'In her new book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, Ijeoma Oluo, author of the best seller So You Want to Talk About Race, looks at how White men in America have preserved their power for generations -- and the consequences that's had for all of us. She argues that overlooking white male mediocrity has helped devalue college education, promoted leadership styles that have hurt business, and prevented progress on major issues like police brutality and gerrymandering.
Augusta Savage, Portrait Head of John Henry, ca. 1940. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The John Axelrod Collection
See How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men
Harriet Washington is an award-winning science writer and medical ethicist. She's the author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History Of Medical Experimentation On Black Americans From Colonial Times To The Present." & Deadly Monopolies:The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself–And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future
Howard Nicholas is an internationally-renowned economist who explains in a brutally honest & studied way how and why the Western countries ensure Africa stays poor & begging for the sake of survival of the rich, developed world.
Also check this lecture as further evidence of the West's diabolical agenda for the people/nations of the South:
Bill Moyers talks with noted lawyer Steven Harper and distinguished historian Heather Cox Richardson about threats to democracy. “When you have a society that loses respect for the rule of law, you lose civilization. There is an enormous price that gets paid.” — Steven Harper
Source: Medium
“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.” — Theodore W. Allen
“There’s nothing that a white man with a penny hates more than a n--ger with a nickel!” — Chris Rock
It started in the late 1600s in America, but like so many scams, it spiraled out of control until it had a life of its own.
Not long after Europeans started arriving on the east coast of North America and the Caribbean Islands they found themselves rich in land but desperate for labor to work the land. The answer they struck upon was importation of bond labor, initially mostly Irish. The Irish had not been considered fully human under English law for centuries, and they ended up in plantations and working sugar under the Caribbean sun. The easy part of importing Irish (and Scottish) slave labor was that they were right next to England. The downside is there wasn’t enough of them for the amazing amounts of land laid before the eager English settlers, and thus the Atlantic slave trade with Africa was born. This is the story we hear in school, but the abridged version we get, intentionally or not, hides the scam of it. Initially the bond terms of convict, Scotch-Irish, and African labor was a set period of time, at the end of which they received bond money and their freedom in this new land. In fact, not that many bondsmen and women lived to be free, but some did, and established themselves as a mixed-race, free peasantry of the new world. If you’ve ever wondered where the free blacks of so many stories of early America came from, a large number were the families of freed African bond laborers.
As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.
The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.
As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom. The whites were told this was because God had made the blacks inferior to the whites, just as the whites were inferior to the superior classes that owned property. It’s worthwhile to remember that they didn’t give whites political rights, they didn’t give whites the vote — that would not happen then nor at the revolution and independence. Whites didn’t get the vote until the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Property owners, both of land and slaves, were the only ones who could vote. That included black land and slave owners until various states passed laws in the early 18th century to take their franchise away.
This plan worked gorgeously. It broke all efforts of the majority of people, African or European, to fight for civil and political rights in America against a landed class that literally ruled everything. It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.
If this seems like a crazy way for people to behave, it’s important to think about what was believed about the natural order of things back in the 1600s. Nowadays, we don’t really think about class as a thing that often, and certainly not a natural thing. But when white and black people were conceived, the idea of class was literally believed to be handed down from God. Aristocracy flowed from the divine right of kings, and by their blood or elevation. The poor were poor because God so wished it. Keeping peasants in line and using them to their fullest was what the aristocracy was for, and the tactics that accomplished this were considered wise stewardship. Sometimes that meant concessions, and sometimes divide and conquer, but as long as you didn’t have peasant rebellions, you were doing a good job. This view of the world, never universal but powerful and prevalent, held on in one form or another for a very long time. It infected the views of British, Spanish, Dutch, and French imperial masters all over. The powerful were those God had chosen, and those in their power were chosen by God to be of use. While fainter, this idea is so strong it still leaks into the modern era in places like the atheological ideas of Prosperity Christianity. In the frame of mind of aristocracy and a divinely ordained ruling class, such a plan to reorder people and make them pliant was understood to be a move of genius blessed by god and king, if it worked.
This plan worked, in fact it worked so well it became the blueprint for the next few centuries of colonization, revised and spread all over the world, even beyond the conception of white and black.
As the aristocrats and their successors traveled around the world through the colonial age, Europeans all over would find or define a group within the colonial territory and elevate it above the other groups, give it some privileges, though never enough to challenge the intruding rulers. In exchange for this slightly elevated status, the rulers would make those people do the colonial dirty work, and usually keep them slightly more well off than their fellows. Over time, these slightly elevated people often tried to keep their European masters in power even after the people realized how evil colonialism was, maintaining the system both to keep above their fellows and out of fear of retaliation for the dirty work they’d done. The most familiar contemporary case of this practice people will recognize is the Belgian categorization of Tutsis and Hutus, and the tragedy that still hangs over that arrangement over a century later. But really, the idea started in Virginia.
The invented category of white people is still the largest case of this colonial strategy in the world. Whiteness was not always invented in opposition to chattel slavery, even in America. As the newly invented whites pushed West, they were reinvented in opposition to the existence of other people inconveniently on the land the newcomers believed God had ordained to them as their destiny. Elsewhere, they were reinvented as the able administrators, the teachers and ministers, and God’s own technocrats, both bettering and properly using the non-white world. Each invention of whiteness was a new permutation, but each one also harkened back to the ur-form of Virginia: God made the whites to serve kings, and everyone else to serve whites. Today, corporations and the remains of colonial systems have reduced the vast majority of those in the arbitrary category of white people to drafted screws for a global forced-labor prison camp.
The great thing about the divide-and-conquer of creating white-skin privilege is that you don’t have to give people thusly bought off anything more, and American power structures didn’t. In places with black slavery, the whites suffered terribly.
There is a simple truth to American history for the majority of people who have ever been American: the worse the black experience, the worse everyone else’s experience, including whites. Driving down (or eliminating) black wages, while always agreeable to whites, drove white pay lower than their European counterparts for most of our history. The labor movement that got its start in America took longer to make progress here, especially in terms of hours and working conditions, largely because employers pitted whites against black or immigrant labor, splitting the movement. Civil and political rights in America only ever had to be better for whites than they were for blacks, preserving that furious inch of superiority that was the defining quality of whites. To this day poor whites are the most intransigent racists — left by an exploitative and violent system without education, access to food and medical care, or even the basic necessities of life in the developed world. In this state their only precious possession is the idea of whiteness Virginian aristocracy blessed them with hundreds of years ago.
So privilege doesn’t really work for the people who have it, or at least not the way many people imagine it does. Some white privileges are basic human rights, like the right to live where you wish in safety from your neighbors and the local police. Others shouldn’t be privileges for anyone at all, like preferred medical treatment based on race. White privilege is sold to whites, but it is the socio-political equivalent of putting “Contains No Arsenic!” on a breakfast cereal box. White folk have bought into that message tremendously. I mean, who wants a breakfast cereal with arsenic in it? Of course, the problem is there’s no reason cereal should ever have arsenic in it in the first place.
Just to keep things plausible, the political arsenic keeps getting introduced into the metaphorical food supply. Perpetual bondage as chattel slaves, Jim Crow, and the current drug war are things terrible enough that white people are happy to accept getting out of them, and into a failed health insurance system, outrageous levels of military spending, failing schools for their children, and even actual arsenic in their food supply. The idea that people should be denied rights because of an organizing principle of 17th century aristocratic control baffles conception, even as it shapes our practical and political lives on a daily basis. It is to the political benefit of the existing system to keep whites, especially poor whites with little more than their whiteness to be proud of. It makes for a predictable political group. Whites thus managed will vote and flock to issues as reliably as tides.
The situation is deeply miserable, even for those living slightly higher up on the shit pile. The biggest two indicators that someone will commit suicide in America are the two boxes they check on the census that are supposed to confer the most safety from misery, and the most advantage one could have in our society: white, and male. What could accuse privilege of failure more than seeking one’s own violent end?
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
— W.E.B. DuBois
The very happiest white men I know are those actively working towards ending racism and sexism, not necessarily professionally, but in all the small ways they learn to. Like people who work on space programs or meditate on rejoining the wonder of their conception of God, I believe an enduring and deep form of happiness arises from imagining a future that is better than the present, and feeling like you have the power to move the world towards it. Hope for the future is not only a good way to be happy, it is the best form of happiness, the most enduring, the most resistant. White people have been told they have it the best it can be had, they are told by power structures, the media, and the people disadvantaged by a global system where overwhelmingly the poorest are not considered white. Thankfully, this pernicious and alienating thought is untrue — a world without our present power structures is one of amazing possibilities, with art and play and dreams of space and life made wondrous beyond imagining.
It’s hard to want anything to change when you’re comfortable, and it is the particular quality of humans, both wonderful and terrible, to get as comfortable as they can where they are. Contentment doesn’t really depend on how much stuff you have, or even how safe you are. Whites in terrible circumstances have often looked at blacks and decided their lives were fine. But there is so much more we all could have.
We’ve spent the last few hundred years throwing out every Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk or Tim Berners-Lee who didn’t happen to be white, and didn’t happen to be a man. That’s a terrible thing to have done to those brilliant and now lost people. It’s a much worse thing to have done to the rest of humanity, including our white selves. When I think, “why don’t I have a jet car and live in Alpha Centuri by now?” I think this is because the people that would have invented sky cars and interstellar travel were born black in Detroit, or in rural India or in the medina in Algiers in the 1950s, and spent too much time figuring out how to eat and not get killed to invent my damned skycar.
White exceptionalism runs to both negatives and positives. Whether whites are seen as intellectually and spiritually superior or morally abhorrent, the argument that whites are intrinsically different from the rest of humanity has all the same flaws as any such argument. There are no intrinsically innocent and wise peoples of the earth, we are all the same wonderful and terrible creatures. Every community produces gentle geniuses and violent monsters. If we accept the normality of white people—and this proposition has in its favor overwhelming evidence: circumstance, (the arbitrariness of whiteness) history, (the universality of both human crimes and genius) and physiology (the genetic difference among “white” is pretty much the same as any group of white and non-whites)—this leaves us looking to social systems and systems of power for the sources of our social problems, which seems pretty sensible, when you think about it.
Just as American exceptionalism has been used to prevent sensible change—“Americans have the best healthcare in the world! We must retain the present system to keep that!” (Hint: America does not, in fact, have the best healthcare in the world)—white exceptionalism has been used to keep whites and non-whites from asking why society doesn’t work in obviously more sensible ways.
We can’t undo hundreds of years of cultural programing in a stroke, but the principles of black liberation begin to point a way out of all this for everyone, not just blacks. There are many great lessons to pick up from movements against the status quo across the 20th century and even before, but none in my study so singularly covers the issues that plague both white people and even the existence of our speck of a planet so much as black liberation. Black liberation is comprehensive — it touches on economics, social values, mutual care, environmental systems and problems of pollution, and even the availability and quality of food.
White exceptionalism, and even the elitism of old, finds their end in this age of global troubles. There is no sanity in maintaining these standards of difference. All our children share one destiny — to live their lives at the bottom of the same polluted gravity well, trying, and usually failing, to get their needs met as the acid seas encroach the land and the great variety of life dies before us.
Hubert Harrison was right to say that the black experience tests and proves the modern democratic idea, but he didn’t go far enough for the current age. In the system that created white supremacy and black persecution, nearly all of our causes lie trapped in the swamp of white mythology, all our hopeful futures slowly drowning in it. No one living is responsible for creating this system, and no one living is really at fault for being caught in its workings. But there is no deus ex machina that will descend from the heavens and set it right. We will have to reach across this chasm ourselves. White people must join the world in fighting the pernicious ideas that created their category. Not because it is merely moral, but because without arriving at the principles contained in black liberation, humanity as we know it will surely pass from this earth.
Writers speak the unspeakable and the closer you get to it, the more real it is, which is part of making life possible for those who come after.
– Arthur Miller
Throughout his entire life, Noam Chomsky has used his knowledge, skills, and stature as a public intellectual to advocate for a radical change in societies that have failed to live to the promises and ideals of a radical democracy. Chomsky has made clear that intellectuals, artists, educators, and other cultural workers have a responsibility to use education to address grave social problems such as the threat of nuclear war, ecological devastation, and the sharp deterioration of democracy. And he has done it by communicating in multiple spheres to diverse audiences. His academic work and public interventions have become a model for enriching public life and addressing staggering forms of economic inequality, needless wars, and class and racial injustices. He has worked tirelessly to inspire individuals and social movements to unleash the energy, insights, and passion necessary to keep alive the spirit, promises, and ideals of a radical democracy. He models his own work on the responsibility of intellectuals by drawing from a wide variety of disciplinary fields and in doing so embraces a notion of education that turns intellectuals and cultural workers into border crossers and refiners of the moral imagination. This talk is dedicated to his courage and relentless spirit of resistance.
Across the globe, democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege. The promise, if not ideals, of democracy are receding as right-wing populism and an updated version of fascist politics are once again on the move subverting language, values, courage, vision, and hope for a more just and humane world. In the current historical moment, we are witnessing a crisis of education, consciousness, civic imagination, and democratic values. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination as right-wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the poor, people of color, refugees, immigrants from the south and others considered disposable. In the midst of an era when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself, there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of great restlessness. The present moment is once again at a historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism are vying for shaping a future that appears to be either an unthinkable nightmare or a realizable dream.
The dark times that haunt the current age are epitomized by a new crop of authoritarians who echo the politics of a totalitarian past and have come to rule in the United States and a number of other societies. These architects of a new breed of fascist politics increasingly dominate major cultural apparatuses and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of all sorts of knowledge producing settings that construct a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet, and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. For instance, in the United States, Donald Trump’s shaping of political culture has become in many ways more toxic and damaging than his public policies given his undermining of the civic fabric, rule of law, and democracy itself. He normalized racism, state violence, hatred, and disinformation by not only bringing it to the center of power, but also by deeply embedding a toxic, death-dealing politics deep into American consciousness and culture. Trump used the term fake news as an instrument of power to disdain the truth and call the press the enemy of the American people. Anti-intellectualism and a hatred for the truth became the new normal in American culture. Under such circumstances, the growing reign of authoritarianism and right-wing popular movements waged a war on critical forms of education, regarded the truth with disdain, and disparaged the very presence of critical judgment in any sphere where civic literacy asserted itself. This plague of ignorance and culture of lies took place in the midst of a death dealing pandemic accelerated by a bungling mode of governance that disdained scientific evidence, played down the seriousness of the virus, offered no national plan to deal with the pandemic, and confused science with pseudo-science. As infections rose and deaths skyrocketed, the United States turned into a funeral home. Trump’s response was to focus relentlessly on the bogus claim that he won the presidential election while relentlessly attempting to legitimate and circulate a range of bizarre and utterly delusional right-wing conspiracy theories.
It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously the call to make education central to politics. The rule of authoritarianism is imposed less and less by military coups than it is through elections subverted by the force of oppressive forms of education that extend from the schools to the social media and other cultural apparatuses. The educational force of the cultural sphere is now amplified by the merging of power and new instruments of culture that have produced powerful sites of struggle in an effort to normalize and legitimate dominant ideas, values, and social relations. Making education central to politics means that any viable notion of education has to address the cultural forces shaping policies and society so as to create a formative culture in the service of democratic modes of agency, desires, and identities. If education is going to work in the service of democracy, it needs a new vision and language in which the call for real change resonates with the concrete needs, desires, values, and modes of identification that working-class people of every stripe can understand and relate to critically. As Stuart Hall, once pointed out without a politics of identification, there is no hope for education in the service of creating critically informed agents. At stake here is the notion that education is a social concept, one rooted in the goal of emancipation for all people. Moreover, this is an education that encourages the acquisition of forms of human agency that are not content to enable people only to become critical thinkers. They should also be engaged individuals and social agents willing to intervene in the shaping of society. This is a pedagogy that calls us beyond ourselves, and engages the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures of domination, and to become a subject rather than an object of history, politics, and power.
If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to create a political project infused with a language of critique and possibility, informed by the crucial notion that there is no substantive democracy without informed citizens. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of not only public goods, but also a democracy with the guarantee of not only civil and political rights, but also economic rights that ensure both dignity and a meaningful sense of agency.[1] Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and a number of other countries in Europe plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements and neo-Nazi parties. In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without informed and critically engaged citizens.
Education must be broadly understood as taking place in multiple sites and defined, in part, through its interrogation on the claims of democracy. As Ariel Dorfman argues it is time to create the cultural institutions and pedagogical conditions in multiple sites extending from the mainstream press to the online digital world in order “to unleash the courage, energy, joy and, yes, compassion with which rebellious millions [can] defy fear and keep hope alive in these traumatic times.”[2] As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, “important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion [making it all the more] important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination,”[3] This is an especially crucial demand at a time when the educational and pedagogical force of the culture works through and across multiple sites. Schooling is only one site of education, while movies, television, books, magazines, the Internet, social media, and music are incredibly significant forces in shaping world views, modes of agency, and diverse forms of identification. What this insight suggests is that academics, artists, intellectuals, and other cultural producers bear an enormous responsibility in addressing social problems, educating a broader public in ways that allow them to think critically and act with conviction and courage. They also need to support those institutions, public spaces, and cultural apparatuses where public issues can be debated, power held accountable, and intellectual inquiry is give the full range of its imaginative and critical possibilities.
The responsibility of public intellectuals also points, as C. W. Mills argues in The Sociological Imagination, to the work of translating private issues into larger systemic considerations, and to speak to people in ways that are accessible, awaken their sense of identification, and illuminate critically the conditions that bear down on their lives. As intellectuals, it is crucial to remember that there is no genuine democracy without the presence of citizens willing to hold power accountable, engage in forms of moral witnessing, break the continuity of common sense, and challenge the normalization of anti-democratic institutions, policies, ideas, and social relations.
In a time when truth has become malleable and Americans have been told that the only obligation of citizenship is to consume, language has become thinner, and more individualistic, detached from history and more self-oriented, all the while undermining viable democratic social spheres as spaces where politics brings people together as collective agents willing to push at the frontiers of the political and moral imagination. Americans have forgotten their civic lessons, and in doing so cede the ground of history to the purveyors of lies, militarism, and white supremacy. Trump’s support for the ideals of the Confederacy makes clear that language is a doorway that can lead to normalizing the horrors of the past. Risking the failure to learn from history, we fail to see elements of a horrendous past re-emerging as “an early warning system.”[4]
Making education central to politics suggests that as artists, researchers, and academics we ask uncomfortable questions about what Arundhati Roy calls “our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our ‘democratic institutions,’ the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community.”[5] Education has the task of creating the conditions in which people develop a collective sense of urgency that prompts a desire to learn how to govern and rather than learn merely how to be governed. Education for empowerment means creating informed and critically engaged social movements willing to fight the emotional plagues, economic inequality, human misery, systemic racism, and collapse of the welfare state caused by neoliberal capitalism and other forms of authoritarianism. Democracy’s survival depends upon a set of habits, values, ideas, culture, and institutions that can sustain it. Democracy is both fragile and always unfinished and its fate and future are not only a political issue but an educational one as well.
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical agency; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions, and social movements to come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.
Noam Chomsky’s work is infused with the notion that history is open, and that it is necessary for people to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if we want to imagine and bring into being alternative democratic futures and horizons of possibility. Chomsky’s importance in developing a vision infused with a mix of justice, hope, and struggle has never been more important than it is today. Moreover, in the face of the emerging tyranny and fascist politics that are spreading across the globe, it is time to heed his call to merge a sense of moral outrage with a sense of civic courage and collective action. At the very least, education is central to politics because it provides the foundation for those of us who believe that democracy is a site of struggle, which can only be engaged through an awareness of both its fragility and necessity. What we cannot do is look away. Goya was right when he warned, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”
OUR souls have touched each other,
Two fountains from one jet;
Like children of one mother
Our leaping thoughts have met.
We were as far asunder
As green isles in the sea;
And now we ask in wonder
How that could ever be.
I dare not call thee lover
Nor any earthly name,
Though love’s full cup flows over
As water quick with flame.
When two strong minds have mated
As only spirits may,
The world shines new created
In a diviner day.
Yea, though hard fate may sever
My fleeting self from thine,
Thy thought will live for ever
And ever grow in mine.
Source: Quartz
More than eighty years ago, a then-obscure German philosopher wrote an essay that foresaw the essential reason behind President Donald Trump's enduring political appeal. His name was Walter Benjamin; born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin was present for a pivotal moment in history, and watched Hitler rise to power. By the time he wrote his most famous essay, he was an exile living in France amidst financial hardships, having recognized that the Reichstag fire three years earlier signified that the Nazis had achieved total power in Germany.
In 1936 — as Hitler was violating international treaties with impunity and preparing Germany for war (a threat that many Western powers did not take seriously) — Benjamin, a Marxist and a Jew who was thus obviously opposed to the Nazis, postulated that modern fascists succeed when they are entertainers. Not just any entertainer — a circus clown or a juggler-turned-fascist wouldn't do. Specifically, modern fascists were entertainers with a distinct aesthetic, one that appeals to mass grievances by encouraging their supporters to feel like they are personally expressing themselves through their demagogue of choice.Advertisement:
Benjamin's insight, which appears to have been largely forgotten, is that keeping fascism out of power means recognizing how they use aesthetic entertainment to create their movements. That does require us to admit, cringe-inducing though it may be, that Trump is an artist — albeit a tacky, shallow and transparently self-aggrandizing one. More importantly, his movement, the MAGA crowd, has a distinct aesthetic which he has created and honed for them.
The key passage from Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which was published in 1936, deserves to be quoted in full:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
Earlier in the essay, Benjamin describes how the history of art itself had changed in modern history. Although works of art were initially created carefully by individual craftsmen working under mentors, industrialization made it possible for art to be produced on a large scale and distributed quickly and easily among millions of people. (Bear in mind that he wrote this in 1936, when printing presses and radio were the main means of mass distribution, television was in its infancy and the internet had yet to be conceived.)
Not surprisingly, this meant that politicians had learned how to utilize art to advance their own agendas. Fascists, however, took things one step further: They recognized that, by using purely aesthetic entertainment to create solidarity among their supporters, they could distract them from the economic and social forces oppressing them, and instead build political movements based around the ability to creatively express their grievances. In other words, you could promote policies that rampantly redistributed wealth upwards, consolidated power in the hands of a few and dismantled democracies, and one's followers would not care as long as they had the aesthetic entertainment to comfort them and make them believe they were being heard by those very politicians who fundamentally despised them.
Because Benjamin was most concerned with Adolf Hitler, who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, his essay drew particular attention to Hitler's love of extravagant military exhibitions. Clearly, there are parallels to Trump, who has usedgaudy militarypageantry in unprecedented ways to impress his supporters, as well asdeclaredliteralwar on many of his own citizens, in part to achieve that same effect. Benjamin quotes Italian fascist and futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose celebration of war is chillingly poetic:
War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.
Obviously, Trump's understanding of art and entertainment precedes his military displays, and may explain how he became the first president to lack either political or military experience. Acknowledging that he did not actually write the books like "The Art of the Deal," which helped make him famous, he still played a major role in choosing the faux-opulent and brassy architectural style that distinguished his early buildings. He was a major creative force behind his hit reality TV show "The Apprentice," which he hosted for a decade until shortly before he began his 2016 presidential campaign. While it would be a stretch to describe Trump as having the soul of an artist, he has always intuitively understood that people like to be entertained, and that making a spectacle of your businesses (such as his real estate holdings) and of oneself (such as through his reality TV show) is good for business.Advertisement:
By developing a knack for entertaining the masses in a self-promotional way — whether by claiming credit for art he did nothing to produce, like "The Art of the Deal," or actually playing a role in artistic choices over investments like his buildings and his TV show — Trump created an image for himself as the quintessential American businessman, the type of billionaire that, as comedianJohn Mulaney astutely observed in 2009, is a caricature of what a hobo might imagine a wealthy person to be like. For the first sixty-plus years of his life, Trump became adept at using aesthetic presentations to make himself into a pop culture icon.
When he decided to run for president, he simply transferred that understanding to the political realm.Advertisement:https://cff3ba30d0e567f75337767a2f5b87bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
There are two main ways that he did this prior to his presidency, both of which he has continued to do during his administration. The first is through his tweets, which took advantage of Americans' dwindling attention span by regularly packing memorable, punchy ideas into very small packages. AsAmanda Hess wrote in Slate back in 2016, the secret to Trump's ability to create a political movement off of Twitter is that "whether he realizes it or not—and he's tweeted that he has 'a very high IQ,' so I'm assuming he does—his most Trump-ian tweets manage to hit upon all three of Aristotle's modes of persuasion: logos (the appeal to logic), ethos (the appeal to credibility), and pathos (the appeal to emotion)."
Trump has tweeted so much that it would take an entire academic paper to deconstruct all of them thoroughly, but Hess' analysis of a Trump tweet directed at one of his rivals in the 2016 Republican primaries, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is quite revealing. After quoting Trump's tweet — "Jeb Bush never uses his last name on advertising, signage, materials etc. Is he ashamed of the name BUSH? A pretty sad situation. Go Jeb!" — Hess points out that "he seized on a truth about Jeb Bush's campaign branding, leveraged it to question the very legitimacy of the Bush name, declared the situation 'sad,' and still had leftover space to offer some condescending words of encouragement."
One finds the same strategy in his tweets trying to delegitimize Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, which the president insists he won even though he hasrepeatedly failed in court to prove any of his claims. On Thursday he neverthelesstweeted, "The 'Republican' Governor of Georgia, [Brian Kemp], and the Secretary of State, MUST immediately allow a signature verification match on the Presidential Election. If that happens, we quickly and easily win the State and importantly, pave the way for a big David and Kelly WIN!" Again, Trump very strategically packed a lot into this single tweet: An insult against a fellow Republican who he feels has been disloyal by not helping him steal the election, to inspire anger; a seeming appeal to logic by requesting "a signature verification match"; and the offer of rewards for other powerful if his wishes are granted.Advertisement:https://cff3ba30d0e567f75337767a2f5b87bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
But the other aesthetic that Trump has honed impeccably is the art of trolling. As my colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote in her book"Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself," this fit with a longstanding trend among American conservatives. Indeed, for years before Trump's rise, they began transitioning away from advocating for traditional conservative ideas and instead focused on encouraging their followers to be bitter, hateful and paranoid. Over time, American right-wing politics was no longer defined by beliefs, but by intense hostility toward perceived threats that they invariably attributed to the left.
"Watch Fox News any day of the week, and most of what they cover is a bunch of segments about how liberals are hypocrites or liberals are the worst,"Marcotte told Salon in 2018 when discussing her book. "Everything is just reinforcing the stereotype of liberals as these hate objects you can just feel justified in trying to punish." She later added that "conservative audiences respond to this kind of media because they want to. I think we underestimate how much people are going to do what they want to do and believe what they want to believe." While Trump supporters may recognize that certain government programs help them, they will disregard those facts if a right-winger appeals to their hostility toward racial minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants or members of other marginalized groups.
This trolling approach defines Trump's official speeches, his press conferences, the rhetoric he employs at political rallies and virtually every other aspect of his political life. For his followers, this type of communication trope has become ingrained into their being. Plenty of conservative politicians appealed to their supporters' basest instincts prior to Trump, but the president and his followers made overtly vilifying the left and gleefully savoring upsetting leftists through their words and actions into their central appeal. He did this when he kicked off his aborted 2012 presidential campaign by promoting a racist conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama and his successful 2016 effort by disparaging Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He has done this on the countless occasions when he has made inflammatory statements about important issues that inevitably upset the left and, just as inevitably, put Trump in the headlines. He and his supporters have even sold T-shirts with controversial messages by appealing to supporters' desire to"drive liberals crazy." Frequently, Trump supporters will actually admit that they don't agree with his rhetoric, but they enjoy his sadistic bullying because it makes them feel good. In other words, they connect with the aesthetic.Advertisement:https://cff3ba30d0e567f75337767a2f5b87bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Trump's is an an approach that goes beyond mere rhetoric and enters the realm of performance art, a fact that Trump himself unintentionally acknowledged during hisfirst speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, when he urged his supporters to chant "12 more years" in order to "really drive [liberals] crazy." That moment epitomized precisely how Trump has transformed traditional political rhetoric into performance art: Instead of simply making the case for his candidacy or advocating for certain ideas, Trump focused on creating a moment in which he would entreat his followers to join him in a performance — not for a major political point, but simply to elicit a desired emotional response from their supposed common enemy. It was the type of performance art that Trump has perfected: To act like a troll, and encourage his supporters to act like trolls, and thereby create an act of mass catharsis through creative self-expression that did absolutely nothing to address any legitimate economic or social concerns that his supporters might have.
If Trump was simply using these ends to advance an otherwise traditional political career, it would debase democracy but not necessarily pose a threat to it. The problem is that Trump is not a traditional American politician; he has all the hallmarks of being a fascist. As Italian philosopherUmberto Eco wrote in a 1995 essay about fascism, "behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives." There are many drives that fuel fascist movements and are present with Trump, including a glorification of an imagined past through appeals to traditionalism (hence Trump's slogan to "Make America Great Again"), a hostility toward intellectuals and a fear of difference (to quote Eco, "the first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders" and is thus "racist by definition"). Fascist movements also pander to the individual and social frustrations of their followers, heavily rely onnationalism, convince themselves that their opponents are elitists and utilize a specific type of machismo that "implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality." When fascists talk about their support of "the People," it is not in terms of a belief in individual rights but rather as "a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People."
Even if Trump never again holds political office, the fascist tendencies that he exploited will continue to thrive, and it is not inconceivable that a future fascist political aspirant will figure out how to replicate his ability to create a political aesthetic as the glue that holds their movement together. The ongoing debacle over Trump's refusal to accept his 2020 election loss is a perfect example of that. For Trump himself, this is almost certainly a symptom of hisobvious narcissism, the fact that in his world nothing is worse than being a "loser." Yet it is telling that so many people are buying into his claims (arecent poll found that 73 percent of likely Republican voters and 44 percent of all likely voters are questioning Biden's victory), despite there being no evidence of voter fraud whatsoever.
Even if Trump miraculously vanishes from the political scene after leaving office, his lies about the 2020 election are likely to foreshadow future ways in which American fascists use mass entertainment to win over support. AsMarcotte recently noted, polls show that most Republican voters do believe that their votes counted, and there are no plausible signs of waning interest in participating in future elections, because they realize that Trump's claims of being robbed are yet another performance art piece in which they can participate.Advertisement:
"Republican voters understand perfectly that Trump's lies are part of a con game — and they imagine they're in on the con," Marcotte wrote. Replace "con" with "spectacular show," or "mass entertainment," or even (dare I say it) "work of art." That's the Trump aesthetic.
The reality is that the problems facing ordinary Americans economically, socially, ecologically and internationally are largely due to the forces identified by the left: income inequality, lack of access to basic needs like healthcare, student debt, predatory lending and so on are all side effects of capitalism. Yet as long as fascists know how to win over supporters by appealing to an aesthetic — whether military parades and catchy tweets or trolling public statements and conspiracy theories that exist mainly to create a shared false narrative that can upset and delegitimize the left — their followers will misidentify the source of their misery, as Benjamin foresaw.
“One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.”
“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
~ Henry Miller
Source: TomDispatch
We’re now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange:
“‘In the plaintiffs’ counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity,’ Giuliani said. ‘I’m not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?’
“‘It means you can’t,’ said U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann.
“‘Big words, your honor,’ Giuliani said.”
Big words indeed! And he couldn’t have been more on the mark, whether he knew it or not. Thanks in part to him and to the president he’s represented so avidly, even as hair dye or mascara dripped down his face, we find ourselves in an era in which, to steal a biblical phrase from Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, all of us see as if “through a glass darkly.”
As in Election Campaign 2016, Donald Trump isn't the cause but a symptom (though what a symptom!) of an American world going down. Then as now, he somehow gathered into his one-and-only self so many of the worst impulses of a country that, in this century, found itself eternally at war not just with Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians and Somalis but increasingly with itself, a true heavyweight of a superpower already heading down for the count.
Here’s a little of what I wrote back in June 2016 about The Donald, a reminder that what’s happening now, bizarre as it might seem, wasn’t beyond imagining even so many years ago:
“It’s been relatively easy... -- at least until Donald Trump arrived to the stunned fascination of the country (not to speak of the rest of the planet) -- to imagine that we live in a peaceable land with most of its familiar markers still reassuringly in place... In truth, however, the American world is coming to bear ever less resemblance to the one we still claim as ours, or rather that older America looks increasingly like a hollowed-out shell within which something new and quite different has been gestating.
“After all, can anyone really doubt that representative democracy as it once existed has been eviscerated and is now -- consider Congress Exhibit A -- in a state of advanced paralysis, or that just about every aspect of the country’s infrastructure is slowly fraying or crumbling and that little is being done about it? Can anyone doubt that the constitutional system -- take war powers as a prime example or, for that matter, American liberties -- has also been fraying? Can anyone doubt that the country’s classic tripartite form of government, from a Supreme Court missing a member by choice of Congress to a national security state that mocks the law, is ever less checked and balanced and increasingly more than ‘tri’?”
Even then, it should have been obvious that Donald Trump was, as I also wrote in that campaign year, a wildly self-absorbed symptom of American-style imperial decline on a planet increasingly from hell. And that, of course, was four years before the pandemic struck or there was a wildfire season in the West the likes of which no one had imagined possible and a record 30 storms that more or less used up two alphabets in a never-ending hurricane season.
In the most literal sense possible, The Donald was our first presidential candidate of imperial decline and so a genuine sign of the times. He swore he would make America great again, and in doing so, he alone, among American politicians of that moment, admitted that this country wasn’t great then, that it wasn’t, as the rest of the American political class claimed, the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensible country in history, the sole superpower left on Planet Earth.
An American World Without “New Deals” (Except for Billionaires)
In that campaign year, the United States was already something else again and that was more than four years before the richest, most powerful country on the planet couldn’t handle a virus in a fashion the way other advanced nations did. Instead, it set staggering records for Covid-19 cases and deaths, numbers that previously might have been associated with third-world countries. You can practically hear the chants now as those figures continue to rise exponentially: USA! USA! We’re still number one (in pandemic casualties)!
Somehow, in that pre-pandemic year, a billionaire bankruptee and former reality TV host instinctively caught the mood of the moment in an ever-less-unionized American heartland, long in decline if you were an ordinary citizen. By then, the abandonment of the white working class and lower middle class by the “new Democrats” was history. The party of Bill and Hillary Clinton had long been, as Thomas Frank wrote recently in the Guardian, “preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the ‘wired workers’; the ‘learning class’; the winners in our new post-industrial society.”
Donald Trump arrived on the scene promising to attend to the abandoned ones, the white Americans whose dreams of better lives for themselves or their children had largely been left in the dust in an ever-more-unequal country. Increasingly embittered, they were, at best, taken totally for granted by the former party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton didn’t even consider it worth the bother to visit Wisconsin and her campaign underplayed the very idea of focusing on key heartland states.) In the twenty-first century, there were to be no “new deals” for them and they knew it. They had been losing ground -- to the tune of $2.5 trillion a year since 1975 -- to the very billionaires whom The Donald so proudly proclaimed himself one of and to a version of corporate America that had grown oversized, wealthy, and powerful in a fashion that would have been unimaginable decades earlier.
On entering the Oval Office, Trump would still offer them blunt words, which would ring bells in rally after rally where they could cheer him to death. At the same time, with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he continued the process of abandonment by handing a staggering tax cut to the 1% and those very same corporations, enriching them ever so much more. So, of course, would the pandemic, which only added yet more billions to the fortunes of billionaires and various corporate giants (while granting the front-line workers who kept those companies afloat only the most meager and passing “hazard pay”).
Today, the coronavirus here in the United States might be more accurately relabeled “the Trump virus.” After all, the president really did make it his own in a unique fashion. Via ignorance, neglect, and a striking lack of care, he managed to spread it around the country (and, of course, the White House itself) in record ways, holding rallies that were visibly instruments of death and destruction. All of this would have been clearer yet if, in Election Campaign 2020, he had just replaced MAGA as his slogan with MASA (Make America Sick Again), since the country was still going down, just in a new way.
In other words, ever since 2016, Donald Trump, wrapped up eternally in his own overwrought self, has come to personify the very essence of a bifurcated country that was heading down, down, down, if you weren’t part of that up, up, up 1%. The moment when he returned from the hospital, having had Covid-19 himself, stepped out on a White House balcony, and proudly tore off his mask for all the world to see summed up the messaging of this all-American twenty-first-century moment perfectly.
Waving Goodbye to the American Moment
Unique as Donald Trump may seem in this moment and overwhelming as Covid-19 might be for now, the American story of recent years is anything but unique in history, at least as so far described. From the Black Death (bubonic plague) of the fourteenth century to the Spanish Flu of the early twentieth century, pandemics have, in their own fashion, been a dime a dozen. And as for foolish rulers who made a spectacle of themselves, well, the Romans had their Nero and he was anything but unique in the annals of history.
As for going down, down, down, that's in the nature of history. Known once upon a time as “imperial powers” or “empires,” what we now call “great powers” or “superpowers” rise, have their moments in the sun (even if it's the shade for so many of those they rule over), and then fall, one and all. Were that not so, Edward Gibbon’s classic six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, would never have gained the fame it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Across the planet and across time, that imperial rising and falling has been an essential, even metronomic, part of humanity’s story since practically the dawn of history. It was certainly the story of China, repeatedly, and definitely the tale of the ancient Middle East. It was the essence of the history of Europe from the Portuguese and Spanish empires to the English empire that arose in the 18th century and finally fell (in essence, to our own) in the middle of the last century. And don’t forget that other superpower of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, which came into being after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and grew and grew, only to implode in 1991, after a (gulp!) disastrous war in Afghanistan, less than 70 years later.
And none of this, as I say, is in itself anything special, not even for a genuinely global power like the United States. (What other country ever had at least 800 military garrisons spread across the whole planet?) If this were history as it’s always been, the only real shock would perhaps be the strikingly bizarre sense of self-adulation felt by this country’s leadership and the pundit class that went with it after that other Cold War superpower so surprisingly blew a fuse. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union's plunge to its grave in 1991, leaving behind an impoverished place once again known as “Russia,” they engaged in distinctly delusional behavior. They convinced themselves that history as it had always been known, the very rise and fall and rise (and fall) that had been its repetitious tune, had somehow “ended” with this country atop everything forever and beyond.
Not quite three decades later, in the midst of a set of “forever wars” in which the U.S. managed to impose its will on essentially no one and in an increasingly chaotic, riven, pandemicized country, who doesn’t doubt that this was delusionary thinking of the first order? Even at the time, it should have been obvious enough that the United States would sooner or later follow the Soviet Union to the exits, no matter how slowly, enveloped in a kind of self-adoration.
A quarter-century later, Donald Trump would be the living evidence that this country was anything but immune to history, though few then recognized him as a messenger of the fall already underway. Four years after that, in a pandemicized land, its economy a wreck, its military power deeply frustrated, its people divided, angry, and increasingly well-armed, that sense of failing (already felt so strongly in the American heartland that welcomed The Donald in 2016) no longer seems like such an alien thing. It feels more like the new us -- as in U.S.
Despite the oddity of The Donald himself, all of this would just be more of the same, if it weren’t for one thing. There’s an extra factor now at work that’s all but guaranteed to make the history of the decline and fall of the American empire different from the declines and falls of centuries past. And no, it has next to nothing to do with (blare of trumpets!) Donald Trump, though he did long ago reject climate change as a “Chinese hoax” and, in every way possible, thanks to his love of fossil fuels, give it as much of a helping hand as he could, opening oil lands of every sort to the drill, and dismissing environmental regulations that might have impeded the giant energy companies. And don’t forget his mad mockery of alternative power of any sort.
I could go on, of course, but why bother. You know this part of the story well. You’re living it.
Yes, in its own distinctive fashion, the U.S. is going down and will do so whether Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or Mitch McConnell is running the show. But here’s what’s new: for the first time, a great imperial power is falling just as the earth, at least as humanity has known it all these thousands of years, seems to be going down, too. And that means there will be no way, no matter what The Donald may think, to wall out intensifying storms, fires, or floods, mega-droughts, melting ice shelves and the rising sea levels that go with them, record temperatures, and so much more, including the hundreds of millions of people who are likely to be displaced across a failing planet, thanks to those greenhouse gases released by the burning of the fossil fuels that Donald Trump loves so much.
Undoubtedly, the first genuine twist in the rise-and-fall version of human history -- the first story, that is, that was potentially all about falling -- arrived on August 6th and 9th, 1945 when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It soon became apparent that such weaponry, collected in vast and spreading arsenals, had (and still has) the power to quite literally take history out of our hands. In this century, even a “limited” regional war with such weaponry could create a nuclear winter that might starve billions. That version of Armageddon has at least been postponed time and again since August 1945, but as it happened, humanity proved quite capable of coming up with another version of ultimate disaster, even if its effects, no less calamitous, happen not with the speed of an exploding nuclear weapon, but over the years, the decades, the centuries.
Donald Trump was the messenger from hell when it came to a falling empire on a failing planet. Whether, on such a changing world, the next empire or empires, China or unknown powers to come, can rise in the normal fashion remains to be seen. As does whether, on such a planet, some other way of organizing human life, some potentially better, more empathetic way of dealing with the world and ourselves will be found.
Just know that the rise and fall of history, as it always was, is no more. The rest, I suppose, is still ours to discover, for better or for worse.
Source: EdwardCurtain Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try ...
