, it also means taking on the challenge producing the tools and tactics
necessary to rethink and create the conditions for a new kind of subjectivity
as the basis for a new kind of democratic socialist politics. We need a
comprehensive politics that brings together various single interest movements
so that the threads that connect them become equally as important as the
particular forms of oppression that define their singularity. In
addition, we need intellectuals willing to combine intellectual complexity with
clarity and accessibility, embrace the high stakes investment in persuasion,
and cross disciplinary borders in order to theorize and speak with what Rob
Nixon calls the “cunning of lightness” and a “methodological promiscuity” that
keeps language attuned to the pressing the claims for justice. [13]
Please continue this article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/22/neoliberalism-in-the-age-of-pedagogical-fascism/?fbclid=IwAR0JVAtiLYlGaSrPeKiWFHcRL7HfVBn75j0D7hPVkOtBb7wvwqjiFIlx0dY
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