HENRY GIROUX
APRIL 24, 2026

In a time of war, resurgent authoritarianism, and an escalating assault on higher education, the language of “institutional neutrality” has emerged not as a safeguard of academic integrity, but as one of the most effective ideological weapons in the campaign to depoliticize the university. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the genocidal destruction of Gaza, and the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, universities have come under intense pressure to demonstrate their “balance” by retreating from political engagement. What has followed is not a principled defense of intellectual independence, but a quiet alignment with power, as institutions rush to adopt policies that prohibit them from taking positions on political and ethical issues deemed external to their “core functions.” Reports suggest that more than 150 universities have embraced such measures, while proposals such as the Trump administration’s “Compact for Higher Education” threaten to make institutional neutrality a condition for federal funding. Under these conditions, neutrality is no longer an abstract ideal; it is fast becoming an instrument of coercion.

The appeal to neutrality, of course, is not new. It draws its legitimacy from the 1967 Kalven Report, which famously asserted that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Yet this formulation depends on a fiction that collapses under historical and political scrutiny: that can stand outside the conflicts that actively constitute the wider society. In reality, there is no dimension of higher education that is not already political. Universities continuously make decisions about what knowledge counts, whose voices matter, which histories are preserved, and which forms of dissent are tolerated or punished. These are not neutral acts; they are structured by power, shaped by ideology, and embedded in larger struggles over the meaning and direction of public life.

What the language of neutrality does, then, is not remove politics from the university but conceal it. More precisely, it functions as a form of political cover, allowing institutions to disavow their own agency even as they engage in deeply political practices, disciplining student protest, sanctioning faculty for dissent, and in some cases, collaborating with state power in ways that endanger those who challenge injustice. Under the current political climate, this posture has taken on an especially troubling form. As universities such as Columbia, Northwestern, and Brown move to accommodate the demands of an increasingly aggressive right-wing agenda, neutrality becomes indistinguishable from capitulation. It serves to normalize a broader project aimed at cleansing higher education of dissenting voices and remaking it as a site of ideological conformity.

At a more fundamental level, the claim that universities can be apolitical is neither naïve nor innocent; it is a disingenuous fiction. There is no institutional decision, from the allocation of research funding to the design of curricula, from hiring practices to the governance of student life, that exists outside relations of power. To invoke neutrality in this context is to render those relations invisible and to legitimize decisions that would otherwise have to be defended as political choices. As McKenna Roberts, a student at Columbia University, makes clear in a striking indictment of this fiction:

“Columbia has never been a neutral institution. From the University’s progressive displacement of West Harlem’s Black and Latinx residents and expansion of its spatial and economic domination in the neighborhood, to its storied history of brutalizing anti-war student protestors, one thing has remained clear: This University has never operated on an axis that prioritizes the interests of its students, faculty, staff, or the broader community. While the debate regarding whether or not colleges and universities should function as spaces of apolitical higher learning continues to swirl, there is nothing about education that is apolitical. A claim of institutional neutrality serves an explicitly ideological purpose: to make invisible the power structures at work and depoliticize the deeply political functionings of elite educational institutions like Columbia.”

Roberts’s critique is not exceptional; it is diagnostic. His argument is crucial because it names what the discourse of neutrality attempts to erase: the university is not a passive observer of power, but an active participant in its reproduction. Neutrality does not suspend this role; it obscures it, allowing institutions to present politically charged decisions as if they were merely administrative or procedural.

This is what makes the current invocation of neutrality so dangerous. It emerges precisely at a moment when universities are being openly targeted by authoritarian forces. When political leaders such as Trump and J.D. Vance cast professors as the enemy, when dissent is criminalized, and when entire fields of study are subject to political surveillance and control, the call for neutrality does not defend academic freedom, it disarms it. Neutrality, in such a context, is not a refusal of politics; it is a form of complicity. This broader erasure of power sets the stage for a second move: recasting the crisis in higher education not as political control from above, but as excess politics from below.

It is against this backdrop that recent critiques of higher education, particularly those emerging from influential platforms such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, must be understood and addressed. When Len Gutkin, in his essay “When Professors Mistake Themselves for Revolutionaries,” insists that “the price of academic autonomy has always been a measure of distance from politics proper,” he reproduces the very illusion that sustains the current crisis. By framing political engagement as a threat to academic freedom, Gutkin not only misidentifies the problem, he redirects attention away from the far more consequential structural transformation reshaping higher education. This misdiagnosis has consequences.

What Gutkin overlooks is that the crisis in higher education does not arise from an excess of political engagement, but from a long history of structural abandonment and an intensifying right-wing assault. Universities have not been “radicalized” by faculty; they have been reshaped by forces far more consequential and coercive. Over the past four decades, higher education has been steadily colonized by the logic of capital, redefining knowledge as a commodity, students as consumers, and research as a revenue stream. He is strikingly indifferent to the reality that this market-driven transformation is now being fused with a right-wing political project that imagines the university not as a democratic public sphere, but as a laboratory for ideological indoctrination, a vision openly advanced by the Trump administration. In this context, the call for neutrality does not protect academic freedom; it disarms it, functioning as a cover for the very authoritarian forces that seek to narrow, regulate, and ultimately suppress critical thought.

As Will Bunch observes, “the problem for roughly three-quarters of U.S. college students in public universities and community colleges is that since the so-called ‘Reagan revolution’ of the 1980s, state tax-dollar support for higher education has plummeted, by a staggering 42 percent.” In this context, as Chris Newfield has argued, when public funding erodes, tuition rises, adjunct labor proliferates, and corporate governance hollows out democratic commitments, fields that address history, race, inequality, and justice are not becoming politicized, they are rendered visible. They give language to conditions the neoliberal university would rather recast as technical, managerial, or neutral. This broader landscape is crucial because the forces reshaping higher education are not confined to internal disputes over activism; they are driven by powerful external political agendas whose reach and consequences far exceed the boundaries of the university itself.

In doing so, such arguments lend intellectual legitimacy to a deeply troubling project. They do not remove politics from the university; they help to replace one form of politics, rooted in critique, dissent, and democratic possibility, with another grounded in control, conformity, and the policing of thought. The real question, then, is not whether universities are political, they always have been, but whether they will align themselves with the forces that seek to narrow the space of critical inquiry or with those that insist on its expansion.

The Far Right Attack Is Not Peripheral.

More troubling is the article’s relative silence regarding the escalating, coordinated assault on higher education by the far right. Universities are no longer merely criticized; they are being methodically reshaped through a politics of intimidation and erasure. Institutions are pressured to conform or face defunding. Books are banned and histories rewritten to purge structural critique. Diversity initiatives are dismantled or criminalized. Faculty are surveilled and publicly vilified. Legislatures arrogate themselves the power to determine what can and cannot be taught about race, gender, colonialism, and the meaning of democracy. Even student protest is recoded as disorder. This is not a culture-war skirmish; it is a struggle over whether higher education will sustain and defend democracy as a democratic public sphere or be reduced to an instrument of ideological control.

In that context, calls for “depoliticization” function less as principled critique than as a form of retreat. When authoritarian movements seek to transform universities into instruments of nationalist myth-making and civic illiteracy, neutrality becomes complicity. Appeals to “learning for its own sake” ring hollow if they ignore the political forces actively attempting to dismantle the conditions under which such learning is even possible.

Higher education matters precisely because it holds the promise of cultivating historical consciousness, ethical reasoning, and critical literacy. These capacities are crucial democratic public goods, equipping students not simply to enter markets, but to interrogate power. More importantly, they equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to be informed and active citizens, without which democracy dies. When critics lament that higher education has embraced advocacy, they often overlook the deeper question: advocacy for what? If the advocacy in question is the defense of civil rights, democratic memory, and human dignity, then to cast it as contamination misunderstands the democratic vocation of higher education itself.

Funding Is the Structural Question.

Higher education did not become politically expressive in a vacuum. It was starved. Public investment declined. Philanthropic foundations became lifelines. Universities outsourced their missions to development offices and branding consultants. Under such conditions, grant priorities inevitably exert influence. But the solution to concentrated funding power is not to frame social justice as the problem or to claim that higher education should free itself from politics or from addressing social issues.

The deeper coercion in higher education is not that scholars occasionally tailor language to political issues. It is that entire institutions have been reorganized around the curse of neoliberal market metrics, rankings, revenue generation, donor appeal, and return on investment. That transformation predates and far exceeds any shift in foundation priorities. It undermines the role of the university as a public good and offers no vision for how to educate students.

If we are concerned about intellectual independence, we must confront the corporatization of the university, the exploitation of contingent faculty labor, and the financialization of research. Otherwise, critiques of politicization become selective,  aimed leftward while ignoring the pervasive political economy that governs universities from above.

Democracy Is the Unspoken Horizon.

What ultimately troubles me about Gutkin’s attack is not that it questions funding strategies or ignores the escalating assaults by the far right and the Trump regime on public discourse, including efforts to restrict what books can be read, what histories can be taught, and what values can be affirmed. Debate is healthy. What troubles me is the normalization of the idea that higher education should retreat from explicit engagement with democracy at a moment when democracy itself is under siege.

When authoritarian forces attack universities as enemies of the nation, when they weaponize white nationalist narratives, when they seek to replace historical reckoning with myth, the call for restraint sounds eerily like an invitation to stand down. Students should not be trained to endure the dismantling of democratic institutions as spectators. They should be equipped to analyze, resist, and transform unjust social arrangements.

Higher education, and the humanities in particular, are not ornamental culture. They are public memory in action. They are the spaces in which societies interrogate their past, imagine alternatives, and cultivate civic courage. To reduce them to apolitical contemplation in the name of restoring public trust is to misunderstand both the crisis and the cure.

The question is not whether politics or social justice enters the classroom, it is already there, woven into every syllabus, every silence, every claim to neutrality. The real question is whether the university will defend its role as a crucible of critical thought and democratic possibility, or submit to the twin forces of market fundamentalism and resurgent authoritarianism. This is not a debate over pedagogy, it is a struggle over the conditions of agency itself: whether education will cultivate the courage to question, to remember, and to resist, or be hollowed out into a training ground for conformity, amnesia, and obedience. The university is not a refuge from these forces, it is one of the primary terrains on which they are fought, and what is decided there will echo far beyond its walls, shaping whether democracy endures as a living project or fades into a managed illusion.

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First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.

Chris Hedges
March 24 2025

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I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turnedon their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

“And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.”

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

BY PAUL STREET  AUGUST 19, 2022

Liberals and moderates complain endlessly about the awfulness of Trumpian Republifascists in their families, workplaces, and communities and of course in United States politics. It’s understandable given the boundless vicious stupidity of the Trump era Amerikaners – the vast mass of MAGAts whose demented voices are so disproportionately over-represented in.US politics thanks to the right-tilted Minority Rule nature of the United States electoral and governance regime (see point # 5 below). Decent human beings have a legitimate need to vent about the monstrously mainstreamed far-right malignancy that stalks the land and controls one of its two viable political parties. Still, it’s tiresome to behold the nonstop eye-rolling and whining from liberals and moderates who commonly say little or nothing about the broader context within which Republi-fascism has arisen and who seem have to lack any real sense of how one might fight this deadly pathology beyond the passive resistance of bitching, mocking, and voting for nauseating, fascism-complicit corporate Democrats once every two and/or four years.

There are many intersecting streams feeding into the river of US-American fascitization. The overlapping and combining tributaries include the following:

1.  A capitalist system whose underlying tendency towards the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and hence power repeatedly humiliates, de-legitimizes, and discredits democracy in the eyes of masses, helping open the door to authoritarian “solutions.”  This system’s inherent generation of ecological crises creates catastrophes certain to fuel late fascism.
2. A capitalist “ruling class” too fractured, amoral, and parasitic to prevent fascist consolidation and containing considerable sectors and individuals more than happy to replace previously normative bourgeois democracy with more openly authoritarian rule. (The US capitalist class has not been given anything close to proper responsibility for Trump and Trumpism-fascism, which masquerades as “populist” and even “working-class” with help from intellectuals who should know better.)
3. A “Weimar” Democratic Party of “inauthentic opposition” whose longstanding acquisition by corporate and financial elites militates against serious resistance to authoritarian rule.
4. A government and political order captured by and working hand in glove with giant socio-pathological corporations and financial institutions whose only allegiance is to investor profit.
5. A party and election system and governance order tilted far to the Minority Rule right of majority public opinion by an interconnected slew of horrific institutions and practices significantly inherited from late 18th Century slaveowners and other propertied elites for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare: the Electoral College, the absurdly malapportioned Senate, the gerrymandered House, states’ rights, judicial review, strictly time-staggered winner- take-all two-capitalist-party-only elections plagued by unchecked big money control mandated corrupt and oligarchic campaign finance rules and practices.
6. A media-politics culture that promotes an infantilizing cult of savagely time-staggered voting in a reactionary, right-tilted electoral regime that is wired to undermine, capture, and destroy popular solidarity and social movements. Howard Zinn captured the cult-like aspects of this disastrous addiction in March of 2008: “The election frenzy…seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us [by the ruling class – P.S.] . It is a multiple-choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.” The criticism applies to a somewhat lesser degree in relation to mid-term election, between quadrennial electoral extravaganzas.  (Just this morning, I heard an N“P”R report from Florida in which a nurse explained what she tells patients and others is “all they can do” for abortion rights and other key policy matters: “Two things- first, vote, second, get someone else to vote. That’s it.” Great advice under the killing confines of the regime described one point above!)
7. A corporate commercial media whose main purpose beyond selling goods and services is to manufactures mass consent to class rule, empire and intimately related hierarchies of race, gender, and nationality. In its entertainment wing no less (if not more powerfully) than in its news formats, this dominant media sells sadistic, sexist, racist, and nationalist violence while propagating hyper-atomized individualism, consumerist one dimensionality, anti-intellectualism, and narrow identity politics. It relentlessly assaults masses’ cognitive and emotive capacity for reason, critical vision, empathy, and solidarity. It filters past and current events in ways that normalize and eternalize oppression. And of course, it relentlessly advances and normalizes the “vote”-addicted “election madness” (Zinn) described in the previous point.
8. A massive police, surveillance, and incarceration state that imprisons a far greater (and disproportionately nonwhite) share of its population than any other nation Earth – a remarkable accomplishment for a county that calls itself the beacon freedom and democracy.
9. Saturation of the nation with more than 440 million firearms, including at least 25 million military assault rifles, disproportionately in the hands of right-wing racists, sexists, nativists, and nationalists.
10. A vast military Empire and military industrial complex that steals vast resources from the potential meeting of social needs while legitimating violent nationalism and global aggression (while transferring wealth and power into the hands of the capitalist oligarchy.
11. An educational-industrial complex that inculcates passivity, conservativism, specialization, individualism, subordination, appeasement, hierarchy, oppression, identitarianism, and narrowness over rebellion, liberation, critical thinking, many-sidedness, solidarity, radical class analysis, active resistance, egalitarianism, and revolutionary vision.  This bankrupt ideological structure has hatched a “chickenshit conformist” intelligentsia that lacks the courage and vision to tell people the full truth about the depth and degree of the authoritarian menace that stalks the land – and the rooting of that menace in the nation’s underlying and interrelated unelected dictatorships of capital and empire. It scoffs at and scandalously maligns and misrepresents the notion of popular revolution over and against those dictatorships.
12. A relentless, many-sided dumbing down of the population so savage that“more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.”
13. Absurdly long working hours that leave masses without time to participate knowledgably and meaningfully in popular struggle.
14. Disastrously high consumer and student debt and economic inequality that combines with a mass consumerist ethos and corporate oligopolistic pricing to keep masses on a seemingly endless treadmill of work, spend, and pay.
15. A pathetic and decrepit “left” plagued by cringingly revisionist non- and even anti-revolutionary maladies: a soulless pseudo-workerist “what’s in for me?” economism; rampant egotism and narcissism; chronic sectarianism; “anarchist” and “anti-authoritarian” refusal to building lasting peoples’ movements and durable leadership; a hyper-identitiarian wokesterism.
16. Mass indifference to and abhorrence of politics on the part of millions of decent, non-fascistic people.

This last problem has been weighing heavily on my mind in recent years. It is wonderful to find hundreds and sometimes even thousands of folks ready to confront authority and “the whole damn system” in the streets and public squares. Still, it is difficult to watch a much larger mass of individuals pass marches, rallies, banners, tables, and leaflets by, seemingly indifferent to atrocities – liked forced motherhood and the continuing racist murder of Black people by police – that they too-privately oppose.

“The best lack all conviction,” William Butler Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” True to that line, I have often been struck at family and social gatherings by how much more interested Republi-fascists are in hearing my revolutionary views – and in discussing politics – than are the liberals and moderates. The FOX News-polluted Republikaner freaks might be mired in vicious and stupid beliefs but at least they give a f*#k in their own horrific way. They bring “passionate” if lethal and idiotic “intensity” to political topics.

The more civilized, cultured, and virtuous folks in the room are commonly far less animated to say the least. Their non-authoritarian views lack public conviction. To be sure, they typically vote Democratic once every two and/or four years. That’s enough disturbing “politics” for them. They often look away and absent themselves from the conversation when political topics come up. A few of these demure and honorable people speak language from the recovery and therapy cultures, rhetoric on how “it’s dysfunctional to concentrate on stuff you can’t change. Focus on something in your actual sphere of influence, like your career or your retirement plan.” Some of these thankfully non-fascist folks turn their repudiation of engagement almost into a pathology. They may not want an authoritarian, patriarchal, and white nationalist order but they have no interest in discussing how and why the nation sits at the brink of neofascistic rule and what could and must be done to prevent that from happening.

Which brings me to something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, wrote in 1958: “He who passively accepts evil,” King said, “is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. There comes a time,” King also remarked, “when silence is betrayal. In the end,” King added, “we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

King voiced similar sentiments five years later in his justly famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he worried that “the great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who…prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…Shallow understanding from people of goodwill,” King wrote, “is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

We desperately need less silence and more truth telling and activism from our friends, from the decent people. Politics is indeed an ugly game, especially in the US thanks in no small part to the factors I listed above. But retreating from engagement only makes it worse. It’s no mere accident that the capitalists and the right have long worked to make politics toxic: it’s an old strategy to discourage activism, passionate intensity, and conviction on the part of the people, the majority of whom do NOT share right-wing values.

But withdrawal and mere spectatorship if even that (I know “good people” who now refuse to even pay attention to the news “horror show”) just make the game worse, even calamitous. Dropping politics, policy, the placement of societal decisions into the category of The Serenity Prayer’s conception of “things beyond our sphere of influence” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other and very dangerous people and forces do not feel the same way about things! They are quite actively using others’ withdrawal to turn the planet into a massive Hell of detention camps stewing in a planet being turned into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber. The game has a way of leaping up off the court/field/pitch/rink and swallowing everything whole, including the crowd and everyone else outside the arena. The “negative peace” doesn’t last. It doesn’t work. It helps bring into being a positive Hell on Earth.

Never forget the counsel of the anti-Nazi German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller:

‘‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.’

Words worth remembering as red zone school and library districts remove “controversial” books from shelves, including an illustrated version of The Diary of Ann Frank in suburban Fort Worth, Texas.

The Republifascists have come big time for women and girls in the hideous Dobbs decision. But make no mistake. The undoing of abortion rights is just the beginning, a pulling of the string meant to unravel the whole yarn ball of civil, social, and human rights that have been won through years dedicated popular struggle.

The absence of conviction and passionate intensity is not limited to liberals and moderates. Serious Marxist and radical thinkers I know deeply grasp and recognize the US Republi-fascist specter and its capitalist, racist, sexist, imperialist, Christian, bipartisan, and nationalist roots and dimensions but share little if any of my “wild-eyed” notion that anything much can or will be done to slay the authoritarian beast – certainly nothing like a revolution, which is all-knowingly proclaimed a pointless pursuit by armchair Marxists who have never lifted a finger to bring one about, much less given any serious consideration to what would be involved in making one built to last. The pessimism of their minds has negated the optimism of their wills (to use the fascism-incarcerated Antonio Gramsci’s terms). But that’s another topic for another day.

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First Published on PaulStreet.org.

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

Shared via Creative Commons.

July 22, 2022
BY HENRY GIROUX

I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.

——- –Theodor Adorno 1959

DeSantis’s View of Education as Propaganda Factories.

The crisis of education in the United States presents not only a danger to American democracy, but also the ideological and structural foundations for the emergence of a fascist state. The slide towards lawlessness and authoritarianism is now aided and abetted by educational policies that are repressive and dystopian, wedded to social control and the death of the social imagination. An unimagined catastrophe now characterizes how American education is being shaped by far-right Republican Party politicians. Nowhere is this more evident than in the policies of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who is on the forefront of transforming American education into a feral propaganda tool for producing and legitimating what is euphemistically called “patriotic education.” Coercion, conformity, and toxic forms of religious, political, and economic fundamentalisms now threaten to destroy education as a democratic public sphere, however weak it may be. Institutions of learning at all levels in the red states are becoming laboratories for what I term the Nazification of American education, replicating pedagogies of repression that were at work in Germany in the 1930s.

The mean-spirited, far-right DeSantis and his Republican allies have inverted an insight taken from the renowned, late educator John Dewey who recognized that politics required informed judgments, public dialogue, dissent, critical exchange, judicious discrimination, and the ability to discern the truth from lies. Instead of embracing these democratic elements of education as central to creating citizens with an open mind and with a willingness to engage in a culture of questioning in order to expand and deepen the conditions necessary for a flourishing democracy, DeSantis and the GOP are doing everything they can to remove such practices both from schools and other cultural apparatuses that function as teaching machines. Under such circumstances, DeSantis and the GOP are producing what Dewey claimed amounted to the “eclipse of the public,” which he considered the most serious threat to the fate of democracy.[1] DeSantis has put into place a range of reactionary educational policies. These include banning books and critical race theory, requiring educators sign loyalty oaths, and forcing them to post their syllabus’s online. He has also instituted legislation that restrict  tenure and allows students to film faculty classes without consent, and much more. [2]

Not only are these laws aimed at minorities of class and color, but this GOP attack on education is part of a larger war on the very ability to think, question, and engage in politics from the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing to hold power accountable. More generally, it is part of a concerted effort not only to destroy public education, but the very foundations of political agency.[3] DeSantis poses a dangerous threat to higher education, which he would like to turn into “a dead zone for killing the social imagination, a place where ideas that don’t have practical results go to die and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent and holding power accountable.”[4] In this case, the attempt to undermine schooling as a public good and democratic public sphere is accompanied by a systemic attempt to destroy the capacity for critical thinking, compassion for others, critical literacy, moral witnessing, support for the social compact, and the civic imagination. DeSantis justifies these acts of repression by claiming that “Florida schools have become socialism factories” and that students at all levels of education should not be subjected to classroom material that would make them uncomfortable.[5] This is code for a pedagogy of repression that revels in deception, kills the social imagination, depoliticizes students, and transforms schools into militarized punishing machines, propaganda factories, and components of the security-surveillance state.  In many ways, the GOP and DeSantis approach to education is not unlike what Putin is doing in Russia. As a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently put it, Putin’s goal is “impart state ideology to schoolchildren….We need to know how to infect them with our ideology. Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”[6] Indeed!  Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, argues that DeSantis’ educational policies represent “one of the most alarming assaults on free speech and academic freedom [and reveal] a troubling pattern of authoritarianism and vindictiveness that would be extremely dangerous in the Oval Office.”[7]

DeSantis’s policies have been particularly cruel and repressive with respect to punishing youth who are marginalized by way of their race, religion, and sexual orientation. He has expanded his attack on Black people bypushing policies that translate “hate speech into proposed laws that would make societal pariahs out of transgender kids” and has made homophobia a driving force of his politics.[8]He shares the disgraced legacy of Trump and other far-right Republican politicians who believe that the threat of violence, if not its actual use, is not only the best way to resolve issues in the name of political opportunism, but also amounts to a display of patriotism.[9] DeSantis’ policies reek of fear, intimidation, and the threat of violence against his critics, especially those educators, teachers, parents, youth, and community groups that reject his attacks on public education and his anti-gay legislation.  His policies are also in line with the violence expressed by Christian fascists such as Joe Ottman, founder of Faith, Education, and Commerce United, who as Paul Rosenberg remarked “stated on his podcast, Conservative Daily, that teachers are ‘recruiting kids to be gay’ and that LGBTQ teachers should be ‘dragged behind a car until their limbs fall off.’”[10] There is little doubt that such measures echo the infamous anti-communist hysteria reminiscent of the dark days of McCarthyite period in the 1950s when thousands of people were banned from their jobs for holding left wing views, and in some cases jailed. DeSantis’ model of politics and reactionary education are closely related to the attacks on education and history that took place in Nazi Germany, a point that is almost completely missed in the mainstream and progressive press when analyzing DeSantis’s war on education.

Education in Nazi Germany.

Education under the Third Reich offers significant insights into how repressive forms of pedagogy become central to shaping the identities, values, and worldviews of young people. Nazi educational policies also made visible how in the final analysis education is always political in that it is a struggle over agency, ideology, knowledge, power, and the future. For Hitler, mattes of indoctrination, education, and the shaping of the collective consciousness of young people was an integral element of Nazi rule and politics. In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that “Whoever has the youth has the future.” According to Lina Buffington and her co-authors, he viewed this battle to indoctrinate youth as part of a wider strategy of Nazi control over education. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, Germany needs an “educational regime [where] young people will learn nothing else but how to think German and act German…And they will never be free again, not in their whole lives.”[11] Under this regime, education was reduced to a massive propaganda machine whose purpose was to indoctrinate young people with “robot-like obedience to Nazi ideologies,” while privileging physical strength, racial instruction, and nationalist fanaticism.[12] At the same time, the most valued form of knowledge under the Nazi educational system emphasized a pedagogy of racial purity.

Race consciousness was a crucial pedagogical goal which was used to both unify young people and elicit political loyalty based on national honor and a “budding nationalistic fanaticism.”[13] To achieve this goal and reduce resistance to fascist ideology, history books were censored, banned, destroyed, and rewritten to align with Nazi ideology. Any knowledge or information deemed dangerous was not only eliminated from books and the curricula, but also purged “from libraries and bookstores.”[14]

Nazi education was designed to mold children rather than educate them. Races deemed “inferior” and “less worthy” were banned from the schools while any positive reference to them and their history was expunged from history books and other curricula materials. The Nazi educational system was deeply anti-intellectual and created modes of pedagogy that undermined the ability of students to think for themselves. As stressed by the writers of The Holocaust Explained, the Nazis “aimed to de-intellectualize education: they did not want education to provoke people to ask questions or think for themselves. They believed this approach would instill obedience and belief in the Nazi worldview, creating the ideal future generation.”[15] Turning Nazi schools into propaganda factories functioned through a massive pedagogical machinery of conformity, censorship, repression, and indoctrination. The attack on teachers also took place through Nazi efforts to encourage students and loyal faculty to spy on those considered politically unreliable. Even worse, teachers who did not support either Nazi ideology or the restructuring of education were dismissed along with Jewish educators who were banned from teaching in the Nazi educational system.[16]

What critics often fail to acknowledge is that the open glorification of “Aryan” races in Nazi Germany has its counterparts in a range of policies now pushed by Republican politicians such as DeSantis. This is not only visible in white replacement theory and the rise of white supremacy in the United States, but also in voter suppression laws, the elimination of the history of oppressed groups from school curricula, the banning of books, and the assault on educators who do not agree with the transformation of American education into right-wing propaganda factories. Not unlike what we have seen in the United States, Nazi education exhibited a contempt for critical thought, open dialogue, provocative books,  intellectual ability, and those youth considered unworthy. The comparisons are particularly evident under the leadership of DeSantis with his deeply anti-intellectual view of schooling, whitewashing of history,  outlawing books, supporting “patriotic education,” passing anti-LGBTQ+ bills and using perpetual fear and intimidation directed at teachers, parents, and youth of color. A particularly egregious echo of the fascist past can be seen in the current attack on librarians. Increasingly, they are being harassed, threatened, and called pedophiles by far-right extremists because they have books on their library shelves that deal with LGBTQ rights and racial equality. Some fascist book censors have gone as far as claiming that librarians who refuse to remove banned books are “grooming” children to be sexually exploited and have attempted to “seek criminal charges against” them.[17]

The model of Nazi Germany’s educational system has a great deal to teach us about the ideologies that produced a society wedded to the related doctrines of racial purity, the banning of books,  the suppression of historical memory, ultra-nationalism, and the cult of the strongman.[18] Under DeSantis, white supremacy, systemic racism, and the indoctrination of youth have the official power of the state on their side. DeSantis’ attacks on youth considered unworthy (LGBTQ youth),  his embrace of lower academic standards, subjecting faculty to political litmus tests through “viewpoint diversity surveys” aimed to “gather evidence” on non-compliant faculty, censoring books that do not follow his ideological proclivities,  racializing knowledge, supporting textbooks as crucial tools for spreading propaganda to students, and controlling teacher’s classroom actions are closely related to the Nazi playbook for making education a tool for indoctrination and control.

The horrors of authoritarianism are back supported by white supremacists such as DeSantis.[19] The long simmering mobilizing passions of fascism are evident not only in a range of reactionary GOP policies that extend from undoing women’s reproductive rights and the right to vote, but also in a more insidious and less acknowledged attack on America’s educational institutions. These attacks amount to a counter-revolution against essential public institutions, critical agency, informed consciousness, engaged citizenship, and the capacity of individuals and a public to govern themselves. At its core, it is an attack on both the promise of democracy and the social imagination.

Critical education is the scourge of white supremacists, because it offers a counterpoint to right-wing educational practices that seduce people into inhabiting the ecospheres of hate, bigotry, and racism. Such anti-racist pedagogies are especially important because of the threat posed by white supremacists to white youths, who are especially vulnerable given how many of them are alienated and isolated, lacking a sense of purpose and excluded, while in need of some sense of community. Racism is learned and white supremacists have enlisted several educational tools, particularly online video games, chat groups, Tik Tok, and other social platforms, to promote and enlist white youths. Ibram X Kendi rightly raises the question of how “white children are being indoctrinated with white supremacist views, what causes them to hate, and how they have become the prime target of white supremacists.”[20] He points to a 2021 Anti-Defamation League report which states:  “An estimated 2.3 million teens each year are exposed to white-supremacist ideology in chats for multiplayer games [and] that 17 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds … encounter white-supremacist views on social media.”[21] In response to this fascist threat, there is a need to acknowledge the political importance of anti-racist education in teaching young people how to recognize the threats posed by white supremacy, how to resist racism in all of its forms, how turn away from hate, and how to discern truth from falsehoods and right from wrong.[22] In reference to the ongoing threat of white supremacy to white kids, with its broad cultural reach and presence in the social media, Kendi writes of the importance of anti-racist pedagogy. He writes:

But how can white kids—or any kids—guard against this threat if they can’t recognize it? How can kids repel ideas of hierarchy if they haven’t been taught ideas of equality? How can kids distinguish right from wrong if they haven’t been shown what’s right and wrong? Recognizing that “an increasing number of U.S. teens are getting ‘radicalized’ online by White supremacists or other extremist groups,” an article published by the National Education Association concluded: “The best place to prevent that radicalization is U.S. classrooms.”[23]

Republicans such as DeSantis reproduce and accelerate the adoption of white supremacist views among many vulnerable white youths. They do this by censoring critical ideas, eviscerating history of its genocidal and racist past,  banning books, imposing degrading constraints on teachers, and in doing so undermining the critical capacities crucial to teaching about systemic racism and its Jim Crow history. DeSantis’ attack on teaching history in the schools draws much of its energy from nostalgic rendering of the past when whites could be proud of a society in which whiteness was an unapologetic mark of privilege, inequality, and state violence. For DeSantis and his Republican Party allies that past is now threatened by people of color, justifying a “political programme that indicts the present as a crime against the past.”[24]  His attacks on public and higher education constitutes a form of apartheid pedagogy.

DeSantis’s fascistic educational policies thrive on a deadly mix of ignorance and racial hatred.  The consequences, while indirect, are deadly, as we have witnessed from a number of mass shootings, including the massacre of 10 Black shoppers in a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a young hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed fascist. As historical consciousness and critical knowledge and skills disappear in schools under DeSantis’ policies, young people are not merely misinformed, they are powerless to recognize in the realm of popular culture how supremacists are using history for their own toxic purposes. For instance, Jeffrey St. Clair writes about how far right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have appropriated the image of the late Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, adorning his image on “shirts, stickers, and flags.”[25] In the educational world being produced by DeSantis and his Republican Party zombies, Pinochet would be erased from history, leaving young people ignorant of how history can be used for fascist goals. In this instance, educational repression is directly connected to the violence of organized forgetting.

Let’s be clear about what is at stake in the fascistic and racist forms of education currently in place in over 36 states by the Republican Party.[26] This is an attack on the very possibility of thinking critically along with the pedagogies and institutions that support the capacity for analytical thought and informed judgment as a foundation for creating informed individuals. It also constitutes a full-fledged attack not just on critical race theory but also critical pedagogy in general.  Of course, critical pedagogy is not just about anti-racist education, it is also part of a much broader project. It is a moral and political pedagogical theory whose purpose is to equip students with the vital knowledge, skills, values, and sense of social responsibility that enable them to be critical and engaged agents. In this sense, it is the essential foundation, regardless of where it takes place, for creating as knowledgeable and socially responsible citizens necessary to combat all elements of fascism and authoritarianism while envisioning a social order that deepens and extends power, democratic values, equitable social relations, collective freedom, economic rights, and  social justice for everyone. This is precisely why it so dangerous to the white supremacists, fascists, and extremist forces now driving politics in the United States.

While the times we live in seem dire, it is worthwhile to take heed from Helen Keller who in a letter to Nazi youth stated: “History hasn’t taught you anything if you think you can kill ideas. The tyrants tried to do so often in the past, but the ideas revolted against them and destroyed them.”[27] For Keller, history without hope is lost and opens the door to fascism, while ideas that draw upon history and combine with mass movements can serve to offer a model for fighting fascism. Ellen Willis builds upon Keller’s sense of hope when she once urged the left to become a movement again. In doing so, she called for a new language, a new understanding of education and a cultural politics that spoke to people’s needs. Most importantly, she called for a “new vision of what kind of society we want,” along with a mass movement capable of “creating institutions…and new ways of living to figure out how our vision might work.”[28] Not only were Willis’s insights prescient for the times, but they are more urgent now given that the increasing danger of fascism that threatens to engulf and destroy the last vestiges of an already weakened democracy in the United States.

“I want to thank Robin Goodman for her keen eye in providing me with resources for this work and her incredible editing.”

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Notes:

[1] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1954).

[2] Kathryn Joyce, “The guy who brought us CRT panic offers a new far-right agenda: Destroy public education.” Salon [April 8, 2022] Online: https://www.salon.com/2022/04/08/the-guy-brought-us-crt-panic-offers-a-new-far-right-agenda-destroy-public-education/

[3] On this issue, see the excellent series of articles by Kathryn Joyce: Kathryn Joyce, “Republicans Don’t Want to Reform Public Education. They Want to End It.,” The New Republic (September 30, 2021). Online: https://newrepublic.com/article/163817/desantis-republicans-end-public-education; Kathryn Joyce, “The guy who brought us CRT panic offers a new far-right agenda: Destroy public education.” Salon [April 8, 2022] Online: https://www.salon.com/2022/04/08/the-guy-brought-us-crt-panic-offers-a-new-far-right-agenda-destroy-public-education/; Kathryn Joyce, “Fighting back against CRT panic: Educators organize around the threat to academic freedom,” Salon, [March 7, 2022]. Online: https://www.salon.com/2022/03/07/fighting-back-against-crt-panic-educators-organize-around-the-to-academic-freedom/

[4] Henry A. Giroux, “Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging Casino Capitalism’s Punishing Factories,” Truthout (July 13, 2014). Online: https://truthout.org/articles/disimagination-machines-and-punishing-factories-in-the-age-of-casino-capitalism/

[5] Amiad Horowitz, “Loyalty oaths for teachers in Florida’s new red scare,” People’s World [June 28, 202) Online: www.peoplesworld.org/article/loyalty-oaths-for-teachers-in-floridas-new-red-scare/

[6] Anton Troianovski, “Putin’s Mission to Indoctrinate Schoolchildren,” New York Times (July 17, 2022), pp. 1, 12.

[7] Max Boot, “DeSantis is smarter than Trump. That may make him ore of a threat,” The Washington Post (July 6, 2022). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/06/desantis-starter-disciplined-trump-nixon-danger-democracy/;

[8] Will Bunch, “GOP’s violent, expanding war on LBGTQ kids should make you think about 1930s Germany.” The Philadelphia Inquirer (June 16, 2022). Online: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/anti-lgbtq-violence-republican-rhetoric-20220616.html

[9] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “How Trump’s Cultivation of Violence Contributed to Jan. 6,” Lucid (July 7, 2022). Online: https://lucid.substack.com/p/how-trumps-cultivation-of-violence?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[10] Paul Rosenberg, “Theocrats are coming for the school board — but parents are starting to fight back,” Salon (December 19, 2021). Online: https://www.salon.com/2021/12/19/theocrats-are-coming-for-the-school-board–but-parents-are-starting-to-fight-back/

[11] Cited in Lina Buffington, Tamara Martinez, Pat McLaughlin, Jennifer Porter, and Nicole Puglia, “The Educational Theory of Adolph Hitler,” New Foundations(August 18. 2011). Online: https://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Hitler.html

[12] Lina Buffington, Tamara Martinez, Pat McLaughlin, Jennifer Porter, and Nicole Puglia, “The Educational Theory of Adolph Hitler,” New Foundations(August 18. 2011). Online: https://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Hitler.html

[13] John Simkin, “Education in Nazi Germany,” Spartacus Educational (January 2020 ) Online: https://spartacus-educational.com/GEReducation.htm

[14] Lina Buffington, Tamara Martinez, Pat McLaughlin, Jennifer Porter, and Nicole Puglia, “The Educational Theory of Adolph Hitler,” New Foundations(August 18. 2011). Online: https://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Hitler.html

[15] Staff “The Holocaust Explained,” The Wiener Holocaust Library (March 2020). Online: https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/life-in-nazi-occupied-europe/controlling-everyday-life/controlling-education/

[16] See Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich In Power (New York: Penguin 2005), especially pages 263-298

[17] Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, “With Rising Book Bans, Librarians Have Come Under Attack.” New York Times (July 8, 2022). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/books/book-ban-librarians.html

[18] See Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich In Power (New York: Penguin 2005); Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford, Berg, 2010); Danielle Appleby, “Controlling Information with Propaganda: Indoctrinating the Youth in Nazi Germany,” Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management  9: (Spring 2013);   Jacob Wilkins, “This Is What Children Learned at School in Nazi Germany,” Lessons from History (February 2022) online: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/this-is-what-children-learned-at-school-in-nazi-germany-6377a4eabd61

[19] Talia Lavin, “Why Transphobia is at the Heart of the White Power Movement.” The Nation [August 18, 2021]. Online: www.thenation.com/article/society/transphobia-white-supremacy.

[20] Ibram X. Kendi, “The Danger More Republicans Should Be Talking About,” The Atlantic (April 16, 2022). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/white-supremacy-grooming-in-republican-party/629585/

[21] Ibid. Kendi, The Danger More Republicans Should Be Talking About.”

[22] I have written extensively on these issues. See more recently, Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy, second edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Henry A. Giroux, Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), and Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of Resistance((London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

[23] Ibram X. Kendi, “The Danger More Republicans Should Be Talking About,” The Atlantic (April 16, 2022). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/white-supremacy-grooming-in-republican-party/629585/

[24] Geoff Mann, “Is fascism the Wave of the future?,” The New Statesman(February 11, 2022). Online:

[25] Jeffrey St. Clair, “When History Called on the General,” Counterpunch+ (July 10, 2022). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/10/when-history-called-on-the-general/; see also, Ariel Dorfman, “Stumbling on Chilean Stones—and Chilean History,” The Nation (January 27, 2022). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-history-pinochet-boric/

[26] Cathryn Stout and Thomas Wilburn, “CRT Map: Efforts to restrict teaching racism and bias have multiplied across the U.S.,” Chalkbeat (April 2021). Online: https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism

[27] Dimitris Kant, “A letter from Hellen Keller to Nazi youth.” Katiousa [May 13, 2022]. Online: http://www.katiousa.gr/istoria/gegonota/mia-epistoli-tis-elen-keler-pros-ti-nazistiki-neolaia/

[28] Ellen Willis, Don’t Think, Smile: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), p.45.

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First published on Counterpunch.

Shared via Creative Commons.

OCTOBER 22, 2020

BY HENRY GIROUX

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We must believe in the Principle of Hope. A Marxist does not have the right to be a pessimist.         —– Ernst Bloch

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Across the globe, democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege. The promise, if not ideals, of democracy are receding as the barbarians who breathe new life into a fascist past are once again on the move subverting language, values, courage, vision and a critical consciousness. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination as right wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the poor, people of color, refugees, immigrants from the south and others considered disposable. In the midst of an era when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself, there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of great restlessness. The present moment is once again at a historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism are vying for shaping a future that appears to be either an unthinkable nightmare or a realizable dream.

The global thrust towards democratization that emerged after World War II is giving way once again to authoritarian tyrannies.

We have arrived at a moment in which two worlds are colliding and a history of the present is poised at a point when “possibilities are either realized or rejected but never disappear completely.”^[1] First, there are the harsh and crumbling worlds of neoliberal globalization and its mobilizing passions that fuel different strands of fascism across the globe, including the United States.^[2] Power is now enamored of amassing profits and capital and is increasingly addicted to a politics of white nationalism and racial cleansing. Second, there are growing counter movements, especially among young people, with their search for a new politics that can rethink, reclaim and reinvent a new understanding of democratic socialism, untainted by capitalism. ^[3] What is not in doubt is that something sinister and horrifying is happening to liberal democracies all over the globe. The global thrust towards democratization that emerged after World War II is giving way once again to authoritarian tyrannies. As alarming as the signs may be, the public cannot look away and allow the terrors of the unforeseen to be given free rein. For those who believe in democratic socialism we cannot allow the power of dreams and militant hopes to turn into ashes.

We now live in a world that resembles a dystopian novel. The COVID-19 crisis created a surrealist nightmare that floods our screens and media with images of fear. We can no longer shake hands, embrace our friends, use public transportation, sit in a coffee shop, or walk down the street without experiencing anxiety and fear. What must be acknowledged is that the pandemic is more than a medical concept. It also refers to ideological and political plagues that emerged as a result of the irresponsible response of the U.S. and other countries such as Brazil, the United Kingdom, and India to the Covid-19 crisis. Marked by inept leadership rooted in a distrust of science and reason and a blind allegiance to market forces, what emerged over time was unimaginable suffering, massive deaths, and a further legitimation of lies and right-wing violence. The horror of the pandemic often blinds us to the fact that anti-democratic economic and political forces that have prioritized profits over human needs have grinded away at the social order for the last forty years.

Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed hedonism, and challenges the very idea of the public good.

A form of predatory capitalism has waged war on the welfare state, public sphere and the common good since the 1970s. As a form of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism believes that the market should govern the economy and all aspects of society. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates untrammeled self-interest, self-help, deregulation, and privatization as the governing principles of society. Under neoliberalism, everything is for sale and the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism. At the same time, it ignores basic human needs such as healthcare, food, decent wages, and quality education. Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed hedonism, and challenges the very idea of the public good.

We live in an age when economic activity is divorced from social costs, while policies that produce racial cleansing, militarism, and staggering inequality have become defining features of everyday life and established modes of governance. Clearly, there is a need to reclaim a notion of democratic socialism in which matters of justice, equity, and equality become the central features of a substantive democracy. The good news is that the demonstrations taking place both in the United States and across the globe suggest that the spirit of democratic socialism is in the air.

Young people are calling for a new narrative to repair the safety net, provide free healthcare, child care, elder care and free quality public schools for everyone. There are loud calls to address state violence, and the plagues of poverty, homelessness, and the pollution of the planet.

The pandemic revealed in all its ugliness, the death producing mechanisms of systemic inequality, deregulation, a culture of cruelty, and an increasingly dangerous assault on the environment. It has also made visible an anti-intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education, that is an education that equips individuals to think critically, engage in thoughtful dialogue, appropriate the lessons of history, and learn how to govern rather than be governed. At the same time, the claims of neoliberal capitalism have been undermined as a result of the economic failures and medical horrors let loose by the pandemic. What was once unthinkable is now said in public by demonstrators across the globe such as those in the United States protesting police violence and the brutality of economic inequality. Young people are calling for a new narrative to repair the safety net, provide free healthcare, child care, elder care and free quality public schools for everyone. There are loud calls to address state violence, and the plagues of poverty, homelessness, and the pollution of the planet.

The pandemic is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all hope is lost. While this pandemic threatens democracy’s ability to breathe, it offers the possibility to rethink politics and the habits of critical education, human agency, and elements of social responsibility crucial to any viable notion of what life would be like in a democratic socialist society.

Put differently, amid the corpses produced by neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, there are flashes of hope, a chance to move beyond contemporary resurgences of authoritarianism. Paulo Freire understood that such a politics is rooted in a pedagogy of hope, one that integrated a critical reading of the world with an attempt to put into practice modes of struggle based on the principles of social and economic equality and human freedom.

It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously Freire’s ongoing attempts to make education central to politics. At stake for Freire was the notion that education was a social concept, one rooted the goal of emancipation for all people. Moreover, this is an education that encourages human agency, one that is not content to enable people to only be critical thinkers, but also engaged individuals and social agents. This is a pedagogy that calls us beyond ourselves, and engages the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures of domination, and to become subjects rather than objects of history, politics, and power. If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to remember Freire’s ongoing project of literacy.

In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without civically literate and critically engaged citizens.

This was a political project in which civic literacy infused with a language of critique and possibility addressed the notion that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and civically literate citizens. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Brazil and a number of other countries plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements and neo-Nazi parties. In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without civically literate and critically engaged citizens.

Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of fascist cultures, mythic historical narratives, and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, as fascists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, particularly in the United States, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent, and hate. Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, though often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.^[4]

The pedagogical lesson here is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals, and the emergence of the carceral state and the horrors of detention jails and camps. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion, a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing to understand what it means to “assume a sense of political and social responsibility.”^[5]

Critical thought and the imaginings of a better world present a direct threat to neoliberal rationality in which the future must always replicate the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression.

Cultural politics in the last twenty years has turned toxic as ruling elites increasingly gain control of commanding cultural apparatuses turning them into pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, Muslims, and others considered excess, or wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion. The capitalist dream machine is back with huge profits for the ultra-rich, hedge fund managers, and major players in the financial service industries. In these new landscapes of wealth, fraud, and social atomization, a savage and fanatical capitalism promotes a winner-take-all ethos, normalizes massive inequalities in wealth and power, and aggressively undermines the welfare state while pushing millions into hardship and misery. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dream worlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance, and deregulation. Within this increasingly fascist landscape, public spheres are replaced by zones of social abandonment and thrive on the energies of the walking dead and avatars of cruelty and misery.

Education within the last three decades has diminished rapidly in its capacities to educate young people and others to be reflective, critical, and socially engaged agents. Under neoliberal regimes, the utopian possibilities formerly associated with public and higher education as a public good capable of promoting social equality and supporting democracy have become too dangerous for the apostles of authoritarianism. Increasingly public schools are subject to the toxic forces of privatization and mindless standardized curricula while teachers are deskilled and subject to intolerable labor conditions. Higher education now mimics a business culture run by a managerial army of bureaucrats, enamoured of market values, who resemble the high priests of a deadening instrumental rationality. The commanding visions of democracy are in exile at all levels of education.

Critical thought and the imaginings of a better world present a direct threat to neoliberal rationality in which the future must always replicate the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression. This dystopian impulse thrives on producing myriad forms of inequality and violence—encompassing both the symbolic and the structural—as part of a broader attempt to define education in purely instrumental, privatized, and anti-intellectual terms. What is clear is that neoliberal modes of education attempt to mold students in the market driven mantras of self-interest, harsh competition, unchecked individualism, and the ethos of consumerism. Young people are now told to invest in their careers, pack their resumes, and achieve success at any cost. It is precisely this replacement of educated hope with an aggressive dystopian neoliberal project and cultural politics that now characterizes the current assault on public and higher education in various parts of the globe. Under neoliberalism, the mantra of privatization, deregulation, and the destruction of the public good is matched by a toxic merging of inequality, greed, and the nativist language of borders, walls, and camps.

It is crucial for educators to remember that language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation, it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. For instance, under Trump and other authoritarians such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the degradation of language reinforces Umberto Eco’s remark that education is an organizing principle feature of fascism. According to Eco, one of the central features of what he called “Ur-Fascism” was its undermining of civic literacy through Fascist schoolbooks [that] made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”^[6]

Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue, to engage language in the pursuit of justice.

If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely.^[7]Language is a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies. Paul Gilroy argues correctly that it is crucial in the current historical moment to re-engage with fascism in order to address how it has crystalized in different forms and in doing so ‘work toward redeeming the term from its trivialization and restoring it to a proper place in discussions of the moral and political limits of what is acceptable.”^[8]

Gilroy provides one more reason for educators to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political. The latter is crucial in order to recognize, as Freire reminds us, that pedagogy is always a struggle over agency, identities, desires, and values while also acknowledging that it has a crucial role to play in addressing important social issues and in defending public and higher education as democratic public spheres. Making the political pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirm oppositional cultural work and pedagogical practices but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage coupled with direct mass action, against a ruthless casino capitalism and an emerging fascist politics. Such mobilization must oppose the glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. At the very least, critical pedagogy proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world and that it is capable of creating the possibilities for individual and social transformation.

Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue, to engage language in the pursuit of justice. . James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and thoughtlessness is considered a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. As is well known, President Trump’s ignorance is on display daily. Not only is he a serial liar but his ignorance also serves as a tool of power to prevent power from being held accountable. In addition, ignorance is the enemy of critical thinking, engaged intellectuals, and emancipatory forms of education. Ignorance is not innocent, especially when it proclaims the space of commonsense and labels thinking dangerous while exhibiting a disdain for truth, scientific evidence, and rational judgments. However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy celebrated as commonsense, the normalization of fake news, and the shrinking of political horizons. There is also the closing of the horizons of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and a “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.”^[9]

The very conditions that enable people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, media becomes more corporatized, oppositional journalists are killed, and reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment. We now live in a new age of cruelty in which we are told that the central mark of our agency is to be at war with others, unleash our most ruthless and competitive side, and learn how to survive in what Naomi Klein calls the “cut-throat jungle of late capitalism.”

Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it.

Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls “ethicide”: and Joshua Sperling defines as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.”^[10] Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest. Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. And so it goes. The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas, or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.”^[11] On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and others are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it. In this instance, critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics losses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the education condition for enabling students and others to think against the grain and where students realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged citizens. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives. This is the moment of hope in which as Ruth Levitas points out the sense of “something missing can be read in every trace of how it might be otherwise, how the ever-present sense of lack might be [tempered].”^[12]

As a rule, educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students. They also need to responsibly assume the role of civic educators within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies. Communicating to a variety of public audiences suggests using opportunities for writing, public talks, and media interviews offered by the radio, Internet, alternative magazines, and teaching young people and adults in alternative schools to name only a few. Capitalizing on their role as public intellectuals, faculty can speak to more general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous. More importantly, as teachers organize to assert both the importance of their role as citizen-educators and that of education in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working with unions.

In the current moment, Freire’s legacy is all the more crucial in its call to embrace critical pedagogy as a political and moral practice in order to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics losses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged citizens. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.

Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.

Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world. If teachers are truly concerned about safeguarding education, they will have to take seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels. Critical pedagogy has an important role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres. In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself. Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies as they traverse local and national borders. In addition, pedagogy as a form of production and critique offers a discourse of possibility—a way of providing students with the opportunity to link understanding to commitment, and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice.

This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading of both the word and the world in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people and provide the conditions for them to become critical agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, values, and civic courage that enables them to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.

Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As difficult as this task may seem to educators, if not to a larger public, it is a struggle worth waging.

In an age of predatory capitalism and an emerging fascist politics, educators, students, and other concerned citizens face the challenge of providing a language that embraces a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare to look beyond the horizon of the given. Fascism breeds cynicism and is the enemy of a militant and social hope. Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. Without hope, even in the most dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.

Hope is the affective and intellectual precondition for individual and social struggle. Hope, not despair, is the precondition that encourages critique on the part of intellectuals in and outside of the academy who use the resources of theory to address pressing social problems. Hope is also at the root of the civic courage that translates critique into political practice. Hope as the desire for a future that offers more than the present becomes most acute when one’s life can no longer be taken for granted. Only by holding on to both critique and hope in such contexts will resistance make concrete the possibility for transforming politics into an ethical space and a public act. Building a better future than the one we now expect to unfold will require nothing less than confronting the flow of everyday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance and the unending project of democratic social transformation. At the same time, in order for resistance to take on the challenges posed by the rise of a fascist politics, it will have to develop an awakening of desire. This form of educated desire is rooted in the dream of a collective consciousness and imagination fueled by the struggle for new forms of community that affirm the value of the social, economic equality, the social contract, and democratic values and social relations.

In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.

The current fight against a nascent fascism across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also as Arendt points out a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.”^[13] Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.^[14]

In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.^[15]Neoliberal capitalism strips hope of its utopian possibilities and thrives on the notion that we live in an era of foreclosed hope, and that any attempt to think otherwise will result in a nightmare. Yet, the fact remains that without hope there is no agency and without collective agents, there is no hope of resistance. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical agency; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.

First published on Counterpunch.

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