HENRY GIROUX - Donald Trump and the Ghosts of Totalitarianism
In the current historical moment in the United States, the
emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination.
One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political
scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he
says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with
informed judgement rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in
noting that “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the
world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation
to finally creating space for action—for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee
a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence
of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our
understanding of American society are dominated by a corporate induced
linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and
democracy itself.
Missing from the commentaries by most of the mainstream media
regarding the current rise of Trumpism is any historical context that would
offer a critical account of the ideological and political disorder plaguing
American society—personified by Trump’s popularity. A resurrection of
historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the
present crisis, particularly the long tradition of racism, white supremacy,
exceptionalism, war mongering, and the extended wars on youth, women, and
immigrants. Calling Trump a fascist is not enough. What is necessary are
analyses in which the seeds of totalitarianism are made visible in Trump’s
discourse and policy measures.
One example can be found in Steve Weissman’s
commentary on Trump in which he draws a relationship between Trump’s casual
racism and the rapidly growing neo-fascist movements across Europe that “are
growing strong by hating others for their skin color, religious origin, or
immigrant status.” Few journalists have acknowledged the presence of white
militia and white supremacists groups at his rallies and almost none have
acknowledged the chanting of “white power” at some of his political gatherings,
which would surely signal not only Trump’s connections to a racist past but
also to the formative Nazi culture that gave rise to the endgame of genocide.
Another example can be found in Glenn Greenwald’s
analysis of the mainstream media’s treatment of Trump’s attack on Jorge Ramos,
an influential anchor of Univision. When Ramos stood up to question
Trump’s views on immigration, Trump refused not only to call on him, but
insulted him by telling him to go back to Univision. Instead of focusing on
this particular lack of civility, Greenwald takes up the way many journalists
scolded Ramos because he had a point of view and was committed to a political
narrative. Greenwald saw this not just as a disingenuous act on the part of
establishment journalists but as a weakness that furthers the march of an
authoritarian regime that does not have to be accountable to the press. Trump
may be bold in his willingness to flaunt his racism and make clear that money
drives politics, but this is not new and should surprise no one who is
historically and civically literate.
What is clear in this case is that a widespread avoidance of
the past has become not only a sign of the appalling lack of historical
consciousness in contemporary American culture, but a deliberate political
weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and blind to the truth, if
not reduced to a discourse drawn from the empty realm of celebrity culture.
This is a discourse in which totalitarian images of the hero, fearless leader,
and bold politicians get lost in the affective and ideological registers of
what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and
standards of judgment.” Of course, there are many factors currently contributing
to this production of ignorance and the lobotomizing of individual and
collective agency. The forces promoting a deep seated culture of
authoritarianism run deep in American society.
Such factors extend from the idiocy of celebrity and popular
culture and the dumbing down of American schools to the transformation of the
mainstream media into a deadly mix of propaganda and entertainment. The latter
is particularly crucial as the collapse of journalistic standards that could
inform the onslaught of information finds its counterpart in a government
wedded to state secrecy and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers, the expanding use of state secrecy,
the corruption of political language, the disregard for truth, all of which
have contributed to growing culture of political and civic illiteracy. The
knowledge and value deficits that produce such detrimental forms of ignorance
not only crush the critical and ethical imagination, critical modes of social
interaction, and political dissent, but also destroy those public spheres and
spaces that promote thoughtfulness, thinking, critical dialogue, and serve as
“guardians of truths as facts,” as Arendt once put it.
Under the reign of neoliberalism, space, time, and even
language have been subject to the forces of privatization and commodification.
Public space has been replaced by malls and a host of commercial institutions.
Commodified and privatized, public space is now regulated through exchange
values rather than public values just as communal values are replaced by
atomizing and survival-of-the fittest market values... Read more:
