The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
news outlets as “fake news,” and his notion of the media as the “enemy of the American people” — another phrase linked to authoritarian regimes — are key warning signs of a fascist politics.25 Trump has legitimated the inexcusable, and defended the indefensible.
Of course, Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political, and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism — its social and political pathologies have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s, when, as Ronald Reagan made clear, government was the problem and the social contract was an enemy of freedom. Both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare, and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and its institutions. Government, framed as the enemy of freedom and purged theoretically of any responsibility for a range of basic social needs, was replaced by an ideology of individual responsibility, where compassion gave way to self-interest, manufacturing was replaced by the toxic power of financialization, and a rampaging inequality left the bottom half of the US population without jobs, dreams, or a future of meaningful work. Donald Trump is a symbol of the pillaging of the democratic state by a corporate, financial, and military oligarchy. As Chris Hedges rightly notes:
The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White Hose of the demagogue Trump. A creeping corporate coup d’état has destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.26
Trump added a new swagger and unapologetic posture to this concoction, embodying a form of populist authoritarianism that not only rejects egalitarian notions of citizenship but also embraces a fear of, if not disdain for, democracy that is at the heart of any fascist regime. How else to explain a sitting president announcing to a crowd during a speech in a Cincinnati suburb that Democratic Party congressional members who refused to clap for parts of his State of the Union Address were “un-American” and “treasonous”?27 This charge was even more disturbing given that in the speech he repeatedly invoked bipartisanship and the idea of national unity.28 Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices. Such threats are not a joking matter and cannot be dismissed as merely a slip of the tongue. Treason is punishable by death, and when the refusal to offer up sycophantic praise is declared treason, the plague of fascism is not far away. The call for political unity also takes a dark turn when coupled with his use of hateful rhetoric to connect inner cities with a culture of criminality, undocumented immigrants with savage crimes, and Muslims with terrorists. Trump’s rhetoric on criminality resonates with a fascist politics in which law and order has little to do with addressing real injustices and a great deal to do with defining as lawless those groups defined as other, excess, threatening, or disposable.29
In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mind set has been resurrected in a new key. As the journalist Matt Taibbi has pointed out, he has amalgamated the mania and violence of pro wrestling with the harsh, survival-of-the-fittest ethos of reality TV.30 He successfully combines the currency of fake reality with an entertainment culture that thrives on extreme violence and cruelty, an approach to politics that echoes the merging of the spectacle and ethical abandonment of past fascist regimes, all with the glossiness of TV. Naomi Klein rightly argues that Trump “approaches everything as a spectacle” and edits “reality to fit his narrative,”31 and as his obsession with ratings suggests, he does so with an obsessive eye on his marks.
Trump’s infantile production of Twitter storms transforms politics into spectacularized theater: verbal grenades that explode in an array of racial panics, fear mongering, and hateful speech. As the bully-in-chief, he militarizes speech while producing a culture meant to embrace his brand of authoritarianism. Consider for example, the “fire and fury” rhetoric and school yard taunts President Trump directed at North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — and Trump’s tune would change over time. An over the top gesture even for Trump who more often than not uses his pulpit to praise authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte. His speeches and policies pit white working and middle class males against people of color, men against women, and the economically insecure whites against economically insecure ethnic and immigrant groups — a politics of diversion that is meant to gloss over his massive assault on the planet and his policies, such as his tax bill. For example, Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels initially garnered far more headlines than his dismantling of environment protections that benefit the fossil fuel plunderers who are a politically strategic and part of the corporate empire.
Economic pillage has reached new and extreme levels. For instance, workers’ wages have remained largely stagnant for the last 20 years, yet the pay gap between the top CEOs and American workers is at startling levels. According to Fortune Magazine, “the average CEO of a large US company makes 271 times the wages of the average worker.”32 While the opioid crisis had claimed over 200,000 lives, The Washington Post reports that some members of Congress “allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.”33 Trump legitimates ignorance of the processes that, as Jim Sleeper puts it, transform:
citizen sovereignty into the mirage of consumer sovereignty by groping us, titillating us, goosing us, insulting us, scaring us, indebting us, monitoring us, stressing us; and, after we’re too ill to bear our sicknesses or their cures, presenting us with a rapacious marketer-in-chief who says he can liberate us because his own power proves that “free markets make free men.”34
According to Roger Cohen, “Trump has lowered expectations. He has inured people to the thread of violence and meanness lurking in almost every utterance; or worse, he has started to make them relish it.”35 Cohen does not go far enough. Like most authoritarians, Trump demands loyalty and team membership from all those under his power, and he hates those elements of a democracy, such as the courts and the critical media, that dare to challenge him. Echoes of the past come to life in his call for giant military parades,36 in White House press secretary Sarah Sanders calling people who disagree with his policies “un-American,”37 and in his Department of Justice threatening to arrest and charge mayors with a federal crime who do not implement his anti-immigration policies and racist assaults on immigrants.38 His minions and collaborators, like Devin Nunes, attack law enforcement agencies including the Justice Department, FBI, and individuals such as Special Counsel Mueller for attempting to enforce the law.39 What can be learned from past periods of tyranny is that the embrace of lawlessness is often followed by a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism.
Trump’s call for blind loyalty reflects more than vanity and insecurity. Trump lives, as Masha Gessen observes, “surrounded by enemies, shadowed by danger, forever perched on the precipice.”40 He has in not too subtle ways also convinced a wide range of radical extremists, from the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to the racist and fascist alt-right movement, that he shares their hatred of people of color, immigrants, and Jews. Imaginary horrors inhabit this dystopian world and frighteningly resemble shades of a terrifying past of genocide, concentration camps, and world war. As Jeffrey St. Clair puts it, “Trump projects the image of president as gravedigger,” offering up to fearful, angry, scared, and resentful whites “sacrificial killing[s] on their behalf. Mass arrests. Torture. Deportation of the sick and helpless. He vows to turn entire nations into glowing morgues. All for them. And they eat it up, savoring the bitterness.”41
State of Disunion
Nowhere is this dystopian vision more succinctly contained than in Trump’s first State of the Union Address and the response it garnered.42 Billed by the White House as a speech that would be “unifying” and marked by a tone of “bipartisanship,” it was in actuality the opposite. Steeped in divisiveness,