https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/11/resisting-the-deadly-language-of-american-fascism/
Resisting the Deadly Language of American Fascism
by Henry Giroux
July 11, 2025
Counterpunch
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Introduction: Language in the Age of Fascist Politics
In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.
In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language.
For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve it. Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is “dumb, predatory, sentimental.” It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.
Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one– fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”
The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US, marked by fantasies of exclusion and accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump’s regime.
State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability
As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance.
This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.”
We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land. The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.
Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy
Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as “domestic terrorists.” It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong’s associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should “blow yourself in the back of the head,” and that Christians should “pray for their deaths.” Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be “beaten and stomped in the mud” before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.
Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a “parasitic plague.” Empathy’s true power lies in its ability to disrupt the conditions that make dehumanization possible. Rather than enabling violence, it challenges the narrowing of moral boundaries and insists on expanding the definition of who belongs within a democratic society.”This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.
Naming the Deep Roots of the Police State
Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles.
The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time.
Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.
The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will.
Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased?
The Collapse of Moral Imagination
What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage– a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: “With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking.” Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.
Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”
Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism
This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is “an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE,” constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe.
This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer, who ominously remarked that “the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have ‘at least 65 million meals.” Change.org, along with others such as Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.” Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump’s inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime.
The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible, deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.
For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.
It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and moder day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.
White Nationalism and Reproductive Control
Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.
These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.
The Systemic Assault on Democracy
This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.
In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.
The Normalization of Tyranny
Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.”
Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”. As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president. As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials , and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.
A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.
Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy.
This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.
Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy
In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.
As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/26/the-road-to-the-camps-echoes-of-a-fascist-past/
In one year, the Trump regime has wrought immense damage to democracy, culture and thought. But there's new hope
Trump has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people. He uses the power of the presidency to peddle misinformation, erode any sense of shared citizenship, ridicule critical media and celebrate right-wing “disimagination machines” such as Fox News and Breitbart News. Under his “brand of reality TV politics,” lying has become normalized, truthfulness is viewed as a liability, ignorance is propagated at the highest levels of government and the corporate controlled media, and fear-soaked cyclones of distraction and destruction immunize the American public to the cost of human suffering and misery.
Under the Trump administration, culture has been weaponized and is used as a powerful tool of power, misinformation and indoctrination. James Baldwin, in a 1979 New York Times essay titled “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” wrote, “People evolve a language … in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”
This is certainly true for Trump, who recognizes that the normalization of state-sanctioned lying kills democracy, and destroys the capacity to produce informed judgments. Trump’s serial lying is daunting in that it normalizes discourses, “actions, and policies exempt from moral evaluation [and] treated as beyond good and evil.” As Hannah Arendt argues in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the erasure of truth, facts and standards of reference furthers the collapse of democratic institutions because it is “easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which have become pious banalities. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it the worst … and [is] easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life.”
As language is emptied of any meaning, an authoritarian populism is emboldened and fills the airways and the streets with sonic blasts of racism, anti-Semitism and violence. New York Times columnist (and former Salon reporter) Michelle Goldberg rightly observes that Trump makes it difficult to hold onto any sense of what is normal given his relentless attempts to upend the rule of law, justice, ethics and democracy itself. She writes:
The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter. … He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.
There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebratory culture. As Byung-Chul Han argues, “every age has its signature afflictions.” Ours is an unprecedented corporate takeover of the U.S. government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.
Trump engages in a culture war that militarizes the social media and in doing so creates a politics of diversion while erasing memories of a fascist past that bears an uncanny and terrifying resemblance to his own worldview. As Zygmunt Bauman observes in “Strangers at Our Door,” Trump’s endless racist discourses, taunts and policies cast blacks, immigrants and Muslims as “humans unworthy of regard and respect” and in engaging in the dehumanization of the Other shifts major social problems away from the “sphere of ethics to that of threats to security, crime prevention, and punishment, criminality, defense of order, and, all in all, the state of emergency usually associated with the threat of military aggression and hostilities.”
Trump makes no apologies for ramping up the police state, imposing racist-inspired travel injunctions, banning transgender people from serving in the military, and initiating tax reforms that further balloon the obscene wealth gap in the United States. All the while using his Twitter feed to entertain his right-wing, white supremacist and religious fundamentalist base at home with a steady stream of authoritarian comments, while showering affection and legitimation on a range of despots abroad, the most recent being the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines.
According to Felipe Villamor of the New York Times, “Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs.” Powerful authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping appear to pose an especially strong attraction to Trump, who exhibits little interests in their massive human rights violations. Trump’s high regard for white supremacy and petty authoritarianism became clear on the domestic front when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, a vicious racist who waged a war against undocumented immigrants, Latino residents and individuals who did not speak English. Arpaio also housed detainees in an outdoor prison that he called his personal “concentration camp.”
As Marjorie Cohn observes, Arpaio engaged in a series of sadistic practices in his outdoor jail in Phoenix that included forcing them “to wear striped uniforms and pink underwear,” “work on chain gangs,” and be subjected to blistering Arizona heat so severe that their “shoes would melt.” There is more at work here than Trump legitimating the practices of a monstrous racist; there is also expressed support for both a culture of violence and state-sanctioned oppression.
Trump’s authoritarianism cuts deeply into the fabric of both government and everyday politics in the United States. For example, despicable and morally reprehensible acts of collaboration with an emergent authoritarianism have created a Republican Party that echoes an eerie resemblance to similar flights of moral and political corruption that characterized the cowardly politicians in power in Vichy France during World War II.
Former conservative talk-show host Charles Sykes is right to argue that members of the current Republican Party are “collaborators and enablers” and as such are Vichy Republicans who are willingly engaged in a Faustian bargain with an incipient authoritarianism. Corrupted by power and willing to turn a blind eye to corruption, stupidity, barbarism and the growing savagery of the Trump administration, Republicans have surrendered to Trump’s authoritarian ideology, economic fundamentalism, support for religious orthodoxy and increasingly cruel and mean-spirited policies, which “meant accepting the unacceptable [all the while reasoning] it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare.”
Alarmingly, they have ignored the criticisms of Trump by high-profile members of their own party. For instance, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Trump of “debasing the nation” and “treating his office like a reality show.” Corker warned that Trump may be setting the U.S. “on the path to World War III.”
Egregious examples of political barbarism, state violence, the morally reprehensible and the utter corruption of politics and democracy have become all too familiar in the first year of Trump’s presidency, and the list just keeps growing. Trump’s hatred of Muslims and undocumented immigrants is visible in his call to build walls rather than bridges, to invoke shared fears rather than shared responsibilities, to destroy all the public institutions that make democracy possible, and to expand a culture in which self-interest, greed, militarism and repression expand the ideology, social relations and practices that breathe life into what might be called gangster capitalism, rather than the less odious notion of a Second Gilded Age.
Trump has no shame and seems to delight in a pornographic display of moral indiscretion that produce waves of not only moral outrage but a constant theater of distraction. Against growing concern over his connection with the Russians, he fires James Comey as head of the FBI. In the face of his failure to pass any of his regressive legislative policies, particularly around healthcare reform, he insults fellow Republicans in Congress. As Robert Mueller’s investigation heats up, he publicly humiliates Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general.
In the interest of political expediency, both Trump and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway have called for the election of Roy Moore, Republican nominee for the Alabama Senate seat abandoned by Sessions. Moore is a theocratic extremist, religious fundamentalist, homophobe and accused sexual predator. More than a half dozen women have now accused him of various forms of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. Trump and Conway’s defense rested on the morally vacuous claim and obscene rationale that it was necessary to elect Moore to the Senate so Trump would have another Republican Senate vote to pass a tax bill that functions as a wet kiss and wedding gift for the rich. It gets worse. This is not simply politics without a moral referent. It is a politics that embraces civic regression, and represents a form of evil one associates with the forms of domestic terrorism that characterizes totalitarianism.
Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption. He revels in a mode of governance that merges the idiocy of a never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with a deeply authoritarian politics of contempt, punishment and humiliation free from any kind of self-reflection or moral evaluation. One under-analyzed example can be seen in his contempt for young people, whether expressed through his attempt to expel more than 700,000 Dreamers from the United States, sanction a budget that eliminates or cuts major social provisions for poor and vulnerable youth, or advocate a tax reform bill that will impose massive suffering and hardships on minorities of class and color.
Trump has given new force to the rise of the punishing state with its obsession with security, incarceration, public shaming and the resuscitation of debtor prisons and the school-to-prison pipeline. Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe is more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by the logic of the market and a “survival of the fittest” ethos, with its willingness if not glee in calling for the separation of economic, political and social actions from any social costs or consequences. It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and the emergence of a politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state.
While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability, or the role that culture plays in legitimating intolerance and suffering. The culture of cruelty and mechanisms of disposability reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society. How else does one explain a long line of state-sanctioned atrocities: the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of black people for profit and labor, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over those populations? The legacies of those horrific roots of U.S. history are coded into Trumpist slogans about “making America great again,” and egregiously defended through appeals to American exceptionalism.
More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in U.S. politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or child care, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.” As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when millions of American children “are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”
Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that enables him to delight in taunting black athletes, defending neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Reichian psycho-politics, with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive against a culture of rancid racism, “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.”
In an age of almost unparalleled extremism, violence and cruelty, authoritarianism is gaining ground, rapidly creating a society in which shared fears and unchecked hatred have become the organizing forces for community. Under the Trump regime, dissent is disparaged as a pathology or dismissed as fake news, while even the slightest compassion for others becomes an object of disdain and subject to policies that increase the immiseration, suffering and misery of the most vulnerable.
Under the shadow of 9/11, fear has gained a new momentum as more and more individuals and groups are denigrated, labeled as disposable, subject to forms of social and racial cleansing that are in accord with the force of a resurgent white supremacy emboldened by the fact that one of its sympathizers is now president of the United States. Rejecting the most basic elements of a sustainable democracy, Trumpism has unleashed a rancid populism and racially inspired ultra-nationalism that sustains itself by looking everywhere for enemies while occupying the high ground of political purity and an empty moralism.
In the past, racist Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to cover over any naked expressions of their racism. This is no longer the case. Under Trump, both racist discourse and the underlying principles of white supremacy are both encouraged and emboldened. In the midst of the collapse of civil society and the public spheres that make a democracy possible, every line of decency is crossed, every principle of civility is violated, and more and more elements of justice are transformed into an injustice. Trump has become the blunt instrument and Twitter preacher for displaying a contempt for the truth, a critical citizenry, and democracy itself. He has anointed himself as the apostle of unchecked greed, unbridled narcissism and limitless militarism.
Wedded to both creating a culture of civic illiteracy and the plundering of the planet for both his own personal gain and that of his corporate cronies, Trump has done more than assault standards of truth, verification and evidence. He has opened the door to the dark cave of moral depravity, political corruption and a dangerous right-wing nationalist populism that, as Frank Rich observes, threatens to have “remarkable staying power” long after Trump is gone.
Gangster capitalism under Trump has reached a new stage, in that it is unabashedly aggressive in mounting a war against every institution capable of providing a vision, a semblance of critical agency or a formative culture capable of creating agents who might be willing to hold power accountable. The American public is witnessing a crisis not merely of politics but of history, vision and agency, or what Andrew O’Hehir more pointedly called the acts of a domestic terrorist. This is a politics of domesticated fear, manufactured illusions and atomizing effects. Trump is the product of a culture long in the making, one fueled by the triumph of finance capital, the legitimation of a rancid individualism and a crippling notion of freedom. In this age of precarity, infantilizing publicity machines and uncertainty, a sense of collective impotency and fear provides the breeding ground for isolation, the corporate state and the discourses of inscription, demonization and false communities.
A culture of immediacy, an economy of profound boredom, instant gratification and spectacularized violence, has created a society of deliberate forgetting and a sadomasochistic culture that thrives on humiliation, revenge, a culture of punitiveness and an aesthetics of depravity. Trump signifies the death of the radical imagination and the apotheosis of its opposite: a lackluster hatred of thoughtfulness, creativity and inventiveness. Trump makes clear that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous, and that everyone has to be either consumer or taxpayer.
I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know. It is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by the power of massive “disimagination machines.” Its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it, but to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift. Ignorance is also the enemy of memory and a weapon in the politics of disappearance and the violence of organized forgetting. It is also about the erasure of what Brad Evans calls “the raw realities of suffering” and the undermining of a politics that is in part about the battle for memory.
Trump within a very short time has legitimated and reinforced a culture of social abandonment, erasure and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the tenets of a predatory and cruel form of gangster capitalism, while using its power to fill government positions with what appear to be the walking dead and at the same time produce death-dealing policies. Of course he is just the overt and unapologetic symbol of a wild capitalism and dark pessimism that have been decades in the making. He is the theatrical, self-absorbed monster that embodies and emboldens a history of savagery, greed and extreme inequality that has reached its endpoint — a poisonous form of American authoritarianism that must be stopped before it is too late. Trump makes clear that democracy is tenuous and has to be viewed as a site of ongoing contestation, one that demands a new understanding of politics, language and collective struggle.
Trump’s reign of terror will come to an end. But the forces that made Trump possible will not end with his political demise. This means that in the ongoing struggle against authoritarianism, progressives need a language of critique and possibility. This suggests the need for a new vocabulary that refuses to look away, refuses to surrender to either the dictates of consumerism, fear or bigotry. It also suggest a left/progressive movement that does more than say what it is against. It also needs a vision and an ongoing project that enables it to say what it is for. This could take the form of creating a political, economic and social platform rooted in the principles of democratic socialism.
Ariel Dorfman, drawing upon his own memories and experience of authoritarianism under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, speaks to the need for such a language. He writes: “It brings back to me the imaginative enormity that every true demand for radical change insists upon. It catches a missing feeling of our age: the belief that alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.”
We get a hint of such a language in the words of the writer Maaza Mengiste, who calls for a discourse of passion, power, responsibility and justice, one that “will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent, visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us.” In the age of Trump, we need to take seriously the notion that education is at the center of politics — that, as Stuart Hall has consistently stressed, “politics follows culture.” For Hall, this meant that addressing oppression cannot rest with an emphasis on economic structures, however important. What was also needed was recognizing how domination worked at the level of belief and persuasion, which suggested that education and consciousness-raising was at the center of politics.
As Hall puts it, “You can’t just rest with the underlying structural logic. And so you think about what is likely to awaken identification. There’s no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition, and … you won’t have a political movement without that moment of identification.”
This suggests a politics that begins both with a vision of what a democratic socialist society might look like and a narrative that makes power visible. This implies a language that is both rigorous theoretically and accessible. Moreover, it means developing a vocabulary that moves people, speaks directly to their problems, allows them to feel compassion for the other and gives them the courage to talk back. This suggests forging the appropriate pedagogical and symbolic weapons that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Rethinking politics means creating a vocabulary that enables us to confront a sense of responsibility in the face of the unspeakable, and to do so with a sense of dignity, self-reflection and the courage to act in the service of a radical democracy. It also means providing the theoretical tools that enable people to connect private problems with wider social issues.
In the face of Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, progressives need a vocabulary that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims, in the discourse of a radical democratic politics. We need a politics that addresses systemic problems and refuses gangster capitalism’s insistence that all problems are personal, an exclusive matter of individual responsibility and privatized solutions. This is not to underplay how difficult it is to acknowledge any viable sense of the outrage and struggle in an age when the power of culture, new digital technologies, social media and mainstream cultural apparatuses seem almost overwhelming in their deleterious effects on shaping agency, desires, values and modes of identification. But rather than surrender to such forces, they need to be reworked in the interest of a set of collective and emancipatory modes of communication, social relations and forms of resistance.
At the same time it is crucial to remember that there is more at stake here than a struggle over meaning. There is also the struggle over power, over the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of critical agency and contribute to a broad social movement that can translate meaning into a fierce struggle for economic, political and social justice. Power is never entirely on the side of domination, and there are numerous examples of resistance cropping up all over the United States. Not only it is evident in youth movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers, but also middle-aged women in the red states fighting over what Judith Shulevitz calls “the big issues for the resistance [such as] health care and gerrymandering, followed by dark money in politics, education and the environment.”
Activists are also mobilizing over immigrant rights, mass incarceration, police violence, abolishing nuclear weapons and environmental justice, among other issues. Facing the challenge of fascism will not be easy, but Americans are marching, protesting and organizing in record-breaking numbers. Hopefully, mass indignation will evolve into a worldwide movement whose power will be on the side of justice rather than impunity, bridges rather than walls, dignity rather than disrespect, and kindness rather than cruelty. What is crucial is that these discrete movements come together under a larger political and social formation in order to develop alliances capable of developing into a democratic socialist party, one willing to make resistance a necessity rather than not an option.
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