After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United States and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s and 1940s. Extreme capitalism has produced massive economic suffering, tapped into a combination of fear and a cathartic cruelty, and emboldened a savage lawlessness aimed at those considered disposable. In the United States, the Trump administration has accelerated neoliberalism as an enabling force that provides fertile ground for the unleashing of the ideological architecture, poisonous values, and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under fascism. While there is no perfect fit between Trump and the fascist societies of Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet, “the basic tenets of extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, and disgust with democracy and the rule of law are essentially the same”(Johnson, 2018). In this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worse excesses of capitalism with fascist ideals – the veneration of war, a hatred of reason and truth; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, a demonization of the other, a discourse of decline, brutal violence, and ultimately state violence in heterogeneous forms.
Neoliberalism creates a failed democracy and in doing so opens up the fascists’ use of fear and terror to transform a state of exception into a state of emergency. As a project, it destroys all the commanding institutions of democracy and consolidates power in the hands of a financial elite. As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Governance is now on the side of a war culture that transforms the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization, and law and order to discredit civil liberties while ridiculing and censoring critics. Under Trump, neoliberal fascism’s most distinctive feature is its war on undocumented children and immigrants, women, Muslims, and Blacks. The model of the prison and the state-sanctioned embrace of violence and lawlessness are now unleashed on youth, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and all those others considered disposable as part of a larger project of state terrorism that embraces white supremacist ideology, state violence, and authoritarian beliefs.
Reason and compassion give way to a rhetoric of rancid bigotry which works to inform policy and inflict humiliation, misery, and suffering on diverse groups at all levels of society who are viewed as degenerate and repugnant. How else to explain the transformation under the Trump administration of ice (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the largest police agency under the rule of the Department of Homeland Security, into what Cynthia Nixon, the candidate for the New York Democratic Governorship in 2018, calls “a terrorist organization of its own, that is terrorizing people who are coming to this country” (Anapol, 2018). Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis) after visiting the southern border issued a statement calling for the abolishment of ice. He writes:
Aida Chavez reports in The Intercept that “in addition to physical and sexual assaults, immigrants in detention are often subject to bigoted remarks by facility personal”(Chavez, 2018). For example, an immigrant who refused to fight another detainee as part of a game refused and threatened to lodge a complaint only to be told that “No one will believe baboon complaints” (ibid). Officers also “denied him hygiene produced and his food was thrown away” (ibid). The guards “continued to refer to him as a…‘gorilla,’ and encouraged others to ‘rattle his cage’” (ibid). In a jail in Florence, Arizona “a guard told a man to “look in the mirror to see King Kong””(ibid). In other instances, immigrants have been sexually assaulted and denied pain medication. In public records obtained by The Intercept, more than a 1,000 complaints have been made about sexual abuse in immigration detention centers (Speri, 2018). The systemic nature and scope of the sexual abuses are horrifying and reveal the underpinnings of a fascist police state. As Alice Speri observes:During my trip to the southern border, it was clear that ice, and its actions of hunting down and tearing apart families, has wreaked havoc on far too many people. From conducting raids at garden centers and meatpacking plants, to breaking up families at churches and schools, ice is tearing apart families and ripping at the moral fabric of our nation. Unfortunately, President Trump and his team of white nationalists, including Stephen Miller, have so misused icethat the agency can no longer accomplish its goals effectively… I’m introducing legislation that would abolish ice and crack down on the agency’s blanket directive to target and round up individuals and families. The heartless actions of this abused agency do not represent the values of our nation and the U.S. must develop a more humane immigration system, one that treats every person with dignity and respect (Pocan, 2018).
It is impossible to separate these vicious acts of dehumanization and assault from the enabling force of Trump’s rhetoric of racial hatred. His toxic discourse of bigotry has a long history and became a defining public feature of his white supremacist ideology the moment he kicked off his presidential bid with the insulting claim that Mexican immigrants are “bring drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume are good people.” The racist invective has been a hallmark of Trump’s presidency surfacing again and again. Another highly publicized example took place at the beginning of 2018 when it was reported he told lawmakers working on a new immigration policy that the United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador, and various African nations (Dawsey, 2018). Given his support for white nationalism and his vaguely coded call to “Make America Great (White) Again, Trump’s overt racist remarks reinforce echoes of white supremacy reminiscent of fascist dictators in the 1930s. Yet, make no mistake. There is much more at work here than a politics of incivility. Behind Trump’s use of vulgarity and his disparagement of immigrants and countries that are poor and non-white lies the terrifying discourse of white supremacy, ethnic cleansing, and the politics of disposability. This is a vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only faceless, voiceless, and subject to terminal expulsion.But the sheer number of complaints – despite serious obstacles in the path of those filing them, as well as the patterns they reveal about mistreatment in facilities nationwide – suggest that sexual assault and harassment in immigration detention are not only widespread but systemic, and enabled by an agency that regularly fails to hold itself accountable. While the reports obtained by The Intercept are only a fraction of those filed, they shed light on a system that operates largely in secrecy, and they help hint at the magnitude of the abuse, and the incompetence and complicity of the agency tasked with the safety of the 40,000 women, men, and children it detains each day in more than 200 jails, prisons, and detention centers across the country (ibid).
This is the language of the police state. The endpoint of the language of racial cleansing and a politics of disposability is a form of social death, or even worse. What is frightening about Trump’s racist vocabulary is that it registers a move from the coded language of benign neglect to policies marked by malignant cruelty and legitimates forms of state violence that act unapologetically and with impunity. It also mirrors both a shift in politics and popular opinion. White supremacists and neo-Nazi moves are on the rise as is a growing popular support and tolerance for such groups – matched by an uptake in violence against Blacks, Muslims, Jews, and other who are the object of this growing bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism.
At a time when any reference to a Nazi past is denounced as unrealistic or inapplicable, moral witnessing is disconnected from historical memory and the horrors of another age surface in different forms. Under such circumstances, once again the architecture of fascism resurrects itself. Trump’s zero tolerance policy which involves the kidnapping and stealing of children from the parents of immigrant families provides moving and crucial testimony to the power historical memory and the necessity to listen to the warnings of the past, particularly in an era of accelerating state terrorism. Fascism begins with words and its ideology, values, and production of identities are learned testifying to the necessity of making the teaching of historical memory and civic literacy central to politics and crucial to analyzing the institutions and formative cultures designed to cancel out the future, especially for young people, immigrants, and others considered less then human and disposable. Under the current era of neoliberal fascism, historical memory and moral witnessing are especially dangerous when they do the bridging work between the past and the present, the self and others, and allow the public to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. Under Trump’s regime of state terrorism, critical thought and education become dangerous because they exemplify as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Hannah Arendt, among others have argued, that “democracy is “a way of life,” an ethical ideal that demands active and constant attention. And if we fail to work at creating and re-creating democracy, there is no guarantee that it will survive” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 25). This is particularly true at a time of emerging illiberal democracies across the globe.
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