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INTRODUCTION

AMERICA’S DESCENT INTO MADNESS

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war.

—John Le Carré

America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem. The mainstream media spin stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible—stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging their pedagogical influence under the glossy veneer of entertainment. Violence now offers the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, or offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in—or compassion and responsibility for—others. Anti-public intellectuals who dominate the screen and aural cultures urge us to spend more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, while producing a depoliticized culture of consumerism. Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that seem to mesmerize the undereducated and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged. Militarized police forces armed with the latest weapons tested in Afghanistan and Iraq play out their fantasies on the home front by forming robo-SWAT teams that willfully assault protesters and raid neighborhood poker games.¹ Congressional lobbyists hired by big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be re-created at home in order to market military-grade surveillance tools and weapons to a full range of clients, from gated communities to privately owned for-profit prisons.

The stories we tell about ourselves no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. The landscape of American politics no longer features towering figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose stories interwove moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough. A culture that once opened our imagination now disables it, overwhelming the populace with nonstop marketing that reduces our sense of agency to the imperatives of ownership, shopping, credit, and debt. But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our parents, religious institutions, schools, and community leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a nation are manufactured by corporate media that broadcast the lifestyles of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related virtues of an unbridled free market and a permanent war economy. The power to reimagine, doubt, and think critically no longer seem possible in a society in which self-interest has become the “only motive force in human life and competition” and “the most efficient and socially beneficial way for that force to express itself.”²

These stories reciting the neoliberal gospel are all the more powerful because they seem to defy the public’s desire for rigorous accountability, critical interrogation, and openness as they generate employment and revenue for right-wing think tanks and policy makers who rush to satisfy the content dictates of corporate media advertisers. Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories enshrine both greed and indifference, encouraging massive disparities in wealth, health, nutrition, education, housing, and debt. In addition, they sanctify the workings of the market, forging a new political theology that inscribes a sense of our collective destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market forces. Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rand’s dystopian society, if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatcher’s nonfiction invocation of the mantra of the wealthy: there is nothing beyond individual gain and the values of the corporate order.

The stories that now dominate the American landscape, and of which I write in the following pages, embody what stands for common sense among market and religious fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties: shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs that help the disadvantaged, elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive rights; attempts to suppress voter-ID laws and rig electoral college votes; full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself; and an ongoing attack on unions, social provisions, and the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform. These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of everyone they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions at home forced into underemployment, foreclosure, poverty, or prison.

All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle of fulfillment.”³ That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled by the rich but carefully packaged in a consumerist and militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful, and inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young people. Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they impose on Americans already marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity, a world turned upside-down, in which ignorance becomes a virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege rather than a resource for the public good.

Every once in a while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has become in the narratives spun by politicians and corporate elite whose arrogance and quests for authority exceed their interest to conceal the narrow-mindedness, power-hungry blunders, cruelty, and hardship embedded in the policies they advocate. The echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in politicians such as Senator Tom A. Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who believes that social assistance to those in need of a place to live, work, or more equitable salaries should be cut in the name of austerity measures. We hear it in the words of Representative Mike Reynolds, another Republican from Oklahoma, who insists that government bears no responsibility to improve access to college education through a state program “that provides post-secondary education scholarships to qualified low-income students.”⁴ We see evidence of the culture of cruelty in the policies of liberal and right-wing politicians who refuse to extend unemployment benefits, have cut $8 billion from the food stamp program (SNAP), which primarily benefits children, and have opted out of Medicaid expansion. These decisions will be deeply consequential. A Harvard University and CUNY study . . . found that the lack of Medicaid expansion in these opt-out states will result in about 7,000 to 17,000 deaths a year.⁵ Similar indications of the culture of cruelty are on display in the call on the part of right-wing billionaire Charles Koch who reaps billions of dollars yearly from his investments while simultaneously calling for the abolition of the minimum wage.⁶ We find evidence of a savage culture of cruelty in numerous policies that make clear that those who occupy the most marginalized sectors of American society—whether low-income families, communities of color, or young, unemployed, and failed consumers—are considered entirely disposable in terms of ethical considerations and the “grammar of human suffering.”⁷

In the name of austerity, budget cuts are enacted and fall primarily on those individuals and groups who are already disenfranchised, and will thus seriously worsen the lives of those people now suffering the most. For instance, Governor Rick Perry of Texas has enacted legislation that refuses state participation in the Obama administration’s Medicaid expansion; as a result, health care coverage will be denied to over 1.5 million low-income residents of Texas.⁸ This is not merely partisan politics. It is an expression of a new form of savagery and barbarism aimed at those now considered disposable in a market-centered society that has embraced a neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest mentality. Not surprisingly, the right-wing appeal to job-killing and provision-slashing now functions as an updated form of medieval torture, gutting a myriad of programs that will quickly add up to profound suffering for the many and benefits for only a small class of predatory bankers, hedge-fund managers, and financiers who leech off society.

The general response from progressives and liberals does not take seriously the ways in which the extreme right wing articulates its increasingly pervasive and destructive view of American society. For instance, the proposals of the new extremists in Congress are often treated, especially by liberals, as cruel hoaxes that are out of touch with reality or as foolhardy attempts to roll back the Obama agenda. On the left, such views tend to be criticized as a domestic version of the tactics employed by the Taliban—keeping people uneducated and ignorant, oppressing women, living in a circle of certainty, and turning all channels of information into a mass propaganda machine of fundamentalist Americanism.⁹ All of these critiques take aim at a deeply authoritarian agenda. But such commentaries do not go far enough. Tea Party politics are about more than bad policy and policies that favor the rich over the poor, or for that matter about modes of governance and ideology that represent a blend of civic and moral turpitude. In this instance, the hidden political order represents the poison of neoliberalism and its ongoing attempt to destroy those very institutions whose purpose is to enrich public memory, decrease human suffering, protect the environment, distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public good. Neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest stage of predatory capitalism, is part of a broader project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital. It is a political, economic, and political project that constitutes an ideology, mode of governance, policy, and form of public pedagogy. As an ideology, it construes profit making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational assertion that the market both solves all problems and serves as a model for structuring all social relations.

As a mode of governance, neoliberalism imposes identities, subjects, and ways of life detached from civic accountability and government regulations. Driven by a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, neoliberal practices buy into the rights and privileges of business and private ownership and are removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a political project, neoliberalism is wedded to the privatization of all public resources, the selling off of state holdings and functions, the deregulation of finance and labor, the elimination of welfare and unions, the deregulation of trade in goods and capital investment, and the marketization, commercialization, and commodification of all aspects of everyday life.

Neoliberalism creates a political landscape devoid of public accountability, access, and agency, which is to say devoid of democracy itself. As a predatory competition for hoarding profit, neoliberalism produces massive inequality in wealth and income, shifts political power to financial elites, destroys all vestiges of the social contract, and increasingly views “unproductive” sectors—most often those marginalized by race, class, disability, resident status, and age—as suspicious, potentially criminal, and ultimately disposable. It thus criminalizes social problems and manufactures profit by commercializing surveillance, policing, and prisons.

The views and concerns of elite private privilege and competitive ownership now out-compete and replace notions of the public good, civic community, and solidarity. Under neoliberalism the social is pathologized while violence and war are normalized, packaged and marketed as cartoons, video games, television, cinema, and other highly profitable entertainment products. Neoliberalism indebts the public to feed the profits of the rich by spending obscene amounts on militarization, surveillance, and war. In the end, it becomes a virulent antagonist to the very institutions meant to eliminate human suffering, protect the environment, uphold the right of unions, and provide resources for those in need. As a rival to egalitarianism and the public good, neoliberalism has no real solutions to the host of economic, political, and social problems generated as its by-products.

At the heart of neoliberal narratives is a disimagination machine that spews out stories inculcating a disdain for community, public values, public life, and democracy itself. Celebrated instead are pathological varieties of individualism, distorted notions of freedom, and a willingness to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from chronic impoverishment and joblessness to homelessness. Within this rationality, markets are not merely freed from progressive government regulation—they are removed from any considerations of social costs. And even where government regulation does exist, it functions primarily to bail out the rich and shore up collapsing financial institutions, working for what Noam Chomsky has termed America’s only political party, “the business party.”¹⁰ The stories that attempt to cover up America’s embrace of historical and social amnesia at the same time justify authoritarianism with a soft edge and weaken democracy through a thousand cuts to the body politic. How else to explain the Obama administration’s willingness to assassinate U.S. citizens suspected of associating with outlaw groups and to secretly monitor the email messages, phone calls, Internet activity, and text messages of its citizens? Or to use the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or trial, maintain an unjust military tribunal system, and use drones as part of a global assassination campaign to kill not just people suspected of crimes but also any innocent person who happens to be nearby when these weapons detonate near them? As Jonathan Turley points out: “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.”¹¹

Ultimately, these acts of abuse and aggression offer evidence of a new reality emerging in the United States that enshrines a politics of disposability, in which growing numbers of people are considered to be a dispensable drain on the economy and thus an affront to the sensibilities of the rich and powerful. Rather than work for a more dignified life, most Americans now work simply to get by in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which getting ahead and accumulating property and power, especially for the ruling elite, is the only game in town. In the past, public values have been challenged and certain groups have been targeted as superfluous or redundant. But what is new about the politics of disposability that has become a central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in which such antidemocratic practices have become normalized in the existing neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless power disparities is now matched by a culture of cruelty defined by the slow violence of debt, impoverishment, wartime military recruitment, criminalization, incarceration, and silent misery. Private injuries not only are separated from public considerations, but historical narratives of structural impoverishment and exclusion are ignored, scorned, or simply censored, as they are in states like Arizona that have forbidden books by Mumia Abu-Jamal, Howard Zinn, and Winona LaDuke from public schools.¹² Similarly, all noncommercial public spheres where such stories might be shared are viewed with contempt, a perfect supplement to the chilling indifference to the plight of communities who are disadvantaged, disenfranchised, and preyed upon. There is a particularly savage violence in the stories that now shape matters of governance, policy, education, and everyday life, one that has made America barely recognizable as a civilian democracy.

Any viable struggle against the authoritarian forces that dominate the United States must make visible the indignity and injustice of these narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions that produce them. For this reason, in The Violence of Organized Forgetting I present a critical analysis of how various elitist forces in American society are distracting, miseducating, and deterring the public from acting in its own interests. Dominant political and cultural responses to current events—such as the ongoing economic crisis; income inequality, health care reform, Hurricane Sandy, the war on terror, the Boston Marathon bombing, Edward Snowden’s exposure of the gross misdeeds of the National Security Agency, and the crisis of public schooling—represent flashpoints that reveal a growing disregard for people’s democratic rights, public accountability, and civic values. As political power becomes increasingly disconnected from civic, ethical, and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

From the inflated rhetoric of the political right to market-driven media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence of these criminogenic and death-dealing forces is undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social services and suppressing opportunities for democratic resistance. Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives, the neoliberal machinery of civic death effectively weakens public supports and prevents the emergence of much-needed new ways of thinking and speaking about politics in the twenty-first century. But even more than neutralizing all forms of viable opposition to the growing control and wealth of predatory financial elites, responses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of disadvantaged groups as disposable populations. How else to explain the right-wing charge that the poor, disabled, sick, and elderly are moochers and should fend for themselves? This is not simply an example of a kind of hardening of the culture, it is also part of a machinery of social and civic death that crushes any viable notion of the common good, public life, and the shared bonds and commitments that are necessary for community and democracy.

Before this dangerously authoritarian mind-set has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It is not enough for people of conscience only to expose the falseness of the stories we are told. Educators, artists, intellectuals, workers, young people, and other concerned citizens also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our communities and ourselves. This demands a break from established political parties, the creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Why are not millions protesting in the streets over these barbaric policies that deprive them of life, liberty, justice, equality, and dignity? What are the pedagogical technologies and practices at work that create the conditions for people to act against their own sense of dignity, agency, and collective possibilities? Progressives and others need to make education central to any viable sense of politics so as to make matters of memory, imagination, and consciousness central elements of what it means to be critical and engaged citizens.

The American public needs more than a show of outrage or endless demonstrations. It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a language of critique, possibility, and broad-based political change. Such a project is indispensable for developing an organized politics that speaks to a future that can secure a dignified life for all: living wages, safe housing, educational opportunities, a sustainable environment, and public support for the arts and other forms of cultural enrichment, particularly for young people. At stake here is a politics and vision that informs ongoing educational and political struggles to awaken the inhabitants of neoliberal societies to their current reality and what it means to be educated not only to think outside of a ruthless market-driven rationality but also to struggle for those values, hopes, modes of solidarity, power relations, and institutions that infuse democracy with a spirit of egalitarianism and economic and social justice.

The Violence of Organized Forgetting not only demonstrates the ways in which America is under siege by forms of political extremism but also explains how too many progressives are stuck in a discourse of foreclosure and disaster and instead need to develop what Stuart Hall called a “sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.”¹³ This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities around the world is the need for the confluence of new and indigenous forms of resistance, a new vision of politics, and a renewed hope in collective struggles and the development of broad-based organizations, all of which are central in the struggle for a substantive democracy. This is a challenge for young people and all those invested in the promise of a democracy to transform the meaning of politics through a commitment to economic justice and democratic social change.

The issues of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control the global flow of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizenry have become largely invisible. And yet these are precisely the issues that must be confronted in order to address how matters of representation, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America becomes increasingly pliant to authoritarianism and the relentless ambient influences of manufactured fear and commercial entertainment that support it.

There is a need for social movements that invoke stories as a form of public memory, stories that have the potential to unsettle common sense, challenge the commonplace, and move communities to invest in their own sense of civic and collective agency. Such stories make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative and provide a different sense of how the world is narrated. These are moments of pedagogical and political grace.¹⁴ As Kristen Case argues: “There is difficulty, discomfort, even fear in such moments, which involve confrontations with what we thought we knew, like why people have mortgages and what ‘things’ are. These moments do not reflect a linear progress from ignorance to knowledge; instead they describe a step away from a complacent knowing into a new world in which, at least at first, everything is cloudy, nothing is quite clear.”¹⁵ She continues: “We cannot be a democracy if this power [to imagine otherwise] is allowed to become a luxury commodity.”¹⁶ If democracy is to once again inspire a populist politics, it is crucial to develop a number of social movements in which the stories told are never completed but are always open to reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of our collective imagination and struggles against injustice, wherever they might be. Only then will the stories that now cripple our imaginations, politics, and democracy be challenged and possibly overcome.