by Henry
Giroux
Authoritarianism
in the American collective psyche and in what might be called
traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as
existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political
system, it is primarily understood as a mode of governance associated
with the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and, of course,
in its most vile extremes, with Hitler’s poisonous Nazi rule and
Mussolini’s fascist state in the 1930s and 1940s. These were and
are societies that idealized war, soldiers, nationalism, militarism,
political certainty, fallen warriors, racial cleansing, and a
dogmatic allegiance to the homeland. Education and the media were the
propaganda tools of authoritarianism, merging fascist and religious
symbols with the language of God, family, and country, and were
integral to promoting servility and conformity among the populace.
This script is well known to the American public and it has been
played out in films, popular culture, museums, the mainstream media,
and other cultural apparatuses. Historical memory that posits the
threat of the return of an updated authoritarianism turns the
potential threat of the return of authoritarianism into dead memory.
Hence, any totalitarian mode of governance is now treated as a relic
of a sealed past that bears no relationship to the present. The need
to retell the story of totalitarianism becomes a frozen lesson in
history rather than a narrative necessary to understanding the
present.
Hannah
Arendt, the great theorist of totalitarianism, believed that the
protean elements of totalitarianism are still with us and that they
would crystalize in different forms. Far from being a thing of the
past, she believed that totalitarianism “heralds as a possible
model for the future.” Arendt was keenly aware that the culture of
traditionalism, an ever present culture of fear, the corporatization
of civil society, the capture of state power by corporations, the
destruction of public goods, the corporate control of the media, the
rise of a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, the dismantling of civil and
political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the
“religionization of politics,” a rampant sexism, an attack on
labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the
emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and the attempts
by demagogues to undermine critical education as a foundation for
producing critical citizenry were all at work in American society.
For Arendt, these anti-democratic elements in American society
constituted what she called the “sand storm,” a metaphor for
totalitarianism.
Historical
conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they
all share a hatred for democracy, dissent, and human rights. It is
too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly
categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic and
leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both
systems. American politics today suggests a more updated if not
different form of authoritarianism or what some have called the curse
of totalitarianism. In this context, it is worth remembering what
Huey Long said in response to the question of whether America could
ever become fascist: “Yes, but we will call it anti-fascist.”
Long’s reply indicates that fascism is not an ideological apparatus
frozen in a particular historical period, but as Arendt suggested a
complex and often shifting theoretical and political register for
understanding how democracy can be subverted, if not destroyed, from
within.
The notion
of soft fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram Gross’s book,
Friendly Fascism, in which he argued that if fascism came to the
United States it would not embody the same characteristics associated
with fascist forms in the historical past. There would be no
Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority,
government-sanctioned book burnings, death camps, genocidal purges,
or the abrogation of the constitution. In short, fascism would not
take the form of an ideological grid from the past simply downloaded
onto another country under different historical conditions. Gross
believed that fascism was an ongoing danger and had the ability to
become relevant under new conditions, taking on familiar forms of
thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences, and
political relations. Similarly, in his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O.
Paxton argued that the texture of American fascism would not mimic
traditional European forms but would be rooted in the language,
symbols, and culture of everyday life. According to Paxton:
No
swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and
Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations
of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of
fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would
transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the
internal enemy).
It
is worth noting that Umberto Eco in his discussion of “eternal
fascism,” also argued that any updated version of fascism would not
openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of
authoritarianism would appropriate some of its elements, making it
virtually unrecognizable from its traditional forms. Eco contended
that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise,
although it will be no less destructive of democracy.
The
renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated,
expanded and updated these views by arguing persuasively that the
United States has produced its own unique form of authoritarianism,
which he calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Wolin claimed that in
the United States an emerging totalitarianism has appeared in form
different from what we have seen in the past. Instead of a
charismatic leader, the government is now governed through the
anonymous and largely remote hands of corporate power and finance
capital. Political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic
sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance.
The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political
culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely
dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one’s disposal,
while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly
fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and
financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of Obama’s
health-care reform indicate–a gift to the health insurance
giants–such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now
carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug companies
as a badge of honor–a kind of open testimonial to their disrespect
for democratic governance and a celebration of their power.
Rather
than forcing a populace to adhere to a particular state ideology, the
general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through
the influence of corporations over schools, higher education, and
other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic
consciousness, and critical citizenship are also the result of the
work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological
and financial interests, a powerful corporate controlled media that
are largely center-right, and a market-driven public pedagogy that
reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and
discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of historical,
social, and racial amnesia is constructed and ciculated through a
highly popular celebrity culture and its counterpart in
corporate-driven news, television, radio, and entertainment to
produce a culture of stupidity, censorship, and diversionary
spectacles.
The
protean forces for creating an authoritarian state are in full play
in the United States and extend far beyond the shadow of a debased
and corrupt politics. A set of complex forces working in tandem is
slowly, insidiously eroding the very foundations of a civic and
democratic culture. Some of the most glaring issues are massive
unemployment; a rotting infrastructure; the defunding of vital public
services; the dismantling of the social safety net; expanding levels
of poverty, especially for children; and an imprisonment binge
largely targeting poor minorities of color. At the same time, a reign
of lawlessness is overtaking the United States as police violence and
state terrorism result in the killing of an increasing number of
black men, women, and young people. But such a list barely scratches
the surface. Institutions that were once designed to serve the public
good now wage war against all things public. For instance, we have
witnessed in the last thirty years the restructuring of public
education as either a source of profit for corporations or an updated
version of control modeled after prison culture coupled with an
increasing culture of lying, cruelty, and corruption.
A
culture of thoughtlessness now drives the predatory formative culture
that allows a range of anti-democratic tendencies to
flourish–tendencies that embody a new and extreme form of
lawlessness and a theater of cruelty. Civic literacy in the United
States is not simply in decline, it is the object of scorn and
derision. The corporate controlled media have abandoned even the
pretense of holding power accountable and now primarily serve as
second rate entertainment venues spouting the virtues of balance,
consumerism, greed, and American exceptionalism.
The
seeds of extremism are everywhere. Instead of being educated, school
children are handcuffed and punished for trivial infractions or
simply taught how to take tests and give up on any vestige of
critical thinking. Celebrity culture now works in tandem with
neoliberal values to vaunt as models individuals who represent
extreme forms of solipsism and a cultivated idiocy. The war on
democracy by the financial elite and other religious and political
fundamentalists is intent on defunding and eliminating every public
sphere that serves the public good rather than moneyed interests. A
war culture now shapes every aspect of society as war-like values, a
hyper-masculinity, and an aggressive militarism seeps into every
major institution in the United States including the schools, the
media, and local police forces. The criminal justice system has
become the default structure for dealing with social problems. More
and more people are considered disposable and excess because they are
viewed as a drain on the wealth or offend the sensibilities of the
financial elite who are rapidly consolidating class power.
The
spirt of aggression and the spectacle of violence permeates the
culture and deeply imprints domestic and foreign policy. As Robert
Koehler points out, “America is armed and dangerous—and always at
war, both collectively and individually.” The outcome of this
unfolding nightmare will be not only a political and economic
instability but this disappearance of public institutions to serve
public needs, if not politics itself. At the same time, the
destruction of a public culture that embraces and sustains democratic
values and practices will be intensified. Surely all this points to
what Hannah Arendt believed was the harbinger of totalitarianism–the
disappearance of the thinking and speaking citizens who make politics
possible.
What
is particularly troublesome is the manifestations of totalitarianism
in the discourse and proposed policy measures of the extremists that
now govern the Republican Party and how this is taken up in the
mainstream media. One finds in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Scott
Walker, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and others a mix of war like
values, expressions of racism, a hatred of women’s rights,
unabashed support for the financial elite, a religious
fundamentalism, a celebration of war, and a deep seated hostility for
all things public. Chris Christie sells himself to the American
public as a bully and believes that threatening violence is a crucial
element of leadership. This was on full display when he recently
stated that teacher’s unions “are the single most destructive
force in public education in America [and deserve] a punch in the
face.”
Threatening
violence appears to be a powerful ideological register shared by many
of the Republican Party candidates. Donald Trump comes close to
supporting a form of racial cleansing by threatening to depart 11
million undocumented Mexican immigrants all the while demonizing them
as rapists and criminals. This script has been played out before just
prior to the genocide promoted in Nazi Germany. Mike Huckabee, Marco
Rubio, and Scott Walker want to abolish a woman’s right to
abortion, and go so far as to argue that they would not permit women
to get an abortion even if their lives depended on it. Huckabee takes
this threat even further. When Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi asked
Huckabee if he would send “the FBI or the National Guard to close
abortion clinics,” he answered “”We’ll see when I’m
president.” Huckabee is a real piece of work stating at one point
that he would deny an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim. This
hatred of women and the need to control and domesticate them to the
crudest forms of male hegemony and control is central to all fascist
regimes.
All
of these candidates, with the exception of Rand Paul, support the
surveillance state and warrantless spying on American citizens. All
of the candidates want to send troops to the Middle East to fight
Islamic extremists, expand the military, and Trump goes so far as to
claim he wants to seize the oil wells in Syria in order to
appropriate their wealth–no apologies for naked imperialism here.
Rick Santorum brags that if he is the next president of the United
States he will be a wartime president, and add that he will also
defend the “sanctity of life in the womb.” John Dean in
resurrecting arguments about the authoritarian personality argues
that Donald Trump, though this applies to most of the Republican
Party leadership, has four clear characteristics or traits that
distinguish them as authoritarian: “They are dominating; they
oppose equality; they desire personal power; and they are amoral.”
This echoes the classic work by Theodor Adorno on the authoritarian
personality.
Similarly,
the mainstream media treats this group of extremists who promote a
culture of fear, racism, and hatred as eccentric, odd, crazies,
colorful, or simply toxic. All the while, they refuse to acknowledge
that the extremism on full display among these politicians reveals a
dark and more threatening side of politics, one that exposes the
unapologetic register of totalitarianism and goes far beyond either
the psychologizing of authoritarianism or locating it within the
aberrant personalities of a few politicians. Totalitarianism is a
complex systemic register that is deeply woven into American
ideology, governance, and policy. It is present in the attack on the
welfare state, the attack on civil liberties, the indiscriminate
killing of civilians by drones, illegal wars, the legitimation of
state torture, and the ongoing spread of domestic violence against
minorities of class and color.
A
few journalists have raised the specter of totalitarianism but they
largely confine the charge to the bellicose Donald Trump. For
instance, Connor Lynch claims points to Trump’s authoritarian
discourse which is “full of race baiting, xenophobia and
belligerent nationalism.” Jeffrey Tucker goes further arguing that
Trump’s popularity not only draws support from “the darkest
elements of American life” but also mimics a form of neoliberalism
in which economics is affirmed as a way of governing all of social
life. For Tucker, Trump is representative of a mode of
totalitarianism that “seeks total control of society and economy
and demands no limits on state power.” Those on the Left, such as
Norman Solomon, who raise this issue are largely marginalized.
What
is useful about these critiques is that they acknowledge that
democracy is dead in the United States and that the forces of tyranny
and authoritarianism offer no apologies for their hatred of democracy
and the culture of poverty, immiseration, and cruelty that they want
to impose on the American people, if not the rest of the world. What
they fail to acknowledge is that the anti-democratic forces at work
in the new totalitarianism are not limited to the discourse of the
new extremists. Totalitarianism is not merely about errant
personalities. It is also about the ideological, political, cultural,
and governing structures of society. These systemic forces have been
building for quite some time in the United States and have been
recognized by our most astute writers such as Sheldon Wolin and Chris
Hedges. What is new is that they are not only out of the shadows but
are enthusiastically embraced by a segment of the population and
articulated in all of their fury by a number of politicians.
Totalitarianism is not simply a personality disorder and is not
limited to the power of a few erratic politicians; it demands and
cannot survive without mass support—it is systemic, a desiring
machine, a politics, a culture, and a distortion of power. And it is
not limited to Republican Party extremists.
Take
for instance the comments on CNN by the alleged liberal Wesley Clark,
a former 4-star general and one-time Democratic candidate for
President of the United States. Clark called for World War II-style
internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” Clark
unapologetically argued for people to be identified who are most
likely to embrace a radical ideology stating that “If these people
are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they
are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It
is their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them
from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”
Calling for domestic internment camps for radicals is more than
chilling and suggests the degree to which a poisonous nationalism
mimics the legacy of Nazi Germany.
As
Bill Dixon has observed “We live in an era in which the conditions
that produce totalitarian forms are once again with us.” A new form
of authoritarianism is now shaping American society. What is equally
true is that there is nothing inevitable about this growing threat.
This dystopian politics must be exposed, made visible, and challenged
on both the local, national, and global planes.
What
is crucial is that the mechanisms, discourse, culture, and ideologies
that inform authoritarianism must become part of any analysis that
now addresses and is willing to challenge the anti-democratic forces
at the heart of American politics. This means, in part, focusing on
the ongoing repressive and systemic conditions, institutions,
ideologies, and values that have been developing in American society
for the last forty years, at the very least. It means finding a
common ground on which various elements of the left can be mobilized
under the banner of a radical democracy in order to challenge the
diverse forms of oppression, incarceration, mass violence,
exploitation, and exclusion that now define the authoritarian nature
of American politics. It means taking seriously the educative nature
of politics and recognizing that public spheres must be created in
order to educate citizens who are informed, socially responsible, and
willing to fight collectively for a future in which a radical
democracy appears sustainable. This suggests an anti-fascist
struggle that is not about simply about remaking economic structures,
but also refashioning identities, values, social relations, modes of
identification as part of a democratic project along with what it
means to desire a better and more democratic future.
Hannah
Arendt was right in stating that “the aim of totalitarian education
has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to
form any,” suggesting that totalitarianism was as much about the
production of thoughtlessness as it was about the imposition of brute
force, gaping inequality, corporatism, and the spectacle of violence.
Totalitarianism destroys everything that democracy makes possible and
in doing so thrives on mass terror, manufactured stupidity, and the
disappearance of politics, all the while making of human beings
superfluous. Yet, power however tyrannical is never without
resistance. Dark times are not ahead, they are here but that does not
mean they are here to stay.
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