Читать книгу The Terror of the Unforeseen - Henry Giroux - Страница 11

Chapter 2

Beyond the Language of Hate

in Dark Times

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone,

they will be forced to deal with pain.

― James Baldwin

George Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language: “newspeak,” a language twisted in order to deceive, seduce, and undermine, becomes fundamental to the operations of a Ministry of Truth whose aim is to root out and abolish language that functions in the service of reason and critical thought. Reason and compassion give way to a rhetoric of rancid bigotry, which works to inform policy and inflict humiliation, misery, and suffering on diverse groups who are viewed as degenerate and repugnant.

Trump’s racism surfaced with great fanfare in his assertion, when launching his presidential campaign, that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people ...”61 Trump’s shameless appeal to white racism was also evident when he repeatedly claimed that the inner cities are composed mostly of African-Americans and that black culture is synonymous with the culture of crime.62 In 2017, Trump allegedly said that people who came to the US from Haiti “all have AIDS.” Another example of such a language was on full display when Donald Trump made headlines at the beginning of 2018 saying that the United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador, and various African nations.63

Trump’s attack on immigrants has drawn sharp rebukes from a number of critics who state that his language is racist, dehumanizes people, and reproduces a form of symbolic violence. In spite of these criticisms, Trump is unapologetic about such comments, wearing them as a badge of honor. For instance, he recalled his 2015 comments about Mexicans being “rapists” in a speech he gave to the National Federation of Independent Business in June 2018 and doubled down on the comments with a statement reeking with derision: “Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized? ‘Oh, it’s so terrible what he said.’ Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.”64

In addition, Trump’s racist ideology and bow to white supremacist beliefs have been on full display in many of his policies, including legislation designed to ban Muslims entering the country and his assertion that many of them hate the US. His racist messaging was also visible with his call for a US judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit to recuse himself because of his Mexican heritage. In some of his more notorious racist comments, he has referred to immigrants as “animals”65 and has attacked “well-known African-Americans as having ‘low IQs’ or being of low intelligence.”66 Some of the most prominent African-Americans whose intelligence was mocked by Trump include NBA great LeBron James, CNN Anchor Don Lemon, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). This is a view long supported by white nationalists and may explain why, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump refused to denounce the endorsement of David Duke, an American white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and former head Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan.

Trump has a long history of demeaning African-Americans and in one notorious incident stated with no evidence that President Obama was a terrible student and that he should never have been accepted by both Columbia University and Harvard Law School.67 Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s overtly racist remarks echo the white supremacy of fascist dictators in the 1930s. Behind Trump’s politics of incivility, his use of vulgarity, and his disparagement of the poor and non-whites lies the terrifying discourse of ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability.68

In this case, more underlies the language of white nationalism and racial resentment. There is also a discourse that annihilates social codes and restrained political behavior and undermines the rule of law. This is a police state vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only as faceless and voiceless, but as excess, redundant, and subject to expulsion. It also informs policies marked by malignant cruelty, legitimates forms of state violence, and mirrors a shift in popular opinion. The United States has a long history of racist language leading to cruel and harmful practices and, in some cases, violence aimed at groups targeted by such language. It was not too long ago that politicians, pundits, and sociologists “labeled black and Latino youth as ‘super-predators’ to justify prison expansion, vastly increased sentencing, and overly aggressive law enforcement that has devastated communities of color.”69 The Trump administration with its legitimation of racist and demeaning rhetoric has emboldened the rise of white supremacists, the alt-right, and neo-Nazis along with a growing popular support and tolerance for such groups — matched by an uptick in violence against blacks, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, transgendered people, and others who are the object of state-approved bigotry and hatred.

While there is no denying that Trump’s legitimation of white nationalists and neo-Nazis constitutes a growing threat to democracy, the real danger lies deeper in the growing power of state sanctioned violence of the police, the criminal justice system, schools modeled after prisons, gun violence, and a carceral system that imprisons mostly poor people of color. This is the fast/hard violence that is expanding under the Trump administration, one that has a long legacy in the United States and is not unique to the emergence of the Trump presidency.

As authoritarianism gains in strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible. Words that speak to the truth, reveal injustices, and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to hold dominant power accountable. The Ministry of Truth functions in Orwell’s 1984 as the Ministry of Lies. History is being rewritten both to eliminate dangerous memories and to align the past with narratives that reinforce anti-democratic ideologies and social relations. Terror becomes the essence of politics bolstered by the denigration and erasure of any viable notion of morality and personal and social responsibility. Notions of virtue honor, respect, and compassion are policed, and those who advocate for them are punished.

Guided by Arendt’s insight into the dynamics of totalitarianism, education both within and outside of institutionalized schooling becomes a tool not only to instill authoritarian convictions but to destroy the ability of the populace to form any convictions that are on the side of justice, freedom, and thoughtfulness. I think it is fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction. Under the regime of Donald Trump, the Ministry of Truth has become the Ministry of Fake News, and the language of “Newspeak” has multiple platforms, morphing into a giant disimagination machinery of propaganda, ignorance, hypocrisy, and fear. Trump’s language and politics have a high threshold for disappearance and zones of terminal exclusion and, as a form of pedagogical regulation, works hard to eliminate expressions of discontent, resistance, and popular democratic struggles.

With the advent of Trump’s presidency, language is undergoing a shift in the United States: it now treats dissent, critical media, and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.”70 The administration also views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” In fact, the Trump administration has repeated this view of the media so often that “almost a third of Americans believe it” and “favor government restrictions on the press.”71 Language has become unmoored from critical reason and informed debate – the weight of scientific evidence and is now being reconfigured within new relations of power tied to pageantry, political theater, and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism. Language is shaped increasingly by the widespread banality of celebrity culture, the celebration of ignorance over intelligence, a culture of rancid consumerism, and a corporate controlled media that revels in commodification, spectacles of violence, the spirit of unchecked individual interest, and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos.

Under such circumstances, language is emptied of substantive meaning and functions increasingly to lull large swaths of the American public into acquiescence, if not a willingness to accommodate and support a rancid populism and galloping authoritarianism. One consequence is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear, injustices proliferate, and language functions as a tool of state repression. The Ministry of Fake News works incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable, claiming that reason, standards of evidence, consistency, and logic no longer serve the truth because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. “Thought crimes” are now labeled as “fake news.” This president views the notion of truth as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power, particularly his attacks on judges, courts, and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty. For Trump, intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing. One consequence is a myriad of practices in which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, willfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion, and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.72

David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama is right in stating: “And while every president is irritated by the limitations of democracy on them, they all grudgingly accept it. [Trump] has not. He has waged a war on the institutions of democracy from the beginning, and I think in a very corrosive way.”73 The New York Times writer Peter Baker adds to this charge by arguing that Trump — buoyed by an infatuation with absolute power and an admiration for authoritarians — uses language and the power of the presidency as a potent weapon in his attack on the First Amendment, the courts, and responsible governing.74 For example, Trump’s admiration for a number of dictators is well known. What is often underplayed is his inclination to mimic their language and policies. For instance, Trump’s call for “law and order,” his encouraging police officers to be more violent with “thugs,” and his adoration of all things militaristic echo the ideology and language of a number of dictators Trump adulates.75

Trump makes no apologies for ramping up the police state, imposing racist inspired travel injunctions, banning transgender people from serving in the military, and initiating tax reforms that further balloon the obscene wealth gap in the United States. All the while, he uses his Twitter feed to entertain his right-wing, white supremacist, and religious fundamentalist base at home with a steady stream of authoritarian comments while showering affection and further legitimation on a range of despots abroad, the most recent being the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines. According to Felipe Villamor of The Washington Post, “Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs.”76 Powerful authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping appear to elicit an especially strong and fawning attraction for Trump who exhibits little interests in their massive human rights violations. Trump’s high regard for white supremacy and petty authoritarianism became clear on the domestic front when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, a monstrous racist who waged a war against undocumented immigrants, Latino residents, and individuals who did not speak English. He also housed detainees in an outdoor prison, which he called his personal “concentration camp.” As Marjorie Cohn observes, Arpaio engaged in a series of sadistic practices in his outdoor jail in Phoenix that included forcing prisoners “to wear striped uniforms and pink underwear,” “work on chain gangs,” and be subjected to blistering Arizona heat so severe that their “shoes would melt.”77 In this instance, Trump not only legitimates the practices of an undeniable racist, he is also offering expressed support for both a culture of violence and state legitimated oppression. Furthermore, Trump’s fascist proclivities also become evident in both his cozying up with dictators such as Putin and Kim Jong-un as well as his use of presidential power to pardon what amounts to a parade of cons, grifters, crooks, and ideological extremists.

At the same time, it would be irresponsible to suggest that the current expression of authoritarianism in US politics began with Trump or that the context for his rise to power represents a distinctive moment in American history. The United States was born out of acts of genocide, nativism, and the ongoing violence of white supremacy.78 Moreover, the United States has a long history of demagogues extending from Huey Long and Joe McCarthy to George Wallace and Newt Gingrich. Authoritarianism runs deep in American history, and Trump is simply the endpoint of these antidemocratic practices.79 Empire has long had roots in diverse forms of domestic state violence while state terrorism amounted to the official memory of authoritarianism, “reaching into the smallest crevices of everyday life.”80

The rise of casino capitalism, a savage culture of cruelty, and a winner-take-all ethos have made the United States a mean-spirited and iniquitous nation that has turned its back on the poor, underserved, and those considered racially and ethnically disposable. Powerful digital and traditional pedagogical apparatuses of the 21st century have turned people into consumers and citizenship into a neoliberal obsession with self-interest and an empty notion of freedom. Moreover, they have also created a society in which civic literacy has taken a direct hit while the formative culture necessary for creating informed and engaged citizens has withered into a grotesque economic and pedagogical apparatus at odds with democratic values and social relations. Shock, speed, spectacles, idiocy, and a culture of sensationalism undercut the discourse of civic literacy, thoughtfulness, and reason.

The ecosystem of visual and print representations has taken on an unprecedented influence given the merging of power and culture as a dominant political and pedagogical force. This cultural apparatus has become so powerful, in fact, that it is difficult to dispute the central role it played in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Analyzing the forces behind the election of Trump, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide a cogent commentary on the political and pedagogical power of an old and updated media landscape. They write:

Undoubtedly, Trump’s celebrity status played a role. But equally important was the changed media landscape. Trump had the sympathy or support of right-wing media personalities such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and Michael Savage as well as the increasingly influential Breitbart News. He also found new ways to use old media as a substitute for party endorsements and traditional campaign spending. By one estimate, the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC — four outlets that no one could accuse of pro-Trump leanings — mentioned Trump twice as often as Hillary Clinton. According to another study, Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season. Trump didn’t need traditional Republican power brokers. The gatekeepers of the invisible primary weren’t merely invisible; by 2016, they were gone entirely.81

What is essential to remember here, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that fascism starts with words and Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political theater echo earlier periods of propaganda, censorship, and repression. Commenting on the Trump administration’s barring the Centers for Disease Control from using certain words, Ben-Ghiat writes:

The strongman knows that it starts with words ... That’s why those who study authoritarian regimes or have had the misfortune to live under one may find something deeply familiar about the Trump administration’s decision to bar officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using certain words (“vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based”). The administration’s refusal to give any rationale for the order, and the pressure it places on CDC employees, have a political meaning that transcends its specific content and context … The decision as a whole links to a larger history of how language is used as a tool of state repression. Authoritarians have always used language policies to bring state power and their cults of personality to bear on everyday life. Such policies affect not merely what we can say and write at work and in public but also [attempt] to change the way we think about ourselves and about others. The weaker our sentiments of solidarity and humanity become — or the stronger our impulse to compromise them under pressure — the easier it is for authoritarians to find partners to carry out their repressive policies.82

Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty were normalized through the proliferation of the strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity, and demonization. As leading scholars on modern Germany, such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer, have made clear, dictators such as Hitler did more than corrupt the language of a civilized society — they also banned words. Soon afterwards, they banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights. The endpoint was an all-embracing discourse of disposability, the emergence of concentration camps, and genocide fueled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing. Echoes of the formative stages of fascism are with us once again and provide just one of the historical signposts of an American-style neo-fascism that appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.

Under such circumstances, it is crucial for anyone concerned about the dangers of fascism to chart how the texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge of the government. That is, it is crucial to interrogate as the first line of resistance how this level of systemic linguistic derangement and corruption shapes everyday life. It is necessary to begin with language because it is the starting point for tyrants to promote their ideologies, hatred, and systemic politics of disposability and erasure. Trump is not unlike many of the dictators he admires. What they all share as strongmen is the use of language in the service of violence and repression as well as a fear of language as a channel for identity, critique, solidarity, and collective struggle. None of them believes that the truth is essential to a responsible mode of governance, and all of them support the notion that lying on the side of power is fundamental to the process of governing, however undemocratic such a political dynamic may be.

Lying has a long legacy in American politics and is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Victor Klemperer in his classic book, The Language of the Third Reich, reminds us that Hitler had a “deep fear of the thinking man and [a] hatred of the intellect” and that his “Mein Kampf preaches not only that the masses are stupid, but also that they need to be kept that way and intimidated into not thinking.”83 Trump displays a deep contempt for critical thinking and has boasted about how he loves the uneducated. Not only have mainstream sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times published endless examples of Trump’s lies, they have noted that, even in the aftermath of such exposure, he continues to be completely indifferent to being exposed as a serial liar.84

In fact, there is something delusional if not pathological about Trump’s indifference to his propensity to lie endlessly even when he is constantly outed publicly for doing so. For instance, in a 30-minute interview with The New York Times on December 28, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Trump made “false, misleading, or dubious claims … at a rate of one every 75 seconds.”85 Daniel Dale, a writer for The Toronto Star who documents Trump’s lies, claims that in the first week of August 2018, he made “132 false claims … 19 per day, almost five times his average. That shatters his previous record of 103 false claims in a week, which he set in June.”86 According to The Washington Post Fact Checker, Trump “has surpassed 10,000 false or misleading claims since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017,” further stating: “It’s an incredible feat of serial mendacity.

Trump’s language attempts to infantilize, seduce, and depoliticize the public through a stream of tweets, interviews, and public pronouncements that disregard facts and the truth. This is about more than Trump’s well-publicized desire to blur the lines between fact and fiction. His more serious aim is to derail the architectural foundations of truth and evidence in order to construct a false reality and alternative political universe in which there are only competing fictions and the emotional appeal of shock theater. Within this ongoing tsunami of lies and misrepresentation, the distinction between fiction and reality collapses as does the ethical foundation for recognizing criminal behavior, corruption, and systemic violence. State legitimized deceit both normalizes intolerance and ignorance and undermines the foundation and formative culture necessary to create critical and informed subjects and collective agents.

I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know — it is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by massive disimagination machines, and its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it but to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift.87 Ignorance is also the enemy of memory and a weapon in the politics of disappearance and the violence of organized forgetting. It is also about the erasure of what Brad Evans calls “the raw realities of suffering” and the undermining of a politics that is, in part, about the battle for memory.88

Trump, within a very short time, has legitimated and reinforced a culture of social abandonment, erasure, and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the tenets of a predatory and cruel form of gangster capitalism while using its power to fill government positions with deadbeats and at the same time produce death-dealing policies. Of course, he is just the overt and unapologetic symbol of a wild capitalism and dark pessimism that have been decades in the making. He is the theatrical, self-absorbed monster that embodies and emboldens a history of savagery, greed, and extreme inequality that has reached its endpoint — a poisonous form of American authoritarianism that must be stopped before it is too late.89 Trump’s actions make clear that democracy is tenuous and has to be viewed as a site of ongoing contestation, one that demands a new understanding of politics, language, and collective struggle.

However, the language of fascism does more that normalize falsehoods and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term attention spans, immediacy, and sensationalism. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange and communication. Destabilized perceptions in Trump’s world are coupled with the force of an inane celebrity culture and the war against all ethos of reality TV. In this environment, the notion of credibility is attacked, and vulgarity and crassness now become a substitute for civic courage and measured arguments. Masha Gessen rightly asserts that Trump’s lies are different from ordinary lies and are more like “power lies.” In this case, these are lies designed less “to convince the audience of something than to demonstrate the power of the speaker.”90

Trump’s prodigious tweets are not just about the pathology of endless fabrications — they also function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism designed to animate his base in a glut of hate while reinforcing a culture of war, fear, divisiveness, and ignorance in ways that often disempower his critics. How else to explain Trump’s desire to attract scorn from his critics and praise from his base through a never-ending production of tweets and electronic shocks that transform politics into a pathology marked by an infantilism one associates with a petulant child. Peter Baker and Michael Tackett sum up a number of bizarre and reckless tweets that Trump produced early in his presidency. They write:

President Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea, boasting in strikingly playground terms on Tuesday night that he commands a “much bigger” and “more powerful” arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier government in Asia. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform [North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un] that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” It came on a day when Mr. Trump, back in Washington from his Florida holiday break, effectively opened his new year with a barrage of provocative tweets on a host of issues. He called for an aide to Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail, threatened to cut off aid to Pakistan and the Palestinians, assailed Democrats over immigration, claimed credit for the fact that no one died in a jet plane crash last year and announced that he would announce his own award next Monday for the most dishonest and corrupt news media.91

Trump appropriates crassness as a weapon. In a throwback to the language of fascism, he has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses, reproducing the tired script of the model of the savior endemic to authoritarianism. In 2016 at the Republican National Convention, Trump stated, without irony, that he alone would save a nation in crisis, captured in his insistence that “I am your voice, I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.” Trump’s latter emphasis on restoring the authoritarian value of law and order has overtones of creating a new racial regime of governance, one that mimics what the historian Cedric J. Robinson once called the “rewhitening of America.”92

Moreover, such racially charged language points to the growing presence of a police state in the United States and its endpoint in a fascist state where large segments of the population are rendered disposable, incarcerated, or left to fend on their own in the midst of massive degrees of inequality. There is more at work here than an oversized, if not delusional, ego. Trump’s authoritarianism and nativist desires are also fueled by elements of narcissism, braggadocio, and misdirected rage. There is also a language that undermines the bonds of solidarity, abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable, and wages a full-fledged assault on the environment.93 Trump is truly the embodiment of what Robert J. Lifton has called in another context a “death-dealing age.”94

In addition, Trump’s ceaseless use of superlatives models a language that encloses itself in a circle of certainty while taking on religious overtones. Not only do such words pollute the space of credibility, they also wage war on historical memory, humility, and the belief that alternative worlds are possible. The threat such language poses for the future is telling and correlates with Trump’s ongoing attempts to make “the past a burden that must be shed in order that a new kind of life can come into being.”95 For Trump and his followers, there is a recognizable threat and danger to their power in the political and moral imperative to learn from the past so as to not repeat or update the dark authoritarianism of the 1930s. Trump is the master of manufactured illiteracy and his obsessive tweeting and public relations machine aggressively engages in a boundless spectacle of self-promotion and distractions — both of which are designed to whitewash any version of the past that might expose the close alignment between Trump’s language and policies and the dark elements of a fascist history.

Trump revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered by a grandiose, though limited, vocabulary filled with words like “historic,” “best,” “the greatest,” “tremendous,” and “beautiful.” As Wesley Pruden observes, “Nothing is ever merely ‘good’ or ‘fortunate.’ … Everything is ‘fantastic’ or ‘terrific,’ and every man or woman he appoints to a government position, even if just two shades above mediocre, is ‘tremendous.’ The Donald never met a superlative he didn’t like, himself as the ultimate superlative most of all.”96 Trump’s relentless exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the self-indulgent use of language. This is true even when he claims he “knows more about ISIS than the generals,” “knows more about renewables than any human being on Earth,” or that nobody “knows the US system of government better than he does.”97 There is also a resonance with the rhetoric of fascism. As the historian Richard J. Evans writes:

The German language became a language of superlatives so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic, and incomparable … The language used about Hitler, Klemperer noted, was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people “believed in him,” he was the redeemer, the savior, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation … Nazi institutions domesticated themselves [through the use of a language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.98

Under the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to authoritarian rule are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives so that the future can be shaped so as to become indifferent to the crimes of the past. Trump’s war on historical memory sets the stage for what O’Gorman calls a “revival of intolerance and, in some cases, literally of fascism” along with “the direct affirmation of Nazi ideology recast in versions of white supremacy.”99 Trump’s unending daily tweets, his recklessness, his adolescent disdain for a measured response, his unfaltering anti-intellectualism, and his utter lack of historical knowledge are well known. For instance, he has talked about the Civil War as if historians have not asked why it took place, while at the same time ignoring the role of slavery in its birth.100 During a Black History Month event, he talked about the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive.101 Trump’s ignorance of the past finds it counterpart in his celebration of a history that has enshrined racism, tweeted neo-Nazi messages, and embraced the “blood and soil” of white supremacy.

How else to explain the legacy of white racism and fascism historically inscribed in his signature slogan “Make America Great Again” and his use of the anti-Semitic phrase “America First,” long associated with Nazi sympathizers during World War II?102 How else to explain his support for bringing white supremacists such as Steve Bannon (now resigned), and Jeff Sessions (also resigned), both with a long history of racist comments and actions, into the highest levels of governmental power? Or his retweeting of an anti-Islamic video originally posted by Britain First, a far-right extremist group — an action that was condemned by British Prime Minister, Theresa May?103

It gets worse: Trump created a false equivalence between white supremacist neo-Nazi demonstrators and those who opposed them in Charlottesville, Virginia. In doing so, he argued that there were “very fine people on both sides” as if fine people march with protesters carrying Nazi flags, chanting hateful slogans, and shouting: “We will not be replaced by Jews.” Trump appears to be unable to differentiate “between people who think like Nazis and people who try to stop them from spewing their hate.”104 Speaking to a group of students at the University of Illinois in September 2018, former President Obama called out Trump for his failure to condemn the violence led by white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. As Obama put it: “We’re supposed to stand up to bullies. Not follow them. We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination, and we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers. How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?”105

Trump has stated without shame that he is a nationalist. For example, in one of his rallies, he urged his base to use the word nationalism stating, “You know…we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I am a nationalist, Okay? I am a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.” Not only does Trump’s embrace of the term stoke racial fears, it ingratiates him with elements of the hard right, particularly white nationalists. After Trump’s strong appropriation of the term at an October 2018 rally, Steve Bannon in an interview with Josh Robin indicated, “he was very very pleased Trump used the word ‘nationalist.’”106 Trump has drawn praise from a number of white supremacists including David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys—a vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brown Shirts-and more recently by the alleged New Zealand shooter who in his Christchurch manifesto praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”107 Trump’s use of the term is neither innocent nor a clueless faux pas. In the face of a wave of anti-immigration movements across the globe, it has become code for a thinly veiled racism and signifier for racial hatred.

Trump’s lengthy history of racist comments and sympathy for white nationalism and white supremacy offers a clear explanation for his unbroken use of racist language about Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Syrian refugees, and Haitians. It also points to Trump’s use of language as part of a larger political and pedagogical project to “mobilize hatred,” legitimate the discourse of intimidation, and encourage the American public “to unlearn feelings of care and empathy that lead us to help and feel solidarity with others,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes.108

Trump’s nativism and ignorance work well in the United States because they not only cater to what the American historian Brian Klass refers to as “the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian or fascist leanings,” they also enable what he calls Trump’s attempt at “mainstreaming fascism.”109 He writes:

Like other despots throughout history, Trump scapegoats minorities and demonizes politically unpopular groups. Trump is racist. He uses his own racism in the service of a divide-and-rule strategy, which is one way that unpopular leaders and dictators maintain power. If you aren’t delivering for the people and you’re not doing what you said you were going to do, then you need to blame somebody else. Trump has a lot of people to blame.110

Trump’s language, especially his endorsement of torture and contempt for international norms, normalizes the unthinkable and points to a return to a past that evokes what Ariel Dorfman has called “memories of terror … parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany … executions, torture, imprisonment, persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too.”111 Dorfman also sees in the Trump era echoes of policies carried out under the dictator Pinochet in Chile. According to Dorfman:

Indeed, many of the policies instituted and attitudes displayed in post-coup Chile would prove models for the Trump era: extreme nationalism, an absolute reverence for law and order, the savage deregulation of business and industry, callousness regarding worker safety, the opening of state lands to unfettered resource extraction and exploitation, the proliferation of charter schools, and the militarization of society. To all this must be added one more crucial trait: a raging anti-intellectualism and hatred of “elites” that, in the case of Chile in 1973, led to the burning of books like ours.112

The language of fascism revels in forms of theater that mobilize fear, intolerance, and violence and legitimates authoritarian impulses and further expands the power of the punishing state. Sasha Abramsky makes this point clear in his analysis of Trump’s endorsement of torture, his offering of cathartic violence to his audiences, his declaring “entire races and religions to be the enemy,” and his “interweaving of a host of fears — of immigrants, of Muslims, of domestic crime and criminals, of changing cultural mores, of refugees, of disease — and a host of deeply authoritarian impulses.”113 Abramsky is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans. Instead, his language comes “with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society. They give the imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence.”114 Surely, the increase in hate crimes during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.

The history of fascism teaches us that language can operate in the service of violence, desperation, and the troubling landscapes of hatred; moreover, it carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history. By undermining the concepts of truth and credibility, fascist-

oriented language disables the ideological and political vocabularies necessary for a diverse society to embrace shared hopes, responsibilities, and democratic values. Trump’s language — like that of older fascist regimes — mutilates contemporary politics, empathy, and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power. Trump’s language not only produces a litany of falsehoods, fears, and poisonous attacks on those deemed disposable, it also works hard to prevent people from having an internal dialogue with themselves and others, reducing self-reflection and the ability to question or judge to a scorned and discredited practice.

Trump’s fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, a toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, and racism. Pathological “levels of hubris, demagoguery, and megalomania” are all present in his discourse, suggesting that the Trump administration marks a destructive moment in American history.115 What was once an anxious discourse about what Harvey Kaye calls the “possible triumph in America of a fascist-tinged authoritarian regime over liberal democracy” is no longer a matter of speculation but a dark reality.116 Trump’s assault on the truth uses language to discredit the media while labeling his enemies as agents of fake news. Unencumbered by knowledge, Trump is not simply hostile to those who rely on facts and evidence, he works hard to prevent people from being able to distinguish between truth and falsehoods while undermining the institutions vital to a democracy that enable informed judgments. Trump is addicted to the language of a war culture, one that promotes a culture of aggression and fear in the service of violence. Language for Trump is part of a sustained state of war on the cultural front.

Any resistance to the new stage of American authoritarianism has to begin by analyzing its language, the stories it fabricates, the policies it produces, and the cultural, economic, and political institutions that make it possible. Questions have to be raised about how right-wing educational and cultural apparatuses function both politically and pedagogically to shape notions of identity, desire, values, and emotional investments in the discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s language both shapes and embodies policies that have a powerful consequences on peoples’ lives, and such effects must be made visible, tallied up, and used to uncover oppressive forms of power that often hide in the shadows. Rather than treat Trump’s lies and fear-mongering as an expression of merely a petulant and dangerous demagogue, it is crucial to analyze their historical roots, the institutions that reproduce and legitimate them, the pundits who promote them, and the effects they have on the texture of everyday life.

Trump’s language has a history that must be acknowledged, made known for the suffering it produces, and challenged with an alternative critical and hope-producing narrative. Such a language must be willing to make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods, and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the diverse modes of oppression that characterize the dark times that have overtaken the United States and, increasingly, many other countries. Progressives need a language that both embraces the political potential of diverse forms racial, gender, and sexual identity and the forms of “oppression, exclusion, and marginalization” they make visible while simultaneously working to unify such movements into a broader social formation and political party willing to challenge the core values and institutional structures of the American-style fascism.117 No form of oppression, however hideous, can be overlooked. In addition, with that critical gaze there must emerge a critical language about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States. At the same time, there is a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres as sites of critical learning. There is also a need to encourage artists, intellectuals, academics, and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible, and challenge the normalizing discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and fascism. There is no room here for a language shaped by political purity or limited to a politics of outrage. A truly democratic vision has a broader and more capacious overview.

Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an essential element of politics, and in part, this can be done with a language that unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. Language is a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. We would do well to heed the words of the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J. M. Coetzee, who, in a piece of fiction, states that “there will come a day when you and I will need to be told the truth, the real truth….no matter how hard it may be.”118 Too much is at stake in the current historical conjuncture for the truth not to be told. A critical language can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms.119 The search and use of such a language can also reinforce and accelerate the need for young people and others to continue creating alternative public spaces in which critical dialogue, exchange, and a new understanding of politics in its totality can emerge. Focusing on language as a strategic element of political struggle is not only about the search for the truth, it is also about power — both in terms of grasping how it works and using it as part of ongoing struggles that merge the language of critique with the language of possibility, and theory with action. While a critical language does not translate automatically into collective action, it is the precondition for a politics that is more than a short-lived protest, demonstration, or cathartic display of outrage. A truly critical language provides a segue to not look away and remain silent, but to take the risk of imagining a movement for the elimination of neoliberal capitalism rather than simply a call to reform it.

As Wen Stephenson observes, the writings of Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism are more relevant than ever in such dark times. Stephenson writes:

… [Arendt] warn[s] against the tendency of her contemporaries to look numbly away, to minimize the horrors, to move on, she insists upon squarely confronting the new facts, if only to try to comprehend them. The kind of comprehension she has in mind, though, would come not by taking refuge in old “commonplaces.” It requires … “examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.”120

Without a faith in intelligence, critical education, and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that casino capitalism, fascism, and right-wing populism pose to the world. All forms of fascism aim at destroying standards of truth, empathy, informed reason, and the institutions that make them possible. The current fight against a nascent fascism in the United States is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also, as Arendt points out, a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.”121 Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine alternative worlds and a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.122

Progressives need to formulate a new language, alternative cultural spheres, and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity, and the promise of a real socialist democracy. We need a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism and democracy, or to normalize greed and excessive competition, or to accept individual interests tied exclusively to monetary accumulation as the highest form of motivation. We need a language and critical comprehension of how power works to enable the conditions in which education is linked to social change and the capacity to promote human agency through the registers of cooperation, compassion, care, love, equality, and a respect for difference. Ariel Dorfman’s ode to the struggle over language and its relationship to the power of the imagination, collective resistance, and civic courage offers a fitting reminder of what needs to be done. He writes:

We must trust that the intelligence that has allowed humanity to stave off death, make medical and engineering breakthroughs, reach the stars, build wondrous temples, and write complex tales will save us again. We must nurse the conviction that we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer and we will find a way to convince.123

In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.