HENRY GIROUX
SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

When Elections Become an Alibi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberal Fascism and the Punishing State.

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

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

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

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

Yet political economy alone cannot explain fascism.

Pedagogical Terrorism and the Education of Desire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Liberal Guardrails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

JOHN P. RUEHL
SEP 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rise and return of the politician businessman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adversarial adoption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new political order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background image by David Horsey | Light Wave

Previously published on Truth-Dig.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

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

Chris Hedges
Aug 31, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can only save ourselves.

This means shutting the country down.

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

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

CHRIS HEDGES
JUL 20, 2026

The road to fascism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “Nation of Strangers,” was constructed over the last six decades of neoliberal assault. We have arrived at the terminus.

We are becoming strangers. Strangers in our own countries. Strangers in the world. The values we cherish, the liberties we once took for granted, and the possibility of a democratic future are vanishing. The communities where we found meaning and purpose are being demolished. The iron grip of fascism is being consolidated. The decades long assault on democratic institutions in the name of neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized name, cutthroat capitalism, is reaping its grim harvest.

Ece Temelkuran in “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” draws on her exile from Turkey, as she did in her previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” to prepare us for a future we do not want but will be forced to endure.

“Nation of Strangers” is written as a series of forty letters beginning in June 2022 and ending in April 2025. Each letter is addressed “Dear Stranger,” which slowly drives home the point that we will soon become, like her, a stranger. First in our own land, then, for some of us, in exile.

She scoffs at our mania for hope, the naïve belief that our hollowed out and corrupted institutions can roll back the fascist tide.

“I don’t believe in hope,” she writes, “but in determination, having faith and doing what you can to survive when there is no hope.”

Temelkuran was a prominent Turkish novelist essayist, and journalist. She wrote a widely read column and had a show on national television. She was also the bête noire of the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, especially after the publication of her 2016 book “Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy.”

She left Turkey after being relentlessly smeared and attacked by government-run media, her colleagues started to be imprisoned, the death threats became “too regular to ignore,” and she lost her job.

Temelkuran called her mother on November 6, 2016, from Zagreb, Croatia: “Mom, I am not coming back home.”

“It was a one-minute phone call,” she explains. “Half of it was silence. But that’s all it took for me, in the autumn of 2016, to become homeless.”

She was 43.

You can see my interview with Temelkuran here.

“The neoliberal system’s reality — extreme inequality — cancels out the fundamental promise of democracy — equality — and that is why the idea of protecting democracy means less and less to people,” she writes.

We are rendered homeless not only because of those who hold power, whether it be Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, or Erdoğan, but because of a bankrupt liberalism, a faux opposition enslaved to the same corporate and oligarchic masters.

“Since our political outrage is considered irrelevant by the conventional homes of realpolitik, the old political parties, we find ourselves politically homeless, too,” Temelkuran notes.

“We no longer know through which political medium we can unite our voices to be heard by the rulers. Like refugees, we stay in temporary places: protest tents, makeshift occupy-movement tents or strike marquees. In the cold or under the sun, we imagine and reimagine a new political home — like an exile who knows that the old home is impossible to return to but still misses a home.”

Fascism’s lifeblood is the demonization of the other, of the stranger.

By 2050, over 1 billion people will find themselves “at threat of being displaced” due to “environmental change, conflict and civil unrest.” By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people may find themselves “left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 [years].”

She warns that the genocide in Gaza is a template for what will come, an exercise by the global ruling class to see how much carnage it can inflict with impunity.

Temelkuran describes Gaza as “a long bleeding, thick scar on the world map,” that is “widening to become a fatal gangrene, swallowing up the entire body of humanity.” She cautions that the “new standards of brutality will be set,” that “too many will become homeless by the end of this story, and it will not only be those whose houses are bombed. And it will all begin with the loss of one word.”

“There will be no explicit agreement needed,” she goes on, “but gradually, people will avoid that one word that is deemed ‘problematic’. It is the word genocide in Germany today; in other countries, it will be other words.”

The void left by the lost word ..

“will soon be filled with harmless words kindly suggested by the power-approved words, such as war, even though the other side is primarily civilians. ‘Let’s not call it a genocide but ‘atrocities.’ Eventually, it will become impossible to join the public conversation without uttering only those approved words. They will operate as signal flares to show that you are not using the criminalized word. This is how fascism works. It not only silences people but also forces them to speak in a certain way.”

Temelkuran chronicles the indignities of surmounting bureaucratic obstacles to apply for residency and visa permits in “soul-sucking waiting rooms.” She wonders, along with the other strangers, if, when the permit expires, it will be renewed or if she will be forced to find another refuge. She is hardened by exile. Humor is dark. She watches as refugees from the war in Ukraine arrive in Germany, clueless about what awaits them.

“The Ukrainians do not know this yet,” Temelkuran contends.

“They don’t doubt that the promise made to them by the Western world will be kept. They still believe that they’ll be welcomed in a civilized manner and taken in gracefully, dignity intact. A very dark, very broken place in me wants to laugh that repugnant laugh. You wish, baby! They never take you in without crushing you first. You will despise yourself, hate everything, give up, turn numb, and only then will everything start happening. You will be welcomed only when you surrender.”

Her experience as an exile mocks the West’s conception of itself.

“Westerners still like to think of Europe as the safe haven for the oppressed intellectuals of the Global South, but that is giving too much credit to Europa when thousands are pushed back into the sea to die,” she insists.

“Putting the spotlight on ‘the exile’ to divert from ‘the refugee’ operates as a crisis management tool, if not a branding strategy for Europe’s self-image.”

The persecution by the regime that drives the stranger into exile is not, ironically, the most difficult to digest.

“What the Westerners haven’t realized yet is that many of us do not leave our homes for fear of a dictator,” she writes.

“They still make the distinction in their heads between the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies.’ But what truly severs your ties to a country is to see so many people, ordinary people, supporting the regime even after witnessing its evil — to see so many choosing to be evil. That is when your faith in humanity shakes. That is what ostracizes us and makes us homeless even when we are at home — the sense of being under siege from inhumanity, madness and brutality.”

The final blow, Temelkuran says, the one that “actually breaks you,” does not come from “the other side.” Rather, it..

“comes from those whom you think of as your people, your side. When the sense of defeat takes over the side you belong to, the anger or self-disgust of being on the losing side turns to self-hatred. The hatred turns people against each other, and then — as I did once before, permanently leaving the country — you find yourself under attack, more viciously than the other side can manage. They say you are not enough. No cut is deeper than that. That is the precise moment when you become a total stranger in your home, when not the dictator but your fellow people sever your ties to your country.”

Home for “the abyss of the unhomed self” is no longer a place. It is not “a thing of the past or a destination to be arrived at in the future.” It is found in “these moments of being fully in myself, an intermittent sense of wholeness, a rare but precious feeling of normal people, and it will only be in the here and now.”

While the home we leave behind may be gone, there are “new homes in the making that yield moments of peace when you least expect them.”

That, perhaps, is a kind of hope, but one accompanied by eternal mourning and estrangement.

Firt published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

ROB URIE
JULY 17, 2026

When American politicians state that terrorism is a threat, what they need is a mirror and an introductory economics textbook to understand that there are many different ways to destroy a nation. From NAFTA to financialization to crypto grifts, the US has been led from one economic catastrophe to another by people claiming to know what they are doing.While you and I know that AI isn’t going to cause 50% – 60% of the jobs in the US to disappear, what astonishes is that this is considered an acceptable outcome by Donald Trump and the US Congress.

For context, the US unemployment rate at the worst point in the Great Depression was 25%. This led to mass protests, a dramatic rise in the fortunes of organized labor, the White House being surrounded by former soldiers wanting to be paid, and WWII. Most governments begin worry about political instability when unemployment rises to 10%. That Trump and Congress heard the 50% – 60% unemployment projection and still thought AI a brilliant idea is testament to an absence of political accountability. There is something deeply broken in US politics.

Graph: surprise, the class war is real. Illustrated is that capital’s share of national income (GDP) has been rising for five decades as labor’s share has been falling. Oligarchs own the capital stock. Labor owns labor. When payments to capital rise, oligarchs benefit. When payments to labor fall, labor loses. As the graph illustrates, labor has been losing in the US for fifty years. Source: economycharts.

Fifty percent unemployment would instantly overwhelm state unemployment insurance systems. These systems divide their perpetually underfunded pools between the number of people eligible to collect, meaning that no one would receive enough in insurance payouts to survive. Every town, city and state affected would be in full-on economic collapse within a few months. Car loans, student loans and mortgages would no longer be paid. The US would be in full-scale economic collapse within six months.

The political effect of this should in theory be analogous to handing someone an empty gun, telling them that it is loaded, and then forcing them to shoot their spouse. The spouse will live because the gun is empty. But the relationship will have ended the second that the trigger is pulled. Trust will have been permanently broken. With the predicted job destroying impact of AI, Donald Trump and the US Congress pulled the trigger. They are fine with the nation disappearing in a puff of smoke as long as their stock portfolios keep rising. If this reads like ‘America first,’ please chime in.

No government would withstand 50% employment without massive social upheaval. This implies that the current US leadership has no stake in the US beyond what can be extracted through looting. Should this read as harsh, you probably aren’t paying attention. The productivity math rigs the capital versus labor game. Through what are called hedonic adjustments, the value produced by capital (e.g. AI) is systematically overstated. The largest possible value is taken away from labor and assigned to capital.

While Trump has long claimed that he opposed NAFTA, the question now is why? 50% unemployment from AI would be far more socially destructive than NAFTA has thus far been. The ‘capital investment’ theory whereby AI represents an investment in the broader economy falls apart above 8% unemployment. The math has it that at 50% unemployment, a 200% increase in productivity would be needed to avoid an economic decline from AI. Last year, with AI in the mix, this value was 3%. This is not going to happen.

Moreover, the gains from AI (if there ever are any) would be directed to capital while the costs would be borne by the newly unemployed. This is Class Warfare 101. Trump and the ‘communists’ (his term) in Congress see their fortunes being bolstered by destroying the US. But they have the math all wrong. They imagine that the stock market would rise in the midst of 50% unemployment. What they should be imagining is every major city in the US being burnt to the ground by newly immiserated citizens. As the saying goes, three days without food and no government will stand.

Graph: between 1948 and the end of 2025, the annual rate of Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth fell from 4% to 2%. While this might not read as problematic, the US hasn’t prospered outside of finance and tech heavy cities since 1980 or thereabouts (46 years). And financialization means that houses that cost $100,000 twenty years ago cost $400,000 today after ordinary (CPI) inflation has been taken out. This is the flip side of crypto grifts and national stock market obsessions. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The reason why the US is in this mess is because American leaders misread the unique position that the US was in at the end of WWII as evidence that capitalism actually works. What gave the US its economic prowess was geography, history and luck. By the end of WWII, industrial infrastructure abroad lay in ruins. Because the US was far away, lies between two oceans, and joined the war late, its industrial infrastructure was in better condition after the war ended than before it. To confuse this with grace, intelligence or hard work is a category error.

By the 1980s, the choice for the US was between manufacturing and asset stripping. The leadership at the time (Reagan) chose asset stripping (finance capitalism). With crypto grifts now having reached their natural limit, the US rediscovered war as a business plan— but without the manufacturing base needed to turn military production back into a business. When the political leadership represented the interests of the nation, the New Deal, public schools and a functioning healthcare system were possible. With crypto grifts, only more crypto grifts are possible.

That American capitalism has been redefined as using asymmetrical power to arrange circumstances such that guaranteed gains go to the few while the hollowed-out shell of a looted economy is left for the rest of us, is to empty the term of descriptive value. That this is a result of American imperialism turned inward brings to the fore the source of the social logic of looting. Having been educated in neoclassical economics, almost none of what is today called capitalism fits the theories of academic capitalism. In that version, a large and intrusive state is required to keep capitalism ‘capitalist.’

Monopoly power has long been the economic proxy for the political power of capitalism. In neoclassical theory, a powerful and intrusive state is needed to prevent concentrated wealth from closing the door on new competitors. Neoliberalism thus holds the paradoxical view that 1) economic power doesn’t exist but that 2) the purpose of the state is to support the interests of the economically powerful. The result is that economic ‘freedom’ now means the freedom to loot (e.g. crypto grifts) without legal consequences.

Readers may recall the ‘Great Powers’ framing of the contest for power when the US went to war against Russia in 2022. While the frame makes limited sense with respect to China and Russia, it misses that the US no longer ‘does’ the national interest. The evidence: the few dozen oligarchs whose interests Donald Trump represents are willing to see half of the US population be unemployed through the implementation of AI as long as their fortunes are intact. That they are set up to benefit while the rest of us are set up to lose illustrates the predatory nature of this willingness.

In fact, the oligarchs’ interests are antithetical to those of the US. Trump wants to permanently levitate the stock market because it is the source of the oligarch’s fungible wealth. Bartering a coal mine for goods and services is complicated and cumbersome. But selling shares in the coal mine to the public and then cashing in through stock options is easy, quick and rewarded with tax incentives (discounted capital gains tax rate). The richest 1% owns half of the stock market and the richest 10% owns about 90%. The stock market is central to continuing oligarch control.

To date, the promise of AI has been prospective, that if A, B and C happen, AI will produce a social benefit. Maybe. Maybe not. But the people who haven’t yet demonstrated a social benefit are already billionaires. The heads of AI company Anthropic have $15 billion apiece following a recent fundraising round. Do they have a profitable business? No. AI commenter Ed Zitron argues that Anthropic’s margins scale linearly. In other words, costs rise 1:1 with revenues. Implied is that the current trajectory provides no path to profitability. So, in capitalist terms, why are these people rich?

To be clear, the issue isn’t envy over fat wallets. It is concern over the aggregating impact of the mis-allocation of social resources. If the greed-heads want a sixth yacht, who would care except for the social power that their wealth gives them to force their self-serving decisions onto the rest of us. Automation AI and a wee bit of enterprise AI likely represent our shared future. So do the coming financial crash and its economic fallout from AI funny money (circular) financing. The problem with circular financing is that it sets off a game of musical chairs once one or more or the participating parties begins to take money out.

The relevant question is what it is that the American political leadership imagines that the US will do for a living in coming decades. The fantasy that has been sold is that ‘markets’ decide this. In the 1990s, outsourcing was claimed to be the product of nature (wage competition) when it was in fact the result of specific policies promoted by specific interests. American industrialists imagined that they could rid the US of organized labor by ridding it of jobs that pay. Now, with crypto grifts being what it is that Americans ‘do,’ the solution from above is political repression.

This political repression would have different social meaning if the sense was that those imposing it had the people’s interests at heart. But they don’t. We, the people. are viewed as annoying complainers who interfere with stock market gains and persistently rank the people running the place lower than venereal disease and serial killers. And the sense that one of America’s political parties will save us has been replaced with the understanding that nothing in the current political mix is going to do so. We are on our own.

Deindustrialization is a form of looting through Wall Street’s role in asset stripping and pirate finance. Financialization is looting through those closest to the money creation machine (banking) taking the money so created for themselves (e.g. crypto grifts). AI is looting through companies that haven’t turned a profit and plausibly never will receiving trillions in realized and prospective ‘investment’ without having produced a public benefit (like toilet paper or toothbrushes). The common theme here is fortunes made through uncreative destruction. US ‘leaders’ are destroyers, not creators

Since the plan for what Americans will do for a living going forward at least theoretically involves firing half of the US workforce, how precisely is this supposed to work? The claim is that AI will replace enterprise (call centers, accounting firms, law firms) workers. Nonsense. These companies are creating tiered service where the customers who don’t matter (like yours truly, apparently) hang up and forget that there is a problem because there is no way to fix it except by ceasing to do business with the offending vendor.

AI is tiering precisely this way. Industrial automation and enterprise AI are already quasi-commodity businesses. The AI finance folks (e.g. Ed Zitron) argue that these businesses will never be profitable because their costs (‘compute’) rise with revenues, leaving margins flat. (With flat margins, a $1 rise in revenues means a $1 rise in costs and a $2 rise in revenues means a $2 rise in costs. With these companies currently losing money, rising revenues mean rising losses. The imagined solution is to cut costs, which finds OpenAI cutting prices on its products to stay competitive. But AI is a growth business?

This leaves only the models being sold as ‘thinking machines’ to produce the return on what will soon be several trillion dollars of investment. Are these thinking machines? It doesn’t help that the CEOs of the two main competitors in the thinking machine space, OpenAI and Anthropic, are philosophically ignorant fabulists who don’t appear to understand how the products that they are selling actually work. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei argues that finer gearing for the AI automaton will cause a conversion from dumb machine to human like consciousness. Are cookies set out on Christmas eve for Santa Claus as well?

But little of what these people believe actually matters. The trillions in financing are premised in all of these AI types earning huge profits for their developers. With the enterprise AI sales people backing off of the claim that AI will replace workers wholesale, it is difficult to see where the value proposition that would support fat margins will come from. Having worked for large corporations, it is guaranteed that the only reason that the AI sales people are getting meetings is on the promise that large numbers of workers will be permanently replaced with AI.

While the gearing in ‘thinking machine’ AI can be ever better refined, the product will always and in every case be a better automaton (mechanical robot), not a thinking machine. An analogy is to build a bridge 90% of the way without having a clear understanding of how the remaining 10% will be built. Continental philosophers explained a century ago both how and why building the final 10% (inanimate to animate) of the bridge is impossible. American AI companies built 90% of the bridge with no way to get to the other side. Brilliant?

Again, the reason why this matters is because the US has put all of its hopes for future economic growth into the AI basket. Capital expenditures of one trillion dollars to date, with another two trillion in theory coming behind it, put the wider economy at risk for what at present looks like a stupid gamble. Further, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has partially solved the cost problem, giving it a large pricing advantage over its competitors. As I understand it, DeepSeek’s architectural advantage over US competitors is across the board in automation, enterprise and generative AI.

What DeepSeek did process-wise was to turn a pig in a python into a mouse in a python until the pig hits the digestive tract, at which point it is turned back into a pig. This allows it to move through the python (AI model) with a low expenditure of effort to be revitalized when it is time for dinner (to produce the query response). Because compute is the major cost of the ‘thinking machine’ AI, this gives DeepSeek a cost advantage that US AI companies probably cannot match in the time needed to do so.

The DeepSeek solution is mathematically clever and likely points the way forward for the US AI companies that survive the next few years. But again, the finance people aren’t going to be in a position to care what happens after loans default and equity values go to zero. The time to pledge, borrow, and cross-collateralize US based AI was after the business case has been demonstrated. FOMO (fear of missing out) is a financial bubble ethos. As Will Rogers put it, once the bubble bursts, people stop worrying about the return on their money to focus on the return of their money.

Where does this leave the US? With 1) an implausible public – private industrial policy that will cause major economic dislocations over the next few years, 2) a commodity AI business that was sold as a high growth (high margin) business, 3) an all new group of entitled billionaires who have never created a product that earned a profit but who now get to tell the rest of us what to do and 4) with a Chinese competitor that built a superior product at lower cost than US firms. As with BYD and the $10,000 EV, who needs a Tesla when you can buy a car that works better for 15% of the cost.

Graph: deindustrialization has been the articulated policy of the US and was codified through serial trade agreements since the 1970s. When it finally took hold around 2001, its impact on the US workforce was utter devastation. In 2016 Donald Trump was elected on his promise to reindustrialize the US. But Trump has the attention span of a gnat and was likely sidetracked by a cheeseburger placed in front of him. The result: manufacturing employment in the US remains about where it was in 2016. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

For those imagining that the US is re-industrializing, think again. Manufacturing employment in the US has fallen under Trump, not risen. Readers who search will find a body of literature from mainstream economists claiming that the US moved up the value chain in recent decades and that US manufacturing is flourishing. This is (Mitt) Romneyesque fantasy. See my recent Substack articles on the ‘China Shock’ for details. The claim about manufacturing is based on hedonic (qualitative) adjustments made to computer chips. Economists confused a dubious financial statistic (hedonic adjustments made to computer chips) with wider productivity growth.

The math has it that valuing the hedonic adjustment at 100% of the increased functionality while users only use 15% of it overstates the increase in the productivity of capital on its own terms. When applied to AI, assuming that the full theoretical change in the value of capital is 100% of the hedonic adjustment, and therefore allocating 100% of productivity gains to AI, is to overstate the change in productivity from AI (15%) and to understate the change in productivity of labor (85%) in the production process. This same point applies to all technology shocks. The game is rigged for capital.

The fall in US GDP growth from 4% in 1948 to 2% today (graph above) is why the US is saber rattling against China, Russia and BRICS. The punchline is that China, Russia and BRICS didn’t deindustrialize the US. The American ruling class did. China, Russia and BRICS didn’t financialize the US. The American ruling class did. China, Russia and BRICS didn’t force the crypto grift economy onto the US. The American ruling class did. And it is the American AI developers who made generative AI a tool for top-down social control. China is using AI to automate factories. Which nation is authoritarian?

To tie this together, AI seems a weak foundation upon which to build a future economy. In the first place, unlike computers, telephones and the internal combustion engine, AI won’t be transformative. What it does well is digital automation. What is does less well and even then, only in particular industries, is enterprise automation. The executives who imagine that AI will replace workers know absolutely nothing about what ‘their’ workers actually do. The US is to the point where class stratification is making the nation unworkable.

Looking forward, expect and prepare for an AI related financial calamity within the next year or two. This will be the result of AI financing, not AI per se. The catalyst could be the economic consequences of the re-shutting of the Strait of Hormuz. Or it could be the implosion of AI financing in the presence of shrinking promises about what AI can do. Either way, the US has been placed very, very far out on the limb of a dying tree. Trump the destroyer is the product of the American turn toward internal predation. My American neighborhood resembles DRC through economic extraction by external forces.

What are the solutions? The re-localization of agriculture. Rationalizing the consumer economy to match social and environmental constraints. A Federal guarantee that all who are willing to work be provided jobs that pay doing the work that the US needs to be done. Public schools from pre-K – PhD that educate the public in the broad attributes of human civilization. A healthcare system that raises life expectancy instead of lowering it. And a Department of Peace with the authority and purpose of ending US military adventurism abroad. Murder is the business of the mafia. It’s time to get the gangsters out of government.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
JULY 10, 2026

The United States has always been divided against itself. From its founding, the promise of democracy has existed alongside the violence of settler colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. The nation’s greatest democratic advances have emerged not from the fulfillment of its founding ideals but from generations of struggle against racial domination, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. American history is therefore not a story of inevitable democratic progress. It is an ongoing struggle over whose histories are remembered, whose humanity is recognized, and whose freedom counts, a struggle measured against the gulf between the nation’s claims to freedom and justice and the reality of systemic cruelty and racialized terror. Today, that struggle has entered a new and dangerous phase. The assault on birthright citizenship is not simply another dispute over immigration or constitutional interpretation. It is an attempt to decide once again who counts, who qualifies as a citizen, and who possesses the right to have rights.  At stake is nothing less than whether the United States becomes a multiracial democratic socialist society or completes its transformation into a fascist white republic.

The attack on birthright citizenship forces the nation to confront a question every democracy must answer: Who belongs, and whose lives are valued? As Judith Butler argues, politics is organized around distinctions between lives regarded as grievable and those rendered ungrievable, between those recognized as fully human and those denied that status. Every authoritarian movement answers that question by transforming citizenship from a universal right into a racial, nationalist, and class privilege. Once citizenship becomes conditional, every other right becomes conditional as well. The Trump-Miller campaign against birthright citizenship is therefore not simply an attack on immigration policy. It is an attempt to transform the United States from an imperfect democracy into a racial state. In doing so, it revives a political tradition that never disappeared, one rooted in the racial nationalism of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the recurring fantasy of preserving the United States as a white republic.

The assault on birthright citizenship is an attempt to steal one of Reconstruction’s greatest democratic achievements. As constitutional scholar Sherrilyn Ifill reminds us, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment undertook a “race-conscious project” designed to dismantle racial caste and establish birthright citizenship as the legal foundation of a multiracial democracy.  As Martha S. Jones demonstrates in Birthright Citizens, birthright citizenship was not bestowed from above. It was forged through generations of Black struggle against slavery, racial caste, and white supremacy. The Trump administration seeks to reverse that democratic achievement by redefining citizenship as a privilege of ancestry, bloodline, and racial hierarchy rather than a constitutional guarantee of democratic equality. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. observes, “These people are the inheritors of that legacy. They believe the country should be white.”

Nor did this assault emerge suddenly. Trump’s “birther” campaign against Barack Obama was the opening act in a broader effort to reopen the very question Reconstruction sought to settle: Who can legitimately claim to be an American? The issue was never where Obama was born. It was whether a Black man could legitimately embody the nation itself. Birtherism transformed citizenship into a weapon of racial warfare, preparing the ideological ground for today’s assault on birthright citizenship. The current campaign extends that poisonous logic from one symbolic target to millions of others, rendering citizenship increasingly contingent, revocable, and politically expendable.

This is why the struggle over birthright citizenship is fundamentally a struggle over the legal foundations of democracy itself. Citizenship is the constitutional basis of every democratic right. Once that foundation is transformed from a universal guarantee into a privilege granted by political authority, democracy itself begins to disappear. Rights cease to belong equally to all; they become favors distributed by a state that defines belonging through race, nationalism, and ideological conformity.

John Ganz captures the magnitude of this transformation with unusual clarity:

“It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian…. If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else.”

The ideological stakes of this struggle become especially visible as the United States marks the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its founding. Official celebrations largely substitute patriotic spectacle for historical reckoning, presenting the nation’s past as an unbroken story of liberty, unity, and democratic progress. Such mythology erases the central role of Indigenous dispossession, slavery, racial capitalism, and generations of democratic struggle in shaping American history, obscuring the crucial truth that democracy has advanced not because the nation faithfully realized its founding ideals but because ordinary people repeatedly forced the nation to confront the violence, exclusions, and contradictions built into those ideals. The assault on birthright citizenship is simultaneously constitutional in its aims and pedagogical in its methods, seeking to reshape how Americans understand democracy, belonging, and political identity.

Ganz’s warning points beyond legal rights to the wider struggle over democratic identity, public values, civic consciousness, and the distribution of political and economic power. The attack on citizenship cannot be separated from the rise of gangster capitalism and the oligarchy that increasingly dominates American society. As wealth and power become concentrated in the hands of a tiny corporate and financial elite, democratic institutions are emptied of any substance, public goods are dismantled, and the media are increasingly captured by concentrated private interests. In addition, staggering class divisions, entrenched racial injustice, and a politics of disposability become normalized. The attack on citizenship is one mechanism through which this emerging social order redraws the boundaries of political membership, legitimates exclusion, and diverts public anger away from the structures of exploitation that produce widespread misery.

This is neoliberal fascism intensified by oligarchic power and racial capitalism. As Harvey J. Kaye reminds us, what often disappears in discussions of authoritarianism is the class war from above that has laid the groundwork for its emergence. For decades, corporate elites, their political allies, and neoliberal policymakers have waged a relentless assault on workers, public goods, democratic institutions, and the social state, producing staggering inequalities of wealth and power while intensifying racial and social injustice. This class war has not only deepened economic insecurity; it has generated the resentments, abandonment, and civic despair upon which authoritarian movements flourish. The attack on citizenship is inseparable from this broader class project.

What is unfolding today is not merely the return of fascist rhetoric but the deliberate construction of a political order in which democracy is hollowed out from within by the convergence of oligarchic power, white supremacy, and authoritarian rule. Constitutional protections are eroded, dissent is criminalized, cruelty is celebrated as civic virtue, and entire populations are rendered disposable.

Every fascist politics begins by deciding who is recognized as part of the political community. It ends by deciding whose rights, lives, and futures no longer matter. Its endpoint is the normalization of lawless abductions, state terror, militarized policing, detention camps, and a social order in which violence becomes the governing principle of politics. This is not simply the story of a democracy in decline. It is the story of a society devouring its own democratic foundations as imperial ambitions, white nationalism, militarized governance, and institutional decay converge in the service of authoritarian power.

Citizenship and the Pedagogy of Fascism.

Political struggles are never won by coercion alone. They are won in the institutions and cultural spaces where people learn to understand themselves, others, and the society they inhabit. Schools, journalism, digital platforms, religious institutions, entertainment, and state policy function as powerful pedagogical forces. They teach people whom to fear, whose lives matter, which histories deserve remembrance, and who belongs to the democratic polity. As Stuart Hall observed, “cultural change is constitutive of political change.” Every political order educates its citizens. The decisive question is what kind of citizens it produces.

Trumpism answers that question by cultivating a new authoritarian subject. Through media spectacles, digital platforms, and state power, it normalizes white supremacy, Christian nationalism, militarism, and the language of exclusion. Figures such as Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Tom Homan, Russell Vought, and others function as the principal anti-public pedagogues of this emerging fascist culture. Their rhetoric legitimates policies whose consequences are inscribed in broken lives, shattered families, public spectacles of humiliation and terror, the destruction of due process, the erosion of democratic freedoms, the killing of children, and, increasingly, blood. They teach that compassion is weakness, violence is virtue, unquestioning loyalty is patriotism, hypermasculinity is the measure of manhood, and domination, cloaked in the language of God, nation, and destiny, is the defining virtue of public life. For Trump and his acolytes, courage no longer signifies moral conviction or civic responsibility. It has been stripped of its ethical content and absorbed into the language of militarized nationalism, where cruelty masquerades as strength, intimidation becomes a badge of honor, and public life is reduced to a theater of aggression. Such a culture thrives on spectacles of violence, celebrates humiliation as entertainment, glorifies brutality as a public virtue, and normalizes the historical amnesia, racial hatred, militarism, and organized abandonment upon which fascist politics flourishes.

The assault on birthright citizenship is a pedagogical project aimed at remaking public consciousness. Its purpose is to persuade Americans that racial exclusion is common sense, hierarchy is natural, and white nationalism is compatible with democracy. The objective is not simply to change immigration law but to redefine citizenship itself, replacing equal membership with a racialized conception of national identity rooted in blood, ancestry, and cultural purity. As Antonio Gramsci argued, political transformation is inseparable from cultural transformation because power secures its deepest victories by shaping how people think, remember, identify, and imagine the world.

Authoritarianism depends upon organized ignorance as much as organized repression. It flourishes when historical memory is replaced by myth produced by powerful disimagination machines, when fear overwhelms reason, and when civic responsibility gives way to tribal loyalty. In such circumstances, citizenship ceases to be a shared democratic practice and becomes a badge of racial and ideological identity, a transformation embodied in the politics of Stephen Miller and the architects of Trump’s white nationalist project. Democracy no longer rests upon constitutional principles but upon exclusionary myths about who constitutes the “real” nation.

The attack on citizenship cannot be removed from the wider war against the institutions that make democracy possible. Under Trumpism, journalists are vilified as enemies of the people and increasingly subjected to intimidation and violence; universities are threatened with political retaliation; schools are subjected to ideological censorship; books are removed from libraries; scientific expertise is dismissed as propaganda; and historical memory is rewritten to erase the histories of slavery, colonialism, racism, and democratic resistance. These are not isolated attacks. Together they constitute a coordinated war on the institutions that cultivate critical judgment, historical consciousness, and the civic capacities upon which democratic self-government depends.

These attacks are directed at education in its broadest sense. Public schools are stripped of their democratic mission and reduced to workforce training or ideological indoctrination. Universities are portrayed as centers of national betrayal. Independent journalism is recast as a political enemy rather than a public good. Culture itself becomes a battlefield in which cruelty is rewarded, ignorance celebrated, and critical thought equated with disloyalty. The objective is not simply to silence dissent but to destroy the moral, intellectual, and civic capacities that make democratic dissent, and democracy itself, possible.

This is why fascism should be understood both as a political regime and as a pedagogical one. It seeks to govern not only through laws, police powers, and executive authority but also through the production of consciousness itself. It wages war over memory, language, identity, and civic imagination because it understands that lasting domination depends upon shaping how people think before it controls how they act. Birthright citizenship is therefore one expression of a larger struggle over education, culture, memory, and civic imagination. Ultimately, the conflict is over what kind of people democracy requires and what kind of subjects fascism seeks to produce.

Manufacturing the Authoritarian Citizen.

Once democratic institutions have been weakened, authoritarian politics can turn to its central task: manufacturing the authoritarian citizen. The assault on birthright citizenship is only one front in this broader project. By dismantling the institutions that sustain democratic memory, critical judgment, and civic responsibility, Trumpism seeks to produce subjects who no longer question power, distinguish truth from propaganda, or imagine democracy as a shared public good. The goal is not simply to govern differently but to reshape the habits, identities, and desires upon which political life itself depends.

Trumpism has embraced this strategy with remarkable consistency. Under Trump’s second administration, the federal government has been weaponized against journalists who expose corruption and abuses of power. As The Guardian reported, federal agents raided the home of Washington Postreporter Hannah Natanson, confiscating her electronic devices in an extraordinary act of intimidation directed at investigative journalism. At the same time, the administration has dismantled longstanding protections for the press while deploying lawsuits and other legal mechanisms against major news organizations and investigative reporters whose work challenges executive power. The message is unmistakable: journalism that holds power accountable is no longer treated as a public service but as a political crime.

Trumpism has extended its assault on democratic culture into a systematic campaign against education. Public schools are increasingly prohibited from teaching the histories of slavery, colonialism, racial violence, and democratic struggle. Universities face political coercion, financial retaliation, and ideological surveillance if they refuse to conform to authoritarian demands. Faculty members are monitored, curricula rewritten, books removed from classrooms and libraries, and critical inquiry dismissed as indoctrination. Even leading universities such as Columbia, Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of California have too often capitulated to political intimidation. By yielding to threats from the Trump administration, they compromise their autonomy, erode academic freedom, and abandon their role as democratic public institutions. Such capitulations normalize authoritarian coercion while further weakening institutions that, despite their limits and exclusions, have historically cultivated critical thought, civic responsibility, and democratic agency.

These attacks are routinely justified as efforts to eliminate bias, restore patriotism, or protect children from ideas that challenge authoritarian myths, including honest accounts of Black freedom struggles, systemic racism, settler colonialism, and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. But such claims conceal a deeper political objective. Authoritarian regimes fear historical knowledge because history reveals that every system of domination has been challenged, resisted, and transformed. As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, history is not the unfolding of national myths but the record of unfinished struggles over freedom, equality, and belonging. Historical memory reminds us that democracy has always been won through collective struggle rather than bestowed from above. Rights are neither gifts nor privileges but political achievements that must continually be defended and expanded.

Culture itself has become one of the principal battlegrounds in this struggle. The digital platforms through which millions now encounter politics have become immense pedagogical machines. They do more than transmit information. They organize attention, shape emotional life, reward outrage, circulate conspiracy theories, amplify racial resentment, and normalize political  violence. As the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Reportdemonstrates, social media and video platforms have now surpassed television and traditional news organizations as the principal sources through which many people receive news. In these spaces, the struggle over democracy increasingly unfolds through algorithms that privilege spectacle over evidence, emotional manipulation over reasoned debate, and disinformation over informed judgment.

Taken together, these developments reveal a coherent political project aimed at remaking political common sense itself. It teaches people to admire cruelty as strength, celebrate ignorance as authenticity, dismiss historical memory as subversion, and accept constitutional rights as contingent upon race, loyalty, and political conformity. Before authoritarianism governs through repression, it educates people to desire the very forms of domination that will ultimately govern them.

The Constitutional Blueprint of the Fascist State.

History offers a sobering lesson. Fascist movements rarely begin by abolishing constitutions, suspending elections, or relying immediately on militarized repression. They often begin by redefining who belongs to the civic community and who does not. Before they eliminate rights, they first determine whose rights count. Citizenship becomes the decisive political threshold separating those entitled to legal protection from those who can be excluded, surveilled, detained, deported, or abandoned without moral consequence.

This is why the attack on birthright citizenship occupies such a central place in Trump’s political strategy. It establishes the governing principle upon which a new authoritarian order can be built. If citizenship is no longer guaranteed by the Constitution but becomes contingent upon ancestry, race, bloodline, or executive interpretation, then every democratic protection becomes vulnerable to political power. Rights no longer belong to citizens because they are constitutionally guaranteed; they belong only so long as the state decides that they do. In such a regime, rights cease to be universal constitutional protections and become political privileges dispensed by white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and ideological zealots who wield state power in the service of exclusion and domination.

Hannah Arendt argued that citizenship rests upon belonging to a political community—the indispensable condition for possessing rights at all. She famously described this as “the right to have rights” and “the right to belong to some kind of organized community.”  Reflecting on the catastrophe of European fascism, she warned that once individuals are stripped of political membership, they lose not merely legal protections but the public standing and institutional guarantees that make those protections meaningful. For Arendt, statelessness was more than the loss of nationality. It marked expulsion from the political community itself, reducing human beings to lives that could be managed, displaced, detained, or discarded with impunity.

Trumpism repackages this racist project in the language of legal restoration and border security. Its objective extends beyond border enforcement to the reconstruction of citizenship itself, transforming the Constitution from a guarantor of democratic equality into the machinery of racial domination. What is at stake is the replacement of democratic citizenship with an exclusionary conception of who counts as an American rooted in white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and an idealized myth of the nation’s past. Citizenship no longer embodies democratic equality; it becomes a weapon for sorting populations into those entitled to rights and those who can be surveilled, detained, deported, and abandoned. In Giorgio Agamben’s terms, this is the political logic that reduces human beings “to bare life,”  persons stripped of meaningful political standing and exposed to arbitrary state power. The historical record is unambiguous: such logic culminates in the camp, where law no longer restrains power but becomes the administrative machinery of exclusion, abandonment, and state terror.

This project cannot be separated from a broader politics of disposability. Once governments succeed in persuading citizens that some people do not truly belong, it becomes easier to normalize policies that would otherwise appear morally unthinkable. Families are separated. Refugees are labeled as enemies. Immigrants become invaders. Protesters become traitors. Journalists become enemies of the people. Political opponents become internal threats. Every expansion of exclusion widens the circle of those who can be denied protection while narrowing the meaning of democratic community itself.

History repeatedly demonstrates that authoritarian regimes consolidate power by transforming legal protections into political privileges. Equality before the law gives way to selective enforcement. Universal rights yield to arbitrary exceptions. Independent courts become instruments of executive power. Citizenship itself becomes contingent upon ideological loyalty and national conformity. The law no longer restrains power; it legitimates power by clothing repression in the language of legality. This is one of fascism’s enduring achievements: it seeks not simply to destroy law but to convert law into an apparatus of domination while preserving the appearance of constitutional order.

The constitutional stakes could not be higher. Every attack on birthright citizenship erodes the principle that all persons born under the Constitution possess equal standing before the law. Once that principle is abandoned, the Constitution no longer limits state power; it becomes a weapon through which authoritarian rule selectively distributes rights, recognition, and community. That is the constitutional logic of the fascist state.

Socialist Democracy or the Fascist State.

The assault on birthright citizenship reveals a truth that many defenders of democracy have been reluctant to confront. Trumpism is more than another conservative movement or an illiberal or authoritarian political formation. It is a fascist project that seeks to reconstruct the legal, cultural, and moral foundations of American society by redefining who counts as fully human, who counts as an American, and who possesses the full protections of democratic citizenship. The far-right offensive on citizenship is not peripheral to that project. It is its constitutional center.

Every fascist movement seeks to replace universal rights with selective privilege. It strips democracy of its egalitarian foundations while preserving the outward appearance of legality. Constitutions remain in place, elections continue to be held, courts still issue opinions, and legislatures still convene. Yet the substance of democracy disappears as executive power expands, dissent is criminalized, historical memory is erased, and citizenship itself becomes dependent upon race, nationalism, and political conformity. Democracy survives as political theater while authoritarian power increasingly governs everyday life through a mix of repression and a spectacularized culture of state violence.

This transformation does not occur through repression alone. It also depends upon a profound educational project. Authoritarianism must teach people to accept exclusion as virtue, cruelty as strength, inequality as natural, and obedience as patriotism. It wages war against history because history reminds us that no system of domination has ever been permanent. It wages war against education because critical thought threatens every regime that depends upon ignorance. And it wages war against citizenship because democratic citizenship embodies the radical principle that rights belong to persons by virtue of their humanity and constitutional equality rather than the whims of political rulers.

The struggle over birthright citizenship therefore reaches far beyond immigration policy or constitutional interpretation. It raises the defining political question of our time: Will democracy continue to rest upon the constitutional principle of universal citizenship, or will citizenship become a racial privilege administered by an authoritarian state? The answer to that question will determine not only who belongs to the nation but also whether the United States is becoming, or has already become, a neo-fascist society.

What is emerging under Trumpism is an authoritarian government that consolidates a fascist social order rooted in what I have elsewhere called gangster capitalism. It is a system in which unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power coexist with racialized disposability, patriarchal domination, ecological devastation, and the criminalization of democratic dissent. It is a machinery of organized misery built upon widening class divisions, racial and gender exclusions, permanent insecurity, and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a financial and corporate elite. State terrorism, unchecked executive power, the militarization of everyday life, endless wars abroad, and expanding forms of domestic repression are not accidental excesses of this system. They are among its governing principles.

The attack on birthright citizenship is one of the clearest expressions of this logic. It redraws the boundaries of belonging to determine who can be excluded, dispossessed, imprisoned, deported, silenced, or abandoned. Fascism has always understood that before it can govern through terror it must first educate people to accept terror as common sense, cruelty as civic virtue, and domination as the natural order of things. It wages war not only against democratic institutions but also against the ethical imagination, historical memory, and social solidarities that make resistance possible.

The greatest ideological triumph of neoliberalism has been persuading people that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. That fiction has become one of the principal obstacles to confronting contemporary fascism. A social order that celebrates billionaires while consigning millions to poverty, debt, racial violence, ecological catastrophe, permanent war, and the slow death of the social state cannot sustain democracy because it destroys the very conditions upon which democratic life depends.

Gangster capitalism does more than generate staggering concentrations of wealth and power. It produces the authoritarian desires, organized fears, racial resentments, and cultures of disposability upon which fascist politics thrives. We inhabit an increasingly delusional social order shaped by the pedagogical force of greed, dehumanization, precarity, corruption, and what the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “the black hole of cruelty.” Cruelty is no longer an aberration or moral failure. It has become a governing principle of gangster capitalism—a political and economic system that turns human beings into disposable objects, rewards domination over solidarity, and transforms violence into spectacle and public policy. The assault on citizenship is one expression of this logic, carrying forward imperial fantasies and a long history of racial terror that remain embedded in the structures of American capitalism.

As Nguyen observes:

“…this is a legacy that extends ‘from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples… to the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults.”

The struggle over citizenship cannot be separated from this legacy or from the economic and cultural order that profits from it. To confront fascism, therefore, requires more than defending existing democratic institutions. It demands dismantling the gangster capitalism that breeds state coercion, legitimates disposability, and reduces democracy to a hollow spectacle. The struggle before us is to refuse a system that equates freedom with markets, citizenship with exclusion, and profit with the highest expression of human value. It means building a democratic socialist future rooted in equality, shared responsibility, public goods, ecological justice, and the radical conviction that every life matters.

Against the machinery of gangster capitalism, fascist terror, permanent war, and state violence, democracy must be reclaimed as a way of life grounded in justice, solidarity, and shared power. The choice before us could not be clearer: either we organize collectively to build a society founded on equality, freedom, and democratic responsibility, or we surrender to a social order defined by permanent war, organized abandonment, state terror, and oligarchic rule. Under such conditions, democracy survives only as spectacle while fascism becomes the organizing logic of everyday life. History remains unfinished. Whether it moves toward justice or descends further into barbarism depends upon our willingness to imagine otherwise, organize collectively, overthrow gangster capitalism, and build a democratic socialist society in which freedom, equality, justice, and human dignity become the measure of politics itself.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

NICK ESTES
JULY 7, 2026

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land. But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism.

Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota. That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth-making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas.

Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025. The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative. That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

This version published on CounerPunch.org.

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ELLEN BROWN
June 26 2026

As Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, few are paying attention to a bill moving through Congress that could seriously impinge on our financial independence.

The Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, H.R. 4766, is slated to make privately issued stablecoins a major component of the U.S. monetary system. Supporters see stablecoins as a way to strengthen the dollar’s global role while creating a vast new market for U.S. Treasury securities. Critics see the rise of programmable private money that can be monitored, frozen, or restricted by its issuers. Banks fear the loss of the deposits that are essential to advancing affordable credit. What appears to be a debate about digital tokens has thus become a battle over the future of banking itself and finance.

Why Stablecoins Matter.

Stablecoins are privately issued digital tokens that can circulate on blockchain networks independently of the banking system. They are designed to maintain a stable value, typically one dollar per token. Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, whose values fluctuate wildly, stablecoins are usually backed by reserve assets such as cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.

Their growth has been explosive. The stablecoin market now measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to expand rapidly. Advocates see them as the next stage in the evolution of money: faster, cheaper, available around the clock, and capable of moving across borders without relying on traditional banking networks.

For users in countries suffering from inflation, currency controls, or banking instability, dollar-denominated stablecoins can function as digital dollar savings accounts. Residents of Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, and other countries may trust a Treasury-backed dollar token more than their own national currency. In some countries suffering from inflation, merchants quote prices in dollar stablecoins and accept them directly through mobile apps.

The Push from Cryptocurrency Advocates: Ending “Regulation by Enforcement”.

The stated goal of the CLARITY Act is to establish a statutory framework that clarifies whether digital assets are securities, commodities, or payment stablecoins. Before this legislation, regulators—primarily the SEC—often applied decades-old laws to modern blockchain technology. Because the rules weren’t explicitly written for crypto, companies would discover they were in violation only when they were served with a lawsuit or a fine.

The most prominent example is SEC vs. Ripple Labs. Ripple launched its XRP token in 2012 and operated for nearly a decade without specific guidance that its token was considered a security. In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple, alleging they had been selling unregistered securities for years. Ripple was forced into years of litigation and hundreds of millions in legal fees to determine if a rule applied to them retroactively.

The CLARITY Act, alongside the GENIUS Act (which focuses on stablecoins), represents a shift from “Regulation by Enforcement” to “Regulation by Guidance,” where firms have a clear rulebook to follow before they launch products rather than waiting for a subpoena to understand their legal status.

The Government’s Interest.

he push for passage of the Clarity Act has come not only from crypto advocates but from policymakers, because every stablecoin backed by Treasury securities creates another buyer for U.S. government debt. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has embraced stablecoins as a means of strengthening the dollar’s global role. The Treasury Department projects that the stablecoin market could eventually reach trillions of dollars. If that happens, stablecoin issuers could become some of the largest buyers of Treasury bills in the world, helping to replace losses from those central banks that have been “de-dollarizing” by selling their reserves of U.S. debt.

Another advantage of stablecoins from the government’s perspective is their ability to reassert U.S. monetary sovereignty over the eurodollar market — the massive, offshore market where dollars are created through bank lending without direct oversight from the Fed. This is a complicated subject for a later article, but the bottom line is that by shifting global demand from uncollateralized eurodollar bank promises to tokens backed 1 to 1 by U.S. Treasuries, stablecoins effectively force privately-issued offshore dollars back onto the U.S. government’s balance sheet.

Promise or Threat? 

Those are some of the upsides, but stablecoins are not neutral payment tokens. Part 3 of this series discussed Project Hamilton, which showed what a public digital dollar could look like — fast, privacy-protected and democratic. The stablecoin system rising in its place looks very different. It is private, not public; programmable, not cash-like; surveilled, not anonymous.

Every stablecoin transaction is permanently recorded on a public blockchain. Tokens can be frozen, seized, or destroyed. Users can be blocked. Circle (USDC) maintains a blacklist function and has frozen addresses at the request of law enforcement or at its own discretion. Tether (USDT) has frozen billions of dollars’ worth of tokens across thousands of addresses. PayPal’s PYUSD includes explicit “freeze” and “wipe” functions in its smart-contract code.

This is the sort of “programmability” that CBDC critics fear – the ability to embed code into the money itself, causing it to execute transactions automatically when specific conditions are met. In fact, stablecoins could potentially be more invasive than a CBDC, since private issuers are not subject to the constitutional obligations imposed on the U.S. government by the 4^th and 5^th Amendments. In a June 23, 2026 podcast, Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, called stablecoins “much more terrifying than CBDCs because you have complete non-accountability.” Private stablecoins operate via private contracts and “terms of service” that often bypass traditional due process. They can embed algorithmic terms that are enforced automatically, without recourse to a court or even a human teller.

A Digital Gold Mine for Issuers.

Under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act), passed in July 2025, stablecoins must be backed 1 to 1 with dollar collateral. That collateral can take various forms, but stablecoin issuers typically maintain their reserves in highly liquid, short-term instruments—primarily 3-month U.S. Treasury Bills—to ensure they can satisfy redemptions quickly. As of June 18, 2026, the 3-month Treasury yield is 3.83% (down from 5%+ in 2024-25).

Stablecoin issuers make huge profits under this arrangement. The issuer sells stablecoins, uses the proceeds to buy Treasuries, and keeps the interest. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, has achieved a market cap of $120 billion with a staff of only about 50 employees. It reported a record-breaking net profit of $6.2 billion for the full year of 2023, and quarterly profits reaching $4.52 billion in Q1 2024 alone. A significant portion of this income is derived from its massive holdings of U.S. Treasuries, estimated at over $100 billion.

Particularly controversial are the stablecoin and crypto businesses of the president’s own family, and the potential conflicts of interestinvolved.

Who Should Receive the Interest – Private Middlemen or the Public?

Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett proposes a different model. He suggests that TreasuryDirect accounts could function as digital wallets, allowing individuals to hold Treasury-backed digital dollars directly and receive the Treasury yield themselves rather than through private intermediaries.

It is a promising idea, but it would require major changes to the existing financial architecture to preserve the credit system now managed by the banks. For more on Prof. Hockett’s proposals, see Digital Greenbacks: A Sequenced ‘Treasury Direct’ and ‘Fed Wallet’ Plan for the Democratic Digital Dollar and The Citizens’ Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Finance.

The Issue of Yield and Deposit Flight.

This is also the major concern of the banking establishment with the pending Clarity Act. A provision allowing stablecoin issuers to pay their customers “rewards,” considered the equivalent of yield or interest, could suck away their deposit base. Issuers collecting nearly 4% interest on their Treasuries could pay rewards of 2% or 3% to investors and easily outcompete banks paying 0.1 or 0.2 percent on deposits. Banking-industry estimates of potential deposit flight into stablecoin platforms range from $65 billion to over $1 trillion, with some analysts warning that in a fully developed stablecoin system, as much as $6 trillion could migrate out of the banking system.

But wait: if banks can create deposits on their books just by making loans, as the Bank of England has confirmed, why are deposits so important to them?

This is another complicated subject for a follow-up article, but the bottom line is that while a bank can create deposits, it cannot create the “reserves” necessary to transfer the loaned funds out of the bank. Deposits created when a bank makes a loan are a liability of the bank – its promise to pay on demand. What it pays with are reserves, which only the central bank can issue – either as vault cash (coins and dollar bills) or as digital reserves held in a “master account” at the Fed. The reserves are the payment rails for transferring deposits, and the cheapest way for banks to get them is through deposits transferred from other banks.

Deposits are thus considered the lifeblood of banks, and we need banks for our credit requirements. Stablecoin issuers don’t create new dollars or extend credit. They just tokenize existing dollars drawn from chartered banks, invest them in government securities, and keep the interest. Banks are the only institutions that create credit for the real economy.

If deposits leave the banking system, lending capacity shrinks; and the most vulnerable institutions are the community banks that extend credit to local businesses. Megabanks have other ways to acquire cheap reserves, including the repo market and the Fed discount window. Community banks rely heavily on incoming deposits to provide the reserves to move their loans, and they cannot compete with stablecoins in attracting deposits because they have substantially higher costs than issuers working with algorithms in the cloud.

Why We Need the Community Banks That Stablecoins Could Undermine.

Richard Werner, Prof. of Economics at the University of Winchester in the UK, argues that community banks are particularly important for economic growth. Large banks prefer large deals with large customers. A banker can spend time arranging a billion dollar transaction for a hedge fund or private equity firm, or spend the same time processing dozens of small loans to local businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses today account for the majority of jobs; and without community banks, they often struggle to get the financing to adopt new technologies and expand production.

Werner points to the German model, where small businesses typically work with local community banks, cooperative banks, and savings banks that lend only within their local areas. Because the bank and its customers share the same economic fortunes, the banks have an incentive to support local productive enterprises. When a business identifies a promising investment opportunity, it can present its plan to a local bank that already knows the company and understands the local economy. Funding decisions can sometimes be made within days, allowing firms to adopt new technologies quickly and remain globally competitive.

The result, he says, is visible in Germany’s remarkable number of “hidden champions”—small and medium-sized firms that nevertheless rank among the top companies in the world within their specialized market niches. Germany’s success, Werner argues, is closely tied to the fact that roughly 80 percent of German banks are small local institutions that lend locally.

Werner extends the same argument to China. After coming to power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping sought to improve economic performance by decentralizing credit allocation. Rather than relying on a handful of central planners to determine where financing should go, China created thousands of local banks, village banks, cooperative banks, and regional institutions. The result was a vast network of local loan officers making lending decisions based on local knowledge. Werner contrasts “five central bankers” making decisions with “five million loan officers” evaluating opportunities throughout the country. He argues that this decentralized approach played a crucial role in China’s sustained high growth and poverty reduction over the following four decades.

The same has been true in the United States, which had a record 30,456 banks in 1921. Today, however, that number has shrunk to only 9,082 insured financial institutions (banks and credit unions). Small banks have had to merge with much larger banks to stay solvent, largely due to higher regulatory costs and the competitive pressure of the megabanks.

Werner observes that bank size also affects where credit is directed. A banking sector dominated by a few large institutions tends to channel credit toward financial speculation and large corporate borrowers. A banking system composed of many small local banks tends to channel newly created money toward productive local enterprises. When credit goes into new technologies, equipment, and productive capacity, the result is to increase output, employment, and sustainable economic growth without triggering inflation.

Werner concludes that if governments want stronger productivity growth, more small-business formation, greater regional prosperity, and less inequality, they need to encourage the creation of local community banks and adopt a lighter regulatory regime for smaller institutions.

Productivity and the Burgeoning Federal Debt.

Economic growth is also particularly important for dealing with the federal debt. Stablecoins may help finance the debt, but they do not shrink it. They just fill some of the gap left by the People’s Bank of China and other central banks that have been selling U.S. Treasuries. The unsustainable $1.2 trillion interest tab must still be paid and continues on its exponential upward growth trajectory.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. can “grow our way out of the debt” by increasing production and expanding the economy faster than the debt grows. President Trump has similarly argued that economic growth can reduce the relative burden of the national debt, much as occurred after World War II.

The federal debt exceeded 100% of GDP at the end of the war. But the debt burden gradually declined as the economy expanded faster than the debt, shrinking the debt-to-GDP ratio. And for that sort of growth in today’s economy, preserving the viability of community banks is essential.

Currency Backed by Debt or Productivity?

As artificial intelligence and automation replace jobs while dramatically increasing productive capacity, however, policymakers may one day question whether money must be issued against debt at all – or whether some portion of it could be issued directly against the productive capacity of the economy itself.

That is not a new idea. In fact it represents a return to our revolutionary roots. It was how the American colonists broke free of the “British system” that exploited the colonies for the production of commodities. Rather than relying on foreign currencies, the American colonial governments paid for goods and services with paper scrip they issued themselves. When the king banned that practice, the colonists rebelled – and they won.

Abraham Lincoln used the same funding mechanism to avoid usurious interest rates from British-backed banks that would have re-colonized the States by debt. He paid for the Civil War effort and major national infrastructure with government-issued Greenbacks (U.S. Notes).

When these government notes exceeded the production of goods and services, the supply and demand curve was skewed toward price inflation. But in a world of AI abundance, the curve will tilt the other way – toward too little money chasing too many goods and services. In an economy of that sort of unprecedented productivity, the government will need to issue new money just to balance the scales. And this money will need to be paid to the consumers who will buy the products, not only to close the wealth gap but to provide the demand to absorb the hyper-abundant supply.

Thus this series comes full circle, to the need for a “universal high income” or “sovereign wealth dividend” to solve an AI-induced unemployment crisis – and for a government-issued digital currency to fund it, built on the cash-like, privacy-protected model of Project Hamilton and the ECASH Act.

Be sure to check Ellen Brown’s earlier posts here on the AI Abundance Paradigm.

First published on Scheerpost.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
JUNE 19, 2026

You can’t have capitalism without racism.

–Malcolm X

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.

Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not simply on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources, all sustained by an authoritarian culture animated by white supremacy, ultranationalism, and the mobilizing passions of fascist politics, especially in the age of Trump.  As Dan Dinello argues, Musk has become an “avatar of chaos, cruelty, and death.” The description is difficult to dismiss. How else are we to understand his role as Trump’s chief enforcer?

 In this case, the world’s richest man played a crucial role in closing and slashing aid for the U.S. humanitarian assistance agency (USAID). To be sure, USAID embodied the contradictions of American power. While it funded vital global health and humanitarian programs, it also functioned as an instrument of U.S. soft power, advancing development agendas and political arrangements often aligned with American geopolitical and economic interests. Its history reminds us that humanitarianism under capitalism has frequently been entangled with empire, shaped as much by the imperatives of power and profit as by the demands of justice and human need. Yet acknowledging these contradictions does not diminish the catastrophic consequences of dismantling the agency. The consequences have been almost unimaginable. Becky Ferreira states that:

“According to monitoring models, the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, 500,000 of which are children, while the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026….[In addition], after USAID closed, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of conflict, and the lethality of conflict, in nearly a thousand administrative regions across Africa.”

Yet the mythology surrounding Musk erases these social foundations. The self-made billionaire is transformed into a heroic figure, while the workers, public investments, and democratic institutions that made his fortune possible disappear from view. Jenni Krithara is right in stating that:

“Elon Musk has become a symbol of success! In reality, however, he is nothing more than a symbol of inequality and exploitation. No billionaire created the wealth he possesses alone. Behind every corporate empire are workers, public infrastructure, universities, research programs, natural resources and entire societies.”

At the same time, Musk’s ascent reveals the power of a culture and public pedagogy that normalizes and celebrates massive inequities in wealth and power. In a society saturated by myths of entrepreneurial genius and limitless success, extreme concentrations of wealth and power are legitimated as objects of admiration rather than outrage. The scandal is not simply that one person can possess more wealth than entire nations while millions struggle to survive and are relegated to life-threatening poverty and lack of adequate health care.

As Thomas Piketty makes clear in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, people are taught to view the grotesque imbalance and staggering levels of inequality and power as natural, inevitable, and even desirable. At work here is a politics that normalizes economic injustice, while depoliticizing any attempt to analyze it and hold a system and individuals responsible for propagating it. It is hardly surprising that Musk regards empathy as a threat to the authoritarian ethic of white Christian nationalism and treats free speech as a disposable principle, useful only when it serves the interests of power.

Under these conditions, inequality becomes a spectacle sustained by a lethal public pedagogy in which exploitation is rebranded as achievement and democracy itself is endangered as economic power increasingly shapes politics, public discourse, and everyday life. The media’s celebration of Musk’s wealth is not innocent reportage. It teaches people to admire concentrations of wealth that earlier generations would have regarded as obscene. It transforms plutocracy into aspiration and dispossession into a private failing rather than a public injustice. Under such conditions, private issues rooted in a celebrity discourse are severed from the broader systems of power and inequality that produce them. To understand Musk’s appeal, however, requires examining the spectacle through which his power is organized and legitimized.

Spectacle in the age of Musk no longer functions simply as distraction. It has become a mode of governance. Musk understands that power today depends less upon persuading people than upon occupying the circuits of attention through which people experience reality itself. The billionaire is no longer merely an owner of capital. He is an engineer of attention, a curator of affect, and an architect of the public imagination.

What Debord once called the society of the spectacle has entered a new phase. Spectacle is no longer confined to television screens, political rallies, or advertising campaigns. It is now embedded in algorithms that organize desire, shape perception, and reward outrage. In Musk’s universe, visibility itself becomes power. Every provocation, conspiracy theory, racist insinuation, or theatrical gesture feeds an economy of attention in which shock displaces thought and notoriety becomes indistinguishable from authority.

The spectacle no longer hides domination. It glamorizes it. Wealth appears as genius, cruelty as authenticity, and the dismantling of democratic institutions as evidence of courage. Politics becomes performance while the public sphere collapses into a marketplace of emotions organized around fear, resentment, and manufactured grievance.

Yet Musk’s wealth is inseparable from the politics it enables. Economic power at this scale does not merely influence public life; it reshapes the very conditions under which democracy can survive. Musk’s politics intensify these dangers.He has used his immense wealth and control over digital platforms to amplify conspiracy theories, attack democratic institutions, and lend support to far-right and nationalist movements in the United States and abroad. He has embraced the language of racial panic, amplified antisemitic and white nationalist narratives, promoted accounts trafficking in racist conspiracy theories, and used X to normalize forms of hatred once relegated to the political margins. Wealth at this scale is not simply economic. It is political, cultural, and pedagogical. It shapes public consciousness while insulating itself from democratic accountability.

Musk represents something historically new: the fusion of celebrity culture, algorithmic power, and authoritarian politics into a single figure whose influence extends across nations and institutions. He is not simply a capitalist with political opinions. He is a spectacle unto himself, a brand organized around excess, provocation, and the performance of transgression. The appeal of such figures cannot be understood through economics alone. It must also be understood aesthetically.

Susan Sontag once argued that fascist aesthetics transforms politics into an intoxicating drama of style, ritual, and emotional intensity. The attraction lies less in ideas than in sensations: the thrill of power, the seduction of force, the glamour of transgression. Musk updates this tradition for the digital age. He stages himself as the outlaw billionaire, the rebellious genius unconstrained by norms, laws, or democratic accountability. What he offers his followers is not merely a politics but an affective experience: the pleasure of belonging to a movement that mistakes cruelty for courage and domination for freedom.

The spectacle’s greatest deception is that it draws attention to Musk the personality while obscuring Musk the architect of a new political economy. Behind the oscillating images of genius and martyr lies a project aimed not merely at dismantling parts of the public sphere but at reorganizing them around private power—integrating his companies into state and military infrastructures, weakening the institutions charged with regulating them, and converting public resources into engines of oligarchic wealth and influence.

Musk’s rise is not a triumph of individual initiative or entrepreneurial genius. It is the product of a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labor, and technological infrastructures are privatized and redirected toward the enrichment of a tiny oligarchic elite. He despises the social contract because it places obligations on wealth and imposes democratic limits on power. As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff note in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, in its place, Musk advances a far-right vision that fuses state power with technological control, elevates algorithmic governance over democratic accountability, and normalizes racialized exclusion as a principle of social order. Musk’s political project promises freedom while producing new forms of dependence, claiming to democratize technology even as it concentrates unprecedented power in private hands.

Will Bunch is right in stating that Musk has transformed X into a global amplifier for racial resentment and white nationalist politics. Under the guise of defending “free speech,” he has repeatedly elevated far-right influencers, reinstated accounts banned for hate speech, and promoted narratives that depict immigrants and racial minorities as existential threats to Western civilization. Just before the Belfast anti-immigrant riots in 2026, Musk amplified calls by the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson for people to “hit the streets,” adding his own exhortation: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” The consequences were immediate and terrifying: attacks on immigrant communities, immigrant addresses posted online and  homes set ablaze, and an online culture of racial hatred legitimated and endorsed by the world’s richest man.

Zadie Smith has observed that the propaganda machinery of fascism once relied on posters, radios, and megaphones, crude instruments compared to what Elon Musk now commands. The comparison is instructive. The danger today lies not simply in extremist messages but in the infrastructures that circulate them. Algorithms reward outrage, synchronize emotions, and impose forms of conformity that often operate invisibly. The propaganda machine no longer shouts at citizens from a distance. It lives in their pockets, curates their desires, and quietly organizes their fears.

Musk presides over precisely such a machinery. X functions not simply as a platform for communication but as an apparatus for manufacturing attention, resentment, and ideological belonging. The result is a culture in which people increasingly surrender the burdens of judgment and critical thought to the emotional rhythms of the feed. Spectacle becomes a form of social organization, teaching individuals to react rather than reflect and to experience political life as an endless theater of outrage and enemies.

X is no longer merely a communication network. It has become an infrastructure of authoritarian politics, normalizing racism, rewarding outrage, and converting white grievance into a global spectacle of resentment and cruelty. The richest man on the planet has become one of the chief architects of a politics of white victimhood, one in which white people are perpetually under siege by dangerous invaders who happen to be Black, Brown, and immigrants. How else to explain his barrage of racist posts and conspiratorial rhetoric, along with his support for far-right anti-immigrant movements such as Restore Britain?

X has become one of the most powerful pedagogical apparatuses of the digital age, teaching millions to equate cruelty with courage, racial hierarchy with common sense, and hatred with truth. What is marketed as free speech increasingly operates as a machinery of authoritarian desire that erodes the civic and ethical foundations of democratic life. The symbolism surrounding Musk has become increasingly ominous. After making a gesture at a political rally that was widely condemned as echoing a Nazi salute, Musk responded to the ensuing criticism with mockery rather than reflection. The episode was revealing because it exposed an authoritarian politics in which provocation becomes spectacle, cruelty becomes a public virtue, and historical amnesia becomes a precondition for making fascist ideas appear ordinary, even commonsensical. Fascism rarely begins with concentration camps or military coups. It begins with the normalization of contempt, the trivialization of violence, and the celebration of power unmoored from ethical responsibility.

Musk’s growing influence has become a warning sign of a new form of oligarchic rule in which immense wealth, technological power, and political influence converge to hollow out democratic life from within. The danger lies not only in his embrace of far-right movements and authoritarian figures abroad, but in the extraordinary capacity of a single billionaire to distort public debate, destabilize democratic institutions, and shape political life across national borders. Musk is not the real issue. He is the symptom. The larger question is whether any vestige of democracy can survive when private wealth acquires such immense power over the institutions and cultures that sustain public life.

The spectacle of the world’s richest man accumulating unimaginable wealth while endorsing politics that deepen social divisions and undermine democratic norms exposes the moral bankruptcy of a gangster capitalism that rewards accumulation while abandoning social responsibility. Trillionaire politics is not simply the concentration of wealth. It is the concentration of power, influence, and the capacity to shape the stories societies tell about themselves.

The gravest danger is not Musk himself but the culture that celebrates him. Citizens are increasingly schooled to applaud the very forces that diminish their agency and erode their social protections. They are encouraged to admire those who dominate them, to mistake cruelty for strength, and to equate democracy with the freedom of billionaires to exercise unchecked power. Trillionaire politics is the end point of a society inhabited by what might be called the walking dead: citizens politically numbed and morally anesthetized, taught to applaud their own dispossession, embrace loneliness as freedom, and accept misery as the price of greatness.

The first trillionaire is not a monument to human achievement. He is an indictment of a corrupt social order that mistakes accumulation for greatness, toxic masculinity for leadership, and domination for success.  Is it any wonder that Musk views empathy as a weakness and free speech as a disposable principle? Both stand in the way of the politics of cruelty, white nationalism, and unchecked power he increasingly champions.

Musk is the product of a culture that worships wealth, mistakes spectacle for truth, and increasingly confuses domination with freedom. He represents the emergence of a new authoritarian formation in which capitalism, digital technologies, and fascist sensibilities converge in unprecedented ways. He is the avatar of a techno-fascist order, an updated form of neoliberal gangster capitalism in which state power, digital technologies, and oligarchic wealth converge to erode democratic institutions and remake society in the interests of a predatory elite.

The danger he poses lies not only in the policies he supports or the movements he amplifies. It lies in the world he helps create: a world in which algorithms replace judgment, cruelty becomes entertainment, racism is repackaged as realism, and democracy is hollowed out by spectacles of resentment and manufactured consent.

If Trump embodies the theatrical politics of authoritarianism, Musk represents its technological future. He is the engineer of a new machinery of spectacle, one capable of shaping consciousness on a planetary scale. In this sense, Musk is not simply the world’s richest man. He is among the most powerful public pedagogues of the twenty-first century, educating millions in the pleasures of unfreedom and the aesthetics of authoritarian desire.

Musk is not an exception to our time. He is the most visible symptom of a society in which cruelty is celebrated as strength, democracy is hollowed out by oligarchic power, and freedom is reduced to the prerogatives of the rich. This is more than a failed society. It is capitalism stripped of its myths and revealed in all of its gangster, authoritarian, and fascist impulses.

First Published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

The retreat into satirical attacks on Trump and his supporters fuels the solidification of fascism.

CHRIS HEDGES
JUN 19, 2026

The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hypermasculinity, are ripe for satire. It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile. But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core. It ignores the real centers of power. It does not engender resistance. It engenders disdain and cynicism. It furthers the social and political divide between us, the “enlightened” and “educated” elite, and them, the despised and ridiculed “basket of deplorables.”

There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.

Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.

“Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths,” writes Nate Bear. “From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.”

Elitist satire — whether on “Saturday Night Live” or other late-night shows — punches down. It seduces liberals into believing that the thugs and grifters who have taken power are too stupid and too inept to last. There are millions of political exiles who understand how this self-delusion, this failure to take fascists seriously, is the great facilitator of fascism. They too once dismissed the goons who now run their countries as a joke.

The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, driven into exile by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in her book “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” lays out the familiar pattern:

“It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritisation of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.”

As Temelkuran warns, Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, “…soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line, ‘The institutions will hold.’ They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon, they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America.”

Comedians such as Kimmel function like the cabaret star, Fritz Grünbaum, who during Nazism, once quipped when the power went out during a performance: “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.” Grünbaum would eventually find himself in the Dachau concentration camp — along with other actors, performers and satirists — where he died of tuberculosis.

The Nazis moved swiftly to close the cabarets — along with all institutions that defied Nazi control — and replaced them with mindless variety shows. They hated mockery as much as Trump, who after Stephen Colbert’s final show, gloated that Colbert was “finished” and called him a “total jerk.” Trump also shared an AI-generated video of himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster, slamming down the lid and dancing. Trump wrote that Colbert’s exit was the “beginning of the end” for other late night hosts.

Jokes about dictators in totalitarian regimes are a criminal offense. Satire is permissible in fascist states only when employed to mock political opponents and demonized minorities. It is not permissible when directed at centers of power. As Gramsci pointed out, the consolidation of power by fascists requires them to win the “cultural battle,” by dominating the public discourse, policing language — including satire — and redefining social, cultural and political norms.

Elitist satire is a pressure-release valve. But because it refuses to confront the roots of our political, social and cultural degeneration — which preceded the Trump presidency — it solidifies the fascist project it seeks to destroy. It reduces the catastrophe to the clown show around Trump: the sycophantic cabinet secretaries, ICE Barbie or Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bizarre war on medical science. It does not address our failed democratic institutions — the academy, elections, courts, Congress, or the media. It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations that have slashed regulation, imposed austerity and deindustrialization and distorted the economic and political system to facilitate the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history. It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.

This elitist satire simplifies the complex social, economic and political forces we must dismantle. It ignores or pays deference to the subterranean forces that created Trump. Gramsci’s “passionate sarcasm” is too revolutionary and too truthful to be broadcast on media conglomerates such as CBS.

“Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in “Humor and Faith.” “Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.”

“There is no laughter in the holy of holies,” Niebuhr continued. “There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.”

When satire is the end point, it is deleterious. It masks what is coming. It must be, as Niebuhr pointed out, the entry point. It must push us, as Gramsci understood, into hard analysis and the organization of mass movements that alone can save us from tyranny. It must cease to play into the hands of a polarized nation, one where opposing factions write each other off as irredeemable. It must acknowledge that given the gravity before us, laughter is not enough.

Originally published on The Chris Hedges Report.

BG image “Spin Control” by Alan Nafzger

Shared via Creative Commons.