Source: Tikkun
Reality now resembles a dystopian
world that could only be imagined as a harrowing work of fiction or biting
political commentary. The works of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and Sinclair
Lewis now appear as an understatement in a world marked by horrifying political
horizons — a world in which authoritarian
and medical pandemics merge.[1] In this age of uncertainty, time and space
have collapsed into a void of relentless apprehension and the possibility of an
authoritarian abyss. The terrors of everyday life point to a world that has
descended into darkness.
The COVID-19 crisis has amplified a surrealist hallucination that floods our
screens and media with images of fear, trepidation, and dread. We can no longer
shake hands, embrace our friends, use public transportation, sit inside a
restaurant, go to a movie theater or walk down the street without experiencing
real anxiety and stress. Doorknobs, packages, counters, the breath we exhale
and anything else that offers the virus a resting place is comparable to a
ticking bomb ready to explode resulting in massive suffering and untold deaths.
Amid this collective terror, the architecture of fascist politics has
resurfaced with a vengeance in the form of a waking nightmare with a cast of
horrors. Surveillance technologies proliferate, armed militia defend groups
refusing to wear protective masks, conspiracy theories originate or are
legitimated by President Trump, right-wing federal judges are appointed a
right-wing Senate at breakneck speed in order to destroy civil
liberties,. Republican politicians and reactionary media pundits use
vitriolic language against almost anyone who criticizes Trump’s destructive and
death-dealing policies, including Democratic governors and liberal and
progressive members of the press and media.
The current coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical crisis; it is also a
political and ideological crisis. It is a crisis deeply rooted in years of
neglect by neoliberal governments that denied the importance of public health
and the public good while defunding institutions that made them possible. At
the same time, this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive
inequalities in wealth, income and power that grew relentlessly since the
1970s.[2] Nor can it be separated from a crisis of democratic values, critical
education and civic literacy.[3] With respect to the latter, the COVID-19
pandemic is deeply
interconnected with the politicization of the social order through the
destructive assaults waged by neoliberal capital on the welfare state and the
ecosystem.[4]
The pandemic has revealed the ugly and cruel face of neoliberalism, which has
waged war on the social contract, public sphere and the welfare state
since the 1970s. Neoliberalism is a worldview that takes as its central
organizing idea that the market should govern not only the economy but all
aspects of society.[5] This is a worldview that vilifies the public sphere,
rejects the social contract and public values; at the same time, it promotes
untrammeled self-interest and privatization as central governing principles. In
this logic, “individual interests are the only reality that matters and
those interests are purely monetary.”[6]
Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market, limits society to
the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed hedonism and
challenges the very idea of the common good. In addition, neoliberalism
cannot be disconnected from the spectacle of fear-mongering, ultranationalism,
anti-immigrant sentiment and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist
as a means of promoting shared anxieties rather than shared responsibilities.
Neoliberal capitalism has created, through its destruction of the economy,
environment, education and public health, a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc
and wide-scale destruction.
What is clear is that the COVID-19 plague must also be understood as part of
a more comprehensive political and educational narrative in which neoliberalism
plays a central role. In this case, we cannot separate the struggle for public
health from the struggles for emancipation, social equality, economic justice
and democracy itself. The horror of the pandemic often blinds us to the fact
that a range of anti-democratic economic and political forces have been
grinding away at the social order for the last 40 years. As engaged citizens,
it is crucial to examine the anti-democratic and iniquitous political, economic
and social forces that have intensified the pandemic while failing to contain
it. This is especially true at a time when a growing number of authoritarian
regimes around the globe replace thoughtful dialogue and critical engagement
with the suppression of dissent and a culture of forgetting. This does not only
include the usual suspects such as Turkey and Hungary, but also allegedly democratic countries such as England, where
government officials recently “ordered schools … not to use resources from
organizations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism.”[7] This state
act of censorship should remind us that fascism begins with language, the
suppression of critical ideas, the undermining of institutions that support
them, and finally with the elimination of groups considered undesirable and
disposable.
How do we situate our analysis of white supremacy, nativism and the
suppression of dissent as part of a broader discourse and mode of analysis that
interrogates the promises, ideals and claims of a substantive democracy?
What role does the legacy and continued force of systemic racism play in the
virus disproportionately infecting and killing poor people of color? How do we
fight against iniquitous relations of power and wealth that empty power of its
emancipatory possibilities, and as Hannah Arendt has argued, “makes most people
superfluous as human beings”? How might we understand how a society driven by
the accumulation of capital at any costs, with its appropriation of market-based
values and regressive notions of freedom and agency, uses language to
infiltrate daily life? These are not merely economic and political issues but
also educational considerations.
Oppressive forms of education have now become central elements of a society
threatened by a number of pandemics that threaten human life and the planet
itself. The propaganda machines of the right-wing media echo the Trump regime’s
support for conspiracy theories, lies about testing and fake cures for the
virus, all the while engaging in a politics of evasion that covers up both
Trump’s incompetence and the machineries of violence, greed, and terminal
exclusion at the core of a society that believes the market is the template for
governing not just the economy but all aspects of society. One consequence is
that truth, evidence and science fall prey to the language of mystification,
which legitimates a tsunami of ignorance and the further collapse of morality
and civic courage.
What the COVID-19 pandemic reveals in shocking images of long food lines,
the stacking of dead bodies and the state-sanctioned language of social
Darwinism and racial cleansing is that a war culture has become an extension of
politics and functions as a form of repressive education in which critical thought
is derailed, dissent suppressed, surveillance normalized, racism intensified,
and ignorance elevated to a virtue. This pandemic has made clear the false and
dangerous market-driven ideological notion that all problems are a matter of
individual responsibility and that the state is simply the tool of the ruling
financial elite.
Neoliberal ideology now works in tandem with corporate media conglomerates
to produce identities defined narrowly by market values, while normalizing a
notion of individual responsibility that convinces people that whatever
problems they face, they have no one to blame but themselves. Right-wing
media platforms such as Breitbart News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and the
Rush Limbaugh podcast reproduce endlessly the falsehoods, misrepresentations
and lies that sustain the conditions that disproportionately produce chronic
illness among poor people of color and contribute to the acceleration rise of
infections and deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is a strain of pernicious neoliberal commonsense and public pedagogy
that celebrates unchecked self-interest, disdains civic freedoms, scorns
scientific evidence and turns away from the reality of a society with
deep-seated institutional rot and the continuous unraveling of social
connections and the social contract. Americans do not simply inhabit a deeply
divided country, which has become the phrase of the day among the liberal
media, but a war culture.
Everyday life has taken on the character of a war zone. The walls and cement
barriers now surrounding Trump’s White House signify a mode of governance
wedded to both a warlike mentality and an expansive culture of cruelty and
ruthlessness, most clearly visible in the police violence waged against poor
people of color. The latter is a murderous violence enabled and encouraged by
the white supremacist ideology at the center of the Trump administration. State
violence hides behind the power of a badge as the police terrorize the spaces
in which Black people drive, conduct their everyday lives, walk the streets and
sleep.
What are the ideologies, institutions and spectrum of injustice in America
that allow the police to kill, with impunity, Breonna Taylor while she slept in
her own home? What allows a police officer to believe without a modicum of
self-reflection that he could brutally kill George Floyd by pinning him to the
ground and kneeling on his neck until he showed no signs of life? What order of
injustice allows the police to shoot, on different occasions, Philando Castile
and Jacob Blake while their children were in the back seat of their car? What
is the connective tissue between the brazen forms of police brutality at work
in American society, the violence Trump calls for and enables among his
right-wing extremist followers, and the organizing principles of violence at
work in Trump’s policies?
The culture of violence runs deep in American society. For example, Attorney
General Bill Barr allowed military forces to attack demonstrators in the
streets outside the White House so that Trump could walk to a nearby church and
pose for a photo op, while ironically holding up a Bible — all the while giving
new meaning to a display of fascist agitprop. It is worth noting that
Trump referred to the right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis who marched in a hate
rally in Charlottesville in 2017 in which Heather Heyer was killed as including
some “very fine people” while calling protesters who marched against racism and
police violence “thugs,” “terrorists” and “anarchists.” Trump is not just deaf
to the violence being provoked by vigilantes, armed extremists and right-wing
militia groups around the country, he
encourages their actions.[8]
Such spectacularized violence cannot be abstracted from those political and
economic forces driving hyper-capitalism, ultranationalism and the politics of
racial sorting, spiraling poverty and soaring inequality. These rapacious
economic structures extend from a predatory financial sector to big
corporations that produce massive misery, engage in unchecked exploitation,
plunder the public sector and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a
ruling elite. This war culture also assaults every element of the welfare
state.
The current stage of hyper-capitalism has waged war on the social contract,
public sphere and the public good for the last four decades. One consequence
has been the publicly owned bones of society — public education, roads,
bridges, levees, water systems — have been underfunded and in many ways pushed
to the breaking point of disrepair and dysfunctionality. Moreover this attack
on the welfare state and the common good is increasingly legitimated and
normalized through tyrannical forms of education in a variety of sites,
especially in the broader cultural sphere. This is a space in which perverse
ignorance, the disdain of science, the repudiation of evidence and conspiracy theories
are produced not only at the highest levels of government but also in the media
and other cultural apparatuses — such as conservative talk radio and Fox News
in the U.S., which David
Enrich describes as playing a “democracy-decaying role as a White House
propaganda organ masquerading as conservative journalism.”[9] Fox News and a
number of other conservative cultural apparatuses function ideologically and
politically to objectify people of color, promote spectacles of violence,
endorse consumerism as the only viable expression of citizenship, and
legitimate a language of exclusion, bigotry and white nationalism. One
consequence is deep-seated anxiety, loneliness, cynicism and profound emptiness
at the heart of American society, coupled with an accelerating culture of
cruelty and white supremacy.
Unfortunately, the political, medical and economic crises Americans are
experiencing have not been matched by a crisis of ideas — that is, a critical
understanding of the conditions that produced the crises in the first place.
Yet the U.S. and several other countries are in the midst of a medical, racial,
political, economic and educational crisis that touches every aspect of public
life. Fascist politics no longer hides behind the call for market freedoms,
small government and individual expressions of freedom. For example, Trump’s
hatred of dissent not only reveals itself in his view of the free press as an
“enemy of the people,” but also in his disdain for any institution that does
not promote the willful narrative of white nationalism. How else to explain his
call for a commission to establish what he embarrassingly labeled “patriotic
education,” a term one associates with dictatorial and fascist regimes?
Trump’s admiration for racial purity and “his ongoing eugenics fixation” has
been expressed in his lavish
praise for what he called the “good genes” of an overwhelmingly white
audience in Minnesota.[10] This is the menacing logic of a eugenicist rhetoric
that disdains bad genes, and hence willingly labels some groups as undesirable
and subject to terminal exclusion. There is more at stake here than an
investment in racial purity; there is also the willingness to erase and rewrite
historical memory, especially the history of racial oppression. This may be
most obvious in Trump’s criticism of the New York Times’ 1619 Project,
which teaches students about the history of slavery. There is more at stake
here than the divisive
rhetoric of a president who is “a gift to polarization.”[11] This is an
ominous language that both echoes a horrifying and dangerous historical period
and normalizes the mobilizing passions of an updated fascism. This is a
language that, as Adam Weinstein of the New Republic observes, reveals a
government that inflames partisan positions that creates chaotic contexts not
unlike those that enabled fascist movements to come to power in Germany and
Italy in the 1930s.[12] He further argues that the Trump administration
represents a gangster state that has “reached an important stage of fascist
maturity”:
It is time to embrace the parallels, to be unafraid to speak a clear truth:
Whether by design or lack of it, Donald Trump and the Republican Party operate
an American state that they have increasingly organized on fascist principles.
It is also time to consider what else the fascists may yet do, during an
unprecedented pandemic, amid unprecedented unemployment, faced with
unprecedented resistance ahead of an unprecedented election.[13]
As part of a broader autocratic maneuver, Trump has made clear that he will
not agree to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election. Not only
has he questioned the legitimacy of the upcoming election which the polls
indicate he will lose, he has also nominated a prospective right-wing Supreme
Court justice whose
presence may play a crucial role in enabling him to secure his re-election
if he contests it.[14] Under such circumstances, fascist politics is now
embraced by him, his sycophantic political allies, and his followers without
apology. Antonio Gramsci’s notion that as the old dies and the new order has
yet to emerge, a new form of barbarism can appear, seems more prescient than
ever and has become increasingly visible under a Trump era which mirrors a
frightening reality.
It is worth repeating that most of the globe is experiencing a new
historical period produced by a hyper-capitalist neoliberal system that is at
odds with any just, prudent and equitable notion of the future. This is a
system which since the 1970s, with its tools of financialization, deregulation
and austerity, has transformed American society, if not most of the world, in
pernicious ways. We now live in an age in which economic activity is divorced
from social costs, all the while enabling policies of racial cleansing,
militarism and white nationalism along with staggering levels of inequality
that have become the defining features of everyday life and established modes
of governance. The economic brutality and barbarism of neoliberal capital has
joined forces with the forces of white supremacy and white nationalism to
create an updated form of neoliberal fascism.[15]
We get glimpses of this new political formation in Trump’s massive tax
giveaway to the ultra-rich and his reversal of policy regulations designed to
protect workers, the public and the environment. Trump’s White House has become
a monument to white nationalism. Consider Trump’s defense of Confederate
monuments and his support for racial sorting, his formulation of suburbs as
white public spheres, his attempt to pass laws that deny citizenship to
particular groups, and his definition of cities as dark enclaves of
criminality, all of which echoes a history rooted in earlier forms of fascism.
Most recently, in his first presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump refused
to denounce white supremacy while signaling
his support to members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, to
“stand back and stand by.”
His inflammatory remarks not only revealed his tribute to white supremacy
and his willingness to stoke racial fears but also his support for right-wing
extremist groups to continue using violence to promote social change. Trump has
made it clear that he is a candidate for aggrieved white Americans and that he
is willing to fan the flames of hatred and bigotry. His racist remarks reveal
the degree to which he has turned democracy into ashes.
American fascism presents itself in the form of unabashed white supremacy, a
defense of nativism, the longing for a strongman, a cult of ignorance that
denies scientific evidence, the elevation of emotion over reason, a disregard
for the law and civil liberties, an enthusiasm for using armed militias to
attack protesters and a celebration
of the enabling rhetoric of violence.[16] Nativist populism as one register
of an updated notion of American fascism has a long history in the United
States. What is different today is that it occupies the center of power in the
White House. Sarah
Churchwell argues persuasively that fascism has resurfaced in America and
that “it draws on familiar national customs to insist it is merely conducting
political business as usual.” She writes:
American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism,
but that doesn’t mean they’re not fascist, it means they’re not European and
it’s not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of
nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic
folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability
or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the
demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of
the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar
fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times.
Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.[17]
Fascism in America has never gone away, it simply exists in different forms,
often at the margins of society. In its updated form, American neoliberal
fascism does not need to make a spectacle of swastikas, jackboots, or Nazi
salutes, or to call for sending those considered disposable to concentration
camps. Fascism today wraps itself in local customs, ultra-nationalism, the
rhetoric of purification, the flag, and Nuremberg-like spectacles — and
legitimates itself not by banishing the media but by controlling it. Moreover,
the tropes of fascism are being mainstreamed in the midst of a plague that
reinforces what Bill Dixon
calls “the protean origins of totalitarianism … loneliness as the normal
register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass
poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political
instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and
warfare.”[18]
As I have said elsewhere, talk of a fascist politics emerging in the United
States and in the rise of right-wing populist movements across the globe is
often criticized as a naive exaggeration or a misguided historical analogy. In
the age of Trump, such objections feel like reckless efforts to deny the
growing relevance of the term and the danger posed by a society staring into
the abyss of a menacing authoritarianism. In fact, the case can be made that
rather than harbor an element of truth, such criticism further normalizes the
very fascism it critiques, allowing the extraordinary and implausible, if not
unthinkable, to become ordinary. Under such circumstances, history is not
simply being ignored or distorted, it is being erased. In this instance, the
claim of moral witnessing disappears. Moreover, after decades of a savage
global capitalist nightmare both in the United States and around the globe, the
mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen
since the 1930s.
This is a fascism that not only grants impunity to the ultra-rich and big
corporations, regardless of their criminogenic behavior, but also exhibits a
disdain for weakness and a propensity for violence. It poisons the air we
breathe and thrives on producing widespread misery. In its current forms, the checks
and balances that liberals point to as an impregnable defense against fascism
in America appear quaint if not delusional in the face of Trump’s frontal
assault on all the institutions that shore up a democratic society along with
his increasing use of state violence to squash dissent. As Peter
Maass points out in the Intercept:
…the accessories and devices of dictatorship have expanded with infectious
ruthlessness in American cities. The police swinging batons wildly, the
paramilitary forces refusing to identify themselves, the hysterical president
trying to incite war, the vigilantes in league with the police, military
helicopters clattering overhead, the general marching in the streets in combat
fatigues, the state TV network losing its tales of sabotage and mayhem —
it’s all there, loud and clear.[19]
Turning away from the horrors of updated fascism can be both complicitous
and dangerous. While there is no
perfect fit between Trump and the historical fascist politics of leaders
such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet, “the basic tenets of extreme nationalism,
racism, misogyny, and a hatred for democracy and the rule of law are too
similar to ignore.[20]
The COVID-19 plague cannot be separated from a broader plague of
hyper-capitalism, right-wing populism, and surge of fascist politics around the
globe. These forces represent the underside of the COVID-19 pandemic and
relentlessly subject workers, the disabled, the homeless, the poor, children,
people of color and, more recently, frontline hospital and emergency workers
and all others considered at risk to lives of despair, precarity, massive
danger and, in some cases, death.[21] At the roots of this larger pandemic is
an unbridled lawlessness and deep-seated disdain for critical thought,
meaningful forms of education and any mode of analysis that holds power
accountable. The pandemic has revealed the toxic underside of a form of
neoliberal fascism with its assault on the welfare state, its undermining of
public health, its attack on workers’ rights and its prioritizing of the
economy and the accumulation of capital over human needs and life itself.
The full-blown pandemic has revealed in all its ugliness the death-producing
mechanisms of systemic inequality, deregulation, a culture of cruelty, the
increasingly dangerous assault on the environment and an anti-intellectual
culture that derides any notion of critical education. Beneath the massive
failure of leadership from the Trump administration lies the long history of
concentrated power in the hands of the one percent, shameless corporate
welfare, political corruption, the legacy of racial violence, and the merging
of money and politics to deny the most vulnerable access to health care, a
living wage, worker protection and strong labor movements capable of
challenging corporate power and the cruelty of austerity and right-wing
policies that maim, cripple and kill hundreds of thousands, as is evident in
the current pandemic.
The brutality of casino capitalism, with its hyped-up version of social
Darwinism, is now openly defended by Trump and many Republican governors in
their call to reopen the economy and undercut or eliminate protective measures
that would slow the pace of the virus. Most at risk are those populations who
have been considered disposable such as poor people of color, undocumented
immigrants, the racially incarcerated, the elderly warehoused in nursing homes
and the working class. These populations are now told to sacrifice their lives
in the interest of filling the coffers of the corporate elite.
At the same time, the claims of neoliberal capitalism have been broken and
what was once unthinkable is now being said in public by large groups of
people. Young people are calling for a new narrative to repair the safety net,
provide free health care, child care, elder care and quality public schools for
everyone. There are loud calls to address state violence, and the plagues of
poverty, homelessness and the pollution of the planet. The spirit of democratic
socialism is in the air. The pandemic crisis has shattered the myth that
each of us is defined exclusively by our self-interest and as individuals are
solely responsible for the problems we face. Both myths run the risk of
breaking down as it becomes obvious that, as the pandemic unfolds, shortages in
crucial medical equipment, lack of testing, lack of public investments and
failed public health services are largely due to right-wing neoliberal measures
such as regressive tax policies and bloated military budgets that have drained
resources from public health, public goods and other vital social institutions
such as public and higher education.
The pandemic has torn away the cover of a neoliberal economic system marked
by what Thomas Piketty calls “the violence of social inequality.”[22]
Inequality is a toxin that destroys lives, democratic institutions and civic
culture and it is normalized through politicians and a right-wing media culture
reduced to sounding boards for the rich and powerful. Former British Prime
Minister Margaret
Thatcher’s infamous quip that “there’s no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women and there are families” no longer holds the status of
neoliberal common sense in a society in which matters of social responsibility
and strong, morally responsive government institutions are crucial in order to
fight the pandemic and the economic and political conditions that worsen its
effects.[23]
If neoliberalism contributed to the unraveling of social connections and the
institutions that support them, the pandemic has made clear how vital such
connections are to both the public health of a society and its democratic
institutions. As social spheres are privatized, commercialized and
individualized, it becomes difficult to translate private issues into systemic
considerations, inequality becomes normalized, and the pandemic crisis is
isolated from the political, economic, social and cultural conditions that fuel
it.
The ideological virus-plague has as one of its roots a politics of
depoliticization and normalization. It attempts to rob people of their sense of
agency, all the while making the unthinkable matters of alleged common sense.
Through a variety of market-based assumptions and pedagogical practices, it
works to undermine and normalize those ideas, values, modes of identification,
and desires that enable individuals to become critically engaged
actors.
Crucial to any politics of resistance is the necessity to take seriously the
notion that education is central to politics itself, and that social problems
have to be critically understood before people can act as a force for
empowerment and liberation. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, matters of
criticism, informed judgment, and critical modes of understanding are crucial
in making a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, life, and death.
The stark choices regarding what the future might look like appear to hang
between the forces of despotism and democracy. Yet as ominous as this
foreboding appears, history is open, and how it will unfold hangs in the
balance. The pandemic is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a
catastrophe in which all hope is lost. While this pandemic threatens
democracy’s ability to breathe, it should also offer up the possibility to
rethink politics and the habits of critical education, human agency, and
elements of social responsibility crucial to any viable notion of what life
would be like in a democratic socialist society. Amid the corpses produced by
neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, there are also flashes of hope, a chance to
move beyond the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism. Beyond the
normalizing ideologies of a poisonous cynicism and paralyzing conformity
endemic to neoliberal capitalism, there is a growing movement to reclaim a
collective political vision that is more compassionate, equitable, just, and
inclusive.
In spite of the ugly terror of a fascist abyss that lurks in the background
of the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic can teach us that democracy is fragile as
“a way of life” and that if it is to survive, critical education, civic
courage, historical consciousness, moral witnessing and political outrage must
become central elements of a pedagogical practice capable of producing citizens
who are informed, politically aware and willing to struggle to keep justice,
equity and the principles of a socialist democracy alive. Rosa Luxemburg’s
once-celebrated claim that under capitalism humanity faces a choice between
“socialism or barbarism” is more appropriate today than in her own time at the
beginning of the 20th century.
The pandemic has done more than expose the cult of capitalism and its
production of social inequities operating on a vast scale in the U.S. and
around the globe. It has also revealed the inner workings of a Trump government
that has been more concerned about the health of the economy than saving lives,
especially the lives of those marginalized by color, class, age and
pre-existing health conditions. Because of Trump’s failure to address the
crisis, the United States has been turned into a giant cemetery. Trump lied
about the severity of the virus, calling it no more dangerous than the flu,
even saying it would just disappear. He admitted to journalist Bob Woodward
that the virus was deadly and airborne and that millions of people could get
infected, sick and die. He flouted the advice of scientific experts and put
incompetents in positions of power to shape health policies. Moreover, as the
virus spread throughout the country, Trump disregarded the advice of medical
and health experts and held indoor rallies in cities around the United States,
impervious to the danger large group gatherings posed to his followers. After
downplaying the virus since its inception while modeling behavior that promotes
it, going so far as to treat mask-wearing as a weakness while ridiculing his
rival Joe Biden for wearing one, Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, have
tested positive for Covid-19. For four years, this administration has lied,
deceived the public, and undermined the health and safety of the nation. Events
have now caught up with Trump’s world of deceit, lies, and willful
ignorance, and he has to bear the fate of his own hypocrisy and moral
failing. What is crucial here is that Trump is not the only the victim of
his own inept leadership and the disdain of health experts and the laws of
science. More importantly, because of his lack of leadership the economy
tanked, millions lost their jobs, at least 208,000 people have died, and more
than 7.3 million are infected. Trump did not deserve this virus, but neither
did the people who contracted it because his irresponsible and vicious
disregard for the lives of others. Trump has blood on his hands, and his
failure to address the pandemic’s reach, severity, and danger is no longer an
issue he can ignore.
Calls to remove Trump from office, raise the minimum wage, support decent
and safe work, offer access to affordable housing, provide universal health
care, lower prescription drug costs, provide free quality education to
everyone, expand infrastructure, defund the police and military, and invest in
community services are important reforms, but they do not deal with the larger
issue of eliminating a market-driven economic system structured in massive
racial and economic inequalities. Renowned educator David
Harvey is right to argue that the “immediate task is nothing more nor less
than the self-conscious construction of a new political framework for
approaching the question of inequality [and racism], through a deep and
profound critique of our economic and social system.” [24]The battle against
capitalism can only take place through a movement that unites its disparate
movements for social justice, emancipation and economic equality.
This is a crisis in which different threads of oppression must be understood
as part of the general crisis of capitalism. The various protests now evolving
internationally at the popular level offer the promise of new global movements
for the struggle for popular sovereignty and economic, racial and social
justice. Central to this struggle is the challenge of destroying the neoliberal
global order. In the current moment, democracy may be under a severe threat and
appear frighteningly vulnerable, but with young people and others rising up
across the globe — inspired, energized and marching in the streets — the future
of a radical democracy is waiting to be reimagined, if not reborn. Democracy
needs to breathe again, inspired by collective struggles to dismantle the
machinery of social death at the heart of neoliberal fascist empire.
