“[T]he great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” —James Baldwin
America is in a state of crisis that touches every aspect of public life, extending from a crisis of economics produced by massive inequality to a crisis of ideas, agency, memory and politics, aided and abetted by controlling apparatuses that induce ubiquitous forms of historical amnesia. We are in a new historical period, one in which everything is tr@nsformed and corrupted by the neoliberal tools of financialization, deregulation and austerity. Within this new nexus of power, anti-democratic principles have become normalized, weakening society’s democratic defenses. Egregious degrees of exploitation and unchecked militarism are now matched by a politics of disposability and terminal exclusion, in which human beings are viewed as the embodiment of human waste, reinforced, if not propelled, by an ethos of white nationalism and white supremacy. As historian Paul Gilroy has noted, the motion of history and the production of politics are now being read “through racialized categories.”
Fascist principles, or one version of what journalist Natasha Lennard calls microfascism, now operate at so many levels of everyday society that it is difficult to recognize them, especially as they have the imprimatur of the president of the United States. Fascist practices and desires work through diverse social media platforms and mainstream and right-wing cultural apparatuses in multiple ways. They largely function ideologically and politically to objectify people, promote spectacles of violence, endorse consumerism as the only viable way of life, legitimate a murderous nationalism, construct psychological borders in people’s minds in order to privilege certain groups, promote mindlessness through the ubiquity of celebrity culture, normalize the discourse of hate in everyday exchanges, and produce endless “practices of authoritarianism and domination and exploitation that form us.” In the fog of social and historical amnesia, moral boundaries disappear, people become more accepting of extreme acts of cruelty and the propaganda machines that create alternative thoughts, and view any viable critique of power as fake news, all the while disconnecting toxic language and policies from their social costs. Writer Fintan O’Toole may be right in arguing that such actions constitute a trial run for fascism:
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
Under the reign of neoliberalism, the dark plague of fascism engulfs American society as the history of concentration camps disappear, the ki1ling of intellectuals is forgotten and the terror of fascist violence evaporates in the spectacles of violence accompanied by anti-intellectual blabber and a rampant culture of forgetting. What must be remembered here is that we are not only moral and political subjects, but also historical subjects capable of both understanding and changing the world. And it is precisely this relationship between historical consciousness and political action that points to new possibilities for change. And while historical consciousness can be both informative and emancipatory, it can also lead to “malicious interpretations of the present,” as well as elements of history that are difficult to accept. At the same time, historical awareness can uncover dangerous memories and narratives of those whose voices have been drowned out by those who have the power to write history to serve their narrow and reactionary interests. It is precisely in the use of “critical” history to offer the resources to challenge the ideological, educational and militant tools deployed by emerging right-wing and fascist groups that their toxic use of history and the present can be challenged. In this instance, any radical social movement needs a historically informed notion of struggle that is solidly on the side of a strong anti-capitalist movement. Resistance is no longer an option, given that both the humanity and the life of the planet are at stake.
American society has turned lethal, as is evident in its assaults upon poor children, undocumented immigrants and those considered disposable by virtue of their race, ethnicity, religion and color. In an age when historical memory either disappears or is rewritten in the language of erasure and misrepresentation, too many people look away and become complicitous with diverse forms of fascism emerging across the globe. Regimes of fear destroy standards of truth, creating easy paths for warmongers, racists, misogynists and nativists to take advantage of a comatose public. Neoliberal fascism, a new social and political formation that combines the savage consequences of economic inequality and a politics of survival with the dictates of ultranationalism and white supremacy, took hold in the 1970s and has become a powerful engine of violence and cruelty, both in the United States and in an increasing number of other countries. Neoliberal fascism is the enemy of revisionist forms of history, because it disdains any resource that can be used to hold power accountable and tr@nslate past events into a form of moral witnessing in the present.
In its upgraded forms, any viable resistance to fascism needs new narratives, a new understanding of politics, power and resistance in order to counter violence and state terrorism while reviving historical memory as a forum for critically interrogating the unsettling and unspeakable, as well as a critical engagement with a culture of real, visceral and symbolic violence. Politics here takes on an ethical necessity and ambition. Most importantly, we need a politics in which education becomes central, a politics in which it is recognized that the populist moment in the service of neoliberal capitalism is, at its core, a crisis of identity, memory and agency, if not democracy itself. As capital is liberated from all constraints, historical memory and the institutions that support it wither, along with the democratic ideals of equality, popular sovereignty and the freedom from basic social needs. Scholar Nancy Fraser has argued that the upsurge of populism in the United States is partly fueled by a revolt against the political elites, the false promises of liberal democracy, and “blockages” caused by neoliberal modes of governance. She writes:
In the United States, those blockages include the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized ma$s incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective system wide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony.
In this instance, populism emerges as a form of politics in which any gesture toward giving a real voice and power to people is substituted for the power of demagogues who claim to speak on their behalf. Right-wing populism begins as a revolt against a neoliberal winner-take-all society and is quickly appropriated by demagogues such as Donald Trump to address a mix of economic anxiety, existential uncertainty and the fear of undocumented immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Instead of learning from a past filled with genocidal wars waged in the name of difference, the emerging fascist tyrants have enshrined a form of unlearning that privileges moral comas and recounts endless narratives of hate that vilify immigrants, refugees and undocumented children as chosen enemies of the paragons of racial cleansing.
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Something sinister and horrifying is happening to alleged liberal democracies all over the globe. Democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, the welfare state and public and higher education are under siege worldwide. Public media are underfunded, schools are privatized or modeled after prisons, the funds for social provisions disappear as military budgets balloon, and the legal system is increasingly positioned as an engine of racial discrimination and the default institution for criminalizing a range of behaviors. The ech0es of a fascist past are with us once again, resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultranationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. Right-wing extremist parties have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through an apocalyptic populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by the dynamics of neoliberalism. Under such circumstances, the promises of a liberal democracy are receding as present-day reactionaries work to subvert language, values, civic courage, history and a critical consciousness. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, for instance, has pledged to rid his country’s educational system of all references to the work of radical educator Paulo Freire. In the United States, Trump accelerates his work on public and higher education by cutting budgets and appointing Betsy DeVos, a billionaire and sworn enemy of public education and advocate of school choice and charter schools, as the secretary of education. In addition, education in many parts of the globe has increasingly become a tool of domination, as market fundamentalists and reactionary politicians imprison intellectuals, close down schools, undercut progressive curriculum, attack teacher unions and impose pedagogies of repression, often ki1ling the imaginative and creative capacities of students while turning public schools into a conveyer belt that propels students marginalized by cla$s and color into a life of poverty or worse—the criminal justice system and prison.
We live at a time in which two worlds are colliding. First, there is the world of neoliberal globalization, which is in crisis mode because it can no longer deliver on its promises or contain its own ruthlessness. Hence, there is a worldwide revolt against global capitalism that operates mostly to fuel forms of right-wing populism and a systemic war on democracy itself. Power is now enamored with amassing profits and capital and is increasingly addicted to a politics of social sorting and racial cleansing. Second, there is a genuine series of democratic revolts and struggles, which is growing, especially among young people, and is rewriting and revising an updated script for democratic socialism, a script that can both challenge the neoliberal world of finance capital while rethinking the meaning of politics, if not democracy itself.
What is not in doubt is that all across the world, the global thrust toward democratization that emerged after World War II is giving way, once again, to tyrannies. As alarming as the signs may be, the public cannot ignore or allow a fascist politics to take root in the United States. Such a threat has been exacerbated as a mode of consciousness and at a time when academic discipline has lost favor with the American public. One consequence is that historical consciousness has been replaced by a form of social and historical amnesia. No longer a required course in most institutions of higher education, history in its various registers and genealogies has declined into near oblivion at a time when forms of public knowledge and civic literacy have accelerated exponentially. Moreover, “fewer than 2 percent of male undergraduates and fewer than 1 percent of females major in history, compared with more than 6 percent and nearly 5 percent, respectively in the late 1960s.” Some colleges have threated to abolish their history departments. Ironically, this is happening at a time when an increasing number of Americans are ignorant of the past, making them vulnerable to the simplistic appeals of demagogues. Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice.