The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
regime over liberal democracy” is no longer a matter of speculation but a dark reality.116 Trump’s assault on the truth uses language to discredit the media while labeling his enemies as agents of fake news. Unencumbered by knowledge, Trump is not simply hostile to those who rely on facts and evidence, he works hard to prevent people from being able to distinguish between truth and falsehoods while undermining the institutions vital to a democracy that enable informed judgments. Trump is addicted to the language of a war culture, one that promotes a culture of aggression and fear in the service of violence. Language for Trump is part of a sustained state of war on the cultural front.
Any resistance to the new stage of American authoritarianism has to begin by analyzing its language, the stories it fabricates, the policies it produces, and the cultural, economic, and political institutions that make it possible. Questions have to be raised about how right-wing educational and cultural apparatuses function both politically and pedagogically to shape notions of identity, desire, values, and emotional investments in the discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s language both shapes and embodies policies that have a powerful consequences on peoples’ lives, and such effects must be made visible, tallied up, and used to uncover oppressive forms of power that often hide in the shadows. Rather than treat Trump’s lies and fear-mongering as an expression of merely a petulant and dangerous demagogue, it is crucial to analyze their historical roots, the institutions that reproduce and legitimate them, the pundits who promote them, and the effects they have on the texture of everyday life.
Trump’s language has a history that must be acknowledged, made known for the suffering it produces, and challenged with an alternative critical and hope-producing narrative. Such a language must be willing to make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods, and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the diverse modes of oppression that characterize the dark times that have overtaken the United States and, increasingly, many other countries. Progressives need a language that both embraces the political potential of diverse forms racial, gender, and sexual identity and the forms of “oppression, exclusion, and marginalization” they make visible while simultaneously working to unify such movements into a broader social formation and political party willing to challenge the core values and institutional structures of the American-style fascism.117 No form of oppression, however hideous, can be overlooked. In addition, with that critical gaze there must emerge a critical language about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States. At the same time, there is a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres as sites of critical learning. There is also a need to encourage artists, intellectuals, academics, and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible, and challenge the normalizing discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and fascism. There is no room here for a language shaped by political purity or limited to a politics of outrage. A truly democratic vision has a broader and more capacious overview.
Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an essential element of politics, and in part, this can be done with a language that unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. Language is a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. We would do well to heed the words of the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J. M. Coetzee, who, in a piece of fiction, states that “there will come a day when you and I will need to be told the truth, the real truth….no matter how hard it may be.”118 Too much is at stake in the current historical conjuncture for the truth not to be told. A critical language can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms.119 The search and use of such a language can also reinforce and accelerate the need for young people and others to continue creating alternative public spaces in which critical dialogue, exchange, and a new understanding of politics in its totality can emerge. Focusing on language as a strategic element of political struggle is not only about the search for the truth, it is also about power — both in terms of grasping how it works and using it as part of ongoing struggles that merge the language of critique with the language of possibility, and theory with action. While a critical language does not translate automatically into collective action, it is the precondition for a politics that is more than a short-lived protest, demonstration, or cathartic display of outrage. A truly critical language provides a segue to not look away and remain silent, but to take the risk of imagining a movement for the elimination of neoliberal capitalism rather than simply a call to reform it.
As Wen Stephenson observes, the writings of Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism are more relevant than ever in such dark times. Stephenson writes:
… [Arendt] warn[s] against the tendency of her contemporaries to look numbly away, to minimize the horrors, to move on, she insists upon squarely confronting the new facts, if only to try to comprehend them. The kind of comprehension she has in mind, though, would come not by taking refuge in old “commonplaces.” It requires … “examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.”120
Without a faith in intelligence, critical education, and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that casino capitalism, fascism, and right-wing populism pose to the world. All forms of fascism aim at destroying standards of truth, empathy, informed reason, and the institutions that make them possible. The current fight against a nascent fascism in the United States is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also, as Arendt points out, a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.”121 Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine alternative worlds and a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.122
Progressives need to formulate a new language, alternative cultural spheres, and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity, and the promise of a real socialist democracy. We need a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism and democracy, or to normalize greed and excessive competition, or to accept individual interests tied exclusively to monetary accumulation as the highest form of motivation. We need a language and critical comprehension of how power works to enable the conditions in which education is linked to social change and the capacity to promote human agency through the registers of cooperation, compassion, care, love, equality, and a respect for difference. Ariel Dorfman’s ode to the struggle over language and its relationship to the power of the imagination, collective resistance, and civic courage offers a fitting reminder of what needs to be done. He writes:
We must trust that the intelligence that has allowed humanity to stave off death, make medical and engineering breakthroughs, reach the stars, build wondrous temples, and write complex tales will save us again. We must nurse the conviction that we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer and we will find a way to convince.123
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.
Chapter 3
The Politics of Neoliberal Fascism
Every age has its own fascism.
— Primo Levi
Introduction
The nightmares