The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
just below the surface of American society are poised to wreak havoc on us again. America has reached a distinctive crossroads in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged to produce what Philip Roth once called “the terror of the unforeseen.” Since the 1970s, American society has lived with the curse of neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest and most extreme stage of predatory capitalism. As part of a broader comprehensive design, neoliberalism’s overriding goal is to consolidate power in the hands of the financial elite. As a mode of rationality, it functions pedagogically in multiple cultural sites to ensure that no alternatives to its mode of governance can be either imagined or constructed. Central to its philosophy is the assumption that the market drives not just the economy but all of social life. It construes profit-making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of agency. It redefines identities, desires, and values through a market logic that privileges self-interest and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human freedom.
As an economic policy, neoliberalism creates an all-encompassing market guided by the principles of privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the free flow of capital. Advancing these agendas, it weakens unions, radically downsizes the welfare state, and wages an assault on public services such as education, libraries, parks, energy, water, prisons, and public transportation. As the state is hollowed out, big corporations take on the functions of government, imposing severe austerity measures, redistributing wealth upward to the rich and powerful, and reinforcing a notion of society as one of winners and losers.124 Put simply, neoliberalism gives free rein to finance capital and seeks to liberate the market from any restraints imposed by the state. At present, governments exist primarily to maximize the profits, resources, and the power of the wealthy. As a political project, neoliberalism empties politics of any substance and denounces any viable notion of the social contract. This is evident as a market society replaces a market economy and the language of politics is replaced by market-based discourses and values. Moreover, neoliberalism produces widespread misery and suffering as it weakens any vestige of democracy that interferes with its vision of a self-regulating market. In a winner-take-all society, the burden of merely surviving prevents many people from sharing in the power to govern.
Theoretically, neoliberalism is often associated with the work of Friedrich August von Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, and most infamously with the politics of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, President Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England. Politically, it is supported by various right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and by billionaires such as the Koch Brothers. The legacy of neoliberalism cannot be separated from its attempt to impose a new narrative in which the logic of the market is more important than the ideals that define a substantive democracy. Moreover, any efforts to “create a more equal society are [considered] both counterproductive and morally corrosive.”125 In this narrative, capital is the subject of history, everything is for sale, the rich get what they deserve, and those who fail to accumulate wealth and power are dismissed as losers, making it easier to refigure massive inequality as virtuous and responsibility as an individual choice. Neoliberalism not only takes aim at the welfare state, social provisions, and public goods, it also cancels out the future. It has produced with a kind of fraudulent weight an all-consuming narrative that treats human misery as normal and its fictional portrayals of those it considers disposable as the apogee of common sense.
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, and rabid misogyny 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 postbellum United States and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany. Fascism — with its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful cult figure, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and the superiority of a select ethnic or national group — has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, free market orthodoxy, and ethical somnambulance, a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.
Neoliberalism as the New Fascism
The war against liberal democracy has become a global phenomenon. Authoritarian regimes have spread from Turkey, Poland, Hungary,
and India to the United States and a number of other countries.126 Right-wing populist movements are on the march spewing forth a poisonous mix of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The language of national decline, humiliation, and demonization fuels dangerous proposals and policies aimed at racial purification and social sorting while hyping a masculinization of agency and a militarism reminiscent of past dictatorships. Under current circumstances, the forces that have produced the histories of mass violence, torture, genocide, and fascism have not been left behind. Consequently, it has been more difficult to argue that the legacy of fascism has nothing to teach us regarding how “the question of fascism and power clearly belongs to the present.”127
Fascism has multiple histories, most connected either to failed democracies in Italy and Germany in the 1930s or to the overthrow of democratic governments by the military, as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. Moreover, the history between fascism and populism involves a complex mix of relations over time.128 What is distinctive about this millennial fascism is that its history of “a violent totalitarian order that led to radical forms of political violence and genocide” has been softened by attempts to recalibrate its postwar legacy to a liberal democratic register.129 For instance, in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland — and in a number of other emerging fascist states — the term “illiberal democracy” is used as code to allegedly replace a “supposedly outmoded form of liberal democracy.”130 In actuality, the term is used to justify a form of populist authoritarianism whose goal is to attack the very foundations of democracy. These fascist underpinnings are also expanding in the United States. In Trump’s bombastic playbook, the notion of “the people” has become a rhetorical tool to legitimate a right-wing mass movement in support of a return to the good old days of American Apartheid.131 Trump’s right-wing populism is born of and breeds “a culture convulsed of hatred and rancor.”132 It is a worldview organized for repulsion willing to intellectually rationalize the murder of a journalist by Saudi Arabia, the killing of children in Yemen, and the forcible separation of migrant families at the southern border.
Democracy is the scourge of neoliberalism
and its ultimate humiliation
As the ideas, values, and institutions crucial to a democracy have withered under a savage neoliberalism, which has been 50 years in the making, fascistic notions of racial superiority, social cleansing, apocalyptic populism, hyper-militarism, and ultra-nationalism have gained in intensity, moving from the repressed recesses of US history to the centers of state and corporate power.133 Decades of mass inequality, wage slavery, the collapse of the manufacturing sector, tax giveaways to the financial elite, and savage austerity policies that drove a frontal attack on the welfare state have further strengthened fascistic discourses and redirected populist anger against vulnerable populations and undocumented immigrants, Muslims, the racially oppressed, women, LBGTQ+ people, public servants, critical intellectuals, and workers. Not only has neoliberalism undermined the basic elements of democracy by escalating the mutually reinforcing dynamics of economic inequality and political inequality — accentuating the downhill spiral of social and economic mobility — it has also created conditions that make fascist principles more attractive.
Under these accelerated circumstances, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible movement that connects the worse excesses of capitalism with authoritarian “strong man” ideals — the veneration of war; a hatred of reason and truth; a celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, scapegoating the other, a discourse of deterioration, and brutal violence, ultimately erupting in state violence in heterogeneous forms. In the Trump administration, neoliberalism is on steroids