By Henry A. Giroux
October 14, 2022
Violence in the United States surpasses the unthinkable and increasingly resides in the space of apocalyptic rage, manufactured ignorance, and the normalization of a pervasive culture of ritualized barbarism. As civic culture collapses and truth succumbs to conspiracy theories, censorship, and the white washing of history, politics is emptied of democratic values, shared responsibilities, and a viable moral compass. Lawlessness is fueled by a diminishing lack of accountability in the political realm leading to an upsurge in racism, domestic terrorism, mass shootings and increasing threats of violence. Acts of violence erupt in even the most protected and secure spaces extending from schools to supermarkets, engulfing every facet of American life. We now live in a time marked by a politics of displacement, disappearance, erasure, patriotic frenzy, and political repression. Human suffering has been turned into a spectacle of racist aggression.
Violence, once hidden or proclaimed to be on the fringe of American society, is now at the center of power and everyday life and has become normalized. Violent threats are now repeatedly lodged against election officials, public health workers, teachers, librarians, as well as almost any politician who refuses to accept the lie that the presidential election was stolen. The threats of violence by a political movement of white supremist and election denying extremists has reached an all time high as has its insane accusations, threats, and hate mongering. For example, influential [peddlers] of hate, particularly QAnon members, now claim that the Democratic Party is filled with blood sucking satanists who abduct and sexualize young children. The fallout from these kind of threats is too extensive to document here one example, as reported by The Daily Beast, captures the vicious lies mainstreamed by such groups and how they incentivize violence among their followers:
“On August 11, Libs of TikTok falsely claimed Boston’s Children’s Hospital was performing hysterectomies on children. On August 15, Matt Walsh falsely said the hospital was putting “every toddler…on a path to sterilization and butchery before they can even talk.” Unsurprisingly, the hospital has since faced a deluge of threats, hate mail, and harassment ever since.“
The threat of violence not only functions as political performance in the interests of political opportunism and the stoking mass violence, it also is used by MAGA Republicans to conquer major critical institutions of society that extend from public schools and libraries to the courts. Dark money now drives such extremism and the repressive laws aimed at women’s reproductive rights, the banning of books, the weakening of voting rights, and assaults on the rights of trans-gender people, among other attacks. Many of these attacks are driven by the modern Republican Party’s central fear of living with difference.
Across the globe, violence is being marketed to further white supremacy, racial purity, and the notion that some groups do not deserve citizenship and as “non-citizens [are] therefore not human.” Politicians such as Orbán in Hungary talk openly about the dangers of “race mixing” in Europe echoing the discourse of white supremacy that now dominates the modern Republican Party. National memory is now corrupted in the name of fascist politics. As G. M. Tamas observes this narrowing of citizenship “is a form of civic death, often followed by “violent death.” As civic culture is undermined, it becomes easier for the GOP to market violence at a time when far right extremists groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and QAnon are “rapidly mutating,” particularly in the United States. The threat of violence has become a standard GOP response to almost any issue. Such violence is aimed increasingly at women fighting for reproductive rights, trans gender youth, those who support gun restrictions, and educators and librarians who oppose banning books.
Right wing language reduces politics to theater and spectacle, while using a neo-fascist echo chamber to spread a fascist logic of neoliberal cruelty, a racist politics of disposability, and a celebration of white, male Christian nationalism and supremacy. Echoes of an earlier fascist past combine the language of cruelty and dehumanization with policies designed to eliminate, repress, and kill those considered marginal—that is, those considered a contaminating and contemptible force in the script of hardcore fundamentalisms. Cruelty has now become ingrained in the DNA of the Republican Party, and much of it is aimed at children.
Right-wing politicians attack poor youth by sinking a child tax credit, plunging millions of kids into poverty. The war on youth continues in other ways. In spite of the fact that firearm related injuries are the leading cause of death among youth, Republicans call for the elimination of even the most sanguine of gun restrictions. Republicans too often depict Black youth as part of a criminal culture and support sentencing children to life without parole—a position reinforced by a reactionary Supreme Court. It should be noted that the U.S. incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world. Republicans do not simply fail children they wage a war on them. Idaho and other state Republicans have moved to make gender affirming care for transgender children a crime, even for the parents of such children.
Republican governors in Texas, Florida, and Arizona inflict immeasurable pain on defenceless migrants by often lying to them and bussing them, often illegally, to other states. In red states, politicians have enacted draconian antiabortion policies and are seeking to outlaw access to health services in states that have not banned women’s reproductive rights. A number of Republicans have voted against a federal disaster relief package that is crucial to aiding people caught in the path of ecological disasters, except when such disasters hit their own states.
Former President Trump now provides cover for domestic terrorists such as the Proud Boys and radical conspiracy groups such as QAnon. Governor Abbott of Texas rejects Biden’s pardon of untold numbers of people convicted of simple marijuana charges, condemning thousands of people in his states’ prisons to the further injustices of a race-based malignant policy of incarceration. Liberal and mainstream language with its embrace of Biden’s notion of “semi-fascism” both obliterates the long history of fascist politics, genocide, and mass violence in the United States as well as the full-fledged fascist politics now driving the current nightmarish moment both in the U.S. and globally. And these examples barely touch the cruelties inflicted on those Americans considered unfit to claim the mantle of human dignity and universal political, economic and social rights.
Fascism is not a marginal force; it is a mass political movement that now occupies the centers of power and employs the willingness and complicity of millions who indulge its cultish and racist fantasies such as the sinister belief that Jews are bringing in millions of migrants to displace and dis-empower whites. When Donald Trump once claimed the U.S. should have more people immigrating from Norway, he was mainstreaming the fascist discourse of racial purity that historically led to the death of millions not considered racially pure enough to be a part of previous fascist societies. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued white replacement theory has a long fascist pedigree that has surfaced once again without apology as was evident when neo-Nazis shouted “Jews will not replace us” while marching in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia at the notoriously violent “unite the right rally. It has also become a central theme at right-wing rallies and in the far-right ecosystem. Writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Colin P. Clarke and Tim Wilson observe that far right celebrities such as Tucker Carlson now play a prominent role in mainstreaming white supremacy through their relentless endorsement of the Great Replacement theory. They write:
“Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, which draws approximately 4.5 million viewers each night, has mentioned elements of the Great Replacement theory in more than 400 episodes. The Great Replacement theory suggests that “global elites” are replacing white Christians (“legacy Americans”) with immigrants. To prevent this phenomenon from playing out, far-right extremists call for the use of political violence.”
Replacement theory is not only spread by pundits such as Tucker Carlson, it has also been promoted by fringe Republican politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Moreover, it has also been endorsed and spread by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third highest ranking leader in the GOP. As reported in The Daily Beast, she not only promoted ads on Facebook endorsing white replacement theory, but she did so knowing that “it radicalized Robert Bowers, the terrorist who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue because he wanted to punish Jews for helping the “invaders” [and] “radicalized Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch terrorist who killed more than 50 Muslims, and who served as the direct inspiration for the Buffalo terrorist?”
The language of violence and white supremacy does more that invoke insidious meanings and racist stereotypes, it also incites threats that lead to violence, mass shootings, and untold deaths. The language of hate and bigotry embodies death-dealing threats that present enormous cause for alarm in society in which fascism is becoming an habitualized part of the culture. Such threats are now endemic to a Republican Party that hates equality, difference, and democracy itself. The language of violence, cruelty, and disposability are the political currency of a Nazi past and have emerged in what can be called the current Nazification of the present.
With Republican Party fascism on the rise, the right-wing social media floods American society with the discourse and images of hate, white nationalism, nativism, and the disavowal of citizenship as a universal right. Christian nationalism, with spokespersons such as retired lieutenant general and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, is dedicated to building a movement in which Christianity defines the governing principles of American life and institutions, all the while destroying the social bonds that provide meaning, dignity, and security to Americans. For instance, Flynn argues that the United States is in the midst of a religious crusade. He willingly attends and speaks at right-wing conferences filled with endless speeches about the “Great Awakening” and reminders that Christians are in a “spiritual war [which] you can’t win without attacking.” Like many GOP evangelicals Flynn “sees conspiracies in just about every corner of American life. According to Michelle R. Smith reporting for Frontline, his thinking fuels violence and is rooted a mix of lies and falsehoods. She writes:
“He’s repeated falsehoods about Black Lives Matter and said that so-called globalists created COVID-19. He tells the tens of thousands of people who have paid to see him speak that there are 75 members of the Socialist Party in Congress and has said the left and Democrats are trying to destroy the country. He asserts, above all else, that the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values. The bedrock, he warns, is crumbling…. He says elementary schools are teaching “filth” and “pornography.” He continues to assert, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, that elections can’t be trusted. He says, over and over, that some of his fellow Americans are “evil.”
Once again, major GOP politicians now use the language of violence to condone egregious acts of lawlessness, a characteristic endemic to the fascist playbook. Sen. Lindsay Graham on Fox News stated that “If there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information…there will be riots in the streets.” It is hard not to interpret Graham’s remarks as both a retaliatory threat of violence in the service of political opportunism and the veiled claim that Trump is above the law. This climate of menace was reinforced following Graham’s threat by former President Donald Trump who in a radio interview warned that if he were charged for mishandling classified documents there would be big “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” adding “I don’t think people of the United states would stand for it.” Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, noted that “Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. We have already seen the consequences of what happens when Trump invites a mob to the streets.” Soon afterwards, Trump went as far as to use the language of violence against Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who against Trump’s wishes, voted favorably for a bill to fund the federal government through mid-December. Combined with a racist reference to McConnell’s wife, Trump stated McConnell must have voted for the legislation “because he has a DEATH WISH.” No subtlety here.
In this age of growing fascism, language has become a central part of the microphysics of repression and everyday life. This is a language that celebrates white nationalism along with a regenerating cult of rage and aggression as a legitimate tool of political power. In this new era of violence, it is crucial to comprehend not only the political, institutional, and cultural conditions at work in turning politics into a form of civil war, but also to identify the sites, policies, and regimes of power that exploit the fears, anxieties, loneliness, and rage that have been produced by a society that has become synonymous with a culture of cruelty, greed, and aggression, and unbridled racism.
It is also crucial to address the rhetorical silences about the threat of fascism in the US. For example, the mainstream press uses coded language to divert from public view both the crisis of capitalism and its morphing into a form of neoliberal fascism. It deals with the authoritarian politics of abduction and disposability suffered by migrants by focusing on the personal narratives of its victims. It focuses on the lies of the GOP while saying nothing regarding what Chris Hedges calls the false claim that America is a functioning democracy. It calls insurrectionists such as a number of the Republican nominees for office in November election deniers rather than dangerous fascists. It condemns Trump’s claim to pardon criminals and thugs who attacked the Capitol while treating it as an isolated event that disappears from the news within 24 hours. Trump’s mishandling of government documents is treated as a personal act of lawlessness rather than being symptomatic of how lawlessness is endemic to fascist regimes, whether in Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, or Orbán’s Hungary.
When the neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy, the mainstream press, as well as Hilary Clinton, “focused solely on her being Italy’s first woman prime minister.” What is often forgotten in this depoliticized homage to gender is that women have played a prominent role the “pursuit of fascist goals.” George Pendle, writing in Air Mail, wrote that Italy’s Meloni “is the most spectacular example of a recent trend in European politics in which charismatic women have taken the reins of far-right political parties and led them to increasing legitimacy. Just look at Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark or Siv Jensen in Norway.”
The crisis of language in the United States is symptomatic of the death of one order, liberal democracy, and the emergence of another, which I call neoliberal fascism. The GOP with its mix of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics, politically corrupt grifters and politicians, January 6th insurrectionists, and right-wing extremists are not simply trying to remove Joe Biden from office, ban books, turn public and higher education into right-wing propaganda machines, eliminate women’s reproductive rights, and define historical, cultural and national memory through the lens white replacement theory and a nostalgic longing for the age of Jim Crow. They are ushering in an updated form of fascism that threatens global existence, not simply the last vestiges of democracy. They are engaged in a project that should be rightfully defined as a counter-revolutionary fascist takeover grounded in the death dealing logics of white supremacy, mass violence, and a politics of disposability, especially when it refers to migrants and trans people.
If Americans want a real debate about violence in the United States and globally, it is crucial to understand it as part of a larger neoliberal global order that enacts the abandonment of public goods, declares welfare as a reckless handout and sinful, views class and racial solidarity as dangerous, and replaces the idea of equality, justice, and freedom with notions of white nationalism, patriotic correctness, and racial cleansing. In addition, any serious discourse about violence has to address the growth of the military-industrial-academic complex, the militarization of everyday life, the militarizing of the police and its culture of racism, and the rise of the national security surveillance state. Americans need a vocabulary and language in which human beings are not considered expendable; profits are not viewed as more important than human needs; and systemic inequality is not viewed as more important than social justice, freedom, and a viable notion of individual agency and collective self-determination. Americans needs a vocabulary, as Robin D. G. Kelly repeatedly reminds us, that rejects liberalism’s defense of capitalism, the priority of the market, and a weak and deracinated notion of the public, social, and common good.
Liberals fear fascism but they fear the end of capitalism even more in spite of the fact that neoliberal capitalism’s endpoint in a time of crisis embraces the fundamental rudiments of fascist politics. Voting will not stop fascism and neoliberalism is not its antidote; moreover, elections at a historical moment in which money drives politics offers a weak depoliticizing prop for avoiding the ideological and structural elements of capitalism that breed massive inequality, suffering, repression, a culture of immediacy, civic dysfunction, the logics of disposability, and ecological devastation. Neoliberalism with its war-against-all mentality mainstreams hatred for those considered other, subjects Black and Brown people to systemic violence, and punishes those who believe in long term investments designed to develop a radically democratic future.
Neoliberal capitalism does not simply embrace violence, it is fundamental to its how it legitimates and reproduces itself. Capitalism is not part of the laws of nature and is the product of an ongoing effort to subvert the public imagination, undermine critical thinking, and decouple economic activity from social costs. Its massive right-wing propaganda machines have militarized culture and the educational apparatuses of persuasion. For the modern Republican Party, the struggle over ideas has become an accelerated war to depoliticize, infantilize, and destroy any vestige of a mass consciousness that has a passion for a socialist democracy.
The hard fascism of the Republican Party now functions as a form of domestic terrorism with its embrace of a global fascist politics. The Democratic Party is the muted underside of fascist politics. It is wedded to a capitalist society that breeds the inequalities, misery, suffering, uncertainties, and precarity that, as Toni Morrison once said, supports a militarized and racist environment that allows fascism to grow while rejecting equality as a central principle of both human relations and democracy itself. It hides its fascist impulses in the hypocritical discourse of a compassionate capitalism, an oxymoron whose ultimate purpose is to protect the financial elite and its ideological and repressive state apparatuses. Wedded to big money, its call for fair elections rings hollow given that “both rising right-wing movements, as well as corporate control of elections, are linked.” They are two sides of the same coin. This addiction to neoliberal capitalism represents a lethal connection between the two political parties. There is also the broader context of American foreign policy and its connection to a fascist politics. This larger context highlights the role that the Democratic Party along with GOP has and continue to play in supporting a range of fascist countries and their right-wing movements, all of whom are blithely defined as allies.
The threat of violence is now used by right-wing politicians and extremist groups to threaten dissent and those who advocate for public health, basic social provisions, democratic values and democracy itself. Language stripped of any regards for civic culture, informed judgment, and an inclusive notion of citizenship becomes spectacularized, emotive, and bereft of reason and any sense of justice. This is about more than a crisis of civic literacy, historical consciousness, moral witnessing, manufactured ignorance, and a rampant anti-intellectualism. This is a language that embraces violence as a means of bonding, offering its followers the muscular allure of a spectacularized authoritarianism mediated through and enlivened, once again, by the false claim that white masculinity is in crisis, aggrieved, and under assault by migrants and people of color. In addition, such violence is now inscribed in a language of commonsense, where it escapes rational analysis and is taken-for-granted.
As civic culture is undermined, thinking itself becomes an object of scorn, and politics is emptied of any ethical substance, reduced to theater, corruption, and a tsunami of lies, it is all the more crucial to reclaim a language that embraces the social contract, common good, and sustainable democratic notions of community. At the very least, such a language would critically analyze the historically and socially constructed categories of truth, politics, and ethics. It would offer a comprehensive notion of politics, one that illuminates the diverse connections that join institutions, power relations, and the habits of everyday life. This would be a politics which, as the late Susan Willis argued, would give people “a voice in collective decision making, not only in government, but at home, at work, at school.”
This should be a politics that would allow for the interrogation of matters of class, inequality, iniquitous power relations, systemic racism, and a politics of commonsense. It should also offer a vocabulary for deepening the connections among diverse groups, social movements, and competing solidarities. It would make education central to politics and create the tools that enable individuals to connect their private troubles to wider, systemic concerns. It would offer a vocabulary for replacing a politics of disconnection and the individualization of the social with a politics of connection; that is, a comprehensive politics that embraces the totality of a system and social order. Following Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis, and Barbara Epstein, a viable notion of resistance needs a new language for rethinking theory, developing an anti-capitalist politics, and a mass movement aimed at democratizing power. This notion of resistance would also include a discourse for relating education to social change, a theory of institutional structures, a developed notion of public intellectuals in the age of digital media and tyranny, and a politics of critique and possibility.
In the current post-Trump era, violent rhetoric has become an apocalyptic rage machine as words are emptied of substantive meaning; reason is overtaken by lies, and the forces of irrationality; modern conscience collapses, overcome by doctrines of hate and the destruction of political and ethical standards. In this upgraded era of fascism and accelerated violence, new and oppressive modes of persuasion are developed in the cultural realm that extend from social media to numerous online platforms. These new regimes of indoctrination and propaganda take on an unparalleled significance in the production of knowledge, identities, agency, values and social relations. Under such circumstances, language no longer functions as simply a repository of meaning and facts, it has turned toxic and takes on a new pedagogical and communicative significance in its ability to shape values, social relations, and identities.
In this new era of violence, it is crucial to grasp not only the political, institutional, and cultural conditions at work in turning politics into a form of civil war, but also to identify the sites, policies, and regimes of power that exploit the fears, anxieties, loneliness, and rage that have been produced by a capitalist society that has become synonymous with a culture of cruelty, war, aggression, and systemic brutality. Under neoliberalism, domination has become internalized, politics has collapsed into the personal, meaningful registers of the social and public sphere have largely disappeared. In this historical period of social atomization and loneliness, social problems are now defined through the regressive neoliberal language of excessive individualism in which all troubles are reduced to pejorative categories such as a lack of ambition, personal failings, individual deficits, laziness, and lack of resilience.
In many societies, violence is being elevated to an organizing principle of power, increasingly valued as a form of political currency. The conditions for democracy are being obliterated by extremists globally who embrace repressive forms of power, lies, and white supremacy as tools of political opportunism. America has a full-fledged fascist problem that must be addressed if it is to think its way to a different politics and future. But America is not alone. Fascist governments are emerging in Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Chile, and the other countries. What these countries share is a hatred of difference, equality, and egalitarian policies and practices. Traditional political categories that often pit parties against each other seem irrelevant when it comes to addressing the emerging threats to global democracy itself. Liberal democracy is no longer on life-support in the United States, it is a corpse hidden behind the language of myth, misrepresentation, and social and historical amnesia. The process of Nazification has almost reached its endpoint and the planet hangs in the balance. Across the globe, the struggle over politics is less a rivalry between traditional political parties and movements than a struggle between an updated brand of fascism and the promise of a socialist democracy. As the ghost of fascism washes across the globe, maintaining hope and the need for massive collective resistance has become a revolutionary act with no other option.
First published on Counterpunch.
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