Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual
What is even more disturbing is that the sensationalism over these incidents hide from view the war on women that has been in full bloom since the 1980s. The Leave It to Beaver mindset that women should stay in the home as homemakers, do not deserve equal pay for equal work with men, should be defined primarily as degrading sexual objects, or that they should be excluded from revolutionary movements headed by men were part of “the good old days’ a term brought back to life by Donald Trump.
Coded in Trump’s campaign slogan to make America great again is the ghostly apparition of the return of the ‘good old days.’ Such a call is not new to a political party that revels in the discourse of decline and celebrates an era that resurrects the barbaric discourses and values of an older fascism for which gender discrimination, homophobia, and racial purity became normalized.
If memories of fascism are now reduced to third rate Hollywood films, radical memories of collective resistance seem to die even more quickly in a country wedded to the culture of immediacy and the quickest route to making a profit. This may account, in part, for the social and historical amnesia on display in the country’s refusal to understand Trump as symptomatic of a number of authoritarian, anti-democratic forces that have been at play for a long time and of which Trump unapologetically endorses. These include attacks on women particularly on reproductive rights, on the LGBT community, on poor minority youth, on neighborhoods inhabited by people of color, on teachers and public servants, on students drowning in debt, on a culture of questioning, on dissent, on critical education, on people of color across the globe, on Muslims, Mexican immigrants. They also include attacks on any other group that does not kneel down in homage to a neo-fascist embrace of white supremacy, Christian religious fundamentalism, ultra-nationalism, militarism, the mass incarceration state, and a savage global neoliberal capitalist fundamentalism. America is at war with itself and Trump is simply one despicable register of that war on democracy. What is distinctive about Trump is that he is shrill and unapologetic about his neo-fascist beliefs and policies whereas Hillary Clinton and the rest of the neoliberal centrists wrap their war mongering policies and support for the financial elite in the empty discourse of liberalism with a disingenuous nod towards social justice and democratic values. The embrace of his overt sexism and racism by large numbers of his followers does not augur well for the future of American politics. Needless to say, Trump is not the only politician who benefits from the death of historical memory and the current fog of social amnesia—all of which has produced an accelerated attack on not only women but on African Americans.
What is truly appalling is that, with the exception of the Black Lives Matter movement and Black protest movements, so little is said about the racism that is part of the long legacy of in your face racism that has emerged with the Trump campaign, a racism that the Republican Party has been nurturing since Nixon’s southern strategy and Reagan’s war on drugs, and later adopted by Bill Clinton’s disastrous law and order polices which produced the worst excesses of the current mass incarceration state.
Throughout his primary and presidential campaign, Trump invoked a language of racist violence that could only be understood in the historical context of the state repression unleashed in the fifties, sixties, and seventies in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and other states where expressions of white supremacy, domestic terrorism, and police violence exploded in full view of the American people and larger world. On numerous occasions Trump told his backers: “to knock the crap out of them [Black Lives Matter protesters], seriously, get them out of here. In the good old days this doesn’t happen because they use to treat them very rough and when they protested once they would not do it again so easily. I’d like to punch them in the face, I’ll tell you. I love the good old days. You know what they use to do to guys like that in a place like this? They would be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”[i]
The backdrop of this discourse reaches back into a time of racist terror and was captured in images of the young Black protesters being beaten by police and white patrons when they tried to integrate lunch counters in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee and Greenville, North Carolina. It was also on full display when black protesters were attacked by police dogs in Detroit, hosed down by high power water cannons in Alabama, and when nine young African American students were taunted and shoved as they attempted to enter the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The latter are “the good old days” that Trump celebrates in his speeches–when protesters were “ripped out of their seat,” “punched in the face,” and “would be carried out on a stretcher.”[ii] These “good old days” also gave us lynchings, the murder of Emmett Till, the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young black girls. The “good old days” in this context serve as a legitimization not only for a ruthless return to racist terror and the suppression of dissent, but the celebration of a type of lawlessness endemic to fascism and updated for the new authoritarianism.
What is being suggested here is that this American form of neo-fascism in its various forms is largely about social and racial cleansing and its end point is the construction of prisons, detention centers, enclosures, walls, and all the other varieties of murderous apparatus that accompany the discourse of national greatness and racial purity. Americans have lived through 40 years of the dismantling of the welfare state, the elimination of democratic public spheres such as schools and libraries, and the attack on public goods and social provisions. In their place, we have the rise of the punishing state, with its support for a range of criminogenic institutions extending from banks and hedge funds to state governments and militarized police departments that depend on extortion to meet their budgets.
Where are the institutions that do not support a rabid individualism, a culture of cruelty, and a society based on social combat — that refuse to militarize social problems, and reject the white supremacist discourses, laws and practices spreading throughout the United States? What happens when a society is shaped by a poisonous neoliberalism that separates economic and individual economic actions from social costs, when privatization becomes the only sanctioned orbit for agency, when values are entirely reduced to exchange values?
Notes.
[i] These quotes have been compiled along with historical context that give them meaning in Ava DuVernay’s brilliant film, 13th, which is available on Netflix.
[ii] Ibid., Ava DuVernay, director, 13th.
Co-published at CounterPunch.
Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.
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3 comments
The sickness unto death (Schopenhauer).
Though he is a euro-philosopher and thus alien to the USA intelligentsia, the concept of the lost self as he discussed, mostly disappeared within materialist Western civilization. ‘Tant pis’ as the French would say, i.e. too bad as long as we can consume and may the devil take the hindmost. Thus hurtling towards extinction, the human race (or at least the Western part of it) keeps dancing around the abyss of natural disasters in thrall to what capitalist technology can provide. ‘More, Better’ and on to the next simulacrum of reality, that which will determine our fate. Especially in the USA land of opportunity, hypocrisy and self delusion are beyond compare. Though one needs to be cautious in comparing the present USA to a decadent Rome, the similarities are unfortunately rather apparent. The casual remark by Clemenceau that the USA went directly from barbarism to decadence is sadly fairly true. Wage slavery in particular in the so-called service industries keeps a very large part of the population subdued while television sports function like the Circus Maximus games. A despondent educated class writes on the obfuscation and its despair on Internet publications without offering much of a solution because frankly there is none.
The human race is like many elephants photographed from the air by Peter Beard whose skeletons lay spread over their enclosed African reserve because they ate all vegetation available. There is no exit and waiting for a non-existent divine intervention, the race for extinction is a true ‘thanatos’ urge, which ignores and despises all adjustments to nature and human functioning within the world. If we want to save humanity very basic changes are necessary, getting rid of opportunist politics, reducing populations by rational means, adjust our material needs to sustainable levels, level social differences in opportunity and remuneration and so on and so on. Keep dreaming one might say as such goals are far off when people accept the status quo (much out of necessity), while victims of our cupidity,
nature and animals die. Where is the dying self of which Schopenhauer has despaired and which formed the basis for a human existential soul, not the ‘hubris’ of technological war fare against the earth and despoliation of our environment. The earth and we may well be a simulation by an unlimited intelligence, but once the elements of self hypnosis ruled by shadows are realized as utterly noxious maybe there will be a human salvation. But don’t hold your breath, soon you will need all the air you can reach if commerce will allow it.
Postscript
If property is theft, then commerce is deceit
Does anyone really believe that Trump is surprised or even worried about about what is being “discovered” about his character and past behavior? He knew when he signed up he would be scathed and ratted out by investigative journalists or bloggers. But he didn’t and doesn’t care. His native insecurity has created in him an insouciant callous against those who know he will never be cool. And yet the press keep congratulating themselves for finding out all this dark ugly signal shit. Trump doesn’t care. The press think they poking him where it hurts. Horsefeathers! Trump is sniggering at the lot of us. The fix is in, folks, and it isn’t the fix you think it is.
This is going to be the weirdest election in the history of the world.
And the October Surprise is turning book in Las Vegas.