HENRY GIROUX
SEPTEMBER 18, 2026

We have many monsters to destroy. – George Seferis

But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?   – Bertolt Brecht

More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public intellectual Manos Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested, comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance, the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief from judgment, conviction from action.”

We have reached such a moment.

The monsters are no longer hiding in the shadows. They occupy presidential offices and ministries, command armies and police forces, control digital platforms, dominate television screens, administer borders, build detention centers, and transform the suffering of others into political theater. Their language of racial purification, mass deportation, extermination, vengeance, and disposability no longer produces the outrage it once might have summoned. Cruelty is displayed as strength. Humiliation becomes entertainment. The spectacle of suffering becomes a source of political pleasure. What should be unbearable becomes familiar; what should provoke resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life.

The monster triumphs not simply when it commits atrocities, but when its language becomes ordinary, its violence becomes acceptable, its weaponization of racial and class divisions goes unnoticed, and its presence no longer disturbs the moral imagination. Toni Morrison gave us another language for understanding how monsters become ordinary. She called it “dead language,” a language emptied of ethical responsibility and enlisted in the service of domination. Morrison’s dead language is itself monstrous. As she writes, oppressive language “does more than represent violence; it is violence.” It is a language that “drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.”

Morrison’s insight reaches beyond rhetoric. Monsters require a language that prepares the ground for their violence, strips their victims of humanity, and teaches people to accommodate the unthinkable. Dead language is one of the conditions that allows monstrosity to pass into everyday life disguised as common sense.

Primo Levi once observed that “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi remains right about the role of unthinking functionaries, but today the monsters themselves have acquired institutional power and public legitimacy. Emboldened by staggering economic inequality, empowered by the machinery of high-tech authoritarianism, and legitimated by an expanding culture of state violence, they have moved from the political margins to the commanding heights of American society.

Here Hannah Arendt’s warning about the failure of thinking takes on a renewed urgency. Monstrosity thrives when judgment is surrendered, when the obligation to think becomes a burden, and when ignorance is transformed from an absence of knowledge into a cultivated refusal to know. We might call this the banality of ignorance: the willful suspension of judgment that allows people to see suffering without confronting it and to hear lies without rejecting them. The monster does not merely demand obedience. It needs subjects who have learned not to think about what their obedience makes possible.

Yet Hadjidakis’s warning poses a question more disturbing than whether monsters now govern us. What does it mean for a society to begin to resemble its monsters? And what pedagogical forces are at work in creating and normalizing that resemblance? Resemblance does not mean that everyone becomes a killer or a fascist. It means that the habits of thought, structures of feeling, and forms of indifference on which monstrosity depends begin to penetrate everyday life. The banality of ignorance becomes a social condition, a cultivated form of moral blindness in which not knowing offers a refuge from responsibility and refusing to think becomes a condition of belonging. But such ignorance does not exist outside the realm of desire. It has an emotional register, a psychology of authoritarianism and a pedagogy of terror through which people learn not simply to live with cruelty but to bathe in its emotional charge, finding pleasure and belonging in “patterns of domination and submission [that harden] into a syndrome of attitudes regarding hierarchy, power, sexuality and tradition.”

The monster has a long history, born in the darkest regions of the social imagination where fear, difference, and power converge. As Manvir Singhhas observed, monsters have long haunted the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the familiar and the terrifying, the civilized and what it casts outside its gates. But monsters are never simply creatures of fantasy. They are warnings, projections, embodiments of collective fears, and often weapons for deciding who belongs within the circle of humanity and who can be expelled from it. What matters politically is what happens when the monster steps out of myth and fantasy, takes possession of the institutions of power, and acquires the authority to decide who may live, who must suffer, and who can be made disposable.

There is, however, another problem with the metaphor of the monster itself. To imagine Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, or other architects of contemporary authoritarian violence simply as monsters risks placing them outside history, as if their cruelty originated in some private pathology detached from the society that produced them. The monster can then become an alibi for the society that created him. Moral outrage becomes individualized, while the institutions, economic interests, racial hierarchies, cultural apparatuses, and political forces that make organized cruelty possible disappear. This is the crucial insight in Jorge Gonzalez Arocha’s argument that turning perpetrators into monsters can itself become a way of looking away. Arocha argues that “reducing the perpetrator to nothing more than a monster protects us from recognising ourselves as potential perpetrators. It distances us from the event and its reality, while placing us in a position of moral superiority….[It] is a way of denying that the ability to destroy also belongs to us, that it forms part of the human condition.”

The problem is not that monsters do not exist. The problem begins when monstrosity becomes an explanation rather than a question. Monsters do not descend upon society from somewhere outside history. They are produced within history, cultivated through institutions, protected by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, financed by powerful economic interests, amplified by media, and normalized through culture. The political significance of monsters lies not simply in the horrors they commit, but in the social order that makes those horrors possible, useful, legitimate, and eventually ordinary. A singular focus on monsters can obscure the deeper structure of gangster capitalism, a system that “prioritises certain forms of power over the common good and enables the gradual dehumanization of our societies.”

The question must therefore change. We must move from monster to machinery, from the pathology of the individual to the political economy of organized cruelty, and from there to the cultural and educational forces that teach people how to live with the suffering such machinery produces. Monsters do not act alone. Their power becomes visible in the institutions that protect them, the wealth that sustains them, the laws that authorize them, and the violence that follows in their wake. We see their handiwork in streets stained with blood, in migrants brutalized and left to die in detention centers, in the torture documented in Israeli prisons, and in the bodies of children and families torn apart by Israeli and American bombs in Gaza. Behind these abstractions are torn limbs, dismembered bodies, children pulled from rubble, families burned and buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and human beings reduced to flesh and bone by systems in which cruelty has been organized, authorized, and repeated until even the most horrific violence threatens to lose its capacity to shock.

The horror lies in a society’s growing accommodation to monsters, in the silence surrounding their crimes and the erosion of moral and political boundaries that once made their actions intolerable. Such silence is never innocent. It is the rigor mortis of ethical and political decay, the point at which a politics organized around death begins to pass as ordinary life. The nightmare no longer lurks in the shadows; it claws its way into daylight and is met with indifference, resignation, or applause. The question is how people learn to live amid mass suffering and eventually look away. What forms of power require such silence? What institutions cultivate it? What culture teaches people to turn away from the bodies left behind? And most important, what pedagogical machinery teaches millions not merely to tolerate cruelty but to identify with those who inflict it, desire the power they embody, and experience the suffering of others as the price of their own imagined liberation?

Political economy, culture, and pedagogy converge here. The monster becomes inseparable from gangster capitalism, pedagogical terrorism, and the culture of cruelty. Gangster capitalism does not accidentally produce monsters. It increasingly requires them, along with publics capable of loving them.

Arendt’s concept of radical evil takes this argument further, moving us from the failure of judgment to the political machinery that renders human beings superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, radical evil emerges from a political order capable of stripping human beings of rights, history, individuality, and finally their claim to membership in the human community. The concentration camp represented the most extreme realization of this logic, but its political significance extended beyond the camp. Totalitarianism required institutions capable of transforming human beings into disposable matter.

Arendt’s later account of Adolf Eichmann complicated the picture further. Eichmann did not appear before her as a demonic figure possessing some unfathomable depth of evil. He appeared frighteningly ordinary: bureaucratic, careerist, obedient, incapable of thinking seriously about the consequences of his actions. The banality of evil did not mean that his crimes were banal. It meant that extraordinary crimes could be administered through ordinary routines, bureaucratic language, professional ambition, obedience, and the suspension of judgment.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Nazi machinery of terror and mass murder, represents another configuration of the political monster. Here ideological fanaticism, administrative intelligence, and extraordinary institutional power converged. Eichmann and Heydrich should not be collapsed into the same psychological type, but both expose the inadequacy of treating atrocity simply as the work of monsters. Modern systems of terror require administrators, lawyers, technicians, police officers, propagandists, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries. Evil becomes most politically dangerous when it acquires an office, a budget, a bureaucracy, a vocabulary of necessity, and a public willing to accept its premises.

Primo Levi understood this danger in another register. He rejected the consoling temptation to divide the world neatly between innocent humanity and incomprehensible monsters. As he once put it, “It is a stupid mistake to see all the demons on one side and all the saints on the other…. To divide into black and white means not to know human nature.” His concept of the gray zone gave this insight its most disturbing political force. The gray zone did not abolish distinctions between victim and perpetrator; it exposed the ways systems of domination corrupt moral life itself. The political lesson is disturbing precisely because it denies us the comfort of believing that atrocity belongs to another species of human being. Modern barbarism does not emerge outside civilization. It is organized through civilization’s institutions, technologies, forms of expertise, and structures of obedience.

Umberto Eco made a related point about fascism. Fascism does not possess a single immutable costume. It changes its language, symbols, technologies, and institutional forms. Eco warned that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.” To search only for Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts is therefore to risk missing fascism when it returns wearing a business suit, carrying a Bible, appearing on podcasts, commanding an algorithm, or invoking the language of freedom, national rebirth, border security, and popular sovereignty. Fascism survives precisely because it learns how to inhabit the historical conditions of its own time.

If fascism changes with the historical conditions it inhabits, then those conditions become central to understanding how its monsters are produced and sustained. The problem of the monster must therefore be situated within political economy, culture, pedagogy, and history. The conditions that make monstrosity possible are neither accidental nor timeless. They emerge from societies in which extreme inequality is treated as natural,cruelty becomes entertainment, racial hierarchy is defended as common sense, militarism becomes a national virtue, and entire populations are designated as disposable.

The monstrosity of the present did not suddenly appear with Trump. Its genealogy runs through the long history of American empire and, with particular force, through the War on Terror. In the name of fighting terrorism, the United States unleashed wars whose direct death toll exceeded 600,000 people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, while estimates of deaths produced indirectly through destroyed infrastructure, disease, displacement, and malnutrition run into the millions. Such devastation cannot be reduced to the language of catastrophic policy failure. It constituted a vast machinery of racialized disposability in which entire populations could be bombed, tortured, displaced, imprisoned, and abandoned while their suffering barely registered within the moral vocabulary of American political life.

Aimé Césaire understood long ago that imperial violence never remains safely confined to the people against whom it is first directed. Colonial brutality, he warned, produces a “terrific boomerang effect”: the habits of dehumanization, racial hierarchy, lawlessness, and organized violence cultivated abroad eventually return home. The War on Terror offers a terrifying contemporary illustration of that warning. The torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, indefinite detention at Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, drone assassination, mass surveillance, and the normalization of permanent war did more than devastate other societies. They helped educate the American public into accepting torture, surveillance, militarized policing, lawless executive power, and the designation of whole populations as threats. Trumpism did not invent this political culture. It inherited it, intensified it, and turned its imperial habits inward. In this sense, the monster came home because the machinery that produced it had been operating for decades.

Under gangster capitalism, the imperial machinery of disposability turns inward, assuming an especially lethal domestic form. Wealth concentrates, public goods are stripped for private profit, democratic institutions are subordinated to billionaire power, and the punishing state expands as the social state contracts. Abandonment and repression become two sides of the same political order.

Pedagogy becomes central because fascism is never merely imposed from above. It must be learned. People must be taught whom to fear, whom to hate, whose suffering matters, whose suffering can be ignored, and whose disappearance can be celebrated. They must learn to experience cruelty as strength, domination as freedom, racial hierarchy as natural, and violence as national purification.

Pedagogical terrorism names this process. It operates through schools and churches, television and social media, podcasts, political rallies, digital platforms, advertising, and the spectacular theater of state violence. These cultural apparatuses do more than communicate ideas. They organize attention, shape consciousness, mobilize desire, and teach habits of feeling. They create the emotional and ideological conditions under which disposability becomes common sense.

Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue. Fear is converted into hatred and humiliation into the desire to humiliate others. Fascism thrives on this emotional economy because it gives private suffering a public target. The wounds inflicted by an increasingly brutal social order are redirected away from the structures that produce them and toward immigrants, Black people, Palestinians, feminists, intellectuals, queer people, dissidents, and anyone else designated as an enemy.

A culture of barbarism takes hold when cruelty is no longer confined to the state or its most fanatical leaders but enters everyday life, shaping public consciousness, political desire, and the boundaries of who is considered human. Barbarism becomes cultural when large numbers of people support forced removal, collective punishment, starvation, exterminatory violence, and the destruction of civilian life without experiencing such policies as a moral catastrophe.

Israel offers a chilling example. In May 2025, a survey conducted by Pennsylvania State University professor Tamir Sorek found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed supported the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, with 54 percent saying they were “very” supportive. More disturbing still, 47 percent agreed that when the Israeli military conquers an enemy city it should act as the Israelites did in the biblical conquest of Jericho, by “killing all the residents.” These figures register something more terrifying than support for a particular military policy. They reveal how the language of expulsion and extermination can migrate from the margins of political life into the moral vocabulary of everyday society. This is what a culture of barbarism looks like when disposability becomes common sense and the destruction of another people can be imagined as legitimate, necessary, or even righteous.

Omer Bartov has gone further, arguing that Israeli society has become complicit through both action and silence, and is increasingly marked by violence, vulgarity, and indifference. What is at stake here exceeds the crimes of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or the Israeli military. It points to the pedagogical production of a social order in which the language of elimination becomes thinkable, mass suffering becomes tolerable, and exterminatory violence can be absorbed into the ordinary rhythms of national life. This is the endpoint of pedagogical terrorism: the manufacture of subjects for whom barbarism no longer appears barbaric.

The culture of fascism does not merely tolerate monsters; it turns them into celebrities, strongmen, saviors, and objects of identification, reproducing a cult of leadership. Their violations of moral and political norms become signs of authenticity, their cruelty proof of strength. Their contempt for democratic restraints becomes a source of pleasure for followers who experience each transgression as their own imaginary liberation from the obligations of equality, compassion, and mutual responsibility.

Trump offered a chilling display of these mobilizing passions of fascism when he called upon his followers to cheat in the November elections. At the Republican convention in Dallas, he instructed thousands of supporters to raise their right hands and repeat an oath of personal loyalty that included the declaration, “I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.” This was more than another assault on democratic norms. It was a fascist political ritual in which loyalty to the leader, contempt for law, and the thrill of collective transgression were fused into a mass spectacle. Yet the incident was absorbed into the churn of the news cycle as another bizarre Trump performance. This is how fascism becomes ordinary: the outrageous is reported, consumed, and forgotten before its meaning can become a matter of sustained public judgment. What should have registered as a political emergency dissolved into the culture of immediacy, stripped of its historical meaning and reduced to another spectacle without consequence.

The political task cannot be reduced to removing individual monsters from power. The language of monstrosity becomes politically disabling when it individualizes what is systemic, directing attention toward pathological leaders while leaving intact the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, racial hierarchies, and educational forces that produce authoritarian consciousness.

The defining political question of our time is not whether monsters have returned. It is what kind of society produces them, what forms of power need them, and what pedagogical machinery teaches people to follow them. The monster is not the end of the analysis but its beginning. Fascism cannot be defeated by removing its most visible leaders while leaving intact the economic, political, and cultural machinery that produced them. The struggle against fascism must also confront gangster capitalism, white supremacy, militarism, the carceral state, and the institutions that turn human beings into disposable populations.

But resistance cannot live on outrage alone. It needs a language of possibility and a politics capable of making hope concrete. Hope is neither optimism nor faith that history bends automatically toward justice. It is a practice born when people refuse the manufactured loneliness of neoliberal life, discover one another in struggle, and recognize that what they experience as private misery is often a public wound produced by structures of power. It takes form in unions, classrooms, demonstrations, mutual-aid networks, abolitionist movements, struggles for Palestinian freedom, immigrant justice campaigns, and organizations capable of turning anger into collective power.

There are already signs that such a politics is struggling to be born in the United States. The resurgence of democratic socialism, the extraordinary growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the electoral victories of socialist candidates, and renewed labor militancy suggest that increasing numbers of people are no longer willing to accept the tyranny of the market as the horizon of political possibility. DSA reported more than 120,000 members by the summer of 2026, alongside a widening field of socialist electoral victories and organizing campaigns. These developments should neither be romanticized nor mistaken for a mass socialist transformation. But they matter because they register something the ruling order desperately wants declared impossible: capitalism is once again being named as a political problem, socialism has returned to public life as a language of possibility, and collective struggle is breaking through the suffocating claim that there is no alternative.

Hope is dangerous to fascism because authoritarian power feeds on isolation, historical amnesia, political exhaustion, and the conviction that nothing can be changed. Militant hope shatters that conviction. It turns private suffering into public anger, spectators into political agents, and the loneliness on which fascism feeds into collective power. Against the pedagogy of fear, it creates a pedagogy of resistance and civic courage. Against the culture of cruelty, it makes solidarity a weapon and justice a collective demand. Against a society organized around disposability, it insists that human beings are worth more than markets, borders, property, and profit, and that the institutions producing misery, abandonment, and organized violence must be transformed.

The struggle is larger than defeating the monsters who occupy the commanding heights of power. We must destroy the conditions that make them possible by building a mass democratic politics capable of confronting concentrated wealth, dismantling racial and economic hierarchies, defending public goods, breaking the grip of militarism, and returning economic and political power to ordinary people. Democracy cannot survive as the political shell of capitalism, emptied of its substance while concentrated economic power governs from within. It must become a way of organizing social life itself, grounded in equality, collective power, and the struggle for a just future.

More than four decades ago, Manos Hadjidakis warned: “When the face of the monster ceases to frighten us, then we must be afraid… because that means we have begun to resemble it.” His warning has never been more urgent. But resemblance is not destiny. The monster depends upon our resignation, our silence, our isolation, and finally our belief that resistance is futile. The most radical form of hope begins with the refusal of that lie. Monsters are made by history, and they can be unmade by collective struggle. That struggle must confront capitalism itself and build a democratic socialist politics capable of wresting power from the ruling elites, returning it to ordinary people, and transforming hope into a force for remaking the world.

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.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

DAVID S. D’AMATO
SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

Today a debate is raging over the question of whether we now have a technofeudal economy of rentierism, pervasive anti-competitive practices, and stagnation or a dynamic and brutally competitive hypercapitalist system. To complicate matters, there are further disagreements amongst those who reject the “technofeudal hypothesis” and contend that existing theories of capitalism already adequately explain the phenomena we observe today.

Featuring prominently within these debates are, among many others, John Bellamy Foster, perhaps the most famous living proponent of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s monopoly capitalism framework, and economist Stephen Maher and political scientist Scott Aquanno, who oppose not only the technofeudal hypothesis, but also the ideas of monopoly capitalism and political capitalism. While these may appear to be niche debates between different Marxist schools, irrelevant to anyone but academic leftists, they confront some of the most important issues in politics and economics today.

Foster sees the state as bound by monopoly capital, now serving to hand out privileges and thus unearned rent streams. The state in this view is also a means through which surplus capital is absorbed (through, for example, spending on war and empire). He describes this as a form of politicalcapitalism in which the state and capital are tightly connected, with the former bolstering the position of the latter as it becomes less competitive and more stagnant. Describing the findings of a study conducted by Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonnahe fifteen years ago, the editors of Monthly Review recently wrote, “Practically, every industry in the United States was controlled by a very few firms, and levels of concentration were rising. These firms were also multinational corporations dominating the world.”

For prominent monopoly capital theorists like Foster, record corporate profits and ballooning asset prices do not necessarily point to a thriving, dynamic economy generally or industrial base specifically. Quite the opposite. They are viewed as the consequences of today’s runaway financialization, an upshot of the fact that the economic surplus cannot any longer be absorbed by markets that are in fact stagnating. This is why we see speculative bubbles, stock buy-backs, and further debt-juiced accumulation, not expansion of the real sector. As within today’s markets, dominated by massive corporate oligopolies, prices are administered more than they are competitively set. There is therefore a tendency toward economic stagnation until it is addressed by intensive state intervention through bailouts, quantitative easing, war and empire, and massive-scale artificial waste. The state must constantly intervene to prop up capital in the face of chronically weak demand.

Maher and Aquanno contend that the monopoly capital school’s idea of competition is fundamentally flawed and outdated, too narrowly focused on the concentration of key sectors and the number of competing companies. They see investment booming, spending on research and development continuing to increase, technological innovation accelerating, and profits soaring to historical highs, and they conclude that there is no evidence of declining productivity or general economic malaise. Rather than seeing corporate consolidation, highly concentrated markets, and strong state intervention and integration as historically aberrant, and thus ushering in a new, anti-competitive form of monopoly capitalism or technofeudalism, they see these features of the present moment as deeply connected to and implicated in capitalism’s competitive dynamics.

To them, it doesn’t matter that most of the growth of the past several decades has been driven by the financial sector, nor does the more conspicuous and muscular role of the state in the economy necessarily mean a less competitive system. They draw on Anwar Shaikh’s formulation of “real competition” to contend that today’s concentrations of capital, financialization, and unabashed statism have in fact intensified competition. They see both capitalists and governments as participants in an extremely fast-paced and intense fight for investment, market position, and survival.

Maher and Aquanno believe that theories of technofeudalism, rentier capitalism, and monopoly capitalism alike entail an implicit argument in favor of an alliance between capital and workers. They see this as an analytical and strategic mistake for socialists. That is, by framing the fundamental problem as one of monopoly, of unearned rents through the corruption of competition, we end up in a shallow, reformist cycle of merely asking for a fairer or more competitive capitalism. This, they argue, forecloses a deeper analysis of the exploitation always present in capitalism and the capitalist accumulation process. They believe that workers fundamentally have no interest in a more competitive and decentralized economy, indeed, that “competition is the problem.” To Maher and Aquanno, the socialist left should focus on the appropriation of our actually quite efficient corporate institutions, administering them to serve socialist goals. In political and economic decentralization, Maher and Aquanno see the traps of reformism and pro-competition liberalism. They believe that socialists must instead take over and democratize the efficient, centralized administrative apparatus already constructed by contemporary financial and technological capitalism. But in setting forth their case, they give short shrift to the argument that democratization would, in practice, mean economic decentralization.

The Meaning of Competition and Socialism

Certainly the number of firms within the field of economic play must have some impact on the overall degree of competitiveness. It would seem that much of this disagreement cannot be solved by pointing to empirical facts, because it is largely, if not entirely, an argument about what we mean normatively when we invoke “competition.” If, on the one hand, we see economic competition as necessarily or definitionally excluding the coercive political means (much as thinkers as diverse as Charles Dunoyer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, and Franz Oppenheimer did), then it is clearly correct to draw a sharp distinction between capitalism and an actual competitive market economy. And it is notable that the theorists of monopoly capital themselves admit that such a truly competitive market system is always introduced as a point of critical departure or hypothetical thought experiment. Foster, for example, recently wrote that “no Marxist economic theorist would ever accept the neoclassical concepts of perfect and pure competition as anything but a fiction.”

Maher and Aquanno maintain a strict Marxist distinction between profit and rent; for them, profit requires an active participation in the cycle of capital accumulation, whereas rent relies on the suspension of that cycle. They argue that it “strains the imagination to say…that any income from ownership is rent.” Yet many historical socialists have held to a version of just this claim and, accordingly, did not hew so closely to Maher and Aquanno’s distinction between profit and rent. Many socialists have regarded rent, interest, and profits as alike, forms of extraction based in the structural inequalities of the capitalist system. Nor does this mean somehow abandoning the labor theory of value. Socialists have in fact long argued that monopoly ownership and special privilege are the mechanisms through which the labor of the worker is stolen. This debate is perhaps best understood not as one between reformist liberalism and socialism, but as yet another iteration of the old debate between Marx and Bakunin, between competing visions of socialism.

The ultimate problem for the Maher and Aquanno view—and indeed for the orthodox position of all statist Marxists—is that their goal of a supposedly rational, democratic, ex ante form of economic planning, to replace the chaos of the marketplace, can only ultimately result in the creation of one giant capitalist firm. Is it never made clear why or how this integrated conglomerate under the direction of state power would be any less exploitative or environmentally destructive than competition. Maher and Aquanno deeply misunderstand the practical, historical relationship between political domination and economic exploitation. The state is not a neutral tool that can be seized from the capitalists and then inverted and democratized, placed in the hands of the working class.

The Marxists’ own historical and material analyses reveal the state, in its structural DNA, as a coercive apparatus that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a specialized minority. This argument was among Bakunin’s key contributions, and what allowed him to predict the emergence of a “red bureaucracy” (or the “new class”) and through it the reemergence of so many of capitalism’s core features and mechanisms. In erecting a highly centralized and powerful administrative hierarchy in which the very few give the orders and the masses do the work, Marxists can and have reproduced exactly the forms of domination, alienation, and extraction that they set out to abolish. These relations existed long before capitalist forms of property and markets, and changing the names does not change the relationships, at least not on its own. We find competitive dynamics and pressures in all human systems. Even in an economic system in which the state owns everything and employs everyone, there will be competition between workers within the state equivalents of companies and business units, as well as reconstituted competitive class struggles between the managing bureaucrats and the workers.

Liberty or Authority?

The old practical question remains: how do we make the economic system democratic and non-exploitative? How do we get to a system where labor is compensated with its full product? It doesn’t seem that centralizing power even further will accomplish what orthodox Marxists believe it will, given our experience with centralized power. To accomplish the normative goal identified by Marx himself, a social world without domination, a world in which human beings are free and not alienated, requires the rejection of hierarchy in all its forms. The tension here is, once again, the one that split the socialist movement between authoritarians led by Marx and libertarians led by Bakunin. Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in the republican reading of Marx (for example, William Clare Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx). In the republican tradition, freedom is a condition of non-domination, the freedom from being subjected arbitrarily to the will of another. Reading Marx in this way, capitalism is just one of many ways that an individual can be so subjected. The real horizon of the socialist is the end of domination—which would have to include the abolition of the state. And while Marxists have often insisted that their doctrine is defined historically and materially, as opposed to normatively, Marx himself clearly set out normative claims and goals.

If Marxists like Maher and Aquanno insist that massive, centralized, hierarchical forms of organization are a necessity of modern economic production, then the anarchist replies that they must be made unnecessary. This is in no way a merely liberal or reformist approach. Bakunin’s position is arguably more radical and ultimately more anti-capitalist than Maher and Aquanno’s in that it takes on the forms of hierarchy and centralized power that actually give rise to the theft of surplus value. Leaving the state untouched leaves the fundamental problem unresolved. The forms of technology and industrial organization we have today are not inevitable. There are local, decentralized, commons-based alternatives that have existed and still can.

Within our current political economy, it is not clear how diminished inter-company competition would actually have to be before Maher and Aquanno would admit that power itself is the ultimate driver of the dynamics we observe. That is, if we reduce the meaning of competition to the mere presence of coercive dynamics, rivalry between organizations, or constraints that compel agents to optimize their performance, then competition is a universal quality of human activity and organization. It is not unique to capitalism or to market economies generally. We will find competition regardless of the label on a system and regardless of its actual structure. Government bureaucrats will struggle and compete amongst themselves for broader administrative powers. The old aristocratic lords constantly competed for land and power. Corporate managers vie for allocations of capital. The anarchists understood that we must structure these historically durable competitive forces horizontally and cooperatively. We can distinguish between competition through domination and theft, and competition within a framework that respects freedom and equality.

Maintaining a normative distinction between the economic means and the political means helps to draw our attention to what is elided when competition is defined as Maher and Aquanno define it, without further analysis or qualification. Theories of rentier capitalism or technofeudalism are, at bottom, attempts to point out and diagnose the expanding role of the political means within contemporary political-economic systems. If we follow Maher and Aquanno in insisting that we must not use these labels because we’re still looking at plain old capitalism, then it isn’t at all clear why they think it’s acceptable to use other labels such as fascism, which also contains competition under their definition. Historical fascism was not just a state form. Not only explicitly but materially, it was also a specific economic system. They must grant that fascism left the capitalist mode of production intact; private property, the wage relationship, and competition between firms all remain under fascism. Large firms and industrial conglomerates were in very active competition for customers, state contracts, and dominance within sectors and markets. If it is only the presence of such competition and of profit-seeking that requires the retention of capitalism as the preferred label, then Maher and Aquanno’s reasoning would seem to require the rejection of “fascism” as a new or distinct category.

They are no less selective and arbitrary in the way they define the productive reinvestment that supposedly distinguishes today’s tech giants from feudalism. Their narrow definition obscures many of the ways political-economic power reproduced itself for centuries under that system. In arguing that today’s tech companies are unlike the old lords, Maher and Aquanno claim that the lords produced unproductively, in order to consume. It is true as far as it goes: they did not produce for the market as we understand it today. Yet this argument facilely ignores the myriad strategies feudal lords used to deploy and reinvest their resources toward consolidating their power and strengthening their ability to dominate and extract more. As a matter of historical fact, feudal lords frequently reinvested in the infrastructure projects that both secured and expanded their extractive capacities, building fortified structures, mills, and roadways; funding large-scale agricultural development; and buying military equipment and arming their retainers. In making productive reinvestment their test, Maher and Aquanno obscure the underlying historical continuity between the various systems of political economy, for example, the feudal, mercantile, and capitalist systems. Dominant ruling classes through time have always applied portions of accumulated surplus toward the architectures (physical, technological, social, legal, and otherwise) necessary for power preservation and continuing extraction. This is a feature of all coercive, hierarchical systems, not just capitalism.

Today’s global corporate monopolies are not competitive in the normal sense in which either classical or neoclassical economists would have used that term. Capitalism is a “market economy” only in an incredibly misleading sense. The federalized, non-capitalist forms of markets outlined by anarchists like Proudhon and Tucker were also called liberal, reformist, and bourgeois in their time. We need new ways to talk about these questions. Perhaps ironically, today’s intra-Marxist debates make the structural necessity of centralized power to capitalism especially salient. Centralized, hierarchical power inherently produces class stratification, domination, and exploitation, regardless of what the system is called or who is in charge. Indeed, we might go further: it is not just that such power produces these results, but that it represents them or constitutes them in and of itself.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

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HENRY GIROUX
SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?   — Bertolt Brecht, Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties (1935).

In his magnificent Age of Extremes, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm warned that one of the defining characteristics of the late twentieth century was that men and women increasingly lived in a “sort of permanent present lacking an organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” Such historical amnesia carries a terrible price. When the past disappears, we lose not only the language necessary to recognize the dangers it has bequeathed to the present but also the capacity to name those dangers when they return in altered forms. Historical amnesia thus becomes a crisis of language: when we lose the words that connect the present to the past, we also lose the political vocabulary necessary to grasp what is unfolding before us. A crisis can awaken historical consciousness, expose the forces that produced it, and become a rallying point for resistance. But when crisis hardens into catastrophe, and the language for naming its causes is emptied of historical meaning, the political imagination begins to collapse. What could once be challenged comes to appear inevitable; what demanded resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life. Catastrophe then becomes more than an event. It becomes a pedagogy of powerlessness, teaching people to live with the intolerable, surrender their belief that the future can be otherwise, and mistake political defeat for historical fate. At that point, normalization becomes one of authoritarianism’s most powerful weapons: hope is drained of its political force precisely when resistance becomes most necessary.

There are moments when the language used to describe a political crisis becomes part of the crisis itself. We are living through one of them. The recent attempt in Jacobin by Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey to theorize Trumpism under the rubric of “democratic fascism” is symptomatic of a wider intellectual failure: the compulsion to soften the language of fascism precisely when fascism needs to be named. The problem extends well beyond one article. Trumpism has been described as populism, illiberal democracy, authoritarian populism, competitive authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and now democratic fascism. Such phrases may register elements of the present crisis, but they can also function as euphemisms that domesticate a political formation whose defining features are increasingly difficult to deny. When language is emptied of its most disturbing implications, it underplays the very dangers it claims to name. In the worst case, it turns critique into a discourse of normalization.

Paul Street has rightly attacked this rhetorical evasion. He describes “competitive authoritarianism,” a term increasingly invoked to characterize the United States under Trump, as a bloodless academic formulation that drains Trumpism of its ideological and political content: racism, xenophobia, militant patriarchy, ultranationalism, political eliminationism, cultism, violence, anti-intellectualism, and the destruction of constitutional restraints. His point is crucial. When a government attacks universities and the press, turns immigration enforcement into a massively funded coercive apparatus, treats political opponents as internal enemies, weakens due process, builds a sprawling machinery of detention and disappearance, normalizes state violence, and organizes political life around vengeance and racial purification, the issue can no longer be reduced to whether electoral competition remains fair. The language of procedural erosion becomes an alibi for refusing to name the political project taking shape before us.

When Elections Become an Alibi.

The phrase “democratic fascism” reproduces this problem in a different form. Fascism does not become democratic because it gains power through elections. It can exploit elections, constitutional procedures, courts, legislatures, and the machinery of a formally democratic state while directing those institutions against democracy itself. To confuse the route to power with the nature of the power being exercised is to mistake democracy’s institutional shell for its political and ethical substance.

History should have settled this question long ago. Fascist movements have repeatedly used democratic institutions to acquire legitimacy and power before attacking the conditions that make democracy possible. Giorgia Meloni did not seize Rome at the head of an armed column. She became Italy’s prime minister after her Brothers of Italy party emerged victorious from the 2022 elections. Yet Brothers of Italy has historical roots in the postwar neo-fascist Italian Social Movement. Even as Meloni has attempted to present herself as a conventional conservative, scandals within her party have repeatedly exposed fascist salutes, Nazi slogans, antisemitism, and nostalgia for Italy’s fascist past. Her election did not magically transform that history into democratic politics. It demonstrated something far more disturbing: elections can provide authoritarian and fascist political formations with the legitimacy they need to enter the state, normalize their language, weaken democratic institutions, and gradually redefine the boundaries of what is politically acceptable. Modi’s India, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and, in a different register, Javier Milei’s Argentina reveal variations of the same larger danger: authoritarian politics need not abolish elections in order to hollow out democracy. Electoral legitimacy can become the vehicle through which authoritarian movements enter the state and dismantle democracy from within.

The liberal fetish of elections does more than disguise fascism as democracy; it launders authoritarian power through the ballot box, turning political surrender into democratic virtue and bad faith into the language of liberal fulfillment. This is the discourse of political cleansing and sanitization. Worse, it drains fascism of its blood, terror, and bodies. The violence concealed by antiseptic terms such as competitive authoritarianism becomes visible in masked immigration agents seizing people from workplaces, homes, parks, and streets; five-year-old children detained with their fathers after returning home from school; families living in terror of disappearance; and a machinery of detention and deportation increasingly liberated from legal restraint. The human cost disappears from view when American missiles strike an Iranian primary school, killing more than one hundred children. It disappears in Gaza, where at least 21,700 Palestinian children have been reported killed and tens of thousands more woundedamid the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and the conditions necessary for life itself. The human cost also disappears from view when Medicaid cuts are projected to leave 7.5 million additional Americans without health insurance by 2034, converting illness, poverty, and premature death into acceptable entries on a bloodless and morally vapid government balance sheet. It disappears as well in the extraordinary spectacle of American military power being used to destroy suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, with at least 230 people killed in 69 strikes by September 9, 2026, often without the government publicly demonstrating that those condemned to death were trafficking drugs. In the most chilling case, two survivors of an initial strike, clinging to the wreckage, were killed in a second attack.

These are not abstract disputes over the adjective attached to an electoral system. They are bodies seized, children buried beneath rubble, families shattered, the sick and poor abandoned, and human beings killed without trial.  A political vocabulary that cannot make this violence visible does more than fail to name fascism. It erases fascism’s human consequences, turning terror into abstraction and cruelty into something ordinary enough to endure. The question is not whether contemporary fascism wears the same uniform as its twentieth-century predecessors, but how its old hatreds, racial hierarchies, and contempt for democracy have found new institutions, new languages, and new forms of violence in the present.

Sarah Churchwell understood the danger precisely. American fascism, she argued, would be “recognizably American, while its fascism would be recognizable as fascism.” The point is crucial. Fascism does not need to reproduce Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany in order to inherit their political logic. The question is what fascism looks like when it speaks an American language, wraps itself in the flag, invokes freedom and Christian nationalism, mobilizes the country’s long history of racial violence, and acquires power through institutions it subsequently turns against democracy itself.

Churchwell’s insight also exposes the danger of treating elections as the dividing line between democracy and fascism. The same mistake haunts discussions of Trump. The relevant question is not whether Americans voted for him. They did. The question is what kind of political and class based formations their votes empowered, what historical forces and cultural conditions made that formation possible, and what happens to democracy once such a movement commands all the major apparatuses of the state. Elections tell us how power was acquired; they do not tell us how that power will be used. A government does not remain democratic simply because it arrived through the ballot box. Democracy must also be judged by what happens afterward: whether dissent is protected or criminalized, whether the rule of law constrains power or becomes its weapon, whether racial and religious minorities retain their rights, whether universities and the press remain independent, whether political opponents are treated as legitimate adversaries or internal enemies, and whether state violence is restrained or celebrated. The ballot box can confer office; it cannot confer democratic innocence.

The Jacobin article itself inadvertently demonstrates the inadequacy of its formulation. It describes Trump’s deployment of more than two thousand ICE agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul, characterizes ICE as an authoritarian police force with an enormous budget, and goes so far as to describe it as Trump’s “political militia.” It also recognizes the spectacular character of its violence: cruelty directed against migrants becomes simultaneously a warning to protesters and a demonstration of state power. What sense does it make to catalogue such practices and then attach the adjective “democratic” to the political formation that produces them? This is more than conceptual confusion; it is the language of apology, a rhetorical laundering of fascism that makes the intolerable appear compatible with democracy.

As Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, Sarah Churchwell, and Jason Stanley have made clear in different ways, the problem runs deeper than terminology. Fascism has never possessed a single institutional form. It changes its language, technologies, cultural styles, and modes of legitimation according to historical circumstances. Contemporary fascism does not need brown shirts marching through every street or the immediate abolition of elections. It can emerge through neoliberal institutions, billionaire-controlled media, digital platforms, militarized borders, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and a security state whose coercive capacities earlier fascist movements could scarcely have imagined.

Neoliberal Fascism and the Punishing State.

This is why neoliberal fascism is a more illuminating framework. Neoliberalism did not simply deregulate markets, privatize public goods, destroy unions, transfer wealth upward, and transform education into a laboratory of market values. It hollowed out the social state while expanding the punishing state, reducing citizenship to consumerism, freedom to market choice, social responsibility to individual failure, and public problems to private troubles. In its wake grew vast zones of abandonment along with the loneliness, precarity, insecurity, anxiety, and powerlessness that inhabit them.

As neoliberalism can no longer disguise its failures behind promises of prosperity and social mobility, its authoritarian core becomes increasingly visible. The market state does not disappear; it merges with the punishing state. Economic violence joins political violence. Surveillance expands. Police power intensifies. Migrants become disposable. Due process becomes an inconvenience. Dissent is increasingly represented as subversion. White supremacy, Christian nationalism, militarism, and billionaire power converge within a political formation increasingly willing to dispense with democratic restraints.

September 11, 2001, marked a crucial turning point in this transformation. The horror of the attacks was seized upon to launch a War on Terror that vastly expanded the national-security state while giving permanent war the legitimacy of permanent emergency. As Tariq Ali argues twenty-five years later, 9/11 became the license for an imperial project extending from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo, detention without trial, torture, surveillance, and the normalization of executive power freed from democratic restraint. But the War on Terror eventually came home. The violence of empire migrated inward, carrying with it the language of permanent emergency, the suspension of rights, the expansion of surveillance, and the construction of entire populations as threats to be managed rather than human beings to be protected. Muslims became objects of suspicion, dissent was increasingly cast as disloyalty, and the distinction between the battlefield and the homeland steadily eroded. The War on Terror did more than produce catastrophic wars abroad; it helped the legal, institutional, and ideological machinery of a domestic security government, a neoliberal fascist state that could later be redirected against migrants, protesters, dissidents, and other designated internal enemies.

The expansion of ICE gives institutional form to this transformation. The agency has undergone a massive expansion under Trump; a recent whistleblower complaint concerning its hiring surge described an unprecedented lowering of standards as thousands of new officers were recruited. The point is not simply that immigration policy has become harsher. The deeper transformation lies in the normalization of a political culture in which masked agents, raids, detention, deportation, intimidation, and spectacularized state violence become acceptable instruments of governance.

Yet political economy alone cannot explain fascism.

Pedagogical Terrorism and the Education of Desire.

Fascism must also be understood as a pedagogical project. It does not simply capture institutions; it produces subjects. People have to learn how to become fascists. They have to learn whom to hate, whom to fear, whose lives matter, whose suffering can be ignored, and why cruelty should be experienced as strength rather than barbarism. They learn, in other words, how to become fascist subjects, white supremacists, and enemies of democracy.

This is where Robert Misik’s recent intervention is indispensable. Drawing upon Leo Löwenthal, Adorno, Freud, and the Frankfurt School tradition, Misik reminds us that fascist agitation effectively turns psychoanalysis on its head. Rather than addressing fear, trauma, loneliness, frustration, and psychic injury, authoritarian politics intensifies them. It feeds anger and bitterness, manufactures paranoia, and offers the authoritarian leader as the savior capable of restoring the world supposedly stolen by immigrants, racial minorities, feminists, intellectuals, dissidents, and other manufactured enemies.

This is the terrain of pedagogical terrorism. Fascist politics educates desire. Through relentless repetition, fabricated threats, conspiracy theories, racial fantasies, enemy stereotypes, public humiliations, and rituals of collective outrage, individuals learn to imagine themselves as members of a besieged community. Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue. As Misik notes, revenge itself becomes a political program. A culture of cruelty feeds on this affective fury, offering those consumed by grievance the intoxicating pleasures of belonging, hostility, and vengeance. Humiliation is repaid through the humiliation of others; fear is converted into hatred; and the desire for recognition is redirected into the exhilaration of domination. Fascism thrives on this emotional economy. It does not merely mobilize anger; it gives anger a target, turns cruelty into a source of gratification, and transforms the lust for revenge and violence into the emotional currency of political belonging. What makes this machinery so powerful is that it feeds on the very loneliness, insecurity, abandonment, and fear that gangster capitalism produces, converting the wounds of a broken social order into the emotional fuel of fascist politics.

Misik calls attention to something conventional accounts of fascism frequently miss: the emergence of an emotional plague in which resentment, humiliation, fear, and the longing for revenge become contagious. They circulate through social media, right-wing television, podcasts, rallies, churches, online communities, and increasingly the institutions of the state. The issue is not merely that people encounter fascist ideas. They inhabit cultural apparatuses that teach them how to feel.

The culture of cruelty is where this emotional plague acquires public form. Cruelty is not an unfortunate excess of contemporary fascism; it is one of its central pedagogical practices. Migrants are humiliated publicly. The vulnerable are mocked. Women are degraded. Protesters are represented as enemies. Violence is celebrated as strength. Politics becomes an extension of war.  The leader’s violations of political and moral norms become sources of pleasure precisely because his followers experience every transgression as their own liberation from the obligations of democracy, empathy, and mutual responsibility.

Misik’s most chilling insight is that fascist violence takes root long before the killing starts. It first colonizes the imagination. People learn to laugh at cruelty, then to admire it as authenticity, and eventually to bathe emotionally in its pleasure quotient. The same pleasure attaches itself to Trump’s culture of lying. His followers do not always have to believe the lie in order to enjoy it; they can recognize its falsity and still delight in the transgression, in watching truth itself mocked and those who insist upon it humiliated. The lie becomes a performance of power, a demonstration that their leader can violate the most elementary standards of truth and accountability and revel in getting away with it. There is a thrill in the violation itself, a shared pleasure in crossing the line, breaking the taboo, and forcing others to witness the spectacle. Cruelty and lying begin to feed each other: humiliation becomes entertainment, deception becomes defiance, and transgression becomes proof of authenticity. What is being cultivated is not simply disbelief in truth but pleasure in its destruction. At that point, the distance between imagining violence, enjoying its spectacle, and endorsing it as justice steadily disappears.

This is the terrain that liberal euphemisms cannot comprehend. “Competitive authoritarianism” describes the erosion of electoral institutions; ‘democratic backsliding’ registers the weakening of democratic norms; and ‘democratic fascism’ acknowledges that fascists can win elections. What all three fail to confront adequately is the transformation of culture and subjectivity through which millions learn to experience domination as freedom, racial hatred as patriotism, ignorance as authenticity, and cruelty as justice. The question confronting us, then, is not simply whether elections continue to take place. It is far more disturbing: What kinds of human beings are being produced inside the hollowed-out shell of democracy?

Elections can survive while democratic culture is destroyed; legislatures can remain while their power is emptied out; courts can persist while judges who refuse political obedience are attacked; and freedom can still be proclaimed while universities, journalists, migrants, protesters, and racial minorities are subjected to intimidation and repression. The institutions remain, but their democratic substance is hollowed out as they are increasingly bent to the demands of authoritarian power. Italy under Meloni offers one version of this process; Trumpism offers another. Fascism does not repeat itself mechanically. It learns. It adapts. It changes its costume, appropriates the language of democracy, and inhabits the institutions it seeks to destroy. What remains constant is its hatred of equality, dissent, human interdependence, and democracy itself. This is precisely what makes contemporary fascism so dangerous: it does not always announce its arrival by abolishing democratic institutions; it can capture them, inhabit them, and turn their authority against the very democratic life they were created to protect.

Beyond the Liberal Guardrails.

The liberal faith in democratic guardrails mistakes the architecture of democracy for democracy itself. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt concede in How Democracies Die that institutions alone cannot restrain elected autocrats, yet the metaphor of guardrails remains tied to the reassuring belief that courts, elections, constitutions, and legislatures possess an inherent democratic force capable of containing authoritarian power. John Dewey exposed the danger of this assumption almost ninety years ago. Writing in Freedom and Culture as fascism engulfed Europe, he warned against believing that democratic conditions somehow maintain themselves or that democracy can be reduced to constitutional prescriptions. Such faith, he argued, can actually conceal the emergence of forces hostile to democratic freedom.

Dewey’s warning cuts to the heart of the present crisis. As Melvin Rogers has argued in returning to Dewey, checks and balances possess no agency of their own; democratic institutions are only as strong as the habits, dispositions, and forms of collective life that give them substance. Democracy, in this sense, is not merely an institutional arrangement but a culture and practice that must be learned, inhabited, defended, and continually renewed.

Democracy is not a structure that survives simply because its institutional shell remains standing. Its substance depends upon the social conditions that make democratic agency possible: economic security, education, equality, public institutions, political participation, and a culture in which people possess both the capacity and the power to govern their common life. Strip away those conditions and democratic institutions can remain formally intact while being emptied from within. Elections continue, courts remain open, legislatures meet, and constitutions are ceremonially invoked even as concentrated wealth purchases political power, billionaire oligarchs dominate public life, white supremacy and Christian nationalism gain institutional force, and the punishing state expands its machinery of surveillance, detention, and violence. Dewey’s warning must therefore be pushed beyond liberal institutionalism itself. The crisis cannot be resolved by repairing capitalism’s excesses while leaving its fundamental relations of power untouched. A social order organized around the concentration of wealth, the privatization of public life, the commodification of human need, and the conversion of economic power into political power continually erodes the conditions that substantive democracy requires. The question is no longer how to save democracy from the excesses of capitalism, but how to free democracy from capitalism’s grip.

For that reason, any struggle against fascism that refuses to confront capitalism as one of its enabling conditions risks treating the symptoms while preserving the machinery that reproduces the disease. Dewey understood the stakes of this failure nearly a century ago. In 1935, he argued that if radicalism means recognizing the necessity of radical change, then a liberalism that is not also radical is “irrelevant and doomed.” His warning speaks directly to the present: the task is not to restore the political order that produced this catastrophe but to transform the conditions that made it possible. Democracy will not be saved by restoring yesterday’s guardrails or returning to a supposedly more humane version of capitalism. It requires a mass politics capable of breaking the concentrated power of capital, democratizing wealth and economic decision-making, rebuilding the public institutions necessary for a common life, and creating new forms of collective ownership, social equality, and democratic control over the institutions that shape everyday existence. What is required, in other words, is a democratic socialism in which democracy reaches beyond the ballot box and enters the workplaces, schools, media, economy, and other commanding institutions in which power is exercised and the conditions of everyday life are determined.

The failure of liberal institutionalism is inseparable from a failure of political language. The liberal obsession with finding a more comfortable vocabulary for this transformation is itself politically consequential. Euphemism becomes complicity when it makes fascism easier to tolerate. If fascism must first pass some imaginary historical test before we are permitted to call it fascism, we will recognize it only when recognition has become politically useless.

Fascism does not cease to be fascism because people voted for it. Democracy may provide the doorway through which fascism enters. Neoliberalism creates the conditions that nourish it. Pedagogical terrorism supplies the machinery through which people learn to desire it. And the culture of cruelty provides the emotional charge that makes domination feel like liberation and feral tribal belonging masquerade as community. What is needed now is a language forged in resistance, capable of naming real existing fascism, exposing the forces that produce it, and turning outrage into organized struggle. Such a language must recover historical memory, make power visible, connect private suffering to its systemic causes, and create the conditions for people to recognize themselves not in the manufactured hatreds of fascist politics but in organized mass struggles against exploitation, racial violence, disposability, and authoritarian rule. The struggle over language is therefore inseparable from the struggle over power: we must name fascism in order to fight it, expose the machinery that produces it in order to dismantle it, and build the collective power necessary to defeat the world that makes it possible.

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.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

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JOHN P. RUEHL
SEP 4, 2026

The Trump administration is part of an international trend of business elites entering government and using commercial relationships as tools of diplomacy and geopolitical influence.

As his superyacht Boardwalk docked in Venice as part of the “Freedom 250 Coastal Diplomacy Italy initiative” in July, billionaire U.S. Ambassador Tilman J. Fertitta was greeted by protests. Fertitta was traveling across the country to meet “with local business leaders, celebrities and Americans on board the yacht,” according to CNN. The incident captured a growing trend of ultrawealthy business figures in positions of political power.

Fertitta is one of several billionaire U.S. ambassadors, alongside those serving in the U.K., Turkey, France and Monaco and the Organization of American States. Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff and outside adviser Jared Kushner are also billionaires, along with President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, education secretary, interior secretary, head of NASA and administrator of the Small Business Administration.

The Trump administration includes 57 Cabinet members and senior officials with net worths of more than $100 million, according to El País. A more informal integration of billionaires into diplomacy was seen during Trump’s May 2026 visit to China. More than a dozen CEOs and senior executives, including BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk, joined the U.S. delegation.

Businessmen have long been prominent in local American politics. A 2021 study by political scientist Patricia A. Kirkland of more than 3,200 mayors in 263 cities found that nearly a third have either been business owners or have executive experience, making it the most common prior profession. But Trump’s second term has brought the ultrawealthy into government at a rapid, top-down scale, on the stated belief that their experience building companies, managing organizations,and negotiating deals makes them better equipped than established politicians dependent on outside funding.

The ongoing billionaire-politician surge has tapped into a wider antiestablishment mood in the country, and the shrinking of the permanent bureaucracy under the Department of Government Efficiency has further elevated political appointees and outside advisers.

But it is neither a new American phenomenon nor confined to the United States. More than 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office, according to a 2023 study in Perspectives on Politics, spanning various government systems. The trend is reshaping international relations as governments adapt to this change.

The rise and return of the politician businessman.

Businessmen were just one of many professions who entered politics in early America, alongside lawyers, landowners, veterans and merchants. But industrialization allowed some to build enormous fortunes through railroads, manufacturing, banking and natural resources. Compared with Europe’s more aristocratic systems, American industrialists increasingly found opportunities to buy their way into political power.

By the early 20th century, several businessmen had reached Washington’s inner circles. Banking and industrial magnate Andrew Mellon became treasury secretary in 1921, while banker Jesse H. Jones chaired the Reconstruction Finance Corp. and later became commerce secretary. During World War II, hundreds of executives entered the government as “dollar-a-year men” to help manage war efforts, including General Motors President William S. Knudsen.

Their direct political influence hit a wall after WWII, as military veterans came to dominate political office. A 1956 Time magazine article noted businessmen’s declining involvement, quoting an industrialist who complained that “the same old warhorses” remained dominant in both parties. Lawyers, though in slow decline, also remained powerful, making up 60% of Congress in 1960, while a variety of staffers, campaign officials, policy advisers and career bureaucrats emerged as another growing political class.

By the end of the 20th century, however, billionaires were again testing the limits of how far wealth could take them. Ross Perot’s presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996 showed that personal fortunes could propel businessmen onto the national stage, helping inspire Trump’s first presidential run in 2000. Michael Bloomberg’s successful run for New York City mayor in 2002, where he served until 2013, showed that the GOPcould embrace the model, with others like Bill Haslam demonstrating its reach into state government as he became the governor of Tennessee (2011–19).

Trump’s 2016 victory accelerated the trend. His appointment of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state in 2017 signaled that corporate experience was treated as a governing asset, while billionaire businessman Robert Johnson was appointed ambassador to the U.K.

Democrats embraced the billionaire politician model, too. Mark Dayton became senator for Minnesota in 2001 and later served as its governor from 2011 to 2019. Bloomberg (now a Democrat) and Tom Steyer both sought the presidential nomination in 2020, while JB Pritzker has served as Illinois’ governor since 2019.

The growing overlap between business and political figures has greatly influenced geopolitics. Major technology, finance, energy and defense firms close to the White House also operate global infrastructure and supply chains that foreign governments depend on. Musk’s Starlink, for example, is essential to Ukraine’s war effort.

The Trump administration’s decision to own major stakes in private companies has further tied corporate interests more closely to U.S. policy, raising questions about how this new fusion of business and government will affect Washington’s dealings abroad, as other countries manage their own class of politicians with vast wealth.

Adversarial adoption.

America’s growing business-politician class can be compared to both its principal adversaries, China and Russia. China’s political business class has been growing its direct contact with American officials and executives, with a delegation representing 22 Chinese companies traveling to the United States in July.

The prominent role of Chinese businessmen is relatively new. After decades of suppressing private capital, Chinese government reforms began encouraging cooperation with business forces in the late 1970s. As researcher Sara Tomczuk notes, the “large numbers of entrepreneurs co-opted into the party, especially in the 1980s, marked a decline in communist ideology as well as a demonstration of the government’s commitment to a market economy.” The “three represents” campaign in 2000, meanwhile, formally recognized private entrepreneurs as part of China’s political order.

Today, more than a third of Chinese billionaires have held or sought formal political office, according to political science analysis website Good Authority. Some have served or are serving as delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC). For instance, Tencent CEO Ma Huateng was a deputy for two terms beginning in 2013 and Xiaomi’s Lei Jun is currently a deputy of the NPC, while others like Baidu CEO Robin Li were part of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. For Beijing, incorporating billionaires with political titles signals loyalty, while giving entrepreneurs access and protection. Alibaba founder Jack Ma and other tycoons have, however, demonstrated the limits of that protection when they overstep. Jack Ma criticized China’s financial system in 2020 and “largely disappeared from public view,” for a while according to NPR.

Still, the business-political overlap has created another channel between China and the United States. Business leaders increasingly encounter one another through political relationships with shared commercial interests that provide an important communications channel, with China’s consul general in New York celebrating “natural consensus” between the business communities in June.

Russia had a near opposite experience with its ultrawealthy in politics. Instead of cautious integration, the Soviet Union’s collapse allowed oligarchs to accumulate enormous fortunes through privatization. Some assumed office, like former deputy secretary of the security council Boris Berezovsky, first deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Potanin and former deputy chairman of the State Duma Mikhail Gutseriev. Many of them had transactional relations with Western capital.

One in five Russian billionaires has sought or held political office, according to Good Authority, but Putin’s rise in 2000 steadily stripped many of them of their political roles. Others were jailed or exiled, and some retained their fortunes by accepting the Kremlin’s political supremacy. Alongside Putin-allied oligarchs ascending, the result was a “general decline in influence among oligarchs in favor of bureaucratic officials,” according to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

The suspicious deaths of dozens of oligarchs since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war show their increasing vulnerability. Still, they remain embedded in politics, with figures like Suleyman Kerimov, Mikhail Prokhorov, Andrey Guryev and Andrei Skoch essential to helping support the Russian political system.

The business-political overlap remains visible in diplomacy. A 2017 meeting between Russian and U.S. business leaders showed an early effort to use these ties before the Ukraine war sent relations into free fall years later. Nonetheless, they remain useful as back channels; in January 2026, U.S. envoys Witkoff and Kushner met Putin’s envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund, in Paris to discuss peace plans relating to the Ukraine war, and met again in Florida in March where they spoke on several topics, including Russian oil.

Others, like Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, continue to play informal roles as state mediators, traveling to Kyiv in May to carry messages between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The new political order.

The trend of business-political overlap has gone global, moving beyond the realm of the great powers. Much of the post-communist world moved in a similar direction, as newly wealthy businessmen entered political systems weakened by flawed democratic reforms.

Some became dominant political figures, such as Georgia’s Bidzina Ivanishvili, who became prime minister in 2012 and remains the country’s de facto leader through his Georgian Dream party. The Biden administration sanctioned him in 2024, but a Trump Tower planned for Tbilisi is now being developed on land partly owned by his Ivanishvili’s son, demonstrating how business relationships can provide workarounds to political barriers.

Similar cases of ultrawealthy businessmen entering politics emerged in Moldova and Ukraine, but EU integration efforts have sought to weaken that influence through “de-oligarchization,” particularly since 2022. Western Europe has generally remained wary of billionaires taking direct political power, with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi being the major exception, serving as Italy’s prime minister in three stints between 1994 and 2011. Skepticism over his dominance meant he failed to establish a lasting model and helps explain the unease over Fertitta’s arrival in Venice and the wider apprehension over Trump.

But wealthy businessmen remain deeply embedded in former European communist countries. Bulgaria’s Delyan Peevski, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms party, has emerged as a vocal Trump ally, alongside Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Andrej Babis, creating an opening for the Trump administration to cultivate figures less constrained by Brussels.

As the Trump administration attempts to bring the Western Hemisphere under greater U.S. influence, Latin America may be the most consequential for the government’s efforts to cultivate ties with politician-businessmen. In a region historically welcoming to the phenomenon, businessmen reached the presidency in the 2010s in Chile and Panama. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa assumed the presidency in 2023, and Nayib Bukele was reelected in El Salvador in 2024. Both have since worked closely with the Trump administration, with business ties being an integral component.

Mexico’s billionaires have proven useful to Washington, even without holding office. Ricardo Salinas Pliego, for example, has maintained ties with Trump since his first administration, and has used his business and media networks to challenge Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as she finds herself in disputes with Trump.

With globalization having helped create an international capital class, the United States has now given the businessman-politician model a new momentum. Some regions, including Western Europe and the Persian Gulf monarchies, remain resistant, but the model is increasingly visible across the world, and may be more than a passing political trend.

Governments and populations may not be able to reverse this, but they will have to understand its implications. As business and political disputes increasingly overlap, commercial infrastructure can become a target. Ukraine’s strikes on distribution centers for Russia’s Wildberries, the country’s biggest online retailer, and Iranian hits on Amazon data centers demonstrate how businesses can get caught directly in geopolitical conflict. And when political systems depend heavily on wealthy individuals, they can quickly become unstable when those alliances break down. With business relationships becoming a major way for states to communicate, negotiate and compete in the 21st century, the line between economic and political power is steadily eroding, and the influence of a small number of wealthy individuals over governments and international affairs is becoming more pronounced.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Background image by David Horsey | Light Wave

Previously published on Truth-Dig.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

PATRICK MAZZA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2026

Editor’s note: I’ve been floored by the onrushing climate disasters taking place across our rapidly heating planet this summer. It’s been the longest time between posts since I started this site, and this is one of the longer posts I’ve made, in both respects much longer than I like. But events have driven me to make a complete statement on climate, the broader context in which it is set, and what we can do now. It’s taken some time. I hope you can set aside 20 or so minutes to read it. You will find my insights on what we can do towards the end.

On August 22, the surface of the world’s oceans averaged 70°Fahrenheit, hottest in recorded history and probably in 125,000 years.

This came in what may be the hottest summer on record. By August 5 the emerging record El Nino cooked Pacific Ocean temperatures beyond the peak reached by the monster 1997-98 El Nino. Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather described the rise as “nothing short of astonishing.” This El Nino is tracking at the high end of projections with months of heating ahead, promising climate chaos around the globe.

Climate scientist James Hansen sets the context. “The ongoing El Nino is already the strongest in the modern record. However, increasing global climate anomalies, poleward shifting of climate zones, increased rainfall extremes, more rapid flash droughts and fires, and marine heat waves are a result of accelerating human-made global warming. The abnormal El Nino strength is itself likely human-driven.”

Then on August 26, a glacier and mountainside in the Langtang Valley of Nepal crashed into the river below during the area’s fourth hottest summer on record after several days of record August heat. The season’s monsoon rains were around 50% above normal, melting the glacier surface and probably infiltrating down to the bedrock lubricating the slide. It spawned a blackened torrent of water, boulders, mud and debris that thundered miles downstream shredding villages and likely killing thousands.

“It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame,” said Berkeley Earth Chief Scientist Robert Rohde.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann was even more definitive. “The torrent was the direct result of warming-induced glacial collapse, which dumped millions of tons of rock, unleashing a high-velocity wave of mud and debris.”

He wrote, “The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action.”

Buried under the muck.

It’s been a hellacious summer. Wildfires and plumes of smoke swept the world under repeated heat domes and long-term droughts. They deeply cut into European agriculture while drying out rivers vital for commerce. Nuclear plants deprived of cooling water shut down in Hungary and Romania. In North America smoke from record fire seasons in Canada and Oregon choked people to the Atlantic coast. Long-term western U.S. drought drained its two largest dam reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell on the Colorado River, to record lows. Flooding spread across many U.S. states, as well as Germany, France, Indonesia and West Africa.

At the close of meteorological summer ending September 1, I’m boiling like the oceans with rage and disgust at how far short our climate efforts have fallen. And I feel like a Nepalese village buried under the muck, overwhelmed by the inundation of bad news. It’s been damned hard digging myself out to get at my writing table. But I’ve had to sit back and reflect on where we stand as a climate movement and a species. And work through my own emotions, which are hitting their own critical threshold. This summer pushed me over the line.

I’ve been in the climate fight for decades. I’ve worked to grow two climate groups into substantial forces. My name is on two books and dozens of papers on climate change solutions. I’ve contributed to several major solutions research efforts and helped organize tables aimed at building consensus on climate policies. I’ve locked myself to a tripod blocking an oil train with its climate-twisting cargo. I’ve been everywhere from governor’s offices to county jail holding tanks. I helped stage the first climate civil disobedience necessity defense in U.S. history for that oil train action, arguing we broke the law to avert a greater harm.

And after all that, after this summer, I recall that Ken Kesey put out a serialized novel called Spit In the Ocean, based on a variety of poker with many wild cards. I wonder if everything I’ve done amounts to spitting in the rising seas while climate chaos holds the winning wild card. I feel a deep sense of failure. Not so much personal failure or even of the movement in which I have participated since the 1990s. Staring us in the face is the greatest failure in the existence of our species and our ancestors since they walked out onto an African savannah opened by climate drying some 3 to 4 million years ago. University of Washington neurophysiologist William Calvin theorizes that abrupt climate shifts over millennia caused diebacks that sorted out our ancestors. Those with the biggest brains survived. These gave us mastery of tools and fire that enabled genus Homo to eventually dominate the planet. Now, in our greatest irony, our immense powers have set us on the road to yet another abrupt climate disruption, consumed in the fires of a rapidly heating planet.

Some years ago, I was conversing with a major environmental leader who has made phenomenal contributions to the cause of the planet. “You know,” he said, thinking about the long-term human future, “species that overshoot their habitat tend to have their numbers reduced.” I fear we are on that road. In 2025, a group of actuaries from University of Exeter published a risk-based analysis of likely heating impacts. They set out potential worst-case scenarios of 2 billion people facing early death if temperatures rise by 2° C by 2050 and 4 billion with 3°C by 2050. Among causes would be social conflict, billions forced to migrate by unbearable heat and thirst, food production collapse, and triggering of tipping points where heating feeds more heating. That number is gaining a lot of play lately because Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam has started a new group, 4 Billion Dead. But depicting these numbers as predictions has come under some criticism. The report emphasizes they are only scenarios against which to measure risks. Nonetheless, when experts whose profession is to assess risk assign even an outer boundary possibility to such scenarios, it should give us pause.

Humanity’s greatest risk – Triggering climate tipping points.

Humanity is increasing climate-heating gases at the fastest rate in the geological record, the whole history of the planet as far as we can understand it. The result is the most rapid heating we can detect. What took centuries now occurs in decades. The growing risk is that we will set off a cascade of tipping points that drive the climate into chaos, potentially realizing something like those Exeter scenarios. This graphic depicts them:

A master tipping point is the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the place in the North Atlantic where warm currents coming from the south sink to the depths, weighed down by their salt content. That opens space drawing the current north. But meltwater from a warming Greenland has been diluting the saltiness and slowing the sinking with knock-on effects reaching back into the entire oceanic circulation. A study published in April found a 90% probability the AMOC will slow 51% by 2100, putting it on a path to eventual shutdown. Impacts could extend to Antarctica and the Pacific. African and Indian monsoons could weaken. This might be happening already with slowing. Shutdown threatens to dry out Amazonia and the African Sahel. It would cool and dry Europe, elevate U.S. east coast sea levels, and pile up heat in southern latitudes.

“I have personally researched this for 35 years,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world’s leading scientific experts on the AMOC. “For the first 30 years we considered this a low likelihood event. I would have said a 5 percent chance of occurring. It’s more like 50/50 now. I would even say more likely than not.”

A recent study from Utrecht University offers perhaps the first ray of daylight in the otherwise grim picture. It showed that the AMOC could collapse at as little as 2° C heating. But if the rate of heating is slowed, the current might remain stable even at 5° C heating.

The Utrecht study brings home the most important message of this piece. Everything depends on the rate of change. Given time to adjust, the Atlantic Ocean can potentially fend off AMOC collapse even under extreme heating. This message applies across the range of climate impacts. We must slow the rate of climate heating as much as possible to avert the worst impacts. That is most important project humanity now faces. It is why, contemplating tipping points dangers some years ago, I revised my climate mission to leaving a planet with which our kids can cope.

Unfortunately, the world is still tracking at a higher rate, heating around 0.3°C per decade. We are bumping up against the 1.5°C target set by the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. A new report from the United Nations Environment Program admits we have blown the 1.5°C goal. The best we can expect is to peak at 1.8-2° C. The report holds out hope that humanity can bring temperatures back down with strong action.

“There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C. Across the globe, extreme heatwaves are already proving that climate impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP. “Now is the time we must double down on climate action. We can and must get on the right path by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening resilience and adaptation, and ensuring exceedance of 1.5°C is as small and short as possible.”

But overshooting 1.5° escalates risks of setting off tipping points, as this graphic from the Global Tipping Points 2025 report shows. The range between 1.5-2°C is crucial. Nearing the low end danger signs are already showing. Coral reefs have already tipped over. Glacier loss from West Antarctica is increasing. The North Atlantic subpolar gyre is destabilizing for the same reasons as the AMOC and could collapse faster. Risk to mountain glaciers gained a bold underscore in Nepal. The Amazon rainforest may be tipping from carbon soaker to emitter. Earth is crossing critical thresholds beyond which dangers radically increase. That’s one reason 1.5°C was targeted in the first place.

Science Daily’s report on the Utrecht study offers a caution on overshoot strategies that might well apply to the range of tipping points. “Much of current climate policy, including the Paris Agreement, focuses on limiting the eventual peak in global temperature. Some strategies involve so-called overshoot pathways . . . The new findings suggest that the path taken toward a given temperature may matter alongside the temperature itself. The faster global warming occurs, the less time the Atlantic Ocean has to adjust, potentially increasing the vulnerability of one of the planet’s most important circulation systems.”

I know people who have made seminal contributions to the cause of the climate and the Earth who have looked at this picture and thrown up their hands in despair. But I’m not there yet. I know that every tenth of a degree could spell the difference between worst-case scenarios and more survivable outcomes. I helped bring a child into the world 30 years ago to the day I am writing this. So I have a direct investment in future generations. But even if I didn’t I could not accept even the remote possibility of billions dying if I could possibly do anything about it.

Digging ourselves out of the hole.

Humanity has dug itself into a hole. The first step to dig ourselves out is – much as an alcoholic or drug addict must admit their addiction to start the recovery process – to acknowledge the depth of our civilizational failure. If generations now living are to gain redemption in the eyes of generations to come, we must confess we have missed the mark, understand why, and do everything in our power to level up, knowing we are leaving them the legacy of a damaged planet and a future wrought with uncertainty.

This is not to say no progress has been made. In the past few years, solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles have become cost-competitive alternatives to fossil fuels. In the first half of 2025, solar and wind additions exceeded world electricity demand growth for the first time. Low-carbon technologies are a substantial reason why China, source of around 90% of climate pollution growth over the past decade, peaked in April 2024. In the first quarter of 2026 its emissions declined for the first time. Solar with battery storage has cut use of California gas peaker plants. A global climate pollution peak may be on arrival.

In terms of creating sustainable materials chains for new technologies, electric mining equipment is eliminating diesel. Recycling of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines is making mining less necessary. New battery chemistries are replacing such troublesome materials as lithium, cobalt and nickel. Renewables land use has been critiqued, often for good reason. But studies show benefits from shading farm fields with solar panels. One projected increased production capable of feeding 2.1 billion people. A Chinese study even showed benefits to some desert ecosystems. But these findings need to be taken with caution since desert solar installations can harm many species.

To see some daylight in these trends is not hopium. New technologies are a necessary part of any solution. But so far they’ve only covered a portion of energy growth. We’ve barely moved the needle on the global primary energy share supplied by fossil fuels. It stubbornly hovers above 80%. We’ve hardly begun to swear off our addiction.

Though climate pollution growth has decelerated, it was still at a record levelin 2025. Forty billion more tonnes of heat-trapping carbon were dumped into the atmosphere. The bathtub is still filling. In July atmospheric CO2 hit 427.87 parts per million, an increase of 1.25 ppm in the last year, around a 50% increase since humanity began mass fossil fuel burning around 1750. (In 1989, the first year I wrote about global warming, we were already at 353 ppm, now seen as the minimum to restore climate stability.) We are crossing into unknown territory where we risk triggering tipping points. So I resonate with skeptical voices who say that we cannot bolt wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and EVs onto the existing system and expect to avert climate catastrophe. The problem is lodged in the basic programming language of the economic system with its demand for endless growth.

Digging down to the deeper roots.

In exploring why are we are failing as a civilization, we have to dig down to the roots. One of the deepest critiques comes under the rather awkward heading of degrowth, the proposition that accelerating consumption is putting inordinate stress on ecosystems so we must begin to pull back. The problem is not climate alone, but as Stockholm Resilience Center puts it, exceeding the planetary boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity. We’re rapidly rolling past them, 3 by 2009, 4 by 2015, 6 by 2023 and 7 by 2025. The following graphic shows the 2025 status.

Degrowth expresses a negative and is widely regarded as politically untenable. It is also a misnomer as it really is not about less in all regards. In return for lower rates of physical consumption, it envisions vast increases in social services, education, leisure time, community connection, and overall quality of life, all of which people desire. Jason Hickel, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate of degrowth, often uses the more apt term ecological socialism. Yes, it’s the big bad S word, target of Cold War propaganda that continues to this day, ignoring the fact that vast parts of our economy are in fact socialist. Social Security and Medicare, publicly owned electrical and water utilities, farm subsidies, to name a few. And under the barrage of an unbridled and oligopolistic capitalism making life increasingly unaffordable, socialism is actually more favored by younger generations bearing the brunt. Even a few politicians will wear the label. So let us use the term ecological socialism to describe the positive direction we want to seek. Or at least hold it in the quiver of terms we use to describe a positive future that is in fact sustainable. A positive is so much more attractive than a negative.

Yet I wonder if we’re culturally and politically capable of achieving such ends. Can we dig ourselves out of the hole we’ve made for ourselves? Can we even comprehend the scope of what we’re confronting? I’ve used the term “we” broadly in this piece to express a general human reality. But here I must get more specific, focusing on the “we” I know best, that of the western countries, particularly my own United States. While Asia is rapidly catching up, we still hold the greatest collective responsibility for climate pollution. The U.S. alone accounts for nearly a quarter of fossil fuel CO2 emissions since 1750, while North America and Europe account for 57%.

Gallup in April put the number of U.S. of Americans who worry a great deal about global warming at 44%, a near high level. The Yale Program on Climate Communication finds somewhat higher levels, 64% who are “somewhat worried” including 29% who are “very worried.” Yet there’s a huge disconnect. People are buying more pickups and SUVs. Some car companies are ending production of sedans. House sizes are growing larger. Aviation continues to expand. We go on living and enjoying our lives as if nothing is happening, at least nothing that will affect us immediately. Mass culture seems largely about diversion and distraction. Though the popularity of superhero movies perhaps indicates we know something is amiss and are subconsciously looking for someone to save us.

Some people more aware of what’s coming down the pike seek to “ruggedize” their lives and move to safer places. “Climate refuges” such as western North Carolina inundated by Hurricane Helene. Or Duluth, Minnesota recently choked by Canadian wildfire smoke that gave it some of the worst air in the world. Or Vermont, both drowned by floods and suffocated by smokes in recent years. Some project the collapse of cities but do not seem to consider that this would create Mad Max countrysides. If you have food when people are starving you may need guns as well. And rural areas are as subject to storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires as cities. There is no safe place in a climate-disrupted world.

The problem with politics as usual.

The only way to avert catastrophic scenarios is to join together in collective action and political movement. And that gets to the nub of the problem. I believe the climate movement has failed to fully comprehend the lock forces arrayed against us have on the political system. To put it bluntly, the power of corporations, especially the fossil fuel industry, and special interests invested in business as usual.

In 2014, Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a study of 1,779 U.S. policy issues from 1981-2002. They found “ . . . it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same . . . whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”

When there is low support for a policy proposal, only one in five among the top 10% of income earners, which the authors say is a good proxy for the top 2%, it has only an 18% chance of being adopted. With support of four in five, the chance of adoption is 45%. The figures for low and high support among interest groups are similar, 16% versus 45%.

Write Gillens and Page, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Did we ever have a chance?

They add that their research this “provides strong support” that the U.S. system is one of economic elite domination rather than majority rule. In other words, we in the U.S. live in an oligarchy rather than a democracy. It hardly comes as a surprise, and explains a whole lot across a range of issues from health care to Gaza.

The upcoming November midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election are critically important. We need to restore some balance to the three branches of government, continually trampled by Trump and his corporate gangsters. Polls indicating a Democratic blowout stir great optimism. The Republican Party truly deserves to be bound and cast into the outer darkness for its complicity in Trump’s rampant law-breaking. As well because of the almost uniform denial of the climate crisis by Republican politicians.

But political realities underscored by Gillens and Page tell us we can’t count on a Democratic Capitol Hill and White House to fully rise to the climate crisis. Substantial Democratic congressional majorities in the first Obama term were not enough to pass a climate policy. I was up close and personal with that debacle, observing the inadequacy of the climate bill, its many gyrations, and its ultimate demise. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act did offer substantial support for clean energy technologies (and some not so clean) but set no carbon limits and in the end only narrowly passed. It proved vulnerable to gutting by Trump. The Democratic Party has climate champions, but also many politicians sold to corporate interests. Climate hushing pushed by party consultants is another bad sign.

It’s going to take a whole lot more than Democratic victories. Minimally, I believe the climate movement should create groups based in congressional districts and states that are purely devoted to watchdogging the climate performance of individual representatives and senators, and dogging them relentlessly to support measures that meet the challenge. It should do the same for major media outlets, continually calling out where they fail to connect climate disruption to weather extremes and disasters.

Assuming 2029 will bring a Democratic congress and presidency, restoration of policies favoring renewables and EVs can be expected. But the climate trajectory virtually assures it will not be enough. It strains credulity to believe systemic change, the kind that draws us back within those planetary boundaries, will emerge from the political system as it is presently constituted. Not with the power that special interests have within it. We must think it more deeply.

The need for disruption.

Here I arrive at the most difficult point. A very particular “we,” those 2% sitting at the top of the oligarchic system, are directly responsible for our civilizational failure. The broader “we” is mostly locked out. We’re being taken to planetary hell by a narrow, mostly self-interested sliver of the population and members of the professional-managerial 10% that directly serve them. Most of us go along because we feel we have no other choice. Even those of us who are aware and alarmed are largely wrapped up in day-to-day issues of survival. Something truly mass is required.

Civil resistance scholar Erica Chenoweth published an often quoted studybased on 323 popular uprisings from 1900-2006. She found when at least 3.5% of a population participates in resistance they always win. Chenoweth notes such participation reflects a far broader consensus in society. That percentage might seem small. But in the U.S. it would mean 12 million people, compared to the 8-9 million who showed up for the most recent No Kings Day. Brought to my local level, it would take the sustained engagement of around 30,000 Seattleites. Even in my notably politically rambunctious city that would be a huge challenge.

Successful civil resistance entails more than showing up at one-day demonstrations. It requires campaigns that build over time, backed by organization and strategic leadership. They must include disruptive actions such as civil disobedience and general strikes. To dislodge the power of economic elites, it’s going to take disruptive action. Chenoweth notes that such mass resistance actually spurs defections among elites who don’t want to be left out.

Such a movement is going to have to extend beyond climate and other ecological challenges. It will have to connect to the conditions of people’s lives, to the increasingly difficult challenges of survival ranging from housing, food and energy costs to medical expenses. It will have to bring together a broad front of social and ecological movements, the often discussed movement of movements, with a vision for systemic change. That is where we can bring the issues of climate and planetary boundaries home in ways people can understand and connect to their daily lives. Ultimately, this movement will have to address who holds the economic levers in society, what an economy is for, and who benefits.

We can begin to shape that movement at the grassroots, in the communities where we live. That is what much of this site deals with under its theme, “Building the Future in Place.” It is meant as a response to the challenges communities will face with multiple crises coming down the pike. I wrote a two-part scenario for how a community accomplishes this beginning here. It centers on organizing to build community-based institutions in at least six areas:

• Public Banking
• Social and Community Housing
• Community Energy Cooperatives
• Sustainable Materials
• Local Food Systems
• Worker Cooperatives

A civilization failing in so many ways is going to bring increasing ruptures and crises. We can see them piling on. Economic and financial turmoil looms. AI seems on the verge of going out of control. Nobody really can predict its impacts on jobs. Wars rage and more are threatened. The same economic elite that is steering the world toward climate catastrophe is behind these other emerging crises, and for the same reason. Self-interested pursuit of wealth and power trumping all other objectives.

In my gut I sense big breakdowns coming. A lot of other people do too. There seems to be a general foreboding about the future, and for many good reasons. In the foreground of my own awareness, triggering those climate feedbacks is the most serious and long-term threat short of a nuclear war, itself not out of the question. A system that has come to this point is bleeding credibility. That provides fertile ground for raising questions about who rules it and why, then getting to that 3.5%.

The most profound moral question humanity has ever faced.

Bill Calvin theorized it was abrupt climate disruptions that drove our evolution, giving us these big brains capable of mastering the planet. The question is – Can we master ourselves? Will we plunge into catastrophes that might eventuate in collapse and dieback, realizing outcomes resembling those Exeter worst cases? Or will we slow down climate change enough to give the planet and coming generations time to catch a break and adjust to changes that are inevitably coming? Are we going to leave a world with which our children and theirs can cope?

These are political and economic questions. But above all they embody the most profound moral question in the long existence of our species. Can our next evolution be one of solidarity with our fellow human beings and the other species with whom we share this planet, rather than through the brute realities of collapse and dieback? Will we learn the most profound lesson taught by all of humanity’s great wisdom paths, that of compassion for each other and those who are to come?

All those questions are in vast uncertainty. I’ve lined out my best sense of the answers, by no means sure they will be nearly enough. But I’m not going to quit. I may be floored by events as I have been these past weeks, but I’m always going to get up and try again. There’s too much at stake. May this be encouragement for you to do the same.

This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.

This version published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Donald Trump is determined to subvert the midterms. All that can save us, if he succeeds, is a national strike

Chris Hedges
Aug 31, 2026

The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.

Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.

If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections.

The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican.

Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.

Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.

The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition.

Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.

Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

When Volodymyr Zelensky — whose presidential term ended in May 2024 — informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trumpresponded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans –  but also voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night.

Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”

This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.

I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security.

These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.

Power — as in all dictatorships — is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.

The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs.

Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education — from kindergarten to graduate school — will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.

Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court grantedTrump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor chargedthat as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”

Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”

“The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:

“The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.”

FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”

This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November.

Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.

First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations.

“At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”

The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.

We can only save ourselves.

This means shutting the country down.

Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Ellen Brown
SEPTEMBER 2, 2026

In August 2026, the U.S. debt reached a gravity-defying $40 trillion, with an estimated fiscal year 2026 deficit of $2.1 trillion. Interest on the debt hit a record $1.4 trillion over the last 12 months and now consumes more than any federal program except Social Security and Medicare, eclipsing defense spending for the first time in U.S. history. Paid with borrowed money, interest compounds exponentially, making it the fastest-growing part of the budget, far outpacing economic growth. By 2036, the Congressional Budget Office projects interest costs will double to $2.1 trillion, with debt held by the public reaching 120 percent of GDP. The CBO director has declared the trajectory to be “not sustainable.”

Increasingly, prominent analysts are saying the United States will have to “print” its way out. But using whose printing press, printing what?

Today “printing” normally means Federal Reserve monetization (Quantitative Easing or QE). The Treasury first issues debt – bills, bonds and notes – which are sold by primary dealers on the open market. If there are insufficient buyers, the Fed as “lender of last resort” may buy the securities with “reserves” created with accounting entries in bank reserve accounts. But Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is trying to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet by selling federal securities, not buy them. And even if the Fed did engage in QE, it would not work today to reduce the debt or the interest. The Fed is required to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, but ever since 2008 it has paid the banks interest on their reserve balances (IORB) as a policy tool to control inflation; and since 2022, the total sum the Fed has paid in IORB has been higher than the interest it received from the Treasury on its securities. The net result is that instead of the Fed remitting profits to the Treasury, the Treasury now owes the Fed money to cover the gap in IORB, increasing the federal debt and the interest bill. The Fed printing press is running, but it is running in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, $4.1 trillion USD in marketable federal securities are maturing this year; and many are long-dated bonds yielding low interest, for which there are insufficient buyers. So the Treasury under Scott Bessent has had to take over the business of buying them, using funds raised by selling short-dated Treasuries for which there is a ready market. Some commentators are calling this “Treasury QE,” but the policy is not pumping new Treasury dollars into the market. Other commentators say the buyback expansion is more like the Fed’s earlier “Operation Twist” — just an asset swap, old debt for new.

An August 22, 2026 article in Forbes compares the effect of Fed and Treasury bond purchases like this:

“Under quantitative easing, the Fed buys Treasury securities and pays for them by crediting the reserve accounts of banks.… Base money, the sum of currency and those reserve balances, expands one for one with the purchase.

Treasury has no such keystroke ability. It spends out of the Treasury General Account, its checking account at the Fed, and every dollar in that account got there through taxes or borrowing. “

The Treasury’s Keystroke Power 

So says conventional analysis, but the Treasury at the direction of Congress actually does have keystroke ability. It is a sovereign power that our forebears used to finance the American Revolution, the Civil War, and some of the most explosive periods of economic growth in U.S. history. From the “colonial scrip” that Benjamin Franklin credited with the prosperity of the colonies, to the Continentals that funded the Revolution, the power to create money was viewed as a public utility. The U.S. Constitution formalized that power in Article I, Section 8, granting Congress the power “to coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof.”

After Lincoln’s Treasury printed enough U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks” to win the Civil War, the Supreme Court twice affirmed its authority to do so. But that power was captured and handed to a banking cartel that met in secret on Jekyll Island in 1910, where they designed a system in which every new dollar must be borrowed into existence from bankers who simply write deposits into their borrowers’ accounts. And thus was the government’s sovereign power to create its own currency captured by private profiteers.

The Lincoln Precedent

The greatest proof of concept for debt-free sovereign currency remains Abraham Lincoln’s Greenbacks. Facing a fractured nation and usurious interest rates from international bankers, Lincoln bypassed the private credit market. Through the Legal Tender Acts of the 1860s, the Treasury issued $450 million in United States Notes (Greenbacks), which funded the North’s victory in the Civil War and extensive national infrastructure development.

In 1871, the Supreme Court upheld the Legal Tender Acts in Knox v. Lee, ruling that the government’s power to issue currency that was not redeemable in specie (coins) was an inherent attribute of sovereignty. But in 1878, the Greenback supply was capped at less than half a million dollars, ensuring that as the economy grew, the sovereign dollar would be dwarfed by private bank credit backed by gold reserves. In Juilliard v. Greenman (1884), however, the Supreme Court confirmed that the power “of making the notes of the United States a legal tender in payment of private debts” was “included in the power to borrow money and to provide a national currency”.

The Populist Allegory: The Yellow Brick Road

By the late 19th century, the scarcity of credit caused by the bankers’ “Cross of Gold” led to a major depression and a grassroots uprising. In 1894, the march of “Coxey’s Army” on Washington—the first of its kind—would become the inspiration for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1889).

In that classic American allegory, the “Yellow Brick Road” (the gold standard) leads to a deceptive Emerald City (Washington D.C.), where the Wizard (the President) pulls levers of illusion. William Jennings Bryan, the “Cowardly Lion” of the Greenback movement, had the roar of a great orator but ultimately lacked the courage to stick to the Greenback solution, instead pivoting to bimetallism (silver). [For more on that see E. Brown, Web of Debt.]

In 1912, Bryan was appointed Secretary of State by Pres. Woodrow Wilson. Bryan vigorously opposed the Aldrich Act, which would have handed the “money power” to the bankers; but the bankers won, and the Federal Reserve Act passed. Since that time, the United States has financed itself not with sovereign money but with interest-bearing debt, rolling it over year after year until the interest bill itself has become the fastest-growing federal expense.

That is how we got caught in a debt cyclone in which interest is compounding at a voracious rate. Congress will be coming up against the debt ceiling soon and will need to vote either to raise the ceiling, cut social services and the military, raise taxes, or authorize the Treasury to print its way out. Granted, Congress is unlikely to resort to the sovereign money alternative until it has no other option but to default, but that alternative is approved by both the Constitution and by statute, and it need not raise consumer prices – in fact it can lower them — if the new money is used to create new goods and services, keeping supply and demand in balance. (More on that shortly.)

The Statutory Keys

A statutory mechanism proposed to deal with earlier debt ceiling crises involves 31 U.S.C. § 5112(k), under which the Treasury Secretary is granted the discretion to mint platinum coins in any denomination. The proposal was to mint trillion dollar coins, which would represent a profit to the Mint (seigniorage) rather than loans, so their value does not count toward the statutory debt limit defined in 31 U.S.C. § 3101. See e.g. Paul Krugman’s whimsical endorsement here.

The “Treasury General Account” (TGA) is essentially the government’s only checking account and is held by the Federal Reserve. Fo the sovereign dollar to work, the Fed would need to credit the TGA with the face value of the coins on deposit but that mandate is also statutory. Under 12 U.S.C. § 391, the Federal Reserve Banks are must act as “fiscal agents” for the United States; and under 31 U.S.C. § 5103, all coins minted by the U.S. Treasury are “legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.”

Despite those mandates, when the trillion dollar coin was raised as a solution to an earlier debt ceiling deadline in 2013, then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke called it “unworkable”; and in 2021, facing another debt ceiling, Janet Yellen called it a “gimmick.”

Perhaps, but the coin is no more a gimmick than the Fed’s own “Quantitative Easing,” which extends the use of a section of the Federal Reserve Act far beyond its intended purpose. Section 14 of the Act (12 USC Sec. 355), authorizing Open Market Operations, was intended only for small-scale adjustments to keep interest rates stead; but during the 2008 and 2020 crises, the Fed used that authority to create billions of dollars in reserves to bail out bankrupt mega-banks.

If the Fed can create trillions in currency to save the banks, why can’t the Treasury do it to save the taxpayers? If trillion dollar coins seem too much like a gimmick, Congress can just lift the 1878 cap on Greenback issues and issue U.S. Notes directly. The GENIUS Act authorizes new forms of digital coins. Why not a digital Greenback coin backed by the full faith and credit of the United States?

Quelling Inflation Concerns

Combining the Legal Tender power (confirmed in Juilliard), the Minting discretion (31 U.S.C. §5112), and the Fiscal Agency mandate (12 U.S.C. §391), the tools are already in place for Congress to issue currency directly. So what is holding it back?

The standard objection is that Treasury-issued money is more inflationary than borrowing, because borrowed money will eventually be paid back, extinguishing the newly created deposits. But the federal debt has not been paid off since Andrew Jackson did it nearly two centuries ago. The debt is just rolled over from year to year, and so is the interest. In fact the interest burden grows faster than the debt, because it is largely deficit-financed. Interest paid on interest compounds exponentially.

Contrary to conventional theory, borrowing money into existence has been shown to be more inflationary than printing it directly. Both add new dollars to the money supply, since the debt-created dollars spent by the government are never paid back. But the interest burden on those dollars drives up taxes, and the Fed attempts to dampen inflation by raising interest rates, which raises the interest that producers must pay on their own debts. Producers then raise their prices to cover these additional costs, inflating consumer prices.

Supporting Data

The additional inflation risk from government-borrowed money is not just theory. In an excellent 2018 academic paper titled “Bringing the Helicopter to Ground,” monetary economists Josh Ryan-Collins of University College London and Frank van Lerven of the New Economic Foundation examined government finance across 13 advanced economies from 1900 to 2011. For roughly 40 years, from the 1930s to the 1970s, 40 to 50 percent of government debt in the countries studied was funded by the creation of new money rather than by borrowing existing wealth from private savings or foreign investors. The new money was created as credit on the books of both central and commercial banks. The authors highlight that this period also had the lowest incidence of banking crises in modern history, and it coincided with the century’s longest sustained period of low government debt-to-GDP and highest GDP growth. Inflation remained manageable until the shocks of the early 1970s.

After the 1970s oil shock, Milton Friedman’s dictum that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” became official dogma. But the historical record showed the opposite: price inflation rose in the 1970s, while new money creation fell. Prices were driven up by a shortage of supply rather than an excess of monetary demand.

Money Creation Needs to Be Productive 

One particularly compelling experiment in publicly-issued money discussed by Ryan-Collins and van Lerven involved New Zealand. Today, nearly all U.S. states are dealing with housing crises. After the Reserve Bank of New Zealand was nationalized in the 1930s, the government solved its housing crisis by using central bank-issued funds to finance housing, infrastructure, public works and support for farmers. Over a four-year period, The Bank created NZ£30 million for the government, real GDP rose 30 percent, and price inflation remained stable.

Why? Because the new money was not bidding for a fixed stock of goods. It was putting unemployed people and idle resources to work to increase the supply of housing, food and other goods.

That is actually the key to avoiding the inflation trap (“too much money chasing too few goods”). If the money is spent on infrastructure and investments that produce new goods and services, supply and demand will rise together, keeping prices in balance.

In fact we may soon be facing the opposite problem – too little money chasing too many goods. Artificial intelligence and robotics promise large increases in productive capacity while threatening the wage income on which consumer demand depends. The solution in that case will be to add new debt-free money to the economy. See my earlier article series here.

The Hamiltonian Option: Grow Our Way Out

An alternative for dealing with the federal debt that is being advocated by the current Administration is the Hamiltonian approach: increase GDP and grow our way out of the debt, as the U.S. did after World War II. It’s a good idea, but financial commentators say it is not enough. Conditions are far different now than in the post-war period, and the numbers won’t work.

Before GDP can grow, funds must be available for labor and supplies; and the Treasury simply does not have them. Treasury-issued dollars could fill the breach and be sustainable, if the money were directed into infrastructure and development, increasing supply along with demand.

Contrary to the Friedman dictum, inflation is not “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” The relevant question is not just how much money is circulating in the economy but where it is circulating and whether it is connecting productive capacity with human needs.

Today, U.S. factories are operating at only 76% capacity, and the American Society of Civil Engineers projects a shortage in infrastructure funding of $3.7 trillion, while trillions in liquid M2 capital are sitting idle in the stock market or circulating strictly within its walls. In fact corporations are now draining hundreds of billions of dollars out of their productive operations to buy back their own stock, further removing financial wealth from the real economy. If newly created dollars were invested in the economy’s industrial slack or the infrastructure gap, goods and services would be produced for the consumer market, raising supply to balance demand and keeping prices from rising.

The most dramatic modern illustration of this principle is China. In the last three decades, China’s M2 money supply has increased by a dramatic 5500%, yet prices have remained stable. Why? Because the money has been invested in infrastructure and development, increasing supply along with demand. For a detailed explanation and references, see my earlier article here.

What If Greenbacks Retired the Debt?

What if new Treasury money were used to gradually redeem some existing federal securities as they mature? This too would be unlikely to drive up consumer prices. Treasury securities are largely held by funds, banks, insurers, foreign institutions and wealthy investors, who are not likely to spend the money on consumer goods but will seek other investments paying interest. An institutional holder of a $1 million Treasury bond which receives $1 million in sovereign dollars has not suddenly gained $1 million in net wealth. One federal liability has just been exchanged for another: an interest-bearing security for non-interest-bearing money. What has changed is just that the government has been relieved of the obligation to keep paying interest on the retired debt.

Conclusion: The Government Has the Power to Bypass the Interest Trap

As Thomas Edison observed in a New York Times interview in 1921:

“If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way.”

It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.

Congress has the constitutional power to issue sovereign money directly – interest-free and debt-free – and viable precedents are available for implementing that policy without driving up consumer prices. The question is whether Congress will reclaim this hereditary power before the interest trap snaps shut completely.

Postscript: In October of this year, the Public Banking Institute will be holding a conference on these and related issues in Philadelphia, the city in which Pennsylvania’s “land bank” first proved the power of publicly-issued credit and Benjamin Franklin’s printing press supplied its currency. For more information, see http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.

Published on Scheerpost.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
AUGUST 7, 2026

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

– James Baldwin

“You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.”

– Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell

Every day we scroll past photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly, they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten..

This is not merely a political development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age. We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference.

As the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki return once again, they do so largely eclipsed by the Trump administration’s transformation of the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary into a spectacle of militarized patriotism, historical mythmaking, and American triumphalism. The pageantry celebrates a narrative of national innocence while eclipsing one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities committed in its name. The more urgent question, therefore, is not simply what happened in August 1945. It is what has become of a society whose formative institutions increasingly educate people to accommodate violence rather than resist it.

The answer lies in more than what Gore Vidal once described as America’s cultivated historical amnesia. Under gangster capitalism, forgetting has become a governing principle of power. We inhabit a regime of organized forgettingthat erases bodies from public consciousness even as it erases historical memory itself. It teaches us to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and to consume the suffering of others as another spectacle in an endless cycle of distraction, entertainment, and forgetting. Such regimes are not abstractions. They become visible whenever policies capable of producing immense human suffering disappear beneath the noise of political spectacle—as in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, a policy that recent analyses estimate has already contributed to “an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.”

How else are we to understand a world in which more than sixty-four thousand Palestinian children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023 while their suffering disappears almost as quickly as the headlines that briefly acknowledge it? How else do we explain the reported deaths of more than one hundred children in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, an event that barely registered before it was displaced by the next manufactured spectacle? These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a broader cultural condition in which atrocity is consumed, circulated, and forgotten with astonishing speed.

This is the deepest wound inflicted by authoritarian culture. It does not merely normalize violence; it reorganizes consciousness. It severs suffering from compassion, history from responsibility, and death from mourning. When the victims disappear from memory almost as quickly as they disappear from life, power secures one of its greatest triumphs: it destroys not only bodies but the public capacity to recognize their loss. In that moment, forgetting becomes the final act of violence, completing in consciousness what bombs, prisons, armies, and occupations begin in history. This cultural condition has been analyzed most powerfully by Robert Jay Lifton.

Robert Jay Lifton gave this condition a name: psychic numbing. He used the phrase to describe the diminished capacity to feel in the face of overwhelming violence. What begins as a psychological defense against unbearable suffering can become a cultural and political condition. Entire societies learn to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and eventually to forget. This condition is not merely an individual affliction, or type of “impaired mourning”; it is a form of public pedagogy. It is cultivated by schools emptied of critical thought, historical consciousness, and civic purpose; it is produced by media cultures organized around spectacle, digital platforms that reward distraction, a culture of immediacy, and political narratives that teach us to accommodate cruelty rather than confront it. Against this pedagogy of forgetting stands the difficult and necessarily troubling work of historical memory.

These questions matter because remembrance is not the same as historical memory. Official rituals of remembrance often console us by confining catastrophe safely to the past. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes in America, U.S.A., historical memory performs a very different task. It returns us to unfinished histories whose consequences continue to inhabit the present. It unsettles rather than reassures. It refuses the comfort of distance and insists that the past is never truly past when the conditions that produced it survive in altered forms. Historical memory does not ask us simply to remember what happened. It demands that we recognize how the logics that made catastrophe possible continue to shape the present.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong to precisely this kind of historical memory because they remind us that atrocities begin long before the first bomb falls. They begin when language is removed from moral responsibility, when history is erased or rewritten through the vocabulary of conquest and colonization, and when entire populations are rendered disposable before they are destroyed. Every genocide is first a crisis of language, memory, and moral imagination. By the time the machinery of death is set in motion, the deeper work has already been done: compassion has been weakened, historical consciousness has been dismantled, and violence has been normalized as common sense. Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand not only as symbols of unprecedented destruction but also as warnings about the political culture that makes such destruction imaginable. Few have expressed this truth more forcefully than the late Howard Zinn:

“What means could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high as from Moses on the Mount.”

The atomic bombings were not merely military events that concluded the Second World War. They inaugurated a new historical formation in which scientific achievement became inseparable from industrialized killing, technological rationality overwhelmed ethical judgment, and civilian annihilation could be justified through the sanitized language of military necessity, national security, and historical inevitability. Long before the bombs incinerated cities, another devastation had already taken place. Human beings had been transformed into abstractions, dehumanized through racist slurs, strategic calculations, and collateral damage.

The bomb exploded first in consciousness. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”  When language is colonized, memory itself becomes vulnerable to conquest—capturing consciousness long before it captures territory. Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to ash, language had already been emptied of moral responsibility, memory had been rewritten in the service of empire, and entire populations had been rendered disposable.

That moral rupture did not disappear with the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became embedded in institutions, policies, cultural narratives, and educational practices that normalized militarism while celebrating technological mastery divorced from ethical restraint. The bomb was transformed into a symbol of national virtue rather than a warning about the abyss into which modern civilization had descended. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell observed, American political culture constructed an official narrative that sought not to confront the moral catastrophe of Hiroshima but to redeem it, converting an act of unprecedented destruction into a story of national innocence and salvation. That narrative did more than justify the bomb. It reorganized moral consciousness.

Lifton argued that Hiroshima did not wound only its victims; it also left a profound mark on the American imagination, fostering a culture of denial, moral justification, and emotional numbing. Yet he never regarded Hiroshima solely as a source of despair. He insisted that confronting its moral legacy honestly could foster resilience, renewal, and what he called “survivor wisdom,” restoring the historical memory and moral imagination necessary to resist future catastrophes. That insight is even more urgent today because the habits of denial and indifference he identified have escaped the nuclear age and become defining features of contemporary political culture.

Among survivors of Hiroshima, this diminished capacity to feel initially functioned as a tragic form of psychological survival. Faced with scenes too horrific to absorb, many found themselves emotionally paralyzed, temporarily incapable of responding to the landscape of death surrounding them. But Lifton extended the concept much further. He argued that the same condition also characterized those who designed the bomb, authorized its use, justified its necessity, and later defended its moral legitimacy. What began as an emergency psychological defense gradually became a cultural condition.

This insight reaches far beyond Hiroshima. What begins as a defense against unbearable suffering can evolve into a political culture organized around indifference. A society that learns not to feel one atrocity gradually acquires the capacity to ignore others. Lifton warned that once Americans constructed what he called a “cordon sanitaire” around Hiroshima—a barrier protecting them from confronting its moral implications—that habit of avoidance spread to other forms of collective suffering. The numbing did not stop with Hiroshima. It became a way of inhabiting the world.

Nothing could better describe our present historical moment. We inhabit societies saturated with images of catastrophe. Yet rather than enlarging our ethical imagination, this relentless exposure often produces exhaustion, indifference, and resignation.

Even more troubling, it feeds a resurgent war culture that glorifies domination, celebrates militarized masculinity, and equates physical strength with moral worth. As Susan Sontag argued in her classic essay on fascist aesthetics, authoritarian culture does more than justify violence; it aestheticizes it. Domination becomes seductive, hierarchy beautiful, submission desirable, and the spectacle of power detached from the suffering it produces. Violence no longer appears as a moral catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of strength, discipline, virility, and national renewal. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of militarized masculinity is not simply a political posture; it is the contemporary expression of this fascist aesthetic. It transforms domination into virtue, physical force into moral authority, misogyny into masculine authenticity, and violence into the highest expression of citizenship. In doing so, it redefines citizenship itself, replacing democratic responsibility with militarized obedience, civic courage with warrior masculinity, and public life with a theater of force.

In such a culture, violence becomes another genre of entertainment, another spectacle in the economy of distraction. The constant circulation of suffering no longer enlarges compassion; it erodes it, teaching people not simply to witness violence but increasingly to admire, consume, and normalize it.

Lifton anticipated this transformation with extraordinary clarity. As this moral desensitization spreads, he argued, people require ever greater spectacles of violence simply to feel anything at all. Disaster becomes normalized, and ordinary suffering loses its capacity to disturb us.

Here the legacy of Hiroshima converges with the digital culture of the twenty-first century.

Algorithms reward outrage while discouraging reflection. Social media platforms monetize fear, resentment, and humiliation. Corporate news reduces war to spectacle, compressing unbearable histories into disposable images. Artificial intelligence accelerates the circulation of propaganda, conspiracy, and racial mythology while diminishing the time necessary for thoughtful judgment. We increasingly encounter suffering not as fellow human beings but as data, content, or scrolling images. Distance becomes permanent. Responsibility evaporates.

This is not simply a technological crisis. It is a pedagogical one.

Every culture teaches people how to see, what to value, whose lives matter, and whose deaths may be ignored. The most powerful educational institutions today are no longer schools alone. They are digital platforms, corporate media, entertainment industries, and algorithmic systems that organize attention itself. These institutions do more than distribute information. They shape consciousness, organize attention, and cultivate habits of feeling. They manufacture forms of identification while teaching indifference toward others.

Under such conditions, fascism no longer requires spectacular rallies or uniforms to reproduce itself. It works more quietly and, for that reason, often more effectively. It reshapes perception, colonizes language, erodes historical memory, and teaches people to regard entire populations as invaders, parasites, criminals, terrorists, or demographic threats rather than as fellow human beings. By the time the machinery of violence is set in motion, its deepest victory has already been won: the democratic imagination has been hollowed out, compassion has yielded to fear, and disposability has become common sense.

Today this pedagogy of dehumanization is once again becoming normalized. Calls for mass deportation, fantasies of ethnic purification disguised as “remigration,” attacks on immigrants, racial conspiracy theories, and genocidal rhetoric directed at Palestinians all depend upon a prior educational achievement: teaching people to regard certain lives as disposable.

That is why figures such as Elon Musk matter. They matter not because they are uniquely evil but because they occupy commanding positions within the cultural apparatuses that now educate hundreds of millions of people. When racist conspiracies, demographic panic, and authoritarian fantasies are amplified through platforms reaching much of the globe, white supremacist propaganda is transformed into common sense. Hatred becomes normalized precisely because it is repeated, circulated, rewarded, and stripped of its historical genealogy.

As Jamelle Bouie has argued, Musk’s rhetoric is no longer confined to coded insinuations or internet provocation. It increasingly echoes themes drawn from the contemporary white nationalist imagination: affirming slogans such as “First the traitors, then the invaders”; declaring that “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor”; amplifying demographic panic over declining white birthrates; and normalizing the language of racial replacement and ethnic cleansing. Bouie also notes the disturbing resonance between this rhetoric and the political imaginary of The Turner Diaries, where “traitors” who defend a multiracial democracy are marked for elimination before the campaign against supposed “invaders” begins. This should not be dismissed merely as inflammatory rhetoric.  Language of this kind does not simply describe the world; it prepares people to inhabit one in which exclusion, racial purification, and political violence appear not only legitimate but necessary.

Yet we should resist the temptation to describe figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Stephen Miller simply as monsters. As Jorge Gonzalez Arocha observes, the language of monstrosity may satisfy our moral outrage, but it ultimately obscures the deeper workings of power. Monsters exist outside history. They are imagined as aberrations, exceptions to ordinary life. Fascism is neither. It is produced within history, cultivated through institutions, sustained by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, amplified by media, and normalized through the everyday pedagogies of schools, digital platforms, entertainment industries, and political culture. When we imagine authoritarianism as the work of monsters, we mistake symptoms for causes, overlooking the social relations, institutional arrangements, and cultural forces that make such politics possible.

The enduring lesson of Hiroshima is not that monsters occasionally seize power. It is that educated people, respected institutions, celebrated scientists, compliant journalists, and ordinary citizens can become participants in systems that separate technical intelligence from moral responsibility. The bureaucrats who planned Hiroshima were not monsters. The scientists who perfected the bomb were not monsters. The journalists who celebrated it were not monsters. They were products of institutions that transformed mass death into administrative necessity and moral obligation. The greatest crimes of modernity are rarely committed outside civilization; they are committed in its name.

The political danger of the language of monstrosity is that it individualizes what is fundamentally systemic. It encourages us to search for evil personalities rather than authoritarian cultures, for pathological leaders rather than the pedagogical apparatuses that educate people into accepting cruelty, disposability, and organized forgetting. Remove one authoritarian leader and another will take his place so long as the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, and educational forces that manufacture authoritarian consciousness remain intact. That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it remains the central political lesson of our own time.

History never repeats itself mechanically. Gaza is not Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not Gaza. Their histories are different, their contexts distinct.  But they reveal a recurring political logic: civilian populations rendered disposable, overwhelming violence justified as necessity, bureaucratic language replacing ethical judgment, and technological superiority mistaken for moral legitimacy. Whenever human beings become abstractions rather than persons, the conditions for atrocity are already present.

This is why remembering Nagasaki matters. Historical comparison is valuable not because it erases difference but because it reveals recurring political logics.

Historical memory breaks the spell of moral indifference. It restores the connection between feeling and judgment, conscience and politics. It reminds us that every genocide begins not with the machinery of death but with the pedagogy of dehumanization. Long before bodies are destroyed, language is corrupted, history is erased, compassion is ridiculed, and entire populations are taught to disappear morally before they disappear physically.

Lifton believed that confronting Hiroshima could become a source of renewal because it enabled us to recover our moral imagination, relearn how to feel, and reconnect ourselves to the broader human project. That may be the most important lesson Nagasaki offers today.

The struggle against fascism begins not only by resisting authoritarian institutions but by refusing the moral indifference upon which they depend. Against organized forgetting and manufacture illiteracy and amnesia, we must recover historical memory. Against the politics of disposability, we must insist upon the irreducible dignity of every human life. Against the seductive myths of technological omnipotence and permanent war, we must reclaim a language capable of naming both truth and justice.

The authoritarian abyss is no longer a distant possibility. It has entered the present. It appears wherever democracy yields to militarism, wherever cruelty is celebrated as strength, wherever historical memory is erased, and wherever entire peoples are stripped of their humanity in the name of security, racial purity, or national destiny. The forces that produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not disappeared; they have assumed new languages, new technologies, and new justifications.

The question is no longer whether we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is whether we can recover the moral urgency necessary to prevent their logic from becoming the defining political grammar of the twenty-first century. Historical memory is no longer simply an act of remembrance; it has become a condition of survival. To remember is to resist. But memory cannot remain a sanctuary for conscience; it must become a catalyst for collective struggle. Its highest purpose is not simply to preserve the past but to interrupt/rupture/transform the present. Only when remembrance gives rise to solidarity, organized resistance, and the struggle to create a more just world does it honor those whose lives history has tried to erase.

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.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

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MICHAEL ALBERT
AUGUST 5 2026

So much going on. Existential crises. Fundamental needs. Short and long term agendas. Sounds heard all around the world. Much to think about. Much to do. But does the following also deserve some notice? I think maybe it does.

Truth is under accelerating assault. Trust is dying. Trump lies at every opportunity. Familiar generalized market duplicity persists. Mainstream media pervasively manipulates. But something related somehow simultaneously smaller and larger now grows steadily stronger to also pervert our lives. Something ridiculously trivial yet also savagely scary threatens to turn us all into liars or into people who deem lies by others inevitable. Something that makes us assume fraud is everywhere until we become people who inexorably logically and defensively distrust and reflexively dismiss all other people. We become people who hate people.

Here is a personal example. A few weeks ago I had a new book appear on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Within a few hours of its appearance, I received a solicitation about it. The fancy email displayed knowledge of the substance of my book and of my own history. It offered help. In two days I got ten more such solicitations. What did it mean?

In my case such solicitations were elaborate emails that admired and praised the targeted book and author and that offered to help the book reach its audience for the social good it could do. Eleven such email solicitations in two days. Each with a signature I didn’t know but by people who were seemingly from well known institutions.This was new for me. Well, it was almost new. Such solicitations had actually started to arrive in my email a few weeks earlier, not for the new book—it was not yet out—but for earlier books.

Some solicitations were pretty ridiculous…one early one was signed by Oprah Winfrey who wrote me to say she was choosing No Bosses for her book club selection because of its brilliant and profound message about what to seek beyond capitalism. An early overshoot. But before long more sophisticated solicitations with more accurate information about the new book, more believable writing, and plausible promotion ideas began to arrive.

Amazingly, in subsequent weeks solicitations kept coming and also got steadily harder to easily brand as the scams they were. They had steadily more detailed, accurate, and “professionally” presented information about the book and about me as its author, and their careful, personalized and elaborate promotional plans got steadily more astute.

At first I would read the emails and consider some of the proposals plausible—but not being a total dupe, I would also test them. But it got steadily harder to easily tell or even to discover that they were scams and before long the effort to test and expose each new solicitation, really any such solicitation, took so much time and effort that the best policy became to simply assume every such invitation was a lie that would eventually seek payment or access. So I went from trusting all emails I got, which had been my default stance since email first surfaced, to now routinely not trusting emails.

So what caused this cottage industry of fraudsters to suddenly appear and grow? AI did. AI is used to incredibly quickly find target books and authors, to research both, to write letters and in some cases to field replies and write again and again.

My concern about this trend escalates when I extrapolate from book scams to all kinds of scams that I can’t even dream of. Selling stuff. Offering stuff. Needing stuff. I got an email earlier today, still book related, but offering to translate the new one. Was it real or AI scamming? Then somehow another approach was tried, and I started to receive letters from radio stations and station-related clubs offering visibility. No fee required, I just had to donate. Maybe one or another solicitation/invitation among dozens was real, but maybe not, and molded to now reflexively distrust, I will never know.

The book scams seek payments to deliver promotional aid that then doesn’t get done. Phishing scams look for information to access accounts. What’s new is proliferation and verisimilitude. I received an email two days ago wanting me to enter information to prevent expiration of an actual subscription I have. Two more the next day. Scam inflation.

All of this, again, is fueled by AI which the scammer uses to find targets, to research the target’s needs, to figure out plausible audience for the chosen books or whatever else the scammer proposes, to write solicitation letters with elaborate promotional proposals, to answer replies from the scamee, and so on. Give this cottage industry some more time and it will be making phone call entreaties. Then FaceTime calls. Whooops. Wait. It already does that.

Estimates now claim there are upwards of 2,500 identified scam operations just regarding books and their authors. I suspect there are more or else how could I get so many invites. And that’s just books.

Sometimes the scammer seeks hundreds or maybe a few thousand dollars to be paid upfront for some service or product. Other times they seek critical information so as to clean out bank accounts. I got one about an hour ago saying my Amazon Prime account was being cancelled unless I clicked a provided link to enter new information. Shortly later I got essentially the same approach, but for another account. I was urged to go in and fix the information and of course the email provided a link for the purpose.

The harm that scammers do to their victims is real, very serious, and accelerating, but it is not the harm I am mainly worrying about in this short piece. The personal damage every time a scam succeeds is bad enough, but I have in mind a wider social effect. As scams proliferate so do the domains of life where it becomes wise to distrust communications. So not only lying but also distrust spreads.

The former aspect, to fraudulently steal, is rational for the person who wants to make a buck and sometimes a really big buck—supposing the person has the moral attributes of a weasel. Such scammers have elaborate web sites. They may have phone numbers that when the victim calls connect the victim elsewhere than what the number implies. Such scams are already hard to discern. Imagine a year or two from now.

The latter aspect, to reflexively distrust, is rational to avoid being ripped off. We dismiss all requests, offers, and entreaties. If this continues to proliferate and accelerate the social effects will grow as well. We aren’t what we eat but we do tend to become what we do. And so we slip slide into a world in which truth and trust are each assassinated. But who benefits if we each believe everyone else is a liar? You may think no one does, but no, the best liars benefit, and also all elites benefit because solidarity requires trust which takes a killing blow.

So I think that alongside war, repression, escalating misogyny, racism, and political obfuscation and manipulation, as if all that wasn’t enough, we now have a slowly but steadily growing epidemic of deception that causes good, caring people to assume that everyone else is an exploitative deceiver.

At exactly the moment when we need to grow solidarity we instead turn inward. It turns out that there may be a method to lots of what looks like madness. The state prosecutes immigrants, the poor, and dissenters with great vigor. It searches, labels, and rounds up “its enemies.” Meanwhile fraud-fueled corruption runs free. The state ignores our enemies or even abets them. Regarding scams, don’t punish the perps, but instead protect them all the way from Trump down. Make mistrust “sensible” at every level.

I hate to write anything pointing out ills without suggesting possible paths to win better, but I have to admit I am unsure how to positively react to the observations offered above. To tell people to be smart, to not get fooled, okay—but when that takes the form of don’t believe anyone who seems nice, anyone who seems supportive, anyone who offers you something positive, because fraud is everywhere—then the advice seems likely to aggravate our social trajectory of distrust and atomization. It seems to build in us an inclination to suspect and dismiss at precisely the moment when we most need caring solidarity.

So I am unsure what to suggest. How can we warn people about the growing “quality” of scammers and yet urge people to collectively care about one another and work together? It is clear how a movement can constructively oppose proliferating AI data centers. How does a movement constructively address proliferating AI truth and trust assassins? Soon, of course, some scammers will offer to protect us against other scammers.

Maybe how to deal with truth and trust decay needs a little thought along with what tactics, what organizational choices, and what strategies we should use to stop Trump, stop fascism, stop ecological collapse, stop impoverishment, stop misogyny, stop racism and then to replace the oppressive institutions that give rise to all that?

And P.S. it really is all one fight. Fascism thrives on lies and mistrust. Indeed, fascism can’t live without them. And our American brand of Trumpian Fascism seems to not even believe or have its adherents believe that there is any actual truth at all. How else can we explain that Trump says the things he does despite that so much of what he says is so transparently false?

The Covid vaccine didn’t work. Vaccines cause autism, but hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin.

Prescription drug prices are down by 2,000 percent.

Foreign countries pay our tariffs.

Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax.

Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate.

Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist.

I invaded Los Angeles and now California’s water is flowing.

Portland is on fire, it needs my help.

Every drug boat in the Caribbean ‘kills 25,000 Americans’

Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files.

Smoke blanketed North America because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of forest.

Climate change is a Chinese hoax.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down.

I, Trump have a 59 percent approval rating.

I won the 2020 election.

The US is ‘the only country in the world’ with mail-in voting.

I, Trump am a stable genius.

And lately, “my dad was born in Germany” which would be fine except that Trump’s dad was actually born in New York City.

And so on.

Truth becomes whatever Trump or whoever proclaims it to be. Does Trump believe his dad was born in Germany when he says so, and that he was born in NYC when he says that? Truth is apparently whatever the biggest boss says it is.

Duck and cover. Alone. Dismiss everyone. Or what?

Michael Albert is the co-founder of ZNet and Z Magazine.

From a post by Michael Albert on Counterpunch.org.

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HENRY GIROUX
JULY 31, 2026

“What if all the cockroaches come together?”

– Abhijeet Dipk

Marx and Engels issued the historic call: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Today, that summons returns with renewed urgency and takes a new form: Young people of the world unite and resist. Youth today possess the courage, imagination, anger, and numbers to change the course of history. They have grown up in societies paralyzed by cynicism, loneliness, desperation, and hatred, conditions that isolate people from one another and teach them to regard cruelty as inevitable. Yet even amid this desolation, a radical possibility remains: the recovery of solidarity as a passion for justice and love as a public and collective force. This militant love begins with the recognition that our lives are profoundly interconnected, that freedom cannot be reduced to individual escape, and that none of us can be secure while others are rendered vulnerable and disposable. It creates bonds strong enough to break through isolation, connect private suffering to public responsibility, and transform compassion into organized resistance. As James Baldwin and Malcolm X understood in different ways, learning to live requires learning to love, not as sentimentality or a retreat into private life, but as a refusal of hatred, racism, and the machinery of disposability.

Militant love takes the side of justice. It finds expression in solidarity, shared struggle, and the willingness to assume responsibility for lives beyond our immediate experience. It transforms loneliness into connection, despair into collective courage, and anger into a disciplined struggle for a world in which no human being is considered expendable. With catastrophe no longer on the horizon but at their doorstep, young people must build a worldwide movement of resistance that neither propaganda nor repression can silence. It is time to bring to a halt the machinery of death sustained by governments and their military-industrial-academic institutions, all stained by the suffering of children, women, the elderly, and those condemned as disposable.

But solidarity becomes a radical force only when moral conviction takes the form of organized struggle. Student-led protests in India have demonstrated how culture can become both a pedagogical weapon and a vehicle of collective resistance. After Chief Justice of India Surya Kant contemptuously referred to unemployed young people as “cockroaches,” Abhijeet Dipke  answered with a provocative challenge on Instagram: “What if all cockroaches come together?” The question spread rapidly, transforming an insult meant to humiliate into a rallying cry of defiance. Confronting the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Modi government, students, unemployed young people, and their supporters used memes, satire, and Instagram reels to expose corruption, puncture the mythology of power, and mobilize mass protest. Met with tear gas, police violence, and detention, they refused to abandon the streets. Their resistance revealed that domination is sustained through more than force. It also depends on images, narratives, and a manufactured common sense that teaches people what to fear, accept, and obey. By turning culture against power, the protesters entered the very terrain where identities are formed, anger finds a language, and private suffering becomes public outrage and collective action.

The youth-led Cockroach Janta Party converted this defiance into a rapidly expanding movement.  With more than 20 million followers on Instagram, it built an alternative public sphere beyond the government’s propaganda machine.Young people turned digital ridicule into political solidarity and carried it from the screen into the streets.  Images of police repression widened public outrage, while the movement’s growing power forced the resignation of India’s education minister and placed educational reform and public accountability on the national agenda. As Arundhati Roy notes, “the student protesters who have swarmed Delhi are showing us a different future for India.”

What began as an insult became a symbol. What began as a meme became a movement. What began online became a material force capable of making an authoritarian government retreat. This was more than a new style of protest. It was a restructuring of politics from below, one that seized the cultural technologies of domination and turned them against the systems of power that produce censorship and dispossession. It showed that culture is not an ornament to politics; it is one of the decisive sites where power is challenged, solidarity is created, and collective agency is born.

The lesson extends far beyond India. It must not be lost on young people in the United States or elsewhere, especially as the genocidal assault on Gaza is accompanied by an accelerating campaign of state and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. The catastrophe in Palestine is not confined to Gaza. It is part of a broader colonial project of dispossession, forced displacement, territorial theft, and the destruction of Palestinian life, a logic of domination increasingly visible across the globe. It is also a warning of what awaits the rest of the world as emerging fascist states answer economic crisis with racist paranoia, militarism, and fantasies of purification. This violence involves more than the crushing of dissent. A gangster form of neoliberal capitalism is merging with colonial violence and authoritarian rule, producing a criminogenic order in which law serves power, cruelty becomes policy, and entire populations are abandoned to injury, exile, and death.  Azeezah Kanji is right to insist:

“We speak often of the “Palestine exception”: the extreme repression of Palestinian and Palestine solidarity speech and activism. We ought also to speak of the Palestine example: understanding Palestine not simply as an exception, but as an emblem of the colonial modern condition.”

The assault on the village of Tell, southwest of Nablus, gives concrete meaning to this “Palestine example”: colonial power operating through the combined forces of the military, the state, and armed settlers to dispossess a people and destroy the conditions necessary for collective life. Following a deadly confrontation involving Palestinians, armed settlers, and Israeli forces, the Israeli government imposed collective punishment. Four Palestinians were killed, dozens were detained, homes were raided, and military operations spread across neighboring communities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a wider military campaign, while members of his far-right government demanded further settlement expansion and the depopulation of Palestinian villages. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese described the combined army-settler attacks as pogroms against defenseless civilians.

What is unfolding across Gaza and the West Bank is a crime against humanity made possible by weapons, diplomatic protection, media indifference, and the shameful complicity of powerful Western governments, especially the United States. Universities invest in and collaborate with the institutions that sustain the war machine. Corporate media turn mass suffering into background noise. Political leaders empty the language of human rights of all meaning by applying it selectively. Under these conditions, silence is not neutrality. It is a form of collaboration, and the normalization of genocide becomes a rehearsal for further crimes.

The young people of India have shown what becomes possible when a generation refuses the future imposed upon it.They are not alone. The resistance emerging among young people across the world offers a language for confronting this global regime of violence. Although sparked by specific grievances, these revolts are rooted in widening inequality, unemployment, economic insecurity, corruption, censorship, and the shameless nepotism of political elites.

What is often missed in the mainstream press is that young protesters are revolting against a global form of gangster capitalism that has denied them a meaningful place in the present and robbed them of a future. Commenting on the Cockroach uprising, Vijay Prashad identifies the deeper economic forces driving this revolt:

“The young protesters are not in revolt because they possess shorter attention spans or a special cultural aversion to authority. They are in revolt because capitalism cannot integrate them into dignified economic life. They have been told to study, acquire degrees, learn new skills, remain competitive, and become ‘entrepreneurs.’ Their families have borrowed money, sold land, postponed medical treatment, and reduced household consumption to pay for education and coaching. At the end of this punishing journey, many discover that the promised job does not exist. Others find only temporary contracts, unpaid internships, platform work, or jobs whose wages bear no relation to their qualifications.”

This crisis is not confined to India. In Bangladesh, student protests brought an end to Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-year rule. In Nepal, resistance to corruption and digital censorship forced the prime minister’s resignation. In Madagascar,protests that began over water and power cuts grew into demands for “a complete overhaul of the political system” and drove President Andry Rajoelina from the country. In Kenya, a decentralized youth movement compelled the government to withdraw a punishing finance bill and continues to challenge state power and shape the country’s politics.

Largely leaderless and digitally connected, these movements have transformed social media into a counter-public sphere and translated online networks into political power in the streets. Different in their histories, demands, and results, they share a crucial lesson: when young people refuse silence, organize across differences, and connect their courage to a broader public outrage, governments can be forced to retreat and seemingly immovable structures of power can begin to crack.

The challenge now is to turn these scattered revolts into a common struggle. Young people everywhere must transform these lessons into an international movement capable of bringing millions into the streets and interrupting the institutions that make mass violence possible. They must organize peaceful demonstrations across borders, build student-worker alliances, occupy public spaces, radicalize the social imagination, and expose the systems of propaganda that sustain it. They must demand an immediate end to the slaughter, an arms embargo, international sanctions, and freedom and justice for the Palestinian people. Moral outrage must become organized power.

Such a movement must be joined by educators, artists, cultural workers, trade unionists, journalists, faith communities, and public intellectuals. Resistance cannot remain fragmented by national borders or confined to isolated campuses and cities. Demonstrations must become global, coordinated, sustained, and impossible for governments to ignore. Boycotts, divestment campaigns, labor actions, teach-ins, and mass civil disobedience must converge into a broad democratic front capable of imposing a political cost on complicity. The capitalist and reactionary nationalist  institutions that sustain oppression must be confronted wherever they operate: in government ministries, corporations, universities, media systems, financial networks, and the arms industry.

The Indian youth movement thus offers a lesson that is both cultural and political.  Images, algorithms, digital platforms, and political spectacles are expressions of power, but they can also be seized as instruments of resistance. Cultural critique must move beyond exposing how consent is manufactured and desire is organized.  The cultural realm can be reclaimed from below and transformed into a public pedagogy of resistance, collective courage, and radical democratic possibility. But digital resistance reaches its limit unless it enters the streets, builds durable organizations, joins workers and communities, and converts visibility into lasting political power.

The power of young people lies not in youth alone, but in their capacity to awaken the rest of society from the paralysis of cynicism, fear, and manufactured helplessness. They can expose the lie that nothing can change, connect struggles that power works to keep apart, and give global solidarity an organized and material form. Yet youthful rebellion cannot be sustained by the rush of collective energy and the explosive reach of digital culture alone. As Vijay Prashad rightly warns, “spontaneity and digital reach alone cannot overcome entrenched power.” If the Cockroach movement is to become a lasting political force, it must link examination reform to what Prashad calls “broader struggles for employment, public education, labour rights, and economic redistribution.” The question, then, is no longer whether young people possess the power to ignite change, but whether people across generations will join them in building a movement capable of sustaining it.

The burden of resistance does not rest solely with the young. Their movements provide a map, not an alibi for the inaction of others. They have revealed the language, imagination, courage, and forms of struggle required of everyone who refuses a future organized around genocide, colonialism, and permanent war. Gaza is being destroyed. The West Bank is being emptied village by village. The politics of genocidal violence is spreading across the globe. The time for isolated gestures and ceremonial outrage has passed. What is needed now is a worldwide uprising of conscience transformed into disciplined, sustained, nonviolent mass resistance. Young people of the world must unite with workers, educators, artists, and all those who refuse a world ruled by cruelty, dispossession, and war. They must organize to shut down the institutions that feed the war machine, making complicity impossible and solidarity unavoidable. At stake is whether the future will belong to the merchants of death or to those with the courage to stop them. Neutrality is no longer an option. Resistance is an imperative.

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.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.