HENRY A. GIROUX: TRUMP VLOVES TO HATE @Arts & Opinion

from the ashes of fascism
TRUMP LOVES TO HATE

by
HENRY A. GIROUX

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth and Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear on his website at www.henryagiroux.com. His interview with Bill Moyers is must viewing.

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^{YOUR
COMMENTS}Trump is a hate-monger, and spreads his message without apology in almost every public encounter in which he finds himself. His embrace of a politics is founded on arrogance, cynicism, unchecked wealth, and a deeply ingrained racism. He stepped over the line the moment he announced his candidacy for the presidency and called Mexican immigrants violent rapists, gang members, and drug dealers. Or for that matter when he called, along with other right-wing extremists, to put refugees in to detention centres and create a database for them.

What is truly sad, alarming, and even cowardly is how few people along with the corporate media and his intellectual defenders recognize that Trump is symptomatic of the brutal seeds of totalitarianism now being cultivated in American society. Donald Trump represents more than the anti-democratic practices and antics of Joe McCarthy. On the contrary, he signifies how totalitarianism can mutate and take different forms in specific historical moments. Rather than being dismissed as a wild-card in American politics, as "careless and undisciplined," or not a true member of the Republican Party, as some conservatives claim, it is crucial to recognize that Trump's popularity represents a dangerous political space that augurs a dire threat to democracy. This is evident not only in his race baiting, his crude comments about women, or his call to round up and deport 11 million immigrants, but also in his increasing support for violence against protesters at his rallies.

There is a disturbing totalitarian message in his call to "make American great again" by any means necessary, none of which is entirely new to American society. What is new is the degree to which this endorsement of violence, racism and the call to violate civil liberties are expressed so visibly and without apology. How else to explain the muted criticisms, if not almost non-existent public and media response, to his comments that: "we're going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule . . . And so we're going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago . . .” This call to do "the unthinkable" is a fundamental principle of any notion of totalitarianism, regardless of the form it takes.

Trump gives legitimacy to a number of fascist policies: his appeal to hypernationalism, disdain of human rights; defining Muslims and immigrants as a perceived racial and religious threat; a rampant sexism; an obsession with national security; the aggressive mobilization of a culture of fear; the targeting of dissent and individual groups; an endorsement of human rights abuses such as torture; support for the ongoing militarization of public life; the invocation of an external enemy as a threat to ‘our way of life;’ the call for the creation of a detention system as part of a state of emergency; support for a blind patriotism; suspension of the rule of law; affirmation of a belligerent masculinity; and an uncompromising imperial policy.

Trump's recent call to bring back waterboarding and to support a torture regime far exceeds what might be called an act of stupidity or ignorance. Torture in this instance becomes a means of exacting revenge on those considered ‘Other,’ un-American, and inferior — principally Muslims, immigrants, and members of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

We have heard this discourse before in the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and later in the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s. This is a discourse that betrays dark and treacherous secrets not simply about Trump, but more importantly about the state of American culture and politics. Trump's brutal racism, cruelty and Nazi-style policy recommendations are more than shocking, they are emblematic of totalitarianism's hatred of liberalism, its call for racial purity, its mythic celebration of nationalism, its embrace of violence, its disdain for weakness and its anti-intellectualism. This is the discourse of total terror. These elements of fascism have become the new American normal. The conditions that produced the torture chambers, intolerable violence, extermination camps, squelching of dissent are still with us. Totalitarianism is not simply a relic of the past. It lives on in new forms and it is just as terrifying and dangerous today as it was in the past.