Trump’s War on Dangerous Memory and
Critical Thought
By
Henry A. Giroux
The ideal subject of
totalitarian rule is not the
convinced Nazi or the dedicated
communist, but people for whom
the distinction between fact and
fiction, true and false, no
longer exists. ― Hannah
Arendt
March 23, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- People living in the United States
have entered into one of the most
dangerous periods of the 21st century.
President Donald Trump is not only a
twisted caricature of every variation of
economic, political, educational, and
social fundamentalism, he is the apogee
of an increasingly intolerant and
authoritarian culture committed to
destroying free speech, civil rights,
women’s reproductive freedoms, and all
vestiges of economic justice and
democracy.
Trump is the fascist shadow that has
been lurking in the dark since Nixon’s
Southern Strategy. Authoritarianism has
now become viral in America, pursuing
new avenues to spread its toxic ideology
of bigotry, cruelty, and greed into
every facet of society. Its legions of
“alt-right” racists, misogynists, and
xenophobic hate-mongers now expose
themselves publicly, without apology,
knowing full well that they no longer
have to use code for their hatred of all
those who do not fit into their
white-supremacist and ultra-nationalist
script.[i]
Trump’s victory makes clear that the
economic crisis and the misery it has
spurred has not been matched by an
ideological crisis– a crisis of ideas,
education, and values. Critical analysis
and historical memory have given way to
a culture of spectacles, sensationalism,
and immediacy.[ii] Dangerous memories
are now buried in a mass bombardment of
advertisements, state sanctioned lies,
and a political theater of endless
spectacles. The mainstream media is now
largely an adjunct of the entertainment
industries and big corporations. Within
the last 40 years training has taken the
place of critical education, and the
call for job skills has largely replaced
critical thinking. Without an informed
public, there is no resistance in the
name of democracy and justice; nor is
there a model of individual and
collective agency rising to such an
occasion. Of course, power is never
entirely on the side of domination, and
in this coming era of acute repression,
we will have to redefine politics,
reclaim the struggle to produce
meaningful educational visions and
practices, find new ways to change
individual and collective consciousness,
take seriously the need to engage in
meaningful dialogue with people left out
of the political landscape, and overcome
the factionalism of single-issue
movements in order to build broad based
social movements.
Manufactured ignorance erases histories
of repression, exploitation, and
revolts. What is left is a space of
fabricated absences that makes it easy,
if not convenient, to forget that Trump
is not some eccentric clown offered up
to the American polity through the
deadening influence of celebrity and
consumer culture. State and corporate
sponsored ignorance produced primarily
through the disimagination machines of
the mainstream media and public
relations industries in diverse forms
now function chiefly to erase selected
elements of history, disdain critical
thought, reduce dissent to a species of
fake news, and undermine the social
imagination. How else to explain the
recent Arkansas legislator who is
pushing legislation to ban the works of
the late historian Howard Zinn? How else
to explain a culture awash in game shows
and Realty TV programs? How else to
explain the aggressive attack by
extremists in both political parties on
public and higher education?
Whitewashing history is an urgent
matter, especially for the Trump
administration, which has brought a
number of white supremacists to the
center of power in the United States.
[iii]
The great novelist, Javiar Marias,
captures in a recent interview why
memory matters, especially as a resource
for understand the present through the
lens of the past. He writes:
I do not know what I might say to an
American young person after Trump’s
election. Probably that, according to my
experience with a dictatorship – I was
24 when Franco died – you can always
survive bad times more than you think
you can when they start, when “thus bad
begins.” Though the predictions are
terrible, I suppose we must all wait and
see what Trump does, once he is in
office. It looks ominous, indeed. And
[Vice President Mike] Pence does not
seem better, perhaps even worse. It is
hard to understand that voters in the
United States have gone against their
own interests and have decided to
believe unbelievable things. One of the
most ludicrous interpretations of
Trump’s victory is that he represents
the poor, the oppressed, the people
“left behind.” A multimillionaire, and a
very ostentatious one to boot? A man who
surrounds himself with gilded stuff? A
guy whose favorite sentence is, “You’re
fired!”? A bloke who has scorned blacks,
Mexicans, women, and of course, Muslims
in general? He is the elite that he is
supposed to fight. Indeed, it is a big
problem that nowadays too many people
(not only Americans, I’m afraid) don’t
know anything about history, and
therefore cannot recognize dangers that
are obvious for the elder ones (those
with some knowledge of history, of
course, be it first- or second-hand).
[iv]
As Marias suggest, historical legacies
of racist oppression and dangerous
memories can be troublesome for the
neo-fascist now governing American
society. This was made clear in the
backlash to Ben Carson’s claim that
slaves were immigrants, Trump’s
insistence that all black communities
are crime-ridden, impoverished
hellholes, and Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos’s assertion that historically
black colleges and universities were
“pioneers of school choice.”[v] Memories
become dangerous when exposing this type
of ideological ignorance aimed at
rewriting history so as to eliminate its
fascist and poisonous legacies. This is
particularly true of the genocidal
brutality waged against Native Americans
and Black slaves in the United States
and its connection to the memory of Nazi
genocide in Europe and the disappearance
of critics of fascism in Argentina and
Chile in the 1970s.
Dangerous memories are eliminated by
political reactionaries in order to
erase the ugliness of the past and to
legitimate America’s shop worn legacy of
exceptionalism with its deadening
ideology of habitual optimism, one that
substitutes a cheery, empty Disney-like
dreamscape for any viable notion of
utopian possibility.[vi] The Disney
dreamscape evacuates hope of any meaning
while attempting to undercut a radical
utopian element in the conceptual
apparatus of hope that speaks to the
possibility of a democratic future very
different from the authoritarian
present. Jelani Cobb is right in
insisting that “The habitual tendency to
excise the most tragic elements of
history creates a void in our collective
understanding of what has happened in
the past and, therefore, our
understanding of the potential for
tragedian in the present.”[vii] The
revival of historical memory as a
central political strategy is crucial
today given that Trump’s white
supremacist policies not only echo
elements of a fascist past, they also
point to the need to recognize as Paul
Gilroy has observed “how elements of
fascism appear in new forms,” especially
as “the living memory of the fascist
period fades.”[viii] What historical
memory makes clear is that subjectivity
and agency are the material of politics
and offer the possibility of creating
spaces in which “the domestic machinery
of inscriptions and invisibility” can be
challenged.[ix] Catherine Clement is
right in arguing that “Somewhere every
culture has an imaginary zone for what
it excludes and it is that zone we must
try to remember today.”[x] Historical
and dangerous memories inhabit that zone
in today’s neo-fascist social order.
While it would be irresponsible to
underestimate Trump’s embrace of
neo-fascist ideology and policies, he is
not solely answerable for the long
legacy of authoritarianism that took on
a frontal assault with the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980. This neoliberal
attack was later embraced in the Third
Way politics of the Democratic Party,
its expansion of the mass incarceration
state, and solidified under the
anti-democratic, war on terror,
permanent war policies of the
Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations.
During this period, democracy was sold
to the bankers and big corporations.
Whistleblowers were sent to prison. The
financial elite and the CIA tortures
were given the green light by the Obama
administration that they could commit
the gravest of crimes and act with
impunity. This surge of repression was
made possible mostly through the
emergence of a savage neoliberalism, a
ruthless concentration of power by the
ruling classes, and an aggressive
ideological and cultural war aimed at
undoing the social contract and the
democratic, political and personal
freedoms gained in the New Deal and
culminating in the civil rights and
educational struggles of the 1960s.
Trump’s unapologetic authoritarianism
has prompted Democratic Party members
and the liberal elite to position
themselves as the only model of
organized resistance in such dark times.
It is difficult not to see such moral
outrage and faux pas resistance as both
comedic and hypocritical in light of
these centrist liberals have played in
the last forty years–subverting
democracy and throwing minorities of
class and color under the bus. As
Jeffrey St. Clair observes, “Trump’s
nominal opponents,” the Democrats Party
are “encased in the fatal amber of their
neoliberalism”[xi] and they are part of
the problem and not the solution. Rather
than face up to their sordid history of
ignoring the needs of workers, young
people, and minorities of class and
color, the Democratic Party acts as if
their embrace of a variety of neoliberal
political and economic policies along
with their support of a perpetual war
machine had nothing to do with paving
the way for the election of Donald
Trump. Trump represents the
transformation of politics into a
Reality TV show and the belief that the
worth of a candidate can only by judged
in terms of a blend of value as an
entertainer and an advertisement for
casino capitalism.[xii] Chris Hedges
gets it right in revealing such
hypocrisy for what it is worth – a
carnival act. He writes:
Where was this moral outrage when our
privacy was taken from us by the
security and surveillance state, the
criminals on Wall Street were bailed
out, we were stripped of our civil
liberties and 2.3 million men and women
were packed into our prisons, most of
them poor people of color? Why did they
not thunder with indignation as money
replaced the vote and elected officials
and corporate lobbyists instituted our
system of legalized bribery? Where were
the impassioned critiques of the absurd
idea of allowing a nation to be governed
by the dictates of corporations, banks
and hedge fund managers? Why did they
cater to the foibles and utterings of
fellow elites, all the while
blacklisting critics of the corporate
state and ignoring the misery of the
poor and the working class? Where was
their moral righteousness when the
United States committed war crimes in
the Middle East and our militarized
police carried out murderous rampages?
What the liberal elites do now is not
moral. It is self-exaltation disguised
as piety. It is part of the carnival
act.[xiii]
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The production of dangerous memories and
critical knowledge and the democratic
formative cultures they enable must
become central to resisting the armed
ignorance of the Trump disimagination
machine. While such knowledge is the
precondition for militant resistance, it
is not enough. A critical consciousness
is the precondition of struggle but is
only the starting point for resistance.
What is also needed is a bold strategy
and social movement capable of shutting
down this neo-fascist political machine
at all levels of government through
general strikes, constant occupation of
the political spaces and public spheres
under the control of the new
authoritarians, and the creation of an
endless wave of educational strategies
and demonstrations that make clear and
hold accountable the different
ideological, material, psychological,
and economic registers of fascism at
work in American society. This is a time
to study, engage in critical dialogues,
develop new educational sites, support
and expand the alternative media, and
fight back collectively. It will not be
easy to turn the tide, but it can
happen, and there are historical
precedents.
The main strategies of change and
political agency, in part, have to focus
on both the young and those most
vulnerable to the dictates of
neo-fascism. Young people, workers, and
those now considered disposable,
especially, are the driving force of the
future and we have to both learn from
them, support them, contribute where
possible, and join in their struggles.
At the same time, as Robin D.G. Kelley
argues in his Boston Review article,
After Trump, “we cannot build a
sustainable movement without a paradigm
shift. Stopgap, utilitarian alliances to
stop Trump aren’t enough. … So where do
we go from here? If we really care about
the world, our country, and our future,
we have no choice but to resist.”[xiv]
This would also suggest building up
unions again and putting their control
in the hands of workers; working to
build sanctuary cities and institutions
that would protect those considered the
enemies of white supremacy – immigrants,
Muslims, Blacks, and those others
considered disposable. Politics has to
be revived at the local and state
levels, especially given the control of
56 percent of state legislatures by
right-wing Republicans. There is also a
need to make education central to the
formation and expansion of study groups
throughout the country and to further a
public pedagogy of justice and democracy
through the alternative media and when
possible in the mainstream media.
Central to the latter task is expanding
both the range of dialogue regarding how
oppression works focusing not merely on
economic structures but also the ways it
functions ideologically, psychologically
(as Wilhelm Reich once argued), and
spiritually as Michael Lerner has
pointed out in his book, The Left Hand
of God: Taking Back our Country from the
Religious Right.[xv]
It is not enough for progressives and
others to examine the objective forces
and underlying conditions that have
pushed so many people to give up on
politics, undercut acts of solidarity,
and dismantle any viable notion of hope
in the future. It is also crucial to
understand the crippling emotional
forces and psychological narratives that
cripple them from the inside out.
It is worth repeating that at the core
of any strategy to resist the further
descent of the United States into
authoritarianism, progressives must
recognize that stopping Trump without
destroying the economic, political,
educational and social conditions which
produced him will fail. In part a
successful resistance struggle must be
both comprehensive and at the same time
embrace a vision that is as unified as
it is democratic. Instead of reacting to
the horrors and misery produced by
capitalism, it is crucial to call for
its end while supporting a notion of
democratic socialism that speaks to the
needs of those who have been left out of
the discourse of democracy under the
financial elite. At stake here is the
need for both a language of critique and
possibility, a rigorous analysis of the
diverse forces of oppression and a
discourse of educated hope.Such a task
is both political and pedagogical. Not
only do existing relations of power have
to be called into question, but notions
of neoliberal commonsense learning have
to be disconnected from any democratic
sense of political agency and notion of
civic literacy. As Michael Lerner
insightfully observes, rather than
engaging in a politics of shaming,
progressives have to produce a discourse
in which people can recognize their
problems and the actual conditions that
produce them. [xvi] This is not just a
political but a pedagogical challenge in
which education becomes central to any
viable notion of resistance. Making
education central to politics means the
left will have to remove itself from the
discourse of meritocracy that often is
used to dismiss and write off those who
hold conservative, if not reactionary,
views. Not doing so only results in a
discourse of shaming and a
self-indulgent congratulatory stance on
the part of those who occupy progressive
political positions. The hard political
and pedagogical work of changing
consciousness, producing new modes of
identity, desires, and values conducive
to a democracy doesn’t stop with the
moral high ground often taken by
liberals and other progressives. The
right-wing knows how to address matters
of self-blame and anger whereas the left
and progressives dispense with the
pedagogical challenges posed by those
vulnerable groups caught in the magical
thinking of reactionary ideologies.[xvii]
While it is crucial to address the
dramatic shifts economically and
politically that have produced enormous
anger and frustration in American
society, it is also important to address
the accompanying existential crisis that
has destroyed the self-esteem, identity,
and hopes of those considered disposable
and those whom Hillary Clinton
shamelessly called a “basket of
deplorables.” The ideological mix of
untrammeled individualism,
self-reliance, a culture of fear, and a
war against all ethic has produced both
a profound sense of precarity and
hopelessness among not only immigrants,
poor people of color, but also among
working class whites who feel crushed by
the economy and threatened by those
deemed other as well as demeaned by so
called elites.
Resistance will not be easy and has to
take place on multiple fronts while at
the same time enabling a view of
politics that understands how a new
class of financial scavengers operates
in the free flow of a global space that
has no national allegiances, no respect
for the social contract, and exhibit a
degree of power that is unparalleled in
its ability to exploit, produce massive
inequality, destroy the planet, and
accelerate human suffering across and
within national boundaries. Resistance
is no longer an option, it is now a
matter of life or death. The lights are
going out on democracy across the globe
and the time to wake up from this
nightmare is now. There are no
guarantees in politics, but there is no
politics that matters without hope, that
is, educated hope. This is not merely a
call for a third political party,
progressives need to create a new
politics and new social and political
formations. For instance, instead of
mounting resistance through a range of
single issue movements, it is important
to bring such movements together as part
of a broad-based political formation.
Any vision for this movement must reject
the false notion that capitalism and
democracy are synonymous. The crisis of
democracy has reached its tipping point,
and once again the possibilities for
reclaiming the ideals and practices of
democratic socialism seem capable of
moving a generation of young people and
others to act. Under the reign of Trump,
the words of Frederick Douglass ring
especially true:
If there is no struggle, there is no
progress. …This struggle may be a moral
one; or it may be a physical one; or it
may be both moral and physical; but it
must be a struggle. Power concedes
nothing without a demand. It never did
and it never will.”[xviii]
Trump’s election is surely a tragedy for
democracy and a triumph for neo-fascism
and it must be challenged and stopped on
a variety of levels. Yet, making clear
Trump’s anti-democratic ideology and
practices will not put an end to the
current stage of neo-fascism in the
United States, especially when memory no
longer makes a claim on our
understanding of the past. Trump’s
election has unleashed a brand of savage
capitalism that not only has and will
continue to have horrible consequences,
but is deeply rooted in a mode of
historical and social amnesia that
eliminates its relationship to an
authoritarian past. Memory loses its
role as a vehicle of liberation when
policies that produce savage modes of
austerity, inequality, racism, and
contempt for public goods become frozen
in historical time and consciousness and
as such become normalized. Under such
circumstances, organized structures of
misrecognition define and legitimate
memory as a threat.
Memory, reason and thoughtfulness have
to awake from the narcotizing effects of
a culture of spectacle, consumerism,
militarism, and the celebration of
unchecked self-interests. A society that
enshrines the war of all against all,
elevates self-interest as its highest
ideal, reduces responsibility to a
solely individual undertaking, makes
distrust a virtue, and turns love and
compassion into a pathology points to a
social order that has lost its memory of
self-worth, dignity, justice, and
compassion. Evil in politics is no
longer a figment of the past but a
present day reality enshrined in the
ethos of neoliberalism. The body of
democracy is on life support and the
wounds now being inflicted upon it are
too alarming to either ignore or
normalize.
Henry A. Giroux is a
Contributing Editor for Tikkun magazine
and the McMaster University Professor
for Scholarship in the Public Interest
and The Paulo Freire Distinguished
Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most
recent books include The
Violence of Organized Forgetting (City
Lights, 2014), Dangerous
Thinking in the Age of the New
Authoritarianism (Routledge,
2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable
Futures: The Seduction of Violence in
the Age of Spectacle (City
Lights, 2015), and America at
War with Itself (City
Lights, 2016). His website is
www.henryagiroux.com.
Notes
[i] See,
for instance, Ned Resnikoff, “Rep. Steve
King: ‘We can’t restore our civilization
with somebody else’s babies.’”
ThinkProgress (March 12, 2017). Online: https://thinkprogress.org/steve-king-white-nationalist-tweet-5f43c687902a#.uh1yf1p8m.
Also, see Chris Hedges, “The March of
Death,” Truthdig (March 12, 2017).
Online:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312
[ii] I
take this up in great detail in Henry A.
Giroux, America at War with Itself,
(San Francisco: City Lights Books,
2017).
[iii] See,
for instance, Emily Bazelon, “Department
of Justification,” The New York
Times, [Feb. 28, 2017]
Online:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/magazine/jeff-sessions-stephen-bannon...
[iv] Gregg
LaGambina interviews Javier Marías, “The
World Is Never Just Politics: A
Conversation with Javier Marías,” Los
Angeles Review of Books, (February
9, 2017). Online:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/conversation-javier-marias/
[v] On
DeVos’s incompetency and racist
understanding of history, see Anthony
Dimaggio, “DeVos and the ‘Free Lunch’
Flimflam: Orwell, Neofeudalism, and the
Destruction of the Welfare State,” Counterpunch (March
7, 2017). Online:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/07/devos-and-the-free-lunch-flimflam...
[vi] Jelani
Cobb, “Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the
Misuse of American History,” The New
Yorker (March 8, 2017). Online:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ben-carson-donald-trump-and-...
[vii] Ibid.,
Jelani Cobb.
[viii] Paul
Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining
Political Culture beyond the Color Line, (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2000), pp. 145-146
[ix] Joao
Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social
Abandonment (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), p. 10.
[x] Cited
in Cited in Helene Cixous and Catherine
Clement, The Newly Born Woman,
trans, Betsy Wing Theory and History of
Literature Series, vol 24 (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
ix.
[xi] Jeffrey
St. Clair, “Fools on the hill: Trump and
Congress,” Counterpunch, [March
3, 2017] Online:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/03/fools-on-the-hill-trump-and-congr...
[xii] The
classic commentary on politics as show
business can be found in Neil Postman, Amusing
Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in
the Age of Show Business, (New
York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985, 2005).
[xiii] Chris
Hedges, “Donald Trump’s Greatest Allies
Are the Liberal Elites,” Truthdig,
(march 7, 2017) Online:www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trumps_greatest_allies_are_the_liber...
[xiv] Robin
D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” Boston
Review (November 15, 2016). Online:
http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go...
[xv] Michael
Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking
Back our Country from the Religious
Right (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
[xvi] This
issue is taken up in great detail in
Michael Lerner, “Overcoming Trump-ism: A
New Strategy for Progressives,” Tikkun (January
31, 2017). Online: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/overcoming-trump-ism-a-new-strategy-for-progressives.
[xvii] Ibid.,
Lerner, “Overcoming Trump-ism”
[xviii] Cited
in Frederick Douglass, “West India
Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New
York on August 3, 1857. Online: http://www.blackpast.org/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress#sthash.8Eoaxpmo.dpuf
Source : http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/trumps-war-on-dangerous-memory-and-critical-thought
