The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of the past.134
Neoliberal structural transformation has both undermined and refigured “the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institution of democracy understood as rule by the people.”135 Since the early seventies, the neoliberal project has mutated into a revolt against human rights and democracy, and created a powerful narrative that refigures freedom and authority so as to legitimate and produce massive inequities in wealth and power.136 Its practices of offshoring, restructuring everything according to the dictates of profit margins, slashing progressive taxation, eliminating corporate regulations, unchecked privatization, and the ongoing commercializing of all social interactions “inflicts alienating misery” on a polity vulnerable to fascist ideals, rhetoric, and politically extremist movements.137
Furthermore, the merging of neoliberalism and fascism has accelerated as civic culture is eroded, notions of shared citizenship and responsibility disappear, and reason and informed judgment are replaced by the forces of civic illiteracy. State sanctioned attacks on the truth, facts, and scientific reason in Trump’s America are camouflaged as one might expect of the first reality TV president — by a corporate-
controlled culture of vulgarity that merges celebrity culture with a non-stop spectacle of violence. As language and politics are emptied of any substantive meaning, an authoritarian populism is emboldened and fills the airways and the streets with sonic blasts of racism, anti-
Semitism, and violence. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rightly observes that Trump makes it difficult to hold onto any sense of what is normal given his relentless attempts to upend the rule of law, justice, ethics, and democracy itself. She writes:
The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter … He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.138
There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebrity culture. As Pankaj Mishra argues we live in a world in which there is a “rout of such basic human emotions as empathy, compassion, and pity.”139 This is a world in which “the puzzle of our age is how this essential foundation of civic life went missing from our public conversation.”140 Part of that puzzle undermining civic culture and its institutions can be found in an unprecedented corporate takeover over of the US government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism, and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.141
Neoliberalism strips democracy of any substance by promoting an irrational belief in the ability of the market to solve all social problems and shape all aspects of society. This shift from a market economy to a market-driven society has been accompanied by a savage attack on equality, the social contract, and social provisions as wages have been gutted, pensions destroyed, health care put out of reach for millions, job security undermined, and access to crucial public goods such as public and higher education considerably lessened for the lower and middle classes.
In the current historical moment, neoliberalism represents more than a form of hyper capitalism, it also denotes the death of democracy if not politics itself. Defining all aspects of society in economic terms, finance and corporate capital defines all behavior through the lens of neoliberal reason. One consequence is that the most fundamental elements of democracy — including the vocabularies that define it, the spaces of deliberation that make it imaginable, and the formative cultures that create the informed citizens that make it possible — are under siege. Anis Shivani’s articulation of the threat neoliberalism poses to democracy is worth quoting at length:
Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-
provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.142
What is particularly distinctive about the conjuncture of neoliberalism and fascism is how the full-fledged liberation of capital now merges with an out-and-out attack on the racially oppressed and vulnerable populations considered disposable. Not only do the oppressive political, economic, and financial structures of casino capitalism bear down on people’s lives, but there is also a frontal attack on the shared understandings and beliefs that hold a people together. One crucial and distinctive place where neoliberalism and fascism converge is in the undermining of social bonds and moral boundaries. Displacement, disintegration, atomization, social isolation, and deracination have a long history in the United States, which has been aggressively exploited and intensified by Trump, taking on a distinctive right-wing 21st century register. More is revealed here than the heavy neoliberal toll of social abandonment. There is also, under the incessant pedagogical propaganda of right-wing and corporate-controlled media, a culture that has become cruel and cultivates an appetite for maliciousness that undermines the capacity for empathy, making people willing participants in their violent exclusion.
While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability. Such cultures reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society. How else does one explain a long line of state-endorsed atrocities — the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of black people for profit and labor, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over those populations? The legacies of those horrific roots of US history are coded into Trumpist slogans, as I mentioned previously about “making America great again,” and egregiously defended through appeals to American exceptionalism.
More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in US politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or childcare, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.”143 As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”144
Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that permits him to delight in taunting black athletes, embrace the ideology of white nationalism, and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Wilhelm Reichian psycho-politics with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency, and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive within a culture of rancid racism: “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets, and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.”145 All of this suggests that fascism is more than faint memory unrelated to the present moment in American history.
Irish journalist, Fintan O’Toole, warns that fascism unravels the ethical imagination through a process in which individuals eventually “learn to think the unthinkable,” — followed, he writes, “by a crucial next step, usually the trickiest