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.

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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.

HENRY GIROUX

FEBRUARY 17, 2025

Neoliberalism’s Embrace of Cruelty and Its Assault on Social Bonds

Neoliberalism has always been more than an economic project; it is a political and educational weapon designed to erode social solidarity and dismantle the foundations of democracy. It does not merely defund public institutions like healthcare, education, and welfare—it delegitimizes them, recasting them as burdens rather than essential public goods.

As a pedagogical and ideological assault, neoliberalism has championed unfettered greed, unchecked self-interest, and a notion of government devoid of any sense of social responsibility.  It has conditioned people to see mutual care as weakness and competition as the only natural order of society. When individuals are forced into relentless competition for survival, they lose any sense of shared responsibility, making them more susceptible to the cruelty that defines contemporary politics. Neoliberalism is a precursor to fascism, especially at a time when it can no longer defend itself as a force for improving the quality of life. In fact, its promotion of extreme inequality, the concentration of power in few hands, and its view of democracy as a poisonous vehicle for equality and inclusion creates the conditions for both extreme violence and cruelty.

To understand fascist politics, we must reckon with its most visceral expression—a culture of cruelty. This cruelty is not an abstraction; it is inscribed on bodies and minds, destroying lives with calculated precision. As Brad Evansreminds us, violence must never be studied in an “objective and unimpassioned way,” for it demands a reckoning that is both ethical and political. A culture of cruelty exposes not only how systemic injustice is endured but also how the machinery of power turns the so-called American Dream into a dystopian ordeal, where millions struggle simply to survive.

At its core, this culture strips working people, the poor, Black and Brown communities, and the marginalized of dignity, hope, and the right to a decent life. Though cruelty has long been woven into the fabric of American history, Trump’s second administration will wield it as an instrument of governance—hollowing out social bonds, eroding moral compassion, and suffocating collective resistance. In its place, it will stage an endless array of brutal spectacles, a politics of suffering in which fear and violence are both the means and the message.

Trumpism is not an aberration but the logical extension of a neoliberal system that thrives on hierarchy, disposability, and fear. The destruction of public goods accelerates the emergence of what Etienne Balibar calls “the transition from the social state to the penal state”—where repression replaces care, and policing takes the place of welfare. The gutting of federal aid programs, the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and the defunding of institutions that support the most vulnerable are not incidental; they are central to the neoliberal strategy of dispossession. In the age of Trump, cruelty becomes an organizing principle of violence as is evident in homegrown notions of fascism that define citizenship in racist inclusive terms for white Christians only, sanctions genocide in Gaza, promotes mass poverty, and supports the ecological destruction of the planet. What we are witnessing as Pankaj Mishra notes is the emergence of a culture convulsed in hatred and rancor matched by an ongoing process of dehumanization and a “retreat into grandiose fantasies of omnipotence.”  Trump’s presence in American politics appears as the current endpoint in which hate, bigotry, and sanctioned ruthlessness “have reached a new peak of ferocity.”

Trump’s upcoming budget will epitomize this cruelty. There is no question it will slash funding for “health care via the Medicaid program and reduce access to food assistance via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).” Moreover, there will be further cuts to Medicaid, low-income housing, job training, and safety net programs for children to fund $4.5 million tax breaks for billionaires and the largest military buildup since the 1980s. As Robert Reich has pointed out, this is not a question of fiscal responsibility but of priorities: the poor and working class are sacrificed on the altar of militarism and corporate welfare. The ideology of hardness, as Adam Serwer notes, runs through American culture like an electric current, ensuring that suffering is not just tolerated but celebrated. Under the grip of gangster capitalism, especially as Trump’s second administration unfolds, the essence of politics is not merely diminished but obliterated, erasing the fundamental possibility of human community and the emancipatory power of the social, public goods, and the global commons.

Trumpism and the Politicization of Cruelty.

Trumpism is not simply a reaction to neoliberal decay; it is the explicit performance of cruelty as an ideological principle. Unlike past presidents who, however flawed, at least feigned a commitment to democratic ideals, Trump embraces a politics of humiliation and vengeance. In a series of actions emblematic of authoritarian retribution, Trump has systematically targeted individuals he perceives as adversaries, employing state mechanisms to exact his personal vengeance. Notably, he revoked the security clearances of former President Joe Biden, Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Alvin L Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, both of whom prosecuted him. Further intensifying this campaign of fear, terror, and intimidation, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, under Trump’s directive, stripped retired General Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci, among others,  of their security detail and clearance, actions that not only humiliate but also endanger those who have previously challenged or criticized the administration. There is no appeal to our better moral and democratic ideals here. This approach to governance thrives on retribution, weaponizing state power to instill fear, suppress dissent, and erode democratic principles.. This is the ideology of fascist barbarism, with its knee-jerk contempt for “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”

The death of moral authority in politics breeds a climate of cruelty in which the unimaginable is normalized. For instance, the alleged helping hand of the U.S. has now been turned into a brutal fist, accompanied by the sneers of billionaire techno zombies, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, who endorse an anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments. How else to explain Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), leading to the suspension of essential services, including HIV treatment in Uganda and cholera prevention in Bangladesh, exacerbating global health crises? How else to explain Trump pushing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza in order to build beachfront property along with  his intensified efforts to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, planning mass deportations on a scale unprecedented in modern American history.

Furthermore, the administration has aggressively targeted sanctuary cities—jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement—by threatening to withhold federal funding and prosecute local officials who uphold sanctuary policies. These measures not only undermine public safety and erode trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement, but they make clear a governance style deeply rooted in vindictiveness, leveraging the apparatus of the state to intimidate and punish, thereby eroding democratic norms and fostering a climate of fear.

For Trump, governance has never been about serving the public but about wielding power as a cudgel against the weak, His rallies have always embodied a theater of cruelty and spectacle that encouraged his supporters to find joy in the suffering of others. His celebration of violence as a legitimate tool of political power is thoroughly documented.  Whether mocking a disabled reporter, humiliating women, referring to undocumented immigrants as vermin, or encouraging police brutality, Trump has a long history of cultivating cruelty not as an unfortunate byproduct but as the very glue that held his movement together. In this worldview, empathy is weakness, and domination is strength.

Trump has fully embraced the logic of state-sponsored violence and weaponized governance, ensuring that social abandonment and the politics of disposability and extermination is not just a byproduct of neoliberal policy but a core feature of state ideology. This orchestrated form of domestic terrorism targets marginalized communities and those courageous enough to hold power accountable, waging an unrelenting war against advocates of justice, equality, and freedom. America is at war with itself.

Manufactured Precarity and the Weaponization of Resentment.

The devastation wrought by neoliberal fascism creates widespread precarity, forcing people into conditions of perpetual insecurity. When social safety nets are dismantled and economic mobility is stalled, individuals become more desperate for stability, making them prime targets for right-wing demagogues who offer scapegoats rather than solutions. Trumpism exploits this desperation by redirecting economic anxiety toward manufactured enemies—immigrants, welfare recipients, transgender individuals, Black and Brown people, and marginalized communities—rather than toward the corporate and political elites responsible for social decline.

Central to the weaponization of resentment is the takeover of those old and new cultural apparatuses that shape mass consciousness, individual and collective agency, and social values. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a mass produced language of contempt for the vulnerable, poor, and others considered unworthy. A constant torrent of hate and bigotry now spreads with tsunami force through podcasts, corporate controlled media, and right wing platforms,  all of which legitimate an ideology of hardness, cruelty, and lies, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action. As I have said elsewhere, “Algorithmic authoritarianism and neoliberalism’s ‘disimagination machines’ have gutted the public sphere, eroding critical thought with conformity and turning truth into the enemy of politics and everyday life. Historical consciousness is now deemed as dangerous, and dissent is branded as treason.” Matters of life, death, and politics now converge in a MAGA party shaped by asocial and ocular order marked by a militaristic and misogynistic notion of masculinity, the celebration of profit over human needs, and an addiction to violence. Shared values and truths have given way to political corruption and the allure of escape from moral responsibility.

Trump and his corporate sycophants are erecting a vast cultural machinery designed to mold individuals into subjects fit for authoritarian rule. This is a subject governed by fear, stripped of agency, and molded into the shape of blind devotion—a body surrendered to the iron grip of the strongman; a mind seduced by the narcotic pull of certainty.

Ensnared in a culture of ignorance, they drift in the fog of anti-intellectualism, where thinking is neither required nor desired. Difference becomes anathema—the Other—an enemy, a poison to be eliminated. They are prisoners of language, trapped within what Zadie Smith calls autoimprisonment, where words do not liberate but constrict, where thought itself is reduced to the blinding poison of manufactured ignorance and consent. Their world flattens into crude binaries—good and evil, us and them, purity and contamination. Complexity is the first casualty, sacrificed on the altar of simplicity, where nuance is a threat and history is rewritten to serve power. This is not merely a political issue; it is existential. It is the slow, methodical erasure of the ability to question, to dissent, to see beyond the walls built around them. It is fascism’s most insidious triumph: not just the crushing of resistance, but the engineering of subjects who no longer know they should resist at all.

Trump’s “rancid and irredeemable character” now washes over America in pandemic-like fashion, weakening the body politic and degrading the substance of language itself. His ruthless attack on transgender athletes, his claim that the collision of an Army helicopter with a commercial airliner was the result of “the Federal Aviation Authority… hiring disabled people as air traffic controllers—saying they suffered from ‘intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism” and his false claim that government agencies were funding “transgender comic books” and “sex changes” in foreign countries do more than legitimate toxic policy changes. What is in fact at work here is an ideological crusade designed to reinforce white supremacist and patriarchal hierarchies. Balibar describes this as the “preventive counterrevolution”—a strategy where extreme violence and mass insecurity are systematically used to prevent collective movements of emancipation.

From Neoliberal Decay to Fascist Restoration.

Neoliberalism does not simply fail; it creates the conditions for authoritarian restoration. As public goods are gutted and civic life is eroded, the only function left for the state is repression. This is why the rise of Trumpism has coincided with an expansion of the police state, the criminalization of protest, and the increasing use of the judiciary as a tool for political warfare. The collapse of the social leaves a vacuum, and that vacuum is filled by the authoritarian impulse to restore order through force.

One of the defining features of authoritarian rule is the alignment of the state with extralegal violence. Under the first Trump administration, we saw the embrace of white supremacist militias, the incitement of political violence, and the normalization of attacks on journalists, educators, and activists. These tactics are not aberrations; they are hallmarks of a system in transition—from neoliberal disorder to fascist consolidation. Balibar’s warning that globalization has divided the world into “life zones and death zones” is evident in Trump’s policies, which privileged corporate elites while criminalizing the poor, dispossessed, and marginalized.

The Fight for Public Goods as the Fight for Democracy.

The fight against this culture of cruelty cannot be waged solely through electoral politics; it demands a radical reimagining of public goods as the bedrock of democracy. The call for universal healthcare, free public education, living wages, and strong labor protections is not merely about economic policy—it is a direct act of resistance against an authoritarian logic that reduces human life to mere survival. More pointedly, it is a rejection of the false equation of democracy with capitalism–a system driven almost exclusively by financial interests and beholden to two political parties that are hard-wired to produce and reproduce neoliberal violence . Resistance begins with language, with exposing power, and in this era of resurgent fascism, the most urgent task is to make clear that neoliberal capitalism is not a pillar of democracy but its betrayal—a gateway to fascism, not freedom.

Balibar argues that democracy requires an “insurrectional element”—a constant struggle against the forces that seek to exclude and dehumanize. The political order is always fragile, always in need of radical renewal. Rebuilding the social is not merely about reversing neoliberal policies but about reclaiming politics from those who have weaponized it as a tool of domination.

Democracy cannot survive in a society where people are forced into constant competition for dwindling resources. Without public goods, civic life collapses, and despair takes its place. Hope, in this context, is not naïve optimism but a call to organized resistance—a refusal to accept the conditions of cruelty as inevitable. The challenge ahead is not only to expose the logic of neoliberal destruction but to fight for a future in which public life is not dictated by profit, and social solidarity is not dismissed as a relic of the past.

With Trump’s second term looming, the stakes could not be higher. Fascism is no longer a distant threat but an unfolding reality, accelerating the collapse of democratic institutions and the expansion of state violence. What is particularly dangerous in this new world order is that Trump and his rich Vichy tech stooges are not simply out to get more tax cuts. The threat they pose is much larger. It is about the resurgence of a totalitarian instrumentalism which, as Mike Brock notes in a recent essay, The Plot Against America, “is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. This is a coup—not with guns, but with backend migrations and erased databases, a digital purge designed to rewrite history and consolidate power.”  Under the Trump administration, this erasure will accelerate alongside acts of overt violence. Countering this new stage of state brutality requires not only understanding the deep roots of neo-fascism in the United States but dismantling the economic, political, and cultural forces that sustain it.

Writing in The New European, Suzanne Schneider delivers a sharp critique of far-right ideologue Curtis Yarvin’s embrace of “turbocapitalism.” She notes that “the engineers… represent the triumph of instrumental reason in our new century. They fetishize efficiency and understand the democratic state as an impediment to the sort of ‘progress’ they desire.” This is not just about controlling information systems; it is a clear indication that education itself has become a political battleground. In this framework, knowledge is no longer a means of enlightenment but a tool for reinforcing authoritarian power.

Only through a massive educational and political struggle can we dismantle the culture of cruelty and its underlying form of “turbocapitalism,” which has taken root in the United States. The aim of which was stated by Peter Thiel, who wrote in 2009 that  “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin, a much celebrated fixture of the right-wing media landscape goes further and argues “that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.” The fusion of gangster capitalism and MAGA techno-fascism has deepened the crisis of democracy, but it has not yet crushed the possibility of renewal. That possibility endures—but only if we refuse to surrender and fight to reclaim the future.

The question Americans face is: Will we surrender to the forces of disposability and repression—or whether we will reclaim a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and the renewed struggle for a world where democracy is not just a hollow promise, but a lived and collective reality. We live in a time too urgent to abandon hope for a more just and radical future.  We face an immense task in recognizing that hope is wounded but not lost and as Alain Badiou states, what we now face is “showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one assigned—that something else is possible, but not everything is possible.” The task before us is not just to resist, but to widen the horizon of the possible—to refuse the suffocating limits imposed by neoliberal fatalism and authoritarian rule, and instead, to fight for a future where justice is not a dream deferred but a struggle embraced, where democracy is not a relic of the past but the foundation of what must come next.

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.

Neoliberal Capitalism ≠ Democracy

MICHEL VALENTIN
FEBRUARY 13, 2025

Trumpism is the new, populist, post-postmodern form of a “non-ideological ideology” redefining the relations between the State and Capitalism.

A new iteration of an oligarchy who, after shifting their political allegiance from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party, formed themselves around President Trump and his hubs of power in Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and the Oval Office, in addition to the Web, as Zuckerberg and Musk as the two-popes of the digital age, where Donald Trump reigns as the “Great Twitter Communicator.”

If there were 12 of them, with a pure heart, and a pure mind bent on self-sacrificing, and Christian compassion, they could be compared to Camelot’s Knights of the Round Table, made famous by the 12^th century Arthur-Lancelot-Graal cycle of the French-Breton Romance. But since they are filthy rich and self-centered, materialist and opportunist, with a tainted heart and mind, they function more like an ideological Pretorian guard supporting and defending the new Presidential Monarch.

This oligarchy/plutocracy constitutes 0.1% of the American population. It owns 14% of the nation’s wealth, $22 trillion in stocks, bonds and real estate, while 50% of Americans own 2.4% of the national wealth ($4 trillion). These ultra rich individuals contributed to the super PACs in favor of Trump’s candidacy. Elon Musk spent more than $200 million of his personal wealth on Donald Trump’s campaign; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, (Amazon) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook and Meta) each gave $1 million [ed. note: so did Apple’s Tim Cook] to the Inauguration Fund of President Trump.

The Super PACs form an unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Politics. In more ways than one, it can be said that MAGA was funded by GAFA—the European acronym to loop together the American multinationals shaping global consumerism (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple). A majority of the American electorate was persuaded that what is good for the ultra-rich entrepreneurs of these multinationals is good for them. [1]

This new configuration took the institution of the State by surprise. It comes as close as possible to a political coup, bypassing the law in many instances. This unconstitutional power grab by the tandem Trump-Musk, took most by surprise, barreling along, as it is, like a runaway train with loose cannons on board. It unwittingly and thoughtlessly imposes what it considers to be the cure to a “rotten,” “lunatic,” “Marxist,” “leftist” state of things existing within many departments of the Federal Government. The Federal agencies Donald Trump accused of harboring (without proof) rampant “abuse, waste, fraud” are gutted or suppressed.

Diktats (250 Presidential decrees the first two weeks), the creation of DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency), the orders of an unelected, “unofficially official” oligarch (Elon Musk), were used or created ad hoc to clean and wipe-out those agencies deemed by the new political and ideological “system” to draining the Government Treasury, and/or propagating “Anti-American values.” By the same token, Trump holds in suspicion all the intellectuals and academics, lawyers and journalists, artists and Hollywood stars who profess or advertise in public liberal, democratic, or socialist ideas. He believes that, at best, their ideas of control and regulation of capitalism hold the country back, impoverishing the middle- and working-classes; at worst, they are the “inside enemy,” a 5^th column helping the “outside enemy” by subverting the unity of the country, and demoralizing America by propagating anti-American values.

Elon Musk and his bevy of cost-cutters were given carte blanche, firing US federal employees, forcing them to retire, resign, or accept a buyout. Musk and his henchmen (are there any women?) work beyond governmental legality. On the one hand, what they are doing to Washington is an overhaul of the Federal Government by planning to replace many career-civil servants at mid- and top-level with new loyal employees, partisan sycophants, and political buddies, or making the old ones take an oath of obedience. On the other hand, they want to put the Government out of business, by “un-governing,” by making the big machinery of the Federal State obsolete.

The best way to get rid of a dog is to scream that it is rabid. One does not have to prove it.

Since mid-January 2025, the American people have been experiencing a mild foretaste of what the Russian people experienced when they were hit by the Easterly, socio-economic Shock-Therapy inflicted by the Chicago School of Economy’s Boys just after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. If one thinks that this vengeful, punitive, cruel, and ultimately idiotic socio-economic “Shock and Awe” treatment of the ex- Soviet Union did not have any bearing on what happened in Russia afterwards, one is clueless. Putin’s imperialist revenge is the by-product of this historic, American-made humiliation and destruction of the economy of what was, for better or worse, a country—something the Chinese government was able to avoid.

So, these politicians for a new socio-economic policy and these megalomaniac plutocrats have to convince the American people that this huge Washingtonian apparatus is worthless, corrupt, and sinful, that the taxpayers’ money spent to run it would be better spent somewhere else. In this battle for the minds of the American electorate, all tricks are justified, even the senseless is forced to make sense. The politics of the sledgehammer is used to squash flies. These “grand liquidators” feel empowered and self-justified by decades of Republican anti-Federalist rhetoric. As Donald Trump constantly repeats, they are only doing what the American voters-taxpayers elected them to do. They are just accomplishing their mandate. The only thing they won’t touch, reform, or diminish is the military, for obvious reasons.

Their principal goal is to free as much Capital as possible from the State Ideological Apparatuses (Althusser), by suppressing and privatizing as much as possible the Government’s functions and services—even if this means destroying what the Government used to positively stand for in the minds of a large majority of the people. They want to maximize the availability of Capital for Big Tech, Big Business ventures and tax breaks for corporations and wealthy entrepreneurs, since the Reaganian trickle-down theory stands paramount in the ideology of these self-declared “benefactors” of humanity. The future development of AI, cybernetics, and space travel will necessitate huge investments, although the Chinese DeepSeek didn’t cost that much. It developed a world-class model of AI app for $5 million. If those oligarchs could, they would totally privatize Health Care and even Social Security.

In order to convince the maximum number of voters, that this “grand deconstruction” of Government and realignment of priorities is for their own good, this new ideology of entanglement of “anarchic populism” (American Libertarianism influence) with Big Money has to conceal its ideological biases. That is to say that the new post-postmodern political discourse had to change.

Giving the word “gaslighting” a new life, Donald Trump and his political cohort started to make of denial and fantasy, the two key ingredients of their representation of reality. Associated to a perverse manipulation of what constitutes “normative reality,” gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a manipulator incites or induces someone to question his/her sanity, memories, or perception of reality. Gaslighted people feel confused, anxious, and unable to trust their own judgment.^[2]

The 2023/24 Presidential Campaign was full of air and gaz. Donald Trump was the Great Manipulator, igniting people’s passions, fueling their volcanic anger, setting their resentment on fire.

It was marked by a shameless and total reversal of the paradigms of the Symbolic system establishing a basic sense of shared reality, keeping the Imaginary in its place, without which a society cannot function in relative harmony: the false became the true, the lie was the prevailing discourse putting to shame all the others (fake news), the metonymic contamination of the larger picture by the manipulative aggrandizement of a minor detail became the real picture, etc. Authenticity, reality, veracity, accuracy, actuality, testimony, genuineness…, became the victimized signifiers of a perverse, and ultimately schizophrenic reversal of our psychic sanity.

Since this reversal is systemic and systematic, it generated like in a self-fulfilling prophecy, an accepted repetitive recourse to the political discourse of “commonsensical slogans” which then passed as “truisms”: statism means economic stagnation (decreasing citizens’ standard of living); rule of law means regulations (impeding creativity, innovation, and development);governmental authority means tyranny; immigration means joblessness and insecurity; diminishing federal and state taxation means income gain; freedom means free enterprise, freedom to choose the type of education for one’s children, or choosing one’s doctor; socialism means loss of freedom, higher taxes, statist regulations, government inefficiency and corruption; etc.

The national indicators for physical and mental health, suicide rates, drug addiction, longevity, child mortality, violent death, etc., showing that the American approach to social problems is very problematic, are denounced by Trump’s Republicans as nasty, lying, liberal, or socialist anti-American propaganda.

This radical re-alignment between Political Power, Big Tech, and Big Government is re-defining the political relationship between the State and Capitalism—high-tech capitalism that is. It subordinates the State to its vision, interests and benefits. Already, in 1994, Esther Dyson, George Gebele, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler mapped the future along those same lines with Cyberspace & the American Dream.

What President Trump and his cronies are doing is following the blueprint of Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy based on an objectivist “State,” whereby the Federal Government becomes a genuine marketplace institution governed by the invisible hand, à la Adam Smith, and not at all a genuine “Government for all.” It would be an anti-Federalist, anti-state made up of competing agencies for protection, defense, surveillance, and retaliation – in short, a “free-market anarchism” based on a strange alliance between populist leaders and the Big CEOS supposed to take care of the livelihood (consumption, jobs, etc.) of people turned into mere consumer-producers.

Making use of an ideology passing as an anti-ideology, magnified by algorithms (AI), this vindictive and activist anti-statism is streamlining the Government, controlling its administrative apparatus. The goal of this “anti-ideological ideology” is to make sure that what’s left of the regulations and restraints imposed by labor laws and environmental sustainability goals, of the constraints put on digital technology (limits put on AI’s development), and of what’s left of the restrictions put on the speculative dimension of financial capitalism are lifted and made inoperative.

What was left of the surveillance dimension of the State in regard to the excess of capitalism is turned around and directed against the State itself.

In fact, what is deemed reactive or oppositional to this unprecedented “governmental grand liquidation,” or critical of the mere unabashed development of a free techno-capitalism and the way it wants to conduct business, quickly receives the accusatory label of being “Anti-American.” Since, for these pundits and deciders (President W. Busch called himself The Decider) of this new state of things, the ends justify the means: dis-information, fake news, the gross manipulation of facts, outright lies, insults and defamation, the false elevated to the level of the “truth,” all constitute the daily staple fed to a credulous, ignorant, indifferent, disoriented crowd, or worse, a public getting off on the spectacle of abjection.

The “ends” here are the colonization and reduction of the economy and its people by the logic and effects of algorithmic digitalization, which, as in a feed-back loop, will guarantee the accumulation of power and capital within the companies of these digital masters, while assuring the future development of the digitalized economy and its people. Marcuse’ One Dimensional Man will then become a concrete reality.

Tim Cook (Apple), Sam Altman (Open AI), Shou Zi Chen (Tik Tok), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichau (Google), Elon Musk (Telsa, X) are the feudal lords of this neo-feudalism. This alliance between Big Power, Big Money, and Big Tech forms a new techno-fascism, whose roots have been resting dormant in Silicon Valley for years. Since the 1960s, Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy and conception of pure capitalism have been working their way throughout the social body. They heavily influenced the economic and political philosophy of Silicone Valley’s entrepreneurs, techno-geeks and digital gurus. The by-products of this ultra-capitalist ideology also tainted the preconceptions and prejudices of these tech-influencers:

“Cult of the performance and of competition, leading logically to the idealization of the winner, the hero, the strong; the one who has the will-power and the intelligence to make things happen, who leads society ahead economically and technologically.

Disdain for the weak, the “feminized” under-achiever, and despising the deviant, the poor, the loser, the dummy; the one unable to adapt or transform himself according the laws of survival of the fittest.”

Capitalism is life. It is Nature’s vital force. There’s no Yin and Yang here. This force is masculinist—which prompted Zuckerberg to genuinely and naively declare that America and capitalism need more “masculine energy.” Reminiscent of the 1960s’ ideological strong man, à la Mike Hammer:

“If he’s anathema out of the past, then it’s our fault. We brought a man back who should have died a long time ago. The present can’t stand a man like that anymore. Now they want indecision and compromise and reluctance and fear… and we’ve dropped a hot iron in society’s lap… he’s always been in the special-privilege class… [someone who is] a threat to a different world.”^[3]

Only the strong should lead. Wealth is their just reward. This is the American Dream à la Trusk (characterial alloy of Trump and Musk).

This nexus of techno-capitalists shares the same unapologetic belief in merit and elitism, entrepreneurial savvy and savoir-faire, opening the doors to a return to the 19^th century Western ideology of Anglo-Saxon obedience wrapped up in Ayn Rand’s so-called “objectivism.” The Russian-Jewish-American intellectual emigree’s novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) directly inspired Kevin Roberts, head of the ultra-conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. Its more directly activist branch, aptly named Heritage Action, gave birth to the (in)famous “Project 2025” in case the Republicans won the 2024 elections. “Project 2025” is a literal blueprint for the take-over, reduction, and privatization of the Federal Government, while weaponizing its Executive Branch in order to enforce the transformation of society into a genuine capitalist society.

In her writings, Rand sold the virtues of rational self-interest and individual freedom which, very naturally, would express themselves into a pure, laissez-faire-laissez-passer capitalist economy with a government whose only raison d’être would be the defense and expansion of capitalism with a population able and entitled to make free choices according to their personal interests. Although in Thoreau’s Walden have the freedom to live the way they chose, they exist in a de-institutionalized state, where the government does “govern not at all.”

Nurtured by the same nexus of cognitivism, evolutionary anthropology, behaviorism, sociobiology, and the scientific, physical materialist explanations of Nature and man (genetics, electro-chemistry of the brain, etc.) the American society is witnessing a return of Spenserian socio-Darwinism, of the survival of the fittest-type of ideology, of eugenics (with its racialism–and racism for the most extreme advocates of this populist-capitalist alliance). Perhaps, when students, they read, uncritically, Plato’s Republic promoting a society directed by an aristocracy based on intellectual and ethical merit and governing over a population divided, according to the ability of its members, into carefully designed and permanent classes, where marriages would be arranged genetically.

Elon Musk (a South African) and Paul Thiel (who spent time in South Africa) at one point or the other have expressed their belief in the genetic (?) inadequacy of Black Africans for capitalism. Donald Trump himself has been known to make crude, racist statements, as well as dismissing many African countries as “shithole countries.” Trump has even proposed the idea of taking in White South Africans “suffering from discrimination,” while deporting illegal Latino immigrants supposed to be rapist, criminals, drug-addicts, mentally ill– all animals unworthy of being called humans and of becoming Americans.

This ideological behavior and discourse announces the return of a certain form of the “Master/Slave dialectic” without dialectics.

A new form of feudalism is therefore shaping itself; a techno-feudalism using populism as a prop. It claims to be anti-ideological or non-ideological, when in fact Trumpism is very ideological. President Trump hides the ideological side of his political movement by claiming that its ingredients are common sense, traditional American values, liberty and nativism.

Big Tech, Big Money, Big power.

This techno-capitalist neo-feudalism, like the Medieval form of feudalism, will be based on allegiance streamlining a social pyramid. Oaths, vows, and troths of faithful obedience and loyalty by technocrats, devoted work by a subservient and obedient workforce of engineers and technicians, and a de-unionized or un-unionized labor, etc. will form the new social order. No wonder the Presidential candidate expressed his desire to be surrounded by obedient and faithful German army generals, the way Hitler was. If, per chance, the chosen peer fails to his or her mandate (the conservative journalist Megyn Kelly, Vice-President Mike Pence…) the “wrath of God” descends upon the poor recalcitrant.

Religion is no longer the unifying glue of this new form of feudalism.

The amalgamating force of society is now constituted, on one hand, by a nexus of consumerism, high-tech, digitalized communication, artificial intelligence, Meta verse and hyper-real or hyper-virtual spectacles, and, in the near future, cybernetics (robots and androids). On the other hand, on the affective side, the new social order is cemented by nativism and a fear/hatred or mistrust of the foreign other (immigrants or foreign countries), since the other’s jouissance is threatening to undermine the jouissance of the nativist citizen-producer-consumer.

“Truskist” (Trump/Musk) Republican’s post-postmodern brand of neo-conservatism corresponds to the abandonment of the neo-liberal type of democracy which has fulfilled its function since WWII. It accompanied the transformation of capital from an extractive and agrarian-type of economy into an industrial, and then, in the 1980s into a globally consumerist and financial type of capitalism with a welfare state as a buffer against the negative spin-offs of capitalism’s contradictions.

Whereas capitalism used to plug its machinery into human desires, now capitalism has become desire itself. The French/Continental Theory so many neo-positivists and cognitivists passionately dislike offers crucial analysis of what is going on today with the uncanny alliance capitalism- high-technology-populism.

“Capitalism is an unmediated desire, or abstract machine. A society actualizing that desire can be conceptualized as a particular mix between fascism-paranoia and anarchy-schizophrenia (tending strongly toward the latter)… It is the coming out of capital, a new golden age of greed that dares to say its name. Without a wince, Capitalism no longer has to justify itself. It no longer has to hide behind fascist-paranoid quasicauses and argue that it serves the common good. It can dispense with belief in and good sense, because it is now stronger than molarity, and stronger than the ideologies that help to reproduce it. The men who personify it—the Donad Trumps and Michael Milkens of the world—do not so much represent an ideological cause as embody a desire. An abstract desire, a mania for accumulating numerical quantities. Possessing things is understandable from the moral-molar point of view, as is wanting to accumulate capital for what it can buy in the way of time, things, and activities. But to accumulate more than anyone could ever spend? And then keep on accumulating greater and greater sums, with no other interest or aim in life? That is beyond good and evil. The neoconservative capitalist is defined less by what he possesses than by what possesses him. He is the personification of a mode of irrationality… It is superabstract.^[4]

The coming-out of post-postmodern capital “surfaces as a fatal attractor whose operational arena is immediately coextensive with the social field.”^[5]

The sky’s the limit of this grand, new re-ordering of things. There used to be a “catch-sentence” symbolizing the expansion of America: “Go West! Young Man!” Elon Musk has changed it into “Let’s Go to Mars!” Perhaps these oligarchs should follow his injunction and build their Xanadu on the Red Planet.

NOTES:

1. (French and European legal acronym for the four most powerful American multinational companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon)
2. The term comes from George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) where a greedy and sadistic Charles Boyer works on Ingrid Bergman (his wife) to send her over the edge into sanity.
3. Mickey Spillane. The Snake. Signet. New York: 1964. 16, 19.
4. Brian Massumi. Monstrosity in A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. MIT Press. Cambridge: 1993. 151.
5. Idem. 152.

Michel Valentin is a writer, an EPIS researcher, University of Montana retired Professor.

First Published on CounterPunch.org

Shared via Creative Commons.
.

JUNE 21, 2024.

By Henry Giroux

---

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

– Malcolm X

Bearing witness is a crucial marker of a responsible press and media. It brings to light the unnecessary suffering and hardship of those rendered voiceless and disposable, as well as the underlying forces that produce such conditions. It also serves to challenge those who “wallow in willful ignorance.”[1]Shattering the lies concealed by claims of innocence is a powerful weapon for holding power accountable, making it visible and subject to exposure and resistance. Bearing witness does not guarantee justice, but it provides the awareness necessary to turn propaganda against itself and mobilize people to function as a collective force of resistance.

The corporate media undermines moral witnessing by often prioritizing the discredited notion of balance over the more crucial goal of seeking truth in the service of accountability and democracy. This retreat from holding power accountable not only discredits the pursuit of truth in the service of justice and the strengthening of democracy but also tends to fall prey to the seductions of corruption, political theater and entertainment.[2]

The dialectic within journalism encompasses what could be termed, on one hand, a politics of erasure and distortion, and on the other, a politics of moral witnessing. The politics of erasure is apparent in how corporate mainstream media disproportionately covers Israel’s aggressive actions in Gaza and portrays Trump as a conventional political candidate rather than an authoritarian threat to democracy both domestically and internationally. This erasure is also evident in how far-right journalism consistently distorts the truth when reporting on issues that conflict with reactionary conservative politics.

Conversely, the pursuit of truth and moral witnessing is exemplified by journalists from sources such as The Intercept, CounterPunch, Truthout, LA Progressive, and other alternative media platforms. These journalists engage deeply with critical social issues and consistently hold power accountable. Despite their commitment to journalistic integrity, these outlets are often marginalized within the media landscape dominated by corporate control.[3]

In what follows, I will comment briefly on how these two modes of journalism operate. First, I will briefly focus on the reporting of Scahill and Grim in The Intercept, which exposed how The New York Times and several other major newspapers underplayed the despair, suffering, and death that Israel is brutally imposing on Palestinians. On the other hand, I will examine how corporate-controlled media failed to address historically, contextually, and critically both Trump’s delusional ramblings and his clear and dangerous threats to democracy.

Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim reported in The Intercept that an internal memo from the New York Times “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land…The memo also instructed] reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars.”[4]

Scahill and Grim also note that major newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times“reserved terms like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific’ almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks.”[5]

This is more than mere style guidelines; it is censorship in service of partisan reporting and moral irresponsibility. Instances of war crimes, the horror of genocide, and the reality of Israel’s violence against Palestinians are being distorted and erased. Critical of the babble of balance, Scahill and Grim highlight the importance of reporting on Israel’s savage war against Palestinians while making clear that the mainstream press represses such reporting, enabling the slaughter to continue.

 Rather than “hating the people who are oppressed,” CounterPunch is another truth-seeking media source that has covered the war on Gaza in great detail, providing both personal accounts of the suffering while placing the conflict in a broader history and political narrative.

The punishing state now wraps itself in censorship, propaganda, and cruel invective parading as a mix between political theater and both sides journalism. Americans are bombarded with the babble of liberals who are too cowardly to name Trump as a budding fascist or as a racist, treating him as either a normal candidate or a bullying clown rather than as a symptom of a deeper malaise of fascism, echoing a pernicious and frightening past. Corporate media normalcy bias treats Trump as simply another choice in the run for the presidency. Under the false insistence on balance, Trump and Biden are treated as two candidates with simply different views, rather than treating Trump as a dangerous and unbalanced threat to democracy itself.

Meanwhile, the corporate-controlled press focuses on the release of thankfully freed hostages and the unfounded charges of antisemitic politicians, who use the guise of antisemitism to undermine free speech and transform higher education into centers of indoctrination. Almost no coverage is given to the indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.”[6]  Bombs explode, and blood flows freely over the bodies of more than 37,000 Palestinians, including thousands of women and children in Gaza. Ten children in Gaza lose a limb daily to war; according to the World Health Organization some “citizens in Gaza are now reduced to drinking sewage water and eating animal feed.”[7] These horrors disappear from mainstream news in their cycle of erasure, misrepresentation, and politics of balance.

It is truly alarming to see and hear how Trump’s frequent lapses into babble and gibberish are either ignored, barely commented on in a serious way, or treated as normal. It has become uneventful in the eyes of the corporate media to acknowledge critically that at his rallies Trump substitutes meaningful discourse with oratory that suggests he has “fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in national consciousness.”[8] He has spoken incoherently about sharks and electric boats in the same sentence. He rants about Taylor Swift, claiming she is beautiful, but liberal and that he is “more popular” than her. He has made cruel remarks about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, joking about the violent attack he suffered at the hands of a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He has attacked Jack Smith and his wife. In a “bizarre, moment. Trump called Pelosi’s daughter a ‘wacko,’” and referred to the Department of Justice as “dirty no-good bastards.”[9] Rarely do these comments get the coverage they deserve in the mainstream media.

There is little commentary about how unfit he is emotionally and what the consequence for the country might be if he is elected to the presidency. As Tim Nichols noted in The Atlantic, Trump’s delusional behavior should “terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency.” He further adds:

I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.[10]

A dangerous right-wing firewall protects Trump and his delusional ramblings and reactionary policies from being identified as a dangerous authoritarian who poses a serious threat to democracy at home and abroad. The cowardly politics of normalization shield him from the criticism and exposure the public deserves. Additionally, he is protected by a right-wing echo chamber that legitimizes, propagates, and celebrates his lies, corruption, and criminal convictions. They also lie for profit. But there is more at work here than a politics of disappearance, there is also a relentless barrage of lies and distortions. Thom Hartman refers to the dominant right-wing echo chamber as “The GOP’s MAGA lie machine,” one that represents “dark side of politics.”[11]  False claims by mainstream conservative media became more visible with Fox News’s nearly $800 million dollar settlement with Dominion for lying about the 2020 presidential election. Unfortunately, the distortion machine continues with impunity. For instance,  Judd Legum recently reported that the Sinclair Broadcast Group is engaged in a systemic campaign of presenting misleading stories about President, which are then distributed on a range of social media. He writes:

This month, Sinclair Broadcast Group has flooded a vast network of local news websites with misleading articles suggesting that President Biden is mentally unfit for office. The articles are based on specious social media posts by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which are then repackaged to resemble news reports. The thinly disguised political attacks are then syndicated to dozens of local news websites owned by Sinclair, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS.[12]

 Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a cult of morally vacuous and politically maligned sycophants who are complicit in his actions and cover for him. Trump and his followers live in a bubble of deceit, hidden through a powerful and expansive culture of ignorance and hatred. This is a party that spreads false and deranged stories about Jewish space lasers, voting machines corrupted by alleged Venezuelan communists, and Democrats who drink the blood of kidnaped children, among other insane conspiracy theories.

The mainstream and right-wing media have emptied language of any substantive meaning, turning it into a poisonous cacophony of lies, bigotry, and deranged conspiracy theories. One crucial caveat must be made. While Trump’s bizarre ramblings rightly suggest an unstable and unhinged mind, this criticism should not but used to overshadow his fascist politics and the conditions that have given rise to Trumpism. The latter is a historical and political issue that cannot be reduced to psychological language.

More to the point. There is more at play here than Trump’s delusional ramblings. There is also his attack on the justice system, his lies about the election, his role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, his history as a sexual predator, his support for Project 2025 and its planned subversion of democracy, and his history leading up to his thirty-four felony convictions. While these events receive critical commentary, they are rarely analyzed as part of a larger program that supports an upgraded fascism. Deceit, ignorance, and the death of civic responsibility now function as the perfect storm enabling fascist politics. America is no longer ashamed of its ignorance; it is now a matter of fondness, provides a sense of community, and serves as a measure of loyalty.[13] What does it take under these circumstances for struggling to prevent democracies from dying? What questions do we need to ask to rethink the meaning of politics, struggle, and collective resistance?

How do we account for this dramatic refusal by liberals and others to name and recognize the ongoing threat of fascism in the U.S.? What institutions under the regime of gangster capitalism have surrendered their educative, political, cultural, and economic responsibilities? How has white supremacy, with its logic and politics of hate, exclusion, and violence once again been able to define who counts as a citizen in the United States? What conditions have allowed the collapse of civic culture into a culture of commodification, surveillance, and punishment? What will it take to develop a world where democracy can breathe again? Where are the public spaces calling for a revolution of values that challenge the war machines and expansive militarized propagandistic cultural apparatuses? What kind of mass movement is necessary to shift public consciousness and the centers of corrupt politics in American society? How can these questions be answered within a broader understanding of the connection between neoliberal capitalism and fascism?

Where is the language we need to bear witness to resist the country’s death drive while affirming the need for justice? How can the language of compassion and solidarity overcome the discourse of institutionalized neoliberalism, rancid individualism, greed, and self-interest? Where are the spaces,  emerging institutions and social movements that will create the conditions to say yes to justice and no to cruelty, systemic racism, mass ignorance, and unfettered greed? What will it take to cultivate a willingness to say no, and the energy necessary to put our minds and bodies on the line for a future in which our children can experience dignity, justice, and joy? What might it mean to inhabit what James Baldwin called a “despairing witness” and, at the same time, to be prepared to lose everything in order to struggle for a world in which economic, political, and social rights are guaranteed for everyone?

All of these questions pose challenges that need to be addressed given the historical crisis facing the U.S. Baldwin never despaired of the struggles and potential danger of being a moral witness, and his words offer hope in the ongoing individual and collective efforts to be strong, brave, and willing to continue the fight for a radical democracy. His words are more urgent and powerful than ever:  “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” In the age of emerging fascism, there is no other choice but to begin again to fight the ghosts of a fascist past that have returned with a vengeance.

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Notes.

[1] Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons For our Own (New York: Crown, 2020).p.53

[2] This issue has been discussed in great depth by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their landmark Manufacturing Consent. See also the work of  Jason Stanley’s  How Propaganda Works, and Robert McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, and too many other critical sources to mention.

[3] Sonali Kolhatkar, “When Corporate Media Fail, Independent Media Rise Up,” Counterpunch (June 15, 2023). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/15/when-corporate-media-fail

[4] Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, “Leaked NYT Gaza memo tells journalists to avoid words ‘genocide’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘occupied territory.’’ The Intercept(April 15, 2024). Online: https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jon Quellay, “93 Nations Back ICC as Israel Faces Charges for War Crimes in Gaza,” Common Dreams (June 15, 2024). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/icc-war-cimes-gaza?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=af4dfba027-Weekend+Edition%3A+Sun.+6%2F16%2F24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-3b949b3e19-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

[7] Cited in Jeffrey St. Clair, “Whoops, They Did It Again–The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a Genocidal War,” Counterpunch + (June 8, 2024). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/08/whoops-they-did-it-again/

[8] Tom Nichols, “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish,” The Atlantic (June 12, 2024). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/trump-sharks-las-vegas-rally-speech/678667/

[9] Annie Grayer, Melanie Zanona, Lauren Fox and Kit Maher, “Inside Trump’s gripe-filled meeting with House GOP and his reunion with McConnell,” CNN(June 13, 2024). Online: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/politics/trump-closed-door-meeting-house-gop/index.html

[10] Ibid. Tom Nichols.

[11] Thom Hartman, “The Dark Side of Politics: The GOP’s MAGA Lie Machine,” The Hartmann Report (June 17, 2024). Online: https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-dark-side-of-politics-the-gops-749

[12] Judd Legum, “Sinclair floods local news websites with hundreds of deceptive articles about Biden’s mental fitness,” Popular Information (June 17, 2024). Online: https://popular.info/p/sinclair-floods-local-news-websites?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=f0dw&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[13] Mark Slouka, “A Quibble,” Harper’s Magazine ( February 2009). Online: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/0082362

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First published on CounterPunch.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Attack on Capitol Affirms Trumpism Will Live On After Trump Leaves White House

However inequitable its bias, capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

November 5, 2020

Well, it’s over. Not the election. The capitalist democracy. However biased it was towards the interests of the rich and however hostile it was to the poor and minorities, the capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. The iconography and rhetoric remain the same. But it is an elaborate and empty reality show funded by the ruling oligarchs — $1.51 billion for the Biden campaign and $1.57 billion for the Trump campaign — to make us think there are choices. There are not. The empty jousting between a bloviating Trump and a verbally impaired Joe Biden is designed to mask the truth. The oligarchs always win. The people always lose. It does not matter who sits in the White House. America is a failed state.

“The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”

There were many actors that killed America’s open society. The corporate oligarchs who bought the electoral process, the courts and the media, and whose lobbyists write the legislation to impoverish us and allow them to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and unchecked power. The militarists and war industry that drained the national treasury to mount futile and endless wars that have squandered some $7 trillion and turned us into an international pariah. The CEOs, raking in bonuses and compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars, that shipped jobs overseas and left our cities in ruins and our workers in misery and despair without a sustainable income or hope for the future. The fossil fuel industry that made war on science and chose profits over the looming extinction of the human species. The press that turned news into mindless entertainment and partisan cheerleading. The intellectuals who retreated into the universities to preach the moral absolutism of identity politics and multiculturalism while turning their backs on the economic warfare being waged on the working class and the unrelenting assault on civil liberties. And, of course, the feckless and hypocritical liberal class that does nothing but talk, talk, talk.

If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient. The liberal class, once again, served as pathetic cheerleaders and censors for a candidate and a political party that in Europe would be considered on the far-right. Even while liberals were being ridiculed and dismissed by Biden and by the Democratic Party hierarchy, which bizarrely invested its political energy in appealing to Republican neocons, liberals were busy marginalizing journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who called out Biden and the Democrats. The liberals, whether at The Intercept or The New York Times, ignored or discredited information that could hurt the Democratic Party, including the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was a stunning display of craven careerism and self-loathing.

Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America.

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are, the election has illustrated, oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. Restoring the rule of law, universal health care, banning fracking, a Green New Deal, the protection of civil liberties, the building of unions, the preservation and expansion of social welfare programs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the forgiveness of student debt, stiff environmental controls, a government jobs program and guaranteed income, financial regulation, opposition to endless war and military adventurism were once again forgotten. Championing these issues would have resulted in a Democratic Party landslide. But since the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate donors, promoting any policy that might foster the common good, diminish corporate profits and restore democracy, including imposing campaign finance laws, was impossible. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. At least the neofascists have the courage of their demented convictions.

The liberal class functions in a traditional democracy as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It ameliorates the worst excesses of capitalism. It proposes gradual steps towards greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with supposed virtues. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements. The liberal class is a vital component within the power elite. In short, it offers hope and the possibility, or at least the illusion, of change.

The surrender of the liberal elite to despotism creates a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues, fill. It opens the door to fascist movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the absurdities of the liberal class and the values they purport to defend. The promises of the fascists are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth. Once the liberal class ceases to function, it opens a Pandora’s box of evils that are impossible to contain.

The disease of Trumpism, with or without Trump, is, as the election illustrated, deeply embedded in the body politic. It is an expression among huge segments of the population, taunted by liberal elites as “deplorables,” of a legitimate alienation and rage that the Republicans and the Democrats orchestrated and now refuse to address. This Trumpism is also, as the election showed, not limited to white men, whose support for Trump actually declined.

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia’s useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19^th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In Notes From Underground, he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Undergroundcarries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action.

 “I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.”

The refusal of the liberal class to acknowledge that power has been wrested from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been revoked by judicial fiat, that elections are nothing more than empty spectacles staged by the ruling elites, that we are on the losing end of the class war, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality.

The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, “the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization — has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe wrote, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.”

“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals — the new realists — who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe wrote. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” 

Populations can endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. 

The historian Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair, his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, wrote of the consequences of the collapse of liberalism. Stern argued that the spiritually and politically alienated, those cast aside by the society, are prime recruits for a politics centered around violence, cultural hatreds and personal resentments. Much of this rage, justifiably, is directed at a liberal elite that, while speaking the “I-feel-your-pain” language of traditional liberalism, sells us out.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

We are in for it. The for-profit health care system, designed to make money — not take care of the sick — is unequipped to handle a national health crisis. The health care corporations have spent the last few decades merging and closing hospitals, and cutting access to health care in communities across the nation to increase revenue — this, as nearly half of all front-line workers remain ineligible for sick pay and some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. The pandemic, without universal health care, which Biden and the Democrats have no intention of establishing, will continue to rage out of control. Three hundred thousand Americans dead by December. Four hundred thousand by January. And by the time the pandemic burns out or a vaccine becomes safely available, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, will have died.

The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent.

The economic fallout from the pandemic, the chronic underemployment and unemployment — close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics — will mean a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. Hunger in US households has already tripled since last year. The proportion of US children who are not getting enough to eat is 14 times higher than last year. Food banks are overrun. The moratorium on foreclosures and evictions has been lifted while over 30 million destitute Americans face the prospect of being thrown into the street.

There is no check left on corporate power. The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. People of color, immigrants and Muslims will be blamed and targeted by our native fascists for the nation’s decline. The few who continue in defiance of the Democratic Party to call out the crimes of the corporate state and the empire will be silenced. The sterility of the liberal class, serving the interests of a Democratic Party that disdains and ignores them, fuels the widespread feelings of betrayal that saw nearly half the voters support one of the most vulgar, racist, inept and corrupt presidents in American history. An American tyranny, dressed up with the ideological veneer of a Christianized fascism, will, it appears, define the empire’s epochal descent into irrelevance.

Copyright 2020 Chris Hedges     

First Published on Scheerpost.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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A Pre-Dystopian Tale.

You can’t live a post-revolutionary existence in a pre-revolutionary society.

This quote has stuck with me over the years, since I first heard it during the early 1970’s in the dining room of a longtime friend’s home in the Haight while interviewing spokespersons for a film I was shooting about a group of activists that had been instumental in creatiing the Free Clinic, the Food Bank, and had been active in several other Bay Area coalitions related to housing and healthcare for the indigent and homeless. The three-story house located on Ashbury near Haight Street also served as home to the group, then self-avowed Marxists, was about as close to being what we would call a commune as it gets, especially in an urban environment. Dinner there was served on a long table in this sizable space in the back of the house, usually accompanied by fervent discussions and debates over topics and strategies centering around local issues and events, often well-oiled by an abundant sampling of varietals from area wineries.

My friend, whom I met while serving in the Navy while we were both stationed in Puerto Rico, was at the time a member of this group of community organizers. He was a native San Franciscan and a lifelong Forty-Niner fan and season ticket holder dating back to when the team played its home games in fog-shrouded Kezar Stadium competing not only against NFL rivals but also on occasion with the ever-present seagulls who had a tendency to gyre overhead, often landing on the field right in the middle of a pass play.

He had moved to Portland, Oregon after military service, taking a job with the local American Express office – a job he was particularly well-suited for, having been a Public Affairs officer for several years while accompanying the Navy Steel Band on its frequent tours throughout the Caribbean as well as Stateside. Plus he was an affable, gregarious, and genuinely entertaining character; at the center of every gathering and a joy to be around. He passed away several years ago after spending the bulk of his adult life working both in and around City Hall and the Bay Area as a tireless advocate for medical facilities and affordable housing for street people whom had no real place to live. In 2013 a 120 unit apartment building designed to house the homeless was erected in SOMA and dedicated in his memory. His name was Rene Cazenave.

One Christmas, Rene invited me to drive down from Seattle and share in the festivities at the home of the parents of one of his paramours (don’t ask her name – I just can’t remember) located in a Portland subdivision. It was a lovely affair, replete with the usual holiday repast and ritual that earmarks the excesses of the season. Later in the evening the party migrated next door to the house of a neighbor whose daughter named Cathleen was a former classmate of Rene’s nameless paramour where we introduced ourselves, gathered around the tree and through the course of the evening regaled each other with tales of some of our exploits. At the time I was a student in Communications at the University of Washington (“U Dub” to its denizens), and was among other things actively involved with instructors and fellow classmates in lobbying for a film production curriculum to be created for the Radio and Television Department.

So my “tale” involved a project we were then currently shooting for several tribal elders of the Quinault Indian Reservation located on the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington. Using an old 16MM Auricon camera together with a spring wound Bolex to record on 16MM color reversal mag-stripe stock, a group of fellow students and I were documenting the tribe’s struggles with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) over rampant and poorly supervised clearcutting of the virgin conifer forests on the reservation. Putting aside the issue of whether “clearcutting” itself is detrimental to the environment, the primary problem here was the “slash” left behind after the logging company was finished with harvesting the timber.

Slash is logging debris – consisting of tree stumps and coarse wooden shards left on the ground that clog local the local watershed, and if left untreated can become a major hazard, not just for fires but also for the local salmon fish hatcheries. The slash we witnessed had been so plentiful on the Quinault, that nothing except weeds would grow in the areas that had been clearcut. The secondary problem in eyes of many of the tribal elders was that outwardly the BIA , tasked by the Department of the Interior to manage reservation resources including the letting of logging contracts, had no re-forestation plan. Nada.

Once again, native Americans had their resources ripped away by colonialists with no goal except for short-term profits coupled with a lust for acquiring abused land at rock-bottom prices. Just across the road from the reservation, on land managed by Georgia-Pacific (now – perhaps ironically in the context of this story – a subsidiary of Koch Industries) stood thousands of acres of pristine new-growth conifer that a decade or two down the road would be ready for harvesting. Thus to the naked eye, the lesson seems to be that private enterprise with a Free Market neoliberal agenda enabled by an abundant revenue stream appeared to do a much better job at husbanding natural resources than a public bureaucracy whose cash flow was subject to the political whims of the current administration and its corporate-controlled Congress.

As I was relating this story I became aware that the elderly gentleman seated in a high backed easy chair across from me was avidly ingesting every word I uttered. He had been proffered earlier as Cathleen’s husband, introduced informally as “Bill”. One could not help but admit that there was a noticeable age difference between the two. When I finished speaking he chimed in that he’d recently completed a backpacking trip in the Cascades with Cathleen, relating how much he enjoyed such outings and how great a priority it was with him that the forests and the watershed that feeds the rivers that in turn supply our water be preserved for the future enjoyment of everyone. Then he said, “Even in D.C., we can see how polluted the Potomac has become, just in the years since I’ve lived there”. It was then that I first realized that he was no ordinary “Bill”. He was none other than William O. Douglas, then Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

For those who either don’t remember or are too young to have known of him, Justice Douglas was a life-long environmentalist, who was recruited by FDR to first serve as on the SEC in 1934 and ultimately nominated five years later to succeed Louis D. Brandeis as Associate Justice at the tender age (for Supremes) of 40. On the bench Douglas became known as a strong advocate of First Amendment rights. He long insisted on a strict interpretation of the First Amendment’s command that no law shall restrict freedom of speech. One of his more famous quotes was: “The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people….“. Later in his public life, Douglas was subjected to several impeachment proceedings led by then Congressman Gerald Ford over his opposition to the Vietnam war and the policies of the Nixon administration and also excoriated by conservative critics for his penchant for relationships with younger women. Maybe there’s still hope for us geezers yet.

Dystopian Realities.

Capitalism — the extractive neo-liberal kind that dominates the world economies currently — depends on conflict. As Naomi Klein relates in her seminal tome on the hegemony of global capitalism The Shock Doctrine, in order to bring about social and political change, there must first be a crisis — either a real, but more often a perceived calamity or disaster. A hurricane in the case of New Orleans and Katrina brought about the wholesale auctioning off of public assets in the Cresent City at bargain basement prices, while subjecting residents of New Orleans to a staggering debt load. And under neoliberal capitalism, politics has become a theatre for controlling economics via military force.

30 years before in the Southern Cone of South America, the crisis was manufactured — similar to what the world is now witnessing in Venezuela and in Brazil exacerbated by rampant corruption — where, after the CIA-engineered coup of the democratically elected socialist regime of Salvador Allende was ousted, free market guru Milton Friedman – he of the Chicago School of Economics – was brought in by the Pinochet government as an advisor to restart the economy – once it was destroyed that is, by the IMF and the World Bank through its proxies in the financial markets having attacked Chile’s currency and commodities markets, creating chaos, hyper-inflation, and rampant corruption, followed by shortages of staples, increased unemployment, poverty, and capital flight (from the clients of international banks in partnership with the IMF/World Bank all dancing to the tune of the Bank For International Settlements). It was the imposition of disaster capitalism on an economy by shock therapy — The Shock Doctrine.

“Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy—tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced with voucher-funded private ones. It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a “Chicago School” revolution, since so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago.”

—— Excerpt From: Naomi Klein. “The Shock Doctrine.”

Then Friedman’s acolytes at the IMF stepped in to offer an olive branch in the form of a bridge loan at high interest, demanding as collateral the transfer of ownership of public assets to private hedge funds and transnational corporations, bought up at pennies on the dollar. What disaster capitalism leaves in its wake is a society of economic zombies; debt peons enslaved to an economic grist wheel riven by poverty, extreme wealth inequality, and increasingly subjected to a system of monopolized economic and political power concentrated in the hands of the plutocracy, benefitting the few at the expense of the many.

“Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population. It is always a form of war. But when that warlike economic model of mass evictions and discarded cultures is imposed in a country that is already ravaged by disaster and scarred by ethnic conflict, the dangers are far greater. There are, as Keynes argued all those years ago, political consequences to this kind of punitive peace—including the outbreak of even bloodier wars.”

— Excerpt From: Naomi Klein. “The Shock Doctrine.”

More than often the catalyst for change comes in the haggard and terrifying visage of war; a disaster scenario that devours all in its path via an insatiable appetite for accumulation through the utter destruction of any competing ideology. It is the single most effective way to transfer economic power from the many to the rentier class and is the driving force behind neoliberal capitalism. Without the immanent threats of force, violence, and fear, the imposition of economic stagnation created through the hoarding of Capital and the extraction of its income stream by the rentier class, austerity programs and polices directed against social programs and the public sector infrastructure would be ineffective against the political will of the many.

The World’s 62 Richest People Own The Same Wealth As The 3.6 Billion Poorest People.

— Oxfam International.

The Carceral State

Let’s be crystal clear about the nature of these threats. Similar to the struggles fought by the underclass against feudalism throughout the entire span of the 19th Century, we are now actively engaged in not only a very real economic class war, but we also in the grips of a do-or-die battle for the viability of democracy itself – on the streets; in the courtroom; in the halls of Congress – waged continuously on a global scale by minions of the neoliberal plutocracy. Without the overt threat of war – The Forever War – now being waged against the poor and the marginalized men and women of color right here on the streets of our cities, capitalism would collapse and the rentier class knows this.

The “domestic front” of The Forever War has never been more overtly conspicuous than in the recent “legalized’ murders by police of poor people of color both in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the frightful counterviolence in Dallas,Texas which resulted in the deaths of five policemen which in the end only serves to validate the interests of the corporate carceral state to keep the underclass under control. Chris Hedges, in a recent post on TruthDig entitled “Legalized Murder and the Politics of Terror” makes a valid case that certain of our citizens, mainly poor and black inhabitants of what he terms as inner city “sacrifice zones” created by neoliberal economic policies, now live in a constant state of terror.

Police officers carry out random acts of legalized murder against poor people of color not because they are racist, although [some] may be, or even because they are rogue cops, but because impoverished urban communities have evolved into miniature police states. Police can stop citizens at will, question and arrest them without probable cause, kick down doors in the middle of the night on the basis of warrants for nonviolent offenses, carry out wholesale surveillance, confiscate property and money and hold people — some of them innocent — in county jails for years before forcing them to accept plea agreements that send them to prison for decades. They can also, largely with impunity, murder them. This downward spiral of violence and counterviolence will not be halted until the ruling ideology of neoliberalism is jettisoned and the corporate state is dismantled. Violence and terror, as corporate capitalism punishes greater and greater segments of the population, are, and will remain, the essential tools for control.

There Is No Alternative

So what is “neoliberalism”? In a recent post for Common Dreams, author and Guardian journalist George Monbiot calls neoliberalism a failed ideology because contrary to its ethos, in practice it stifles competition resulting in economic stagnation through wealth extraction rather than creating economic growth through re-investment.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. “The freedom neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows. Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty. It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”.

 

Yet for all of its protestations for liberty and freedom, holding that all attempts to limit competition be treated as being antithetical to the exercise of the Free Market; that taxes and regulation be minimized; that public services be privatized; neoliberal capitalism functions most effectively under monopolistic conditions where there is a decided lack of competition ensuring the highest prices, lowest costs, and largest profits for its rentier owners. To Monbiot, neoliberalism is the Zombie Doctrine, extracting as its sustenance unearned income in the form of interest and rents from the living, thereby leaving in its wake an economy that is essentially a corpse.

Oxymoron.

How many of us still use a car to commute to work? I mean, there you sit all alone by yourself camped behind the wheel thinking about how you’re going to break it to your boss that you really need to take two weeks off instead of just one because you (or your significant other) are craving a life-changing experience like a trip to Cuba now that the neoliberals have convinced the Castros that Capitalism is cool for the jibaros. You could offer to smuggle in some cigars – only she doesn’t smoke.

Come on, admit it. This is how you waste an hour each way each day, dreaming and worrying about shit that will never happen while increasing exponentially your chances of getting into a fender-bender and making a new enemy of some other poor commuter who’s caught up in the same black hole, when you could be riding to work in style. I don’t mean hitching a ride on one of those Tech Bro mega buses from Oracle, Google or Genentech. I’m talking about Public Transportation. Why?

Because it’s way affordable, surprisingly convenient, environmentally friendly, and most importantly it will force you to interact with what is going on around you every day in the real world – in the real economy. The first thing you will notice once you board the 38 Geary or the 9 Sunnyvale bus is how many people rely on public transportation to get them where they need to be. The second thing you will notice is how many of them are handicapped; in wheelchairs, on crutches, or led by seeing-eye dogs. The third thing you will see is how many are school kids, shouldering backpacks and clutching books or skateboards and chattering excitedly with their mates. The fourth thing you will notice is that many are geezers headed home from the doctor’s office or from shopping. And when you look out the windows of the bus or train, you will see, on almost every other block, the homeless, the indigent , and the forgotten; those who can’t afford a house or a car or even to pay the bus fare. You will be confronted by fellow classmates of the Ninety-Nine Percent and victims of The Forever War.

On the bus coming home one morning I, along with several others, became engaged in an angry confrontation with a man who was vociferously defending the seating reserved for seniors and the handicapped in the front of the bus against those whom he perceived did not qualify as either. The spark for his initial outburst was a woman pushing an infant in a baby carriage who wanted to take a seat across from him. “These seats are for seniors and the handicapped only”, he blurted, pointing toward the back of the bus. “Go sit somewhere else.” When other passengers reminded him that the reserved seating also pertained to women accompanied by children he blanched but offered no response.

A few moments later he turned his attention to a young woman with a small dog in her lap seated across from him, berating her with a similar fervor, accusing her of usurping the rightful space dedicated to individuals like himself, claiming that he was not only handicapped and a senior citizen, but also a veteran Marine who had served in Vietnam; had fought for the freedom of people like her whom he felt didn’t respect who he was and were taking advantage of his sacrifices.

“You were never in the military. You never fought for freedom”, he accused her. “You don’t know anything about me”, she retorted. “There are plenty of available seats for seniors here. And besides, I don’t believe in either fighting or the military”. Face darkening, he shot back, “How can you not believe in the military. The military fights for peace.” Opening her mouth in disbelief, she countered, “Fighting for peace? That’s an oxymoron!” You could almost see his bald head explode as he unleashed the full force of his pent-up rage with a verbal torrent of accusations and abuse, aimed at forcing the now completely flabbergasted young women to move, demanding that she get out of her seat and get off the bus.

I had heard enough. “Maybe you should get off the bus”, I exclaimed. “Who’s you?”, he answered. “You”, I retorted. Then he saw me. “Why don’t you get off the bus?”, he shouted. “I will – in two stops,” I answered. “But before I do I think you should apologize to this woman for treating her so badly.” “I’m not going to apologize, you apologize to her,” he screamed. “Okay, I will. I’m a veteran too”, I countered. Then turning to the young women, whom by now was in tears and being consoled by the woman with the baby carriage, I proceeded to express my personal regrets that she had to endure such an unwarranted personal attack coming from a complete stranger and hoped that she would forgive us for our insensitivity and callousness.

Of course all that did was to set him off like a hand grenade and he began focusing his anger toward me and away from the young girl, accusing me of stupidity, telling me to shut up, and even challenging me to a fight. Fortunately a passenger from the rear of the bus sidled up, stood between us and demanded we both stop yelling and give the rest of the the riders some peace, a sentiment that was seconded by the operator who chimed in over the P.A. calling for all of us to shut up, calm down, and take a seat.

I knew arguing with the man was moronic on my part because by then he was practically incoherent in his rage against the machine and just needed some space to vent before he wound down and ran out of gas. His litany of pain and abuse ran something like this: nobody respected him; nobody listened to him; nobody loved him; everybody was against him.  He’s was ripe for a conversion to Trumpism.

“It’s PTSD; I get it,” I muttered to myself, feeling ashamed that I’d only contributed to the fracas, and not abated it by any means. However, I did take only small amount of comfort in knowing I had at least managed to briefly deflect the focus of his indignation from the luckless young woman whom had borne the brunt of his assault.

Afterwards I got to thinking — always a dangerous thing — that this poor, lonely, angry man is not alone – even if he feels isolated and victimized by an Empire for which he sacrificed several years of his life ostensibly in defense of; in a world not of his making; for a world that ignores its victims and rewards only those it deems complicit in its designs as victors. There are a lot of us – especially us veterans, all having become Empire’s sacrificial lambs; recruited from the lower classes; trained to kill and maim in order to bring “democracy” to the unwashed and the unwilling; anointed as the saviors of freedom and forgiven any excesses in its pursuit; then promptly abandoned on the trash heap of neoliberal Captalism when either too used up, too unwilling to continue, or too old to die.

We are all Zombies on this bus.

Manufacturing Consent.

I recently watched a production of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1950’s masterpiece “Childhood’s End” adapted as a miniseries on the Sci Fi Channel (CBS) in which the Earth is taken over by a master race of “Overlords” – servants to an all-powerful entity called the “Overmind” – who set out to pacifiy the human race at first by propaganda disseminated by intermediaries who, though long-dead, resemble trusted individuals from the past, seemingly resurrected to serve as trusted guides; and second by imposing a new world order where there is no poverty, no sickness (although people do die), and no wars; only shared peace and prosperity where everybody gets along in a Hobbesian utopia.

This goes on for a decade or two until the now-docile human population begin to have children, but these offspring turn out to have special powers known only to the mysterious and unseen Overlords. When the Overlords finally decide to reveal themselves to humankind, the event triggers a backlash among the populace but by now of course it is too late to back out. The Trick in the Tale is that a bargain has already been struck by the human race; decades of prosperity in exchange for their children – a deal with the Devil – reinforced by the physical appearance of the Overlords who turn out to resemble Beelzebub or Hob; replete with horns, cloven hooves and pointed tail.

The Human Race has turned itself into Zombies; bamboozled by greed into sacrificing the Future for a Life of plenty in the present, thereby disenfranchising their own children whom will no longer even be human in whatever future they might have under the Overmind. There’s that “propaganda” word again. Is it just me, or does this sound eerily familiar?

“Oh, and I say it again, you’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amok!”

— Malcolm X.

And you always thought that propaganda meant brainwashing and torture sessions a la The Manchurian Candidate or being tied to a chair and exposed to a Leni Riefenstahl film or a Communist Party broadside and poster. No, not those. We get bombarded by propaganda every day — at least 400 discreet messages each 24 hours — telling us where to eat, how to get there, what to wear, when to get there, what is good on the menu, how to save money by spending more money, and who to vote for so that everything keeps going in the direction we are programmed to believe it is going in (which is really nowhere). Messages declaring that capitalism creates wealth and socialism is for freeloaders; what drugs to take to get thin; how to avoid paying taxes; and basically how to be a model consumer.

 

Propaganda is ubiquitous; on the TV, at the movies, on your smart phone (ever wonder why it’s called “smart”), in the subway, on billboards, on the sides of buses, at the ballpark, hanging from streetlight posts, all over the internet. Everywhere. A person by the age of Fifty has been exposed on average to 7.3 million such messages. I’ve been exposed to nearly 9.5 million in my lifetime.

Recently during my half-hour morning workouts, I witnessed a guy doing pushups – one-handed – while texting with the other, eyes completely glued to the four-inch screen on his phone as if his life depended upon the content of the message he was interacting with. There can be no questioning the fact that we are programmed from birth to death to be model citizens – commodities really; to consume, and to not upset the status quo. A lot of money is spent to convince us that this is our one goal in Life; that it is our reality and anything else is bad for business. So if you believe you cannot afford to do any of this, you are as worthless as a toad and twice as ugly.

You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny.

— Old Schoolyard “put-down”.

Of course this universal messaging is not overtly called propaganda. It is commonly known under the euphemism advertising and the people who originate it are members of the “public relations” industry. The individual who is credited with creating public relations and who is widely regarded as one of the most influential personalities of the 20th Century is Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays was the first person to take his uncle Freud’s ideas about how to manipulate the masses to the mainstream. He showed American corporations (and the government) how to make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods (and political/economic policies) to their unconscious desires and thereby keep the masses happy — and docile. Why?

Because there is a fortune to be extracted from pliant and indebted consumers – what classical economists such as Adam Smith called unearned income – interest and rents that accrue to the rentier class – by convincing the public to empty their wallets, leverage their assets, browbeat them to become slaves to compound interest, and ultimately blame the government and/or themselves for their economic suicide when economic winds change.

Isle Of The Dead

Look at what is happening to Puerto Rico right before our eyes – the Zombie Doctrine in full regalia. Since the mid 1950’s, Puerto Rico had been promoted through Operation Bootstrap as a Free Market island paradise for transnational corporations. The enticements of cheap labor, low rents, abatement of customs duties, and a 10 year tax moratorium created a boom cycle that lasted for several decades as many companies opened branches there. Traditional agri-businesses tied to sugar cane, tobacco and fishing that had been the basis for the local economy in the past were de-emphasized in favor of rapid industrialization.

But mechanization of much of the agribusiness economy coupled with globalization starting in the late 1960’s and NAFTA in the 1990’s flooded the market with competitive alternatives and Puerto Rico soon experienced increasing levels of unemployment, peaking in 2006 when the tax moratorium was ended and businesses started to close causing a severe economic crisis.

Since the year 2000, Puerto Rico has seen a net loss in population of nearly 400,000 people, many of whom migrated stateside leaving paradise in search of a better life. More recently, the three major ratings agencies downgraded Puerto Rico’s debt to junk status, citing its long history of economic weakness (New York Times, 2014). The island’s debt burden began to grow after government expenses began outstripping revenues in the late 1990s, ballooning currently to an estimated $70 billion.

Much of this debt has been purchased by hedge funds whom are demanding that the debt be restructured, pledging what is left of the island’s public assets as collateral. In a statement published by CNBC, the island’s governor Alejandro García-Padilla issued a last ditch appeal for calm in the face of this TINA (There Is No Alternative) crisis.

Puerto Rico adopted the most stringent austerity measures. The payroll has been reduced dramatically. We have deferred other obligations. We have withheld tax refunds. The inability to pay our suppliers has resulted in the loss of commercial credit and many services must now be paid on delivery. Without supplier credit, medicines and supplies for public hospitals and air-ambulance service to trauma centers are now in jeopardy. The emergency measures we have taken are unsustainable, harm our economy, reduce revenues and diminish our capacity to repay our debts. Puerto Rico cannot endure any more austerity. On July 1, 2016, Puerto Rico will default on more than $1 billion in general obligation bonds, the island’s senior credits protected by a constitutional lien on revenues. Creditors and bond insurers have initiated multiple lawsuits and last week, hedge funds filed an injunction before the Southern District of New York claiming the “absolute highest priority” over government resources, including those needed for essential public services. That complaint minces no words and states that, in “times of scarcity,” bondholders should be paid before essential services.

In other words, Puerto Rico’s economy and its people are effectively zombies on suicide watch.

Zombie Jamboree

 

Economist Michael Hudson explores the concept of earned vs unearned income and the rise of financialization as the driving force behind what he calls junk economics in his recent book, Killing The Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

“There are many ways to commit economic suicide on a national level. The major way throughout history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to a point where it cannot be repaid by large swaths of the economy. That is the point at which austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent. Today is not the first time this has happened in history. But it is the first time that running into debt has occurred deliberately, applauded as if most debtors can get rich by borrowing, and not reduced to a condition of debt peonage.”

Professor Hudson argues that the rentier class, made up of members of the One Percent who own large portfolios of Real Estate, stocks, bonds and derivatives plus the investment banks and Wall Street brokerages that manage these portfolios, provide no substantive value to the real economy because they do not add to economic output. These unearned rents, dividends, fees, bonuses, mortgage and loan interest payments, insurance premiums, and Capital gains actually suck up earned revenue from the real economy generated through the business cycle; via profits gleaned from the buying and selling of goods and services, from wages, and from sales and income taxes that support the public sector; all of which can no longer be re-invested into growing the real economy and thereby be deployed to expand business production, create jobs, and maintain the public infrastructure.

On the contrary, a large percentage of this unearned income vacuumed up from the real economy into this neoliberal financialized economy is used by transnational companies and Wall Street for speculation; to accumulate more assets like Real Estate, thereby bidding up the price of these assets on the “free market” pushing the price of homes beyond the range of many buyers; and to buy back outstanding shares of stock, inflating stock market prices which for Wall Street results in increased bonuses and commissions for that company’s senior management as well as increased dividends and Capital Gains for its stockholders.

“A recent Harvard Business Review article calculated that for the decade 2003-2012, the 449 companies publicly listed in the S&P 500 index “used 54% of their earnings – a total of $ 2.4 trillion – to buy back their own stock” – even more than the 37% paid as dividends. This left only 9% of earnings available for new capital investment. This management strategy created financial wealth by elevating the stock price, not by producing more goods. Earnings per share rose not because companies actually earned more, but because there were fewer shares outstanding among which to spread the earnings. Many of the companies [even] downsized and outsourced their employment and production.”

— Hudson, Michael (2015-08-26). Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

One can make the case that an increase in property values will result in an increase in revenues from property taxes which are used by municipalities for funding schools, maintaining roads, providing police and fire protection, and collecting garbage thereby providing a contribution to the real economy. While true, taxation based upon market valuation does nothing to address income and capital inequality; the endemic failures inherent with neoliberal capitalism’s propensity for self-annihilation plus it begs the question of alternative ways to fund the public infrastructure and elevate the indigent such as through Community Land Trusts, Commonomics projects, and an UBI – sometimes called Quantitative Easing for the masses – which will be treated in later chapters of this series on The Neoliberal Book of The Dead.

There is another equally distressing problem with what Professor Hudson terms as “asset-price inflation bubbles”. Since rents and interest add to the cost of living, they also serve to deflate real economy spending while simultaneously inflating the break-even cost of living and thereby making the cost of U.S. labor less competitive on a global scale.

“What makes American labor so high-cost is the monthly “nut” that wage earners must spend to carry their debts and pay for housing, taxes and health insurance. There is no way for an economy with such high debt service, real estate and tax charges to compete with less financialized economies where housing is not so debt-leveraged, where family budgets do not have such high debt carrying charges, and where taxes have not been shifted so regressively off the FIRE sector onto labor and industry.”

— Hudson, Michael (2015-08-26). Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

 

Then there are the Zombie banks. Remember the 2008 Wall Street bailouts? The TARP bailouts ostensibly amounted to $700 billion. But because of a paucity of reserves, some banks were deemed to be undercapitalized, so the FDIC and the Federal Reserve over time have actually spent more than $19 trillion to retire “troubled assets” through the Fed’s Quantitative Easing programs – AKA helicopter money or welfare for Wall Street. Plus those undercapitalized banks could now get loans under Dodd-Frank at a discount. As Bloomberg.com reported in 2013, this amounted to a discount of .8% on the capitalized value of all of their liabilities.

Multiplied by the total liabilities of the 10 largest U.S. banks by assets, it amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion a year. To put the figure in perspective, it’s tantamount to the government giving the banks about 3 cents of every tax dollar collected. “The top five banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits. In other words, the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry — with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy — would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.

Read that last sentence out loud and let it sink in. The top five largest banks in the US are profitable only because of subsidies from the taxpayers! And…they are “too big to fail” which means they’ll be back like Terminators begging the taxpayer for another bail out. Perhaps a better solution in the future might be for these financial behemoths to instead turn to their shareholders and depositors for “bail-ins” in order to regain some semblance of solvency should the need arise. Yeah, bail-outs and bail-ins – corporate welfare unchained.

This was no accident. It is the central strategy of the Zombie Doctrine; use economic distress caused by excessive debt overhead that reduces spending in the real economy, to foreclose on assets distressed because of such inflated debt service fees and transfer them from debtors to creditors while keeping the underlying debt intact, and then force the public to not only make good on that debt now owned by the Rentier Class, but to prop up the market valuation of these assets through interest-free loans, subsidies, tax breaks, and Quantitative Easing tranches, then force the public to pay again via austerity programs that attack the public safety net and its assets. As Michael Hudson points out “The 2008 crisis afforded an opportunity to grab vast sums and subsidies by threatening that the alternative was chaos.” Who made all of these threats? The Federal Reserve in cahoots with the Treasury.

Until 2008, financial crashes had a silver lining: to wipe away the debt overhead so that economies can recover. Debt relief through bankruptcy traditionally forced housing prices to fall back to more affordable levels. But the Fed’s aim was (and remains) to preserve the economic power of the One Percent and revive bank balance sheets by preventing housing, stock market or bond prices from falling. In conjunction with cutting back public spending programs, this shrinks the domestic market, and wages fall instead of the housing and other asset prices. The banks were bailed out, not the economy.

— Hudson, Michael (2015-08-26). Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

Stagnation and Austerity

This financialization of the economy has not led to real economic growth. It has in fact resulted in stagnation — a zombification of the economy — because stock buyback programs, debt service on loans and dividends paid to the rentier class use profits that could have been deployed to generate more economic output have instead been cannibalized for self-preservation. Plus the rentier class, awash in hyper-inflated assets have no place to put their money except in these same markets at exponentially expanding prices.

In other words, Zombie Economics is one “yuge” Ponzi scheme with participants tautologically claiming economic growth is true because they say it is when in reality it is a chimera; a massive transfer of public funds into private hands exacerbated by politically-imposed austerity programs that are designed purposely to shrink economic output and accelerate the accumulation of Capital for the elites.

 

According to economists Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster in their book The Endless Crisis, stagnation is endemic to this phase of neoliberal capitalism – a phenomenon the authors call The Great Stagnation, having produced in the last few decades a seemingly endless series of economic crises.

From a Marxist point of view, the authors describe a global economy increasingly monopolized — a few very large transnational firms that control one or several industries — resulting in an increasingly concentrated accumulation of Capital with too few avenues for strategic investment for growth. Hence, this corporate largesse is hoarded offshore in tax havens or exploited by Wall Street for speculation in commodities hedges and derivatives.

Stagnation is the word that economists use for this phenomenon. In human terms it means declining real wages, massive unemployment, a public sector facing extreme budget crises, growing inequality and a general and sometimes sharp decline in the quality of life. “This neoliberal campaign for the internationalization of monopoly capital is not merely an attack on the working class. Rather it must be understood, more broadly, as an attack on the potential for political democracy, that is, on the capacity of the people to organize as an independent force to counteract the power of corporations.

— McChesney , Robert W.; Bellamy Foster, John (2012-09-01). The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (p. 9). Monthly Review Press.

The Friedman Doctrine.

As a matter of course, this discussion inexorably dovetails back to Milton Friedman and his slavishly loyal followers from the Chicago School whom dominate neo-classical economics today and whose neoliberal policies to a large extent have created an economic pandemic of income disparity and stagnation imposed by austerity.

In his book , “Where Did All The Money Go?” economist George Blackford eviscerates Friedman’s core assumptions regarding a scientific basis for his economic models. In one instance, Blackford targets specifically Friedman’s essay entitled “The Methodology of Positive Economics” in which Friedman presented a thought experiment positing that “excellent predictions” could come from confidence in a system based upon an hypothesis that an expert billard player would perform as if he (or she) intuitively understood all of the complicated mathematical formulas and geometrical angles associated with participating in the game and would then make all of the instantaneous calculations by eye to cause the balls to move in directions commensurate with these formulas, not as a result of any empirical evidence demonstrating that a billiard player actually could complete such a process, but is derived from a belief that unless these subjects were capable of such a result, they could not in fact be called “expert” billiard players. In other words, class matters and only “experts” should control the game.

“In spite of the simple fact that scientific understandings and explanations arise through logic and reason from the implications of the assumptions (i.e., premises) on which scientific arguments are based, and that a logical argument only has substantive meaning to the extent the premises on which it is based are true, Friedman argues that the relevance of a theory cannot be judged by the realism of its assumptions so long as it is also argued that it is as if its assumptions were true. Aside from the fact that this argument makes absolutely no sense at all as a foundation for scientific inquiry, it begs the question: Why should mainstream [neo-classical] economists be taken seriously if their theories and, hence, their arguments are based on false assumptions?”

According to Blackford it is precisely the blind adherence to the neo-classical anti-Keynesian policies of financial de-regulation implemented over the previous four decades by acolytes of this “free market” Friedman Doctrine — one that assumes speculative asset bubbles do not exist in spite of historical proof to the contrary and completley ignores the other side of the Balance Sheet; the explosion in debt and its concommitant appendage – compound interest, to be paid by declining earned incomes wrenched from the Real Economy and transferred as unearned income to the Rentier Class.

“Is it any wonder that the economic models created by mainstream [neo-classical] economists in the wake of Friedman’s billiard-player analogy have ignored the long-run relationship between consumption and effective demand, output, and employment…to the effect that the logical implications of mainstream economic models have been used to justify deregulating the domestic and international financial systems, cutting taxes on the wealthy and increasing taxes on the not so wealthy, eliminating usury laws, promoting the adoption of private retirement accounts, destroying labor unions, converting Social Security from a pay-as-you-go into a partial-prepayment system, opposing increases in the minimum wage and many other policies that only make sense within a paradigm that not only ignores the essential role of government in providing for the common good but also ignores the long-run relationship between consumption and effective demand as well and simply assumes that increasing saving [for the Rentier Class] enhances economic growth in spite of the utter absurdity of this assumption?”

Cedargrove

This is a picture that I took in 2012 of derelict homes on the very block where I grew up on the East side of Detroit. At the time the picture was taken, there were only six habitable homes still standing on a block that once boasted 30 or more working class houses and the families that lived in them. I cannot show you images of what they looked like back in the heyday of the Motor City of the 1950’s. But what I hope to do is to somehow illustrate the decaying effects of the neoliberal policies of globalization, austerity, and financialization on a real neighborhood over time. This is what Capitalism does to neighborhoods – my old neighborhood – when it is unchecked.

My parents bought a home on this block in 1947 for $13,000. That same house in 2012, one of the six still standing that can be lived in, was on the market for $4,000. The rest are now inhabited by transients, cannibalizers, ghosts and zombies — all of whom were once believers in the American Dream. Mom and Dad believed in that dream too, and although they never profited much in the Real Estate markets, maybe because Real Estate wasn’t something to speculate with back then, they never liked mortgages and as a result always strove to own their homes outright. You have to wonder whether or not a family can even afford to do that nowadays.

Think about it. If you were to take out a 30 year mortgage at a nominal interest rate of say 6%, because of the nature of compound interest over the term of that loan you could wind up paying more than double the original settlement price of the home to the bank. Double! A $500K fully amortized loan for 30 years at a 6% compound interest rate generates nearly $580K in total interest payments over its term. And this is perfectly acceptable and not considered to be usury. Why? Because keeping you in debt up to your eyeballs is part of The Plan.

Plus that $580K in interest would effectively be removed from the Real Economy where it could have been used to expand business production and create jobs. Instead it would be used solely to reduce the loan principal – for debt deflation – and to fill the coffers of the Rentier owners who would use it to buy more property and create more debt.

 

No wonder we are all slaves to this four-letter word called work. Come on. Just because your name is on the deed, do you think the home is actually yours? You may be legally responsible, paying property taxes, insurance, and upkeep on it. But you are doing so for the benefit of the real owners, a mortgage or insurance company whom actually holds the Title. The property will not be yours until you pay off that mortgage. Without debt peons like you, how would the rentier class be able to maintain that 5 to 7 percent annual return that compound interest affords them?

Think of what you could do if you didn’t have to pay that interest – or for that matter the property taxes and insurance. You wouldn’t have to work as hard or long and maybe save a nest egg or even buy another home, lease it and become a rentier yourself. Or you could retire early, actively build a better world for your kids and stop working on the chain gang as a debt zombie for someone else.

You can read Chapter I and Chapter II and Chapter IV of The Neoliberal Book of The Dead on this site. Just follow the highlighted links.

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© Kazkar Babiy ™ MMXIV.

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