The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
and fawning attraction for Trump who exhibits little interests in their massive human rights violations. Trump’s high regard for white supremacy and petty authoritarianism became clear on the domestic front when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, a monstrous racist who waged a war against undocumented immigrants, Latino residents, and individuals who did not speak English. He also housed detainees in an outdoor prison, which he called his personal “concentration camp.” As Marjorie Cohn observes, Arpaio engaged in a series of sadistic practices in his outdoor jail in Phoenix that included forcing prisoners “to wear striped uniforms and pink underwear,” “work on chain gangs,” and be subjected to blistering Arizona heat so severe that their “shoes would melt.”77 In this instance, Trump not only legitimates the practices of an undeniable racist, he is also offering expressed support for both a culture of violence and state legitimated oppression. Furthermore, Trump’s fascist proclivities also become evident in both his cozying up with dictators such as Putin and Kim Jong-un as well as his use of presidential power to pardon what amounts to a parade of cons, grifters, crooks, and ideological extremists.
At the same time, it would be irresponsible to suggest that the current expression of authoritarianism in US politics began with Trump or that the context for his rise to power represents a distinctive moment in American history. The United States was born out of acts of genocide, nativism, and the ongoing violence of white supremacy.78 Moreover, the United States has a long history of demagogues extending from Huey Long and Joe McCarthy to George Wallace and Newt Gingrich. Authoritarianism runs deep in American history, and Trump is simply the endpoint of these antidemocratic practices.79 Empire has long had roots in diverse forms of domestic state violence while state terrorism amounted to the official memory of authoritarianism, “reaching into the smallest crevices of everyday life.”80
The rise of casino capitalism, a savage culture of cruelty, and a winner-take-all ethos have made the United States a mean-spirited and iniquitous nation that has turned its back on the poor, underserved, and those considered racially and ethnically disposable. Powerful digital and traditional pedagogical apparatuses of the 21st century have turned people into consumers and citizenship into a neoliberal obsession with self-interest and an empty notion of freedom. Moreover, they have also created a society in which civic literacy has taken a direct hit while the formative culture necessary for creating informed and engaged citizens has withered into a grotesque economic and pedagogical apparatus at odds with democratic values and social relations. Shock, speed, spectacles, idiocy, and a culture of sensationalism undercut the discourse of civic literacy, thoughtfulness, and reason.
The ecosystem of visual and print representations has taken on an unprecedented influence given the merging of power and culture as a dominant political and pedagogical force. This cultural apparatus has become so powerful, in fact, that it is difficult to dispute the central role it played in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Analyzing the forces behind the election of Trump, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide a cogent commentary on the political and pedagogical power of an old and updated media landscape. They write:
Undoubtedly, Trump’s celebrity status played a role. But equally important was the changed media landscape. Trump had the sympathy or support of right-wing media personalities such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and Michael Savage as well as the increasingly influential Breitbart News. He also found new ways to use old media as a substitute for party endorsements and traditional campaign spending. By one estimate, the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC — four outlets that no one could accuse of pro-Trump leanings — mentioned Trump twice as often as Hillary Clinton. According to another study, Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season. Trump didn’t need traditional Republican power brokers. The gatekeepers of the invisible primary weren’t merely invisible; by 2016, they were gone entirely.81
What is essential to remember here, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that fascism starts with words and Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political theater echo earlier periods of propaganda, censorship, and repression. Commenting on the Trump administration’s barring the Centers for Disease Control from using certain words, Ben-Ghiat writes:
The strongman knows that it starts with words ... That’s why those who study authoritarian regimes or have had the misfortune to live under one may find something deeply familiar about the Trump administration’s decision to bar officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using certain words (“vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based”). The administration’s refusal to give any rationale for the order, and the pressure it places on CDC employees, have a political meaning that transcends its specific content and context … The decision as a whole links to a larger history of how language is used as a tool of state repression. Authoritarians have always used language policies to bring state power and their cults of personality to bear on everyday life. Such policies affect not merely what we can say and write at work and in public but also [attempt] to change the way we think about ourselves and about others. The weaker our sentiments of solidarity and humanity become — or the stronger our impulse to compromise them under pressure — the easier it is for authoritarians to find partners to carry out their repressive policies.82
Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty were normalized through the proliferation of the strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity, and demonization. As leading scholars on modern Germany, such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer, have made clear, dictators such as Hitler did more than corrupt the language of a civilized society — they also banned words. Soon afterwards, they banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights. The endpoint was an all-embracing discourse of disposability, the emergence of concentration camps, and genocide fueled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing. Echoes of the formative stages of fascism are with us once again and provide just one of the historical signposts of an American-style neo-fascism that appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.
Under such circumstances, it is crucial for anyone concerned about the dangers of fascism to chart how the texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge of the government. That is, it is crucial to interrogate as the first line of resistance how this level of systemic linguistic derangement and corruption shapes everyday life. It is necessary to begin with language because it is the starting point for tyrants to promote their ideologies, hatred, and systemic politics of disposability and erasure. Trump is not unlike many of the dictators he admires. What they all share as strongmen is the use of language in the service of violence and repression as well as a fear of language as a channel for identity, critique, solidarity, and collective struggle. None of them believes that the truth is essential to a responsible mode of governance, and all of them support the notion that lying on the side of power is fundamental to the process of governing, however undemocratic such a political dynamic may be.
Lying has a long legacy in American politics and is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Victor Klemperer in his classic book, The Language of the Third Reich, reminds us that Hitler had a “deep fear of the thinking man and [a] hatred of the intellect” and that his “Mein Kampf preaches not only that the masses are stupid, but also that they need to be kept that way and intimidated into not thinking.”83 Trump displays a deep contempt for critical thinking and has boasted about how he loves the uneducated. Not only have mainstream sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times published endless examples of Trump’s lies, they have noted that, even in the aftermath of such exposure, he continues to be completely indifferent to being exposed as a serial liar.84
In fact, there is something delusional if not pathological about Trump’s indifference to his propensity to lie endlessly even when he is constantly outed publicly for doing so. For instance, in a 30-minute interview with The New York Times on December 28, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Trump made “false, misleading, or dubious claims … at a rate of one every 75 seconds.”85 Daniel Dale, a writer for The Toronto Star who documents Trump’s lies, claims that in the first week of August 2018, he made “132 false claims … 19 per day, almost five times his