Source: TruthOut
(NOTE: this lengthy but quite chilling &
provocative essay by one of the finest public intellectuals today is
well worth the read. His references are very impressive as well &
should be delved into. We will not make our way out of this wicked
darkness without the an awareness of the Beasts we’re dealing with)
This week’s revelation that Donald
Trump is already plotting new ways to try to put himself permanently above the law is just the
latest reminder of the looming threat of lawless and emboldened right-wing
forces in the United States. Trump’s new scheme to expand a Nixon-era policy
memo to prohibit the Justice Department from prosecuting presidents, even after they leave office, is just a tiny hint
of the greater threat. In recent months, several scholars have sounded the alarm that the United States is
“sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.” The concern is not unfounded given
that in his run for the presidency in 2024, Trump has boldly telegraphed his
aspirations to impose an authoritarian future on the United States. He has
repeatedly injected authoritarian language, extremist ideas and threats of
violence into the mainstream. Moreover, he has done so to “create a climate of
trepidation and powerlessness that discourages mobilization by the opposition,”
in the words of scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Forecasting his authoritarian
intentions, Trump has openly stated that he intends to terminate portions of
the U.S. Constitution, calls his political enemies “vermin” and boldly proclaims he will make himself a dictator “on day one.” On Truth
Social, he claimed without irony that a president should
have blanket authority and total immunity “even for events that ‘cross the line.’” He has repeatedly stated that if he regains the White
House, “it will be a time for retribution” and revenge.
Taking pages from Hitler’s speeches,
Trump has also said that the biggest threat to the United States “is from within.” In this instance, he reproduces
a version of McCarthyite slander with his claim that the country is being overrun by
“communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like
vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on
elections, and need to be rooted out.” His constant attacks on what he labels
as the “enemy within” are meant to incite his MAGA followers to wage violence
against people of color, critics, progressives, LGBTQ+ Americans, news
networks, immigrants, feminists, and any other group that does not buy into
Christian nationalist, white supremacist views.
Trump’s discourse overflows with the
genocidal language used in the Third Reich. The historian Heather Cox
Richardson rightly notes that Trump’s “use of language
referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because
it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S., this
concept is most associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews
as ‘vermin’ and vowed to exterminate them.”
Trump has claimed that immigrants
“are poisoning the blood of our country” and polluting his notion of white
Christian culture, and he’s indicated that, if reelected, he plans to make them
undergo “ideological screening” in order to enter the country legally (assuming
here that he wants to make sure they would not vote for the Democratic Party).
If his vision were carried out, millions of undocumented immigrants would be
barred from the country while others would be rounded up, put into what amount
to Gulag camps, and subjected to unimaginably harsh policies. Given Trump’s calls
to shoot shoplifters, impose death penalties on drug dealers, and his
suggestion that his former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley,
“deserves to be executed,” there is no reason to doubt Trump’s authoritarian designs.
On the campaign trail, Trump
repeatedly echoes the language of autocrats such as Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orbán, who embraces the concept of “illiberal democracy,” and claims, as The Guardian points out, that
the biggest threat to Hungary and other nations is “the ‘mixing’ of European
and non-European races.” Trump and the GOP, like many of the authoritarian
politicians they admire, believe that equality is a weakness endemic to
democracy and destroys society. Trump’s contempt for the law and desire for
absolute power is not only evident in his remarks about wanting to be a
dictator; it was also on full display when his legal team argued before a D.C. Circuit Court that unless
Trump is impeached, he could not be held responsible for “selling pardons,
military secrets, or simply having people assassinated.” As Thom Hartmann put it, “Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC
Appeals Court that if Trump became president again, he could order SEAL Team
Six to assassinate Joe Biden or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about
it.” While Trump’s lawlessness is central to his grab for unchecked power,
there are also displays of the delusions and aspirations of a Nazi-infested
politics.
What is especially disturbing about
the emerging fascism in the United States is the lack of general public outrage
that accompanies it. Such silence extends from almost the entirety of the Republican
Party, the mainstream media, 84 percent of white Evangelicals, and a number of
the wealthiest American billionaires and corporate tycoons. While the
Democratic Party, including President Joe Biden, have called out Trump as a
fascist, they have been silent about their support for decades of neoliberal
economic policies, the ravages of deindustrialization, a staggering rise
in economic inequality and cuts to social programs. Such policies
have produced the conditions that have accelerated the rise of authoritarianism
in the United States. Wedded to the interests of the banks, corporate ideology
and the financial elite, their silence should come as no surprise. At the same
time, such policies have produced enormous economic hardships and a diminished
sense of agency that creates an enforced silence among the most impoverished
populations and often results in their inevitable retreat from politics,
especially in relation to voting in national elections.
In the current historical moment,
language has increasingly forfeited its obligation to a politics of truth,
justice, equality and freedom, and in doing so has turned cannibalistic and
cruel. As political horizons and public life wither under the assault of an
emerging fascism and a mainstream media that refuse to confront it, language
appears to fail in the presence of what Zygmunt Bauman called “the
emergence of modern barbarity.” A continuing series of crises — political,
cultural, economic and ecological — are translated into emotional plagues of
fear, lies and violence produced by right-wing spectacles that have undermined
the ability of the U.S. public to address critically the endless attacks by
tyrannical forces on democratic ideas, values and institutions. Matters of
historical context, interconnections, informed judgment and critical analysis
that refuse to divorce themselves, in the words of Winifred Woodhull, “from social institutions and material relations of power and
domination” are either ignored or disappear from public view.
Language in the age of gangster capitalism and fascist politics is under siege,
functioning less as a vehicle of audacious truth and moral witnessing than as a
tool to purge democracy of its ideals. In the face of a politics of enforced
silence, the United States is experiencing an era marked by what Brad Evans calls “a closing of the political,”
grounded in the assumption that “nothing can be done.”
The poisonous shadow of
authoritarianism has entered the public imagination in spectacular fashion as a
normalized political discourse. A boisterous creed of “annihilating nihilism”
marked by a politics of vacuousness, resentment, historical amnesia,
self-interest and freedom from responsibility has become a dominating force in
U.S. politics. A right-wing vocabulary of hatred, bigotry, lies and conspiracy
theories has produced a brutalizing politics whose rhetoric and polices echo a
dark and horrifying period of history unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s
in Europe. The mobilizing passions of fascism are now being produced,
circulated and legitimated though all aspects of the mass media, which are
increasingly under the control of a billionaire class. How else to
explain not only Trump’s public courting of white supremacists and antisemites,
such as Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, but also Nikki Haley’s claim that slavery was not the cause of the Civil
War? Such comments reveal the GOP’s fascist tendency not only to whitewash and
seek to erase the relevance of the history of racism, but also to endorse the
poisonous ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. As Czech
dissident Václav Havel once remarked, “the disorder of real history is replaced
by the orderliness of pseudo-history.… Instead of events, we are offered
non-events.”
Extremist language that was once
considered unimaginable and relegated to fringe groups has been elevated to the
center of power, politics and everyday life. For instance, billionaire Elon
Musk’s recent racist comments echo the racial eugenicist
movements in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, from which Hitler took
inspiration. Yet, little is said in the mainstream press connecting Musk’s
comments to a shameful past that gave us the Tuskegee experiments and provided
a rationale for Jim Crow and racial segregation laws. Enforced silence is a
tool for the repression of history and the wiping out of historical
consciousness and memory, especially those moments in history we associate with
segregation, exploitation, disposability and genocide. Fascist discourse is
currently abetted and affirmed by ongoing public displays of the detritus of
fascist politics, which makes visible that which the United States has
forgotten and of which it should be ashamed — that is, a society in which
collective morality and the ethical imagination appear to no longer matter.
Beyond bold and unapologetic public
displays of fascist rhetoric, beliefs and policies, there are relentless
right-wing assaults against democracy that are barely recognized in the media
and in public discourse for the danger they pose to democracy. A short list
includes book censorship, turning libraries into student detention centers,
voter suppression laws, threatening election workers, assaulting reproductive
rights, enacting cruel policies against queer and trans people and harassing
critical educators. In addition, schools are turned into indoctrination
centers, torrents of propaganda replace facts, history is whitewashed, dissent
is suppressed and those who provide medical care to trans people and people in
need of abortions are criminalized.
These authoritarian aggressions have
become embedded in United States culture to the degree that they fail to garner
any alarm or concern from the wider public. As fascist beliefs, values and
language multiply, so do attacks by far right politicians, reactionary pundits
and white supremacists against diversity, equality and inclusion, all the while
promoting a white nationalist notion of who counts as a citizen. As Toni
Morrison once noted, this is a language constrained by the
“weary and wearying vocabulary of racial domination.” It is “a dead language” trapped in sordid silence
regarding the racist ideology that drives its claims to “exclusivity and
dominance.”
A dangerous silence now often
accompanies a language at war with democratic ideals and the public
imagination. This is an enforced silence among the larger public that purposely
mutes matters of critical agency, moral responsibility, reason, justice and the
demands of keeping alive a substantive democracy. It is a language where moral
outrage disappears, is silenced or both, while concealing the danger that this
fascist language portends. This is a depoliticizing silence that clouds lies
and untruths in mindless theater, spectacles and a flood of evasions. Under
such circumstances, community is emptied of any substance, reduced to notions
of the social organized around the merging of lies and violence. The loneliness
and social atomization produced under neoliberalism provide fodder for the
dictatorial energies that offer forms of the false promise of community rooted
in hate, bigotry and lies, often resulting in habitual ignorance to justice.
Mainstream institutions such as schools, the media and online platforms that
should trade in imaginative ideas and provide a critical culture are under
siege. One consequence is the breakdown of civic culture, egalitarian values
and politics itself. What many Americans fail to realize is that this
reactionary mode of silence is a form of complicity that creates a political
climate marked by cruelty, violence and lawlessness. How else to explain the
lack of public outrage against an extremist Republican Party that rejects free
summer lunch programs for food-insecure youth, weakens child labor laws and
restricts voting rights?
Liberal and conservative Americans
are immersed in a crisis of silence that ignores the fact that politicians such
as Trump embrace totalitarian values — the language of dictators — and advocate
for violence as a tool of political opportunism. This is not to suggest that
all forms of silence function to erase the scourge of racism, white supremacy
and the misery imposed by neoliberal capitalism.
Silence can be contemplative, offer
consolation, and provide the space for close analysis, thinking critically and
mobilizing modes of critical agency. However, in an era marked by a massive
flight from ethical and political responsibility, a particular kind of
administered silence emerges, one that subverts any sense of critical agency
and abandons a more noble message regarding a warning of the dangers to come
and the lessons to be addressed. Under such conditions, silence operates
increasingly within oppressive relations of power. Tyrannical relations of
power are now at the center of U.S. politics and radiate a contempt for
dissent, integrity, compassion and liberty which, as Bauman notes in his book Babel,
ejects “any sense of critical agency and [refuses] to recognize the bonds we
have with others.”
In the face of injustice, silence
has become ethically mute, and exhibits a dehumanizing indifference to human
suffering in the midst of dangerous politics. Enforced silence, both as a
subjective stance and as a political space of organized moral irresponsibility
and self-deception, increasingly legitimates and helps to produce a society
that has lost its moral bearings and wallows in a repudiation of civic courage
and human rights. This current politics of enforced silence is happening at a
time when many Americans seem oblivious to the threat posed to democracy by
Trump, the GOP, far right foundations, reactionary cultural apparatuses and
neoliberal educational institutions.
Silence today has become part of a
politics of disappearance where critical ideas are buried along with dangerous
memories, and the bodies of journalists, poets and those who lead the fight
against oppression in its diverse modes. As Spanish painter Francisco Goya once warned of the degree to which truth and
informed judgments are overcome by ignorance, superstition and falsehoods, “the
sleep of reason produces monsters.” Martin Luther King Jr. gave a contemporary
valence to Goya’s warning in his famous 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to
Break the Silence.” His words alerted Americans to the dangers of refusing to
speak out in the face of militarism, racism and massive poverty. Stating that
“a time comes when silence is betrayal,” King was clear regarding how the
refusal to speak out eviscerates both the idea of democracy and the promise of
resisting the mobilizing passions of fascism, especially militarism, poverty
and racism. The challenge posed by King’s call to resist a complicitous silence
in the face of injustice is exceptionally relevant today. At the heart of this
challenge is the need to not only make detectable the current threats to democracy
but also to understand how silence in the face of tyranny legitimates
authoritarianism along with the risks it poses to any viable notion of justice,
equality and freedom.
It is important to note that fascism
not only arrives through the language of hate, bigotry, dehumanization and
military dictatorships as it did in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s; it also
arrives through the everyday acceptance of an ethically debilitating silence.
In the current moment, such silence accompanies authoritarian threats to
democracy. A politics of silence facilitates a tsunami of manufactured
ignorance advanced by the repression of dissent, the cowardice of the
mainstream media, the unaccountability of social media platforms steeped in the
astonishing toxicity of hatred, and a disdain for equality, freedom and truth
in a society, notes Jonathan Crary, governed by the corrupting
force of the billionaire elite.
Given the current threat posed to
U.S. democracy, enforced silence should be analyzed within the uniquely current
threats to liberty, basic human rights and equality that sabotage any viable
notion of democracy. Such a challenge is especially crucial at a time when the
habits of democracy are being replaced by what David Graeber called the “habits of oligarchy, as though no
other politics are possible.” The politics of silence increasingly works
through multiple sites and seemingly contrasting impulses, often aligning
itself with a reactionary disdain for the public good. In part, it does so by
refusing to address the growing (yet to some, seemingly unrelated) issues of
Trump’s full embrace of fascist politics, the growing attacks on freedom of
expression and the struggle for social justice.
This is all the more reason to
reclaim the language of the common good; to protect public and higher education
from a fascist takeover; to reject the privatization of public goods; expand
the power of unions and the rights of workers, people of color, women,
immigrants, queer and trans people, and all those others considered excess and
disposable. The plague of silence has to be broken so as to inject the struggle
for human rights back into the language of politics, and to fight for a
socialist democracy built on the anti-capitalist values of equality, social
justice, liberty and human dignity. The words of Frederick Douglass are
prescient here and worth remembering. He
writes:
If there is no struggle, there is no
progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are
men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder
and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.
If the plague of silence is to be
overcome, Americans need to tap into a language that makes clear that they will
not look away or refuse to stand up in the face of fascist aggression. The
brilliant writer Maaza Mengiste argues for such a language with his call for a
vocabulary that “will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent,
visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us.”
Fortunately, especially since the
Occupy movement in 2011, a number of social movements have emerged to provide a
language that both exposes and makes the ruthless power of the financial elite
and other anti-democratic forces accountable through a discourse of critique
and hope. The Occupy movement made the discourse of inequality and class
differences a more central part of a national political narrative. In the last
decade, workers have used the language of economic justice, solidarity and fair
play to reenergize the labor movement. The resurgence of the labor movement
provided a discourse that exposes how neoliberalism benefits the wealthy and
privileged.
Silence has become the language
through which people are either depoliticized or are willingly complicit with
the economic and racial forces of totalitarianism.
Meanwhile movements such as the
movement for Black lives have highlighted the language of structural racism
along with making visible a history of slavery, racial abuse and police
violence, and crafting a nuanced and multidimensional discourse of liberation.
The #MeToo movement created new
discourses to make visible the pervasive extent of sexual assault, violence and
harassment across a wide variety of sites and greatly advanced gender justice.
The abolitionist movement has
provided a contextual and relational language highlighting the punitive nature
of highly racialized criminal legal system and the carceral state while
instituting a national movement to defund the police.
Trans and queer people have
invigorated a movement and language that critiques the right-wing weaponization
of marginalized and ostracized identities.
Climate activists have exposed the
danger fossil fuels pose to the planet, and how the most vulnerable
populations, especially Black and Brown communities, pay a heavy price for the
abuses of the oil and gas industries. In doing so, they have inserted the
language of climate justice into the public sphere and made clear how
capitalism is creating a murderous future for human beings by destroying the
environment.
Black and Brown theorists working
with the idea of intersectionality have provided a new language highlighting how every social movement is “shaped
by multiple intersecting inequalities and power dynamics,” which draw
“attention to unmarked categories” of both oppression and resistance. All of
these movements have imaginatively offered a new language of politics and
continue to further expand and sharpen such discourses.
Equally promising is the increased
political activism of young people, who are voicing a language and pedagogy of
disruption, critique and possibility. As I stated more than a decade ago in Truthout, theirs is a
language “that recognizes that there is no viable politics without will and
awareness and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial
foundation for understanding and intervening in the world.” Young people
recognize that they have been written out of the script of democracy for too
long and are now creating spaces and enacting a language in which to expand
individual and social agency through collective forms of resistance as starting
points to build a new democratic social order.
Fortified with the energy and
language of these dynamic movements, it is incumbent upon the broader left and
its various social movements to continue to develop a language that not only
highlights social injustices but also includes a vocabulary that moves people,
allows them to feel compassion for “the other” and gives them the courage to
talk back. Beyond highlighting the wide range of social injustices, all of us
on the left must continue to develop a vocabulary that speaks to people’s needs
in a way that is moving, affirming, recognizable and enables them to confront
the burden of conscience in the face of the unspeakable, and to do so with a
sense of dignity, self-reflection and the courage to act individually and
collectively in the service of a radical democracy.
One important contribution of these
diverse social movements is that they all produced a language that allows us to
recognize ourselves as agents, not victims. In doing so, they have expanded the
discourse of radical democratic politics. Of course, there is more at stake
here than a struggle over meaning; there is also the struggle over power, over
the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of critical
agency and contribute to a broad social movement that will translate meaning
into a fierce struggle for economic, political and racial equality. While there
is a new energy among youth and a number of powerful social movements, there is
the ongoing challenge of confronting with renewed vigor a culture of silence
and indifference that has become the most powerful educational force of the
emerging fascism.
Writing about the civil rights
struggles of the ‘60s, Martin Luther King Jr. was prescient in acknowledging
that the tyranny and violence of authoritarianism feeds on silence, moral
apathy and the collapse of conscience. Given the fierce urgency of the times,
the struggle against an enforced silence is especially crucial when people
refuse to speak up in the face of injustice. Silence has become the language
through which people are either depoliticized or are willingly complicit with the
economic and racial forces of totalitarianism. As King notes, it is the language of those “who
accept evil without protesting against it.”
The new social movements in the face
of an emerging fascism have done us a great theoretical and political favor in
making clear that any viable mode of resistance must embrace a language that
translates into power — a critical language that expands the power of
education, agency and resistance. This is a language that imaginatively
rethinks the forces of militarism, capitalism, racism and sexism in light of
the dramatic changes taking place technologically, culturally and politically.
There will be no justice or democracy in the United States unless a mass
multiclass social movement emerges that combines political and individual
rights with economic rights — that joins a movement for gender and racial
equality with a movement for economic justice.
At the same time, many new social
movements need to further a language that is not only theoretical and critical
but also passionate. In many ways, they do this, but a politics of passion
needs a greater place in their politics. Central to such a language is a
politics of emotion that addresses what Ruth Ben-Ghiat refers to as communities
of belonging. This is a language that invites joy while mobilizing emotions
that embrace compassion, justice and hope. What might be called a politics of
identification and emotion is particularly important at a time when many people
living in a neoliberal society are atomized, feeling alienated, lonely,
invisible, and subject to far right emotional appeals to forms of allegiance
rooted in hatred, bigotry and a poisonous nationalism.
Anand Giridharads claims that today’s left is often too cerebral
and too suspicious of what he calls empowering emotional appeals. He writes
that much of the left today is “suspicious of the politics of passion” and
“doesn’t do emotional appeals,” adding:
Can those who defend the rule of law
and pluralism and economic justice and human rights not only articulate those
ideas but also appeal to the more basic human needs to belong, to have
anxieties soothed, to have fears answered, to feel hope, or just to feel something
at the end of bleak and tedious days?… In an era [of anxiety and future dread]
such as this, leaving the politics of emotion, of passion, to aspiring
autocrats is a dangerous abdication.
It is worth emphasizing that the
struggle against fascism and for a socialist democracy will not take place if
education is not made central to politics. Any attempt to further the language
of social, economic and racial justice will not be effective if it does not
construct a language of critique, possibility and desire. We need a language
that pedagogically moves people, makes power visible and creates communities of
belonging, justice and compassion. We need to continue to fight aggressively
the plague of silence with what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues is “the power to think the absent.” It is
only then that a critical public consciousness can be awakened, and a
multiracial working-class movement can begin to bring into fruition a
democratically socialist society.