THE TERROR UNFORSEEN
by
Henry A. Giroux
__________________________________________
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. He was recently named one of
the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate
on education. His most recent book is The Terror of the
Unforeseen (LARB, 2019), for which he penned the companion
essay below.
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YOUR
COMMENTSThe
Terror of the Unforeseen echoes a warning about the past
that now haunts the present: the terror that comes with the
plague of a resurgent fascist politics. Evidence of this plague
can be seen at a time in which there is a dangerous attack being
waged in many countries against journalists who have played
a crucial role in both educating people against the emerging
increase in right-wing populism and exhibiting the civic courage
necessary to understand how power works in our time. Civic courage
does not come easy and many journalists have been killed in
their pursuit of uncovering injustices and holding power accountable.
In 2018 alone, 53 journalists have been killed, with one of
the most notorious cases being Jamal Khashoggi.
Never
has the practice of thinking critically, reading critically,
and developing a sense of engaged and courageous agency been
more important. We live at a time in which free speech, critical
inquiry, and democracy itself are under siege. In this historical
moment, it is impossible to say enough about the important role
that writers, artists, educators, journalists, and other cultural
workers can and have played in fighting against injustices and
the rise of authoritarianism across the globe. In what follows,
I want highlight some of the themes from my The
Terror of the Unforeseen that deal with
an emerging fascist politics and the growing elements of extreme
capitalism, which I call neoliberal fascism, which is attacking
the most fundamental elements of democracy. In doing so, I will
stress the central role that education now plays in politics,
not only as part of a language of critique but also as a discourse
of possibility that allows us to imagine a better world.
Talk
of a fascist politics emerging in the United States is often
criticized as either a naive exaggeration or a failure to acknowledge
the strength of liberal institutions. Yet, the case can be made
that rather than harbour an element of truth, such criticism
further normalizes the very fascism it critiques, allowing the
extraordinary and implausible to become ordinary. After decades
of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United Stats and abroad,
the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike
anything we have seen since the 1930s. The architects and managers
of extreme capitalism have used the crisis of economic inequality
and its “manifestly brutal and exploitative arrangements”
to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial
cleansing and white supremacy. In doing so, they have not only
tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of
millions of Americans in order to redirect their anger and despair
through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization, they
have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a
toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance, and a militarized
spirit of white nationalism . While there is no perfect fit
between Trump and the fascist societies of Mussolini, Hitler,
and Pinochet, “the basic tenets of extreme nationalism,
racism, misogyny, and a hatred for democracy and the rule of
law are too similar to ignore.
In
this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance
in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement
that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies
of casino capitalism with fascist ideals. Such ideals include:
the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization;
a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity;
the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a
politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over
reason, the weaponization of language; and a discourse of decline,
and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never
entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce
its central assumptions, are with us once again, ushering in
a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards
homicidal extremes.
The
urgency of addressing the rise of fascism both in the United
States and abroad might begin with the regime of untruth and
manufactured illiteracy that allows and helps normalize the
catastrophic conditions that make neoliberal fascism a potent
source of identity, fantasy, pleasure, and investment. One place
to start, and many journalists do this, would be a critical
analysis of the Trump administration’s efforts to abandon
and discredit traditional sources of evidence, facts, and analysis
in its attempt to normalize fake news, a culture of lying, and
the world of alternative facts. At stake here is making visible
a radically altered relationship between the public and truth
and the ensuing demise of civic culture and the public institutions
that make it possible. As the public’s grip on civic literacy
weakens, language is emptied of any substantive meaning and
the shared standards necessary for developing informed judgements
and sustained convictions are undermined. In a world where nothing
is true, all that is left to choose from are competing fictions.
One consequence is that everything begins to look like a lie.
Of course, there is more at stake here than the creation and
normalization of a culture of lying, there is also the threat
to democracy itself.
We
do not live in a post-truth world and never have. On the contrary,
we live in a pre-truth world where the truth has yet to arrive.
As one of the primary currencies of politics, lies have a long
history in the United States. For instance, state sponsored
lies played a crucial ideological role in pushing the US into
wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, legitimated the use
of Torture under the Bush administration, and covered up the
crimes of the financial elite in producing the economic crisis
of 2008. Moreover, we have been living the lie of neoliberalism
and systemic racism for over forty years and because of the
refusal to face up to such lies, the United States has slipped
into the abyss of an updated American version of fascism of
which Trump is a both symptom and endpoint.
Under
Trump, lying has become a rhetorical gimmick in which everything
that matters politically is denied, reason loses its power for
informed judgments, and language serves to infantilize and depoliticize
as it offers no room for individuals to translate private troubles
into broader systemic considerations. Truth is now mobile making
it easier to deny even a modicum of rational judgment while
reinventing a fascist politics that echoes the past and allows
the “intrusion of criminality into politics.” Post-truth
is a pedagogical tool of deflection that as the novelist Toni
Morrison points out functions “like a coma on the population”
imposing misery and traumas so deep and cruel that they kill
the moral imagination and “purge democracy of all of its
ideals.
As
the politics of lying moves from the margins to the center of
power, Trump’s fake news industry wields enormous political
and pedagogical power while at the same time accelerating and
normalizing and endless stream of fake news and misrepresentations,
wrapped in a kind of dystopian legitimacy. Trump’s attack
on the truth wages a war against the ethical imagination, privatizes
experiences, and resonates with a larger culture of speed, instant
gratification, and consumerism. Coupled with a society that
worships celebrity culture, the spectacularization of power
and the masculinization of the public sphere make it easier
for Trump and his associates to rehabilitate fascist ideas,
principles, and a fascist political culture.
At
a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power,
culture, politics, finance, and everyday life now merge in ways
that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all
over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in
the hands of the ultra-rich, the educative force of culture
has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. This can be seen
in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and
consumption that produce, shape, and sustain ideas, desires,
and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of
democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism.
Under such circumstances, misfortune is seen as a weakness and
the Hobbesian rule of a ‘war of all against all’
replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion
for others.
The
entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin
of history, specifically the proto fascist era of 1930s and
1940s. They are with us once again producing dystopian fantasies
out of the decaying communities and landscapes produced by forty
years of a savage capitalism. White male rage has emerged out
of the destruction of social bonds and the gutting of the welfare
state and intensified with the neoliberal unleashing of destructive
energies of “deracination, displacement, and disintegration.”
Angry white male loners looking for a cause, a place to put
their agency into play, are fodder for cult leaders. They have
found one in Trump for whom the relationship between the language
of fascism and its toxic worldview of “blood and soil”
and the “fear of inferior blood” has moved to the
center of power in the United States.
Fascism
first begins with language and then gains momentum as an organizing
force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate
violence against entire groups -- Black people, immigrants,
Jews, Muslims and others considered "disposable."
In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains,”
describes immigrants as "losers" and "criminals,"
and has become a national mouthpiece for violent nationalists
and a myriad of extremists who trade in hate and violence. One
recent example can be found in the Trump-like language used
in the manifesto posted by the El Paso shooter. Using a rhetoric
of revulsion as a performance strategy and media show to whip
up his base, Trump employs endless rhetorical tropes of bigotry
and demonization that set the tone for real violence.
There
are historical precedents for this collapse of language into
a form of coded militarism and racism -- the anti-Semitism couched
in critiques of globalization and the call for racial and social
cleansing aligned with the discourse of borders and walls. Echoes
of history resonate in this assault on minority groups, the
use of racist taunts, and twisted references that code a belief
in racial purity, and legitimate attacks on and possible criminal
action against those who do not mirror the twisted notions of
white supremacy.
In
an age when civic literacy and efforts to hold the powerful
accountable for their actions are dismissed as “fake news,”
ignorance is no longer innocent. That is, a manufactured ignorance
becomes the breeding ground not just for hate, but for a culture
that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of
the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance a
non-negotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful
to weaponize everyday discourse. While Trump has been portrayed
as a serial liar, it would be a mistake to view this pathology
as a matter of character. Lying for Trump is a tool of power
used to discredit any attempt to hold him accountable for his
actions while destroying those public spheres and institutional
foundations necessary for the possibility of a democratic politics.
At the heart of Trump’s world of lies, fake news, and
alternative facts is a political regime that trades in corruption,
the accumulation of capital, and promotes lawlessness, all of
which provides the foundation for a neoliberalism on steroids
that now merges with an unabashed celebration of white nationalism.
The post-truth era constitutes both a crisis of politics and
a crisis of history, memory, agency, and education. It is worth
reiterating that this new era of barbarism cannot be understood
or addressed without a reminder that fascism has once again
crystalized into new forms and has become a model for the present
and future. Trump’s language and policies are best understood
as a contemporary remnant of the fascist imagination.
Fantasies
of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism,
and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination
that has turned lethal. This is a dystopian imagination marked
by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive
meaning, cleansed of compassion, and used to legitimate the
notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain.
What we are witnessing is a shrinking of the political and moral
horizons and a full-scale attack on justice, thoughtful reasoning,
and collective resistance. Such anti-democratic tendencies create
new and urgent challenges for journalists, educators, and other
to speak out about important social issues with a deep sense
of commitment and courage.
Under
the current reign of neoliberal fascism, politics extends beyond
the attack on any vestige of truth, informed judgments, and
constructive means of communication. There is more at work here
than the need to decode and analyze Trump’s language as
a tool for misrepresenting reality and shielding corrupt practices
and policies that benefit major corporations, the military,
and the ultra-rich. There is also a worldview, a mode of hegemony,
which comes out of a fascist playbook, and translates into dangerous
policies and potentially violent acts. This is evident in Trump’s
attacks on dissent and his support for the use of violence against
journalists and politicians who are critical of his views. One
such example can be found in his critique of members of the
Democratic Party whom he labeled as the radical left. Not only
did he hurl a McCarthyite slur at them, he also implied in one
instance that one response to their opposition might be violence.
In addition, he has attacked with racist rhetoric black athletes
and Congresswomen of color, as well as black newscasters, suggesting
they have low intelligence and in the case of Ilhan Omar stating
she was both an Al Qaida supporter and had married her brother.
There is more at work here than infantilizing schoolyard threats.
We have seen too many instances where Trump’s followers
have beaten critics, attacked journalists, and shouted down
any form of critique aimed at Trump’s policies —
to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals
and journalist critical of the administration.
Trump
aligns himself with a number of ruthless dictators and appears
to glow in their presence all the while heaping insults on America’s
allies such as Canada. Trump’s fans include a number of
white nationalists and white supremacists, who have been involved
in recent killings, the most recent being in El Paso, Texas.
Patrick Crusius, the El Paso gunman, published online a white
nationalist screed that echoes numerous racist and xenophobic
views aimed at Hispanics. Crusius argues that white people are
at risk of genocide and that people of color will replace them.
Trump may not be directly responsible for this horrendous crime
but he has used his Twitter account to refer to an “invasion”
of migrants at the southern border, condemned Mexican immigrants
as “rapists,” and Syrian refugees as “snakes.”
Moreover, his rhetoric in support of walls and borders is not
about security but a symbol of unadulterated nativism. Of course,
Trump does not just fan the flames of violence with his rhetoric,
he also provides legitimation to a number of white nationalists
and right-wing extremists groups who are emboldened by his words
and actions and too often ready to translate their hatred into
the desecration of synagogues, schools, and other public sites
as well as engage in violence against peaceful protesters, and
in some cases commit heinous acts of violence.
Trump
is the endpoint of a malady that has been growing for decades.
What is different about Trump is that he basks in his role and
is unapologetic about enacting policies that further enable
the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him)
and by mega-corporations. He embodies with unchecked bravado
the sorts of sadistic impulses that could condemn generations
of children to a future of misery and in some cases state terrorism.
He loves people who believe that politics is undermined by anyone
who has a conscience, and he promotes and thrives in a culture
of violence and cruelty. Trump is not refiguring the character
of democracy, he is destroying it, and in doing so, resurrecting
all the elements of a fascist politics that many people thought
would never re-emerge again after the horrors and death inflicted
on millions by previous fascist dictators. Trump represents
an emergence of the ghost of the past and we should be terrified
of what is happening both in the United States and in other
countries such as Brazil, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary. Trump’s
ultra-nationalism, racism, policies aimed at social cleansing,
and his hatred of democracy echoes a period in history when
the unimaginable became possible, when genocide was the endpoint
of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and nationalist
rhetoric ended in the horrors of the camp. The world is at war
once again, it is a war against democracy, and Trump is at the
forefront of it.
Trump
represents a distinctive and dangerous form of American-bred
authoritarianism, but at the same time he is the outcome of
a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed, and engaged for
the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has
Trump “normalized the unspeakable” and in some cases
the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have
never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and, yes,
courage itself.
In
part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life,
the public good, citizenship, and justice that has real substance.
One challenge is to confront the horrors of casino capitalism
and its transformation into a form of fascist politics under
Trump. As Fred Jameson has suggested such a revolution cannot
take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the “impossible
present.” Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves
to a language of critique and a narrow focus on individual issues.
What
is needed is also a language of militant possibility and a comprehensive
politics that draws from history, rethinks the meaning of politics,
and imagines a future that does not imitate the present. We
need what Gregory Leffel calls a language of “imagined
futures,” one that “can snap us out of present-day
socio-political malaise so that we can envision alternatives,
build the institutions we need to get there and inspire heroic
commitment.” Such a language has to create political formations
capable of understanding neoliberal fascism as a totality, a
single integrated system whose shared roots extend from class
and racial injustices under financial capitalism to ecological
problems and the increasing expansion of the carceral state
and the military-industrial-academic complex. William Faulkner
once remarked that we live with the ghosts of the past or to
be more precise: “The past is never dead. It’s not
even past.” Such a task is all the more urgent given that
Trump is living proof that we are once again living with the
ghosts of a dark past. However, it is also true that the ghosts
of history can be critically engaged and transformed into a
radical democratic politics for the future. The Nazi regime
was more than a frozen moment in history. It is a warning from
the past and a window into the growing threat Trumpism poses
to democracy. The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most
importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit
of civic justice and collective action in the fight for a substantive
and inclusive democracy.
The
dark shadow of authoritarianism may be spreading, but it can
be stopped. In addition, that prospect raises serious questions
about what educators, youth, intellectuals, journalists, and
other cultural workers are going to do today to make sure that
they do not succumb to the authoritarian forces spreading across
the globe, waiting for the resistance to stop and for the lights
to go out. Critical reading is especially important at a time
when ignorance has more political currency than historical memory,
moral witnessing, and thinking itself. The need to think critically
becomes particularly important in a society that appears to
become increasingly amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical,
political and moral forgetting are not only wilfully practiced
but also celebrated. The United States has degenerated into
a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical
thought as both a liability and a threat. Reading critical books
is no longer an option but a necessity in the fight against
manufactured ignorance. Such reading is the foundation for thinking
dangerously and acting courageously. Reading critically is more
than a mode of resistance. That is, it is the foundation for
a formative and educational culture of questioning and politics
that takes seriously how the civic imagination can become central
to the practice of freedom. Even more reason to take seriously
John Dewey’s observation that “Democracy must be
born anew in every generation and education is its midwife.”
Books matter, especially if as intellectuals, artists, writers,
journalists and educators we want to imagine alternative futures
and horizons of possibility inspired by the ideals and promises
of a radical democracy.
