Читать книгу The Terror of the Unforeseen - Henry Giroux - Страница 10

Chapter 1

The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump

The murdered are [now] cheated out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can offer them: remembrance.

― Theodor Adorno

In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. This is especially troubling when the “toxic passions”1 of the fascist past seem to re-emerge in an unceasing stream of racism, demonizing insults, lies, and militarized rhetoric, serving as emotional appeals that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and the media. Power, culture, politics, finance, and everyday life have merged in unprecedented ways and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. In the current historical moment, the new mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption produce, shape, and sustain desires and modes of agency with extraordinary power and influence. Take, for instance, robot-generated lies and misrepresentations, the endless charges of fake news aimed at traditional media sources critical of the White House, the growing debasement of evidence and facts in a post-truth world, the power of the digital media in spreading “viral” hoaxes, toxic partisan politics, and misinformation, and the utilization of all of these via Facebook “to erode the informational underpinnings of democracy.”2

The informal educational apparatuses — particularly the corporate controlled media — increasingly reinforce what might be called “The Trump Show,” wittingly and unwittingly, in spite of their growing criticism of Trump’s lies and reckless policies. Obsessed with Trump’s daily barrage of tweets, insults, and spectacularized diversions, the mainstream media have become complicit in giving Trump unprecedented power to shape the daily working of the established media.3 Mike Allen writes in Axios that “Trump and the media, for all of his attacks and despite the cultural chasm between them, just can’t quit each other … Cable news is setting records, books are hot again, newspapers are racking up the digital subscriptions and an op-ed is a hot gossip topic — all because of the national obsession with … Trump fever.”4 Tom Engelhardt extends this argument and calls Trump “a perpetual motion machine of breaking headlines.” He writes:

As a start, it’s indisputable that no one has ever gotten the day-after-day media coverage he has. Not another president, general, politician, movie star, not even O.J. after the car chase. He’s Da Man! Since that escalator ride, he’s been in the news (and in all our faces)in a way once unimaginable. Cable news talking heads and talk-show hosts can’t stop gabbling about him. It’s the sort of 24/7 attention that normally accompanies terrorist attacks in the United States or Europe, presidential assassinations, or major hurricanes. But with him, we’re talking about more or less every hour of every day for almost two-and-a-half years without a break. It’s been no different on newspaper front pages. No one’s ever stormed the headlines more regularly … There, he has, if anything, an even more obsessional audience of tens of millions for his daily tweets, which instantly become “The News” and then, of course, the fodder for those yakking cableheads and talk-show hosts.5

Such media coverage is particularly dire in light of the growing pedagogical importance of the new media and the power they now have on the political imagination of countless Americans. And it is particularly true of the conservative media empire of Rupert Murdoch, along with Clear Channel, which dominates the radio airwaves with its ownership of over 1250 stations, and Sinclair Media Group, which owns the largest number of TV stations in America, and which all trade in outrage, hate, scorn, humiliation, and bullying.6 Right-wing hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have audiences in the millions, shaping much of what America learns, and, it would appear, the entirety of what Trump watches and hears. Moreover, for media giants such as Fox News, the line between its conservative opinion makers and its news operation has collapsed. Referring to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s interview on the channel, James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The New York Times, remarked that Fox’s “news operation is no less part of the White House messaging structure than Judge Jeanine.”7 These outlets have played a dangerous role channeling populist anger, and David Bell is right that the educational force of this media machine poses a threat to the United States.8 The first casualty of this re-education of America has been truth, the second moral responsibility, and the third the last vestiges of justice. The result is a massive increase in human misery and suffering worldwide.

More than a dystopian dismissal of the truth, this is a normalization of deceit, a challenge to thinking itself, and a repudiation of the educational conditions that make an informed citizenry possible. Truth is confused with opinions, and lies have become normalized at the highest level of government. Trump’s mendacity, bolstered by Fox News and other media, is used not only to discredit scientific reason and traditional sources of truth, it also blurs the relationship between fact and fiction, making it difficult for the public to make informed judgments. Presidential tweets now flood the public realm, which make outlandish allegations about voter fraud, slanderous assertions regarding immigrants and crime, and even such whoppers as claiming “unsung success” for the disastrous government response to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, in which 3,000 people died, and where rebuilding was barely addressed.9 Trump’s penchant for cruelty is particularly evident in his refusal to provide Puerto Rico with much needed aid. As of 2019, he has “threatened to kill any bill that includes substantial new assistance to Puerto Rico that Democrats are demanding.”10 Under the Trump administration, moral responsibility morphs into legal irresponsibility as undocumented workers come under attack, thousands of Vietnamese who have lived in the U.S. are threatened with deportation, and policies are implemented that overturn financial regulations designed to prevent another economic recession. In Trump’s worldview, justice is measured by one’s loyalty to the administration rather than to the rule of law. How else to explain Trump’s firing of James Comey, his criticisms of the intelligence agencies, his critique of his own Attorney General for recusing himself from the Russian investigation, and his administration’s endless attacks on the Mueller investigation? Not only has Trump violated the rule that Presidents refrain from involvement in individual criminal investigations, he has threatened to shut down a Justice Department investigation by top law enforcement agencies that involve him, his family, and a number of his closest advisors.11

Trump insists that the Department of Justice be used as a political tool to punish his enemies and reward his friends. For example, he put pressure on the former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to wage a criminal investigation against The New York Times for running an anonymous op-ed that called into question Trump’s ability to govern, if not his sanity. In the op-ed, an alleged senior official in the administration stated that Trump was amoral and erratic in his decision-making, using “misguided principles,” and was simply unfit to be president.12 Trump condemned the article “as an act of treason.” Trump’s unapologetic embrace of lawlessness and his blind spot for constitutional principles border on the pathological. He has argued that protesters should be thrown in jail, immigrants seeking asylum should be denied due process, and people who burn the flag should lose their citizenship. Emulating the rhetoric of gang bosses, he has stated that individuals who cooperate with federal prosecutors in criminal investigations are disloyal and that such cooperation or “flipping … almost ought to be outlawed.”13

Trump shamelessly relativizes the meaning and implementation of “law and order” depending on whether the perpetrator of the alleged crime is a friend or an enemy. “Illegals” or anyone in his target audience of “criminals” he insists should be roughed up by the police, but friends such as Rob Porter, a former White House senior aide charged with abuse by both of his ex-wives, should have criminal charges dismissed. He criticized Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department for bringing charges against two popular Republican Congressmen, Chris Collins (NY) and Duncan Hunter (CA), suggesting the charges against them be dropped because they are loyal to him and that their “two easy wins [in the November 2018 elections are] now in doubt because there is not enough time.”14 Collins was charged with a series of crimes including insider trading and multiple counts of securities fraud while “Hunter has been charged with wire fraud, false campaign reporting, and using hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions for his own personal ‘slush fund’ to cover vacations and personal medical expenses.”15

As Chris Hayes observes, law and order for Trump has little to do with justice or the rule of law:

If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption. And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law.16

The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a GDP per capita of $62,152, and yet its current policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty will make matters worse.17 As Professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has reported, Trump’s tax approach “stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest one percent and the poorest 50 percent of Americans.”18 Trump’s health care reforms, particularly the elimination of the individual mandate, which requires nearly all Americans to get coverage or be strapped with a penalty, threatens to leave close to nine million people without health insurance in 2019.19

Americans increasingly find themselves in a society in which those in commanding positions of power and influence, rather than refusing to cooperate with evil, exhibit a tacit approval of the emerging authoritarian pathologies and acute social problems undermining democratic institutions and rules of law. Many politicians at all levels of power remain silent and therefore complicit in the face of such assaults on American democracy. Ideological extremism and a stark indifference to the lies and ruthless policies of the Trump administration have turned the Republican Party into a party of collaborators, not unlike the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s.20 Both groups were more than ready to buy into the script of ultra-

nationalism, cultivate toxic masculinity, demonize racial and ethnic others, support unchecked militarism and fantasies of empire, and sanction state violence at home and abroad. The noble history of a World War II resistance that bore witness to human suffering and mounted the courage to face “the unspeakable” while being “committed… to the unimaginable” casts a dark shadow today over a Republican Party and other politicians who look away in the face of an emerging fascism at all levels of government.21

Former conservative commentator Charles Sykes is right in arguing that members of the current Republican Party are “collaborators and enablers” and, as such, are Vichy Republicans who are willingly engaged in a Faustian bargain with an incipient authoritarianism. Corrupted by power and all too willing to overlook corruption, stupidity and the growing savagery of the Trump administration, Republicans have been disposed to surrender to Trump’s authoritarian ideology, economic fundamentalism, support for religious orthodoxy, and increasingly cruel and mean-spirited policies, which has “meant accepting the unacceptable [reasoning] it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare.”22 Alarmingly, they have ignored the criticisms of Trump by high-profile members of their own party. For instance, former Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, accused Trump of “debasing the nation,” “treating his office like a reality show,” and warned “Trump may be setting the US on the path to World War III.”

This is not to propose that the Republicans who support Trump, or the media commentators who defend his callous policies and assaults on the truth, or the intellectuals who turn the other way and either apologize for Trump or remain silent, are simply updated Nazis.23 Nevertheless, it is meant to suggest a real and present danger. People of power have turned their backs on the cautionary histories of the fascist and Nazi regimes and, in doing so, willingly embrace a number of authoritarian messages and tropes: the cult of the leader, the discourse of the savior, white nationalism, a narrative of decline, unchecked casino capitalism, systemic racism, silence in the face of a growing police state, the encouragement of state endorsed violence, the hollowing out of democracy by corporate power, a grotesque celebration of greed, a massive growth in the inequality of wealth, power, and resources, a brutal politics of disposability, an expanding culture of cruelty, and a disdain for public virtues, all wrapped up in an authoritarian populism. These tropes are both the cause and effect of a growing culture of social and historical amnesia that normalizes fascism and mobilizes language into an instrument of violence. As the renowned British historian Richard J. Evans observes:

Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism . . . so that “fanatical,” “brutal,” “ruthless,” “uncompromising,” “hard,” all became words of praise instead of disapproval … In the hands of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, the German language became strident, aggressive, and militaristic. Commonplace matters were described in terms more suited to the battlefield. The language itself began to be mobilized for war.24

Even disposability is no longer the discourse of marginalized extremists. It now exists at the highest levels of government. Examples of such reckless rhetoric include: Trump’s immigration policy teeming with threats of a wall to keep out Mexican “criminals” and “drug dealers”; his Muslim ban and efforts to curb newcomers from “shithole” countries; his zero-tolerance policy towards undocumented workers, which separated children from their parents and then incarcerated the children — some as young as five years old; and his revoking of the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of people from Honduras and San Salvador, among other countries, which furthered such racist and exclusionary agendas.

Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This is a dystopian imagination marked by incendiary words, cleansed of any critical ideas, and devoid of any substantive meaning. Even domestic populations, such as youth subject to mass shootings in their schools, fare poorly in Trump’s worldview. In the wake of the school shooting massacre in Parkland, Florida, Trump and Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, have called for the arming of teachers as opposed to restricting gun access or providing support services for students in the face of such carnage.

Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” Trump’s ignorance lights up the Twitter landscape almost every day. He denies climate change along with dangers that it poses to humanity, shuts down the government because he cannot get the funds for his wall — a grotesque symbol of nativism — and heaps disdain on the heads of his intelligence agencies because they provide proof of the lies and misinformation that shapes his love affair with tyrants. This kind of power-drunk ignorance is comparable to a bomb with a fuse that is about to explode in a crowded shopping center. This dangerous type of ignorance fuses with a reckless use of state power that holds both human life and the planet hostage.

There is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy the shrinking political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political. That is, the very conditions necessary for enabling people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, journalism becomes more corporatized, and reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment. Voting remains one of the few sites where people can actively participate in politics, but even here, turnout has remained at historic lows. Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, collective resistance, and the radical imagination. The unprecedented attacks on the mainstream media and the practice of independent journalism bear witness to these changes. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are right in arguing that Trump’s threat to use “libel laws,” his labeling of critical 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, fear, racism, war mongering, nativism, and immigrant bashing, it once again displayed Trump’s contempt for democracy. Claiming “all Americans deserve accountability and respect,” he spent ample airtime equating undocumented immigrants with the criminal gang MS-13, regardless of the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens do. As Juan Cole points out, “Americans murdered 17,250 other Americans in 2016. Almost none of the perpetrators was an undocumented worker, contrary to the impression Trump gave.”43 According to Cole, “Where the race of the perpetrator was known in 2016, about 30 percent were white and 36 percent were black; less than two percent were known to be of another ethnicity. However, Trump foregrounded murders by immigrants. Homicide tracks pretty closely with poverty, not with race.”44 For Trump, as with most demagogues, fear is the most valued currency of politics. Moreover, he delivered it in spades, suggesting that the visa lottery system and “chain migration” — in which individuals can migrate through the sponsorship of their family — pose a threat to America and “present risks we can just no longer afford.” He suggested even DREAMERS were part of a culture of criminality and in a not too subtle expression of derision stated “Americans are dreamers too.” White nationalists such as Richard Spencer and David Duke cheered Trump’s remark. This was one of many gestures well-suited to his white nationalist base.

Trump proudly declared that he was not going to close Guantánamo and once again argued “terrorists should be treated like terrorists.” The ruthless policy of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, rather than being seen as war crimes, fan the paranoia, nihilist passions, and apocalyptic populism that feed his base. Pointing to menacing enemies all around the world, Trump argued for expanding the nuclear arsenal and the military budget. He also called on “the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people” — in other words, to rid the federal workforce of those who disagree with him, allowing him to fill civil service jobs with friends, families, cronies, and sycophants.

His insistence on “loyalty” instills fear in those he appoints to government positions if they dare to hold power accountable. This is what happens when democracies turn into fascist states. As Jacob Levy points out:

[Trump’s call] on Congress to allow Cabinet officials … to fire civil servants on grounds of political disagreement, ending the century-old rule of a professional and apolitical civil service that stays on as political appointees come and go. This is of a piece with the months-long rhetorical assault on the so-called “deep state” by Trump and the Trumpist media. Maybe there will be no such legislation. But Trump saying it matters. House Speaker Paul Ryan echoing the call for a “purge” at the FBI matters. Fox News’s constant public delegitimation of the civil service matters. It matters in particular for the Russia investigation, of course. Trump means to push out anyone who isn’t on “his team” in a way that the FBI and the Department of Justice are really not supposed to be, and that process is underway in front of our eyes. But it also matters more broadly for the character of the American state and bureaucracy. By discouraging professionals and encouraging politicization, Trump is already changing the civil service by his speech.45

None of this is entirely unexpected. As Michael Tomasky puts it, “Honestly, who couldn’t have imagined any of this? To anyone who had the right read on Trump’s personality — the vanity, the insecurity, the contempt for knowledge, the addiction to chaos — nothing that’s happened has been surprising in the least.”46 Nevertheless, Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined: he is not only the enemy of democracy, he is symptomatic of the powerful political, economic, and cultural forces shaping this new American fascism.

Roger Cohen, writing for The New York Times, argues that Trump has so degraded and soiled public discourse that people have become numb and exhausted. How else to explain the sycophantic posturing of the mainstream press and much of the American public in the face of Trump’s racist State of the Union Address? As Cohen observes:

Many commentators swooned. It was enough that Trump did not go on walkabout. For NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, “It was optimistic; it was bright; it was conciliatory.” Frank Luntz, a respected Republican pollster, thought that only one word qualified: “Wow.” He tweeted that the speech was a “brilliant mix of numbers and stories, humility and aggressiveness, traditional conservatism and political populism.” Jake Tapper of CNN discerned “beautiful prose.” Even the Washington Post saw “A Call for Bipartisanship” (its initial Page One headline) lurking somewhere. Three in four American viewers approved of the speech, according to a CBS News poll.47

There are some critics who claim that Trump is simply a weak president whose ineptness is being countered by “a robust democratic culture and set of institutions” and not much more than a passing moment in history.48 Others, such as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser, view him as an authoritarian expression of right-wing populism and an outgrowth of neoliberal politics and policies,49 while historians such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton analyze him in terms that echo some elements of a fascist past. Some conservatives such as David Frum view him as a mix between a modern day, self-obsessed, emotionally needy narcissist and demagogue whose assault on democracy needs to be taken seriously and asserts that whether or not he is a fascist is not as important as what he plans to do with his power. For Frum, there is a real danger that people will retreat into their private worlds, become cynical, and enable our collective slide into a form of tyranny that would then become difficult to defeat.50

Corey Robin argues that we overstep a theoretical boundary when comparing Trump directly to Hitler. According to Robin, in comparing Trump to Hitler or the policies of the Third Reich, we not only exaggerate the threat that Trump poses to the values and institutions of democracy but overestimate the growing threat of authoritarianism in the United States. For Robin, Trump has failed to institute many of his policies, and thus is just a weak politician with little actual power. He contends that George W. Bush’s policy decisions were far worse than anything we have seen in Trump’s emerging administration and concludes that while Trump talks like an authoritarian, he never really gets what he wants. Jacob Levy sums up Robin’s argument, “A year later, we’re still in NAFTA and NATO, there haven’t been mass deportations, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been thrown in jail, the separation of powers is intact, and so on. Just ignore his words.”51

But words matter. They matter because they not only provide the ideological and affective scaffolding for policies but also because they function as pedagogical tools to define social relations, mobilize desires, create modes of identification, and shape one’s relationship to others and the larger world. Thus, Trump’s racist language has enabled the rise and increasing normalization of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and a surge of white nationalism. His rhetorical attacks on the critical press, journalists, and others who criticize him send a chill through American society and undermine the foundations of dissent. His verbal attacks on undocumented immigrants and Muslims enable and encourage the proliferation of hate crimes. His impetuous insults aimed at allies work to undo the liberal international order. His praise for the uber-rich and corporate elite breathes new life into a criminogenic casino capitalism.52 As Hannah Arendt has argued, language is a form of action, and that action is often pedagogical. Trump’s discourse makes clear that education is at the heart of politics; it carries the weight of weapons forged in the realm of the symbolic and pedagogical, and changes how people see things, how they invest in themselves and others.

As Jeffrey C. Isaac notes, whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance; more important is the threat he poses to the DACA children and their families, to poor, undocumented immigrants, and a range of others.53 The oppressive and regressive policies already put into place by the Trump administration — the expansion of the military-industrial complex, the elimination of Obamacare’s individual mandate, the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and a range of deregulations that will impact negatively on the environment for years to come — will have long-term effects on United States and the world. As Richard J. Evans has noted, “Violence indeed was at the heart of the Nazi enterprise,” and “Every democracy that perishes dies in a different way, because every democracy is situated in specific historical circumstances.”54 Our circumstances include the threat of a nuclear war, the disappearance of health care for the most vulnerable, the attack on free speech and the media, the rise of the punishing state and the increasing criminalization of social problems, the destruction of the environment, and other forms of violence.

American society has entered a dangerous stage in its history. After 40 years of neoliberalism and many more of systemic racism, many Americans lack a critical language to understand the growing rootlessness, gutted wages, lost pensions, collapsing identities, feelings of disposability, the loss of meaningful work, the demise of shared responsibilities, an epidemic of loneliness, and a culture of violence, cruelty, and greed. Since 9/11, Americans have been bombarded by a culture of fear that, in dampening their willingness to be critical agents, ultimately depoliticizes them. Shared fears rather than shared responsibilities undermine the basic foundations of the social ties necessary in a substantive democracy. Everyone is now a suspect or a consumer but hardly a critically engaged citizen. The ravages of debt, poverty, and the daily struggle to survive — problems made worse by Trump’s tax and health policies — depoliticize some, too. Trump’s aim to eviscerate public institutions, from education to the media, have made it all the more difficult for many people to become informed citizens and recognize how the “crystalized elements” of totalitarianism have shaped an American-style fascism,55 which is not a relic of the past or an idea, but our emerging reality.

Trump is not in possession of storm troopers and concentration camps, or concocting plans for genocidal acts, at least not at the moment. But as Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and others theorists of authoritarianism have taught us, totalitarian regimes come in many forms and their elements can come together in different configurations. Under Trump, democracy has become the enemy of power, politics, and finance. More importantly, since Trumpism will not simply fade away in the end, the comparison between the current historical moment and fascism is much needed. Adam Gopnik agrees:

Needless to say, the degradation of public discourse, the acceleration of grotesque lying, the legitimization of hatred and name-calling, are hard to imagine vanishing like the winter snows that Trump thinks climate change is supposed to prevent. The belief that somehow all these things will somehow just go away in a few years’ time does seem not merely unduly optimistic but crazily so. In any case, the trouble isn’t just what the Trumpists may yet do; it is what they are doing now. American history has already been altered by their actions — institutions emptied out, historical continuities destroyed, traditions of decency savaged — in ways that will not be easy to rehabilitate.56

There is nothing new about the possibility of authoritarianism in a particularly distinctive guise coming to America. Nor is there a shortage of works illuminating the horrors of fascism. Fiction writers from George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, and Aldous Huxley to Margaret Atwood, Philip Dick, and Philip Roth have sounded the alarm in often brilliant and insightful terms. Politicians such as Henry Wallace wrote about American fascism, as did a range of theorists such as Umberto Eco, Hannah Arendt, and Thomas O. Paxton, who tried to understand its emergence, attractions, and effects. What they all had in common is an awareness of the changing nature of tyranny and how it could happen under a diverse set of historical, economic, and social circumstances. They also seem to share Philip Roth’s insistence that we all have an obligation to recognize “the terror of the unforeseen” that hides in the shadows of censorship, makes power invisible, and gains in strength in the absence of historical memory.57 A warning indeed.

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.58 In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship, and justice that has real substance. This cannot happen without a revolution in consciousness — one that makes education central to politics. One element central to developing a critical consciousness is to confront the horrors of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism under Trump. At the very least, this would involve developing a formative and sustainable anti-capitalist movement.

Moreover, as Fred Jameson has suggested, such a revolution cannot take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the “impossible present.”59 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 possibility and a comprehensive politics for the future that does not imitate the present.

And by “the present,” I do not just mean Trump. Neoliberalism has sanctioned a hyper-individualism, the destruction of the welfare state, the privatization of everything, and massive inequalities in wealth and power. It has become difficult, given the neoliberal order’s power to control not only markets and economics but all of social life, to imagine any other kind of economic system or society. Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” has been normalized. Neoliberalism has colonized memory, undercutting the capacity to remember or envision a world radically different from the present. Naomi Klein is right in arguing that what is missing from too many social movements in the United States is an inability to get beyond saying no.60

William Faulkner once remarked, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Trump is living proof that we are living with the ghosts of a dark past, and not only can it return, “it’s not even past.” 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 courage in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy. The stakes are too high to remain complacent, cynical, or simply outraged. A crisis of memory, history, agency, and justice has mushroomed and opened up the abyss of a fascist nightmare. Now is the time to talk back, embrace the radical imagination in private and public, and work until radical democracy becomes a reality. There is no other choice.