BERNIE SANDERS
FEBRUARY 12, 2025

We we are living in an extremely dangerous time. Future generations will look back at this moment – what we do right now – and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism. They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who in 1863, looking out at a battlefield where thousands died in the struggle against slavery and stated that; “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Do we stand with Lincoln’s vision of America or do we allow this country to move to a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires?

But it’s not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, and the reality that the three richest people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 170 million people. It’s not just that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, and that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we’ve ever had.

It is also that we are looking at a rapid movement, under President Trump, toward authoritarianism. More and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands.

Right now, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged. These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, reform them or end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional – and must be stopped.

Two weeks ago, President Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans – an outrageous and clearly unconstitutional act. As I hope every 6th grader in America knows, under the Constitution and our form of government the president can recommend legislation, he can support legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding passed by Congress. It is Congress, the House and the Senate, who control the purse strings.

But it’s not just Congress that’s under attack. It’s our judiciary.

This weekend, the Vice President, a graduate of Yale Law School, who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, said that: “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Really? I thought that one of the major functions of the federal courts is to interpret our Constitution and, when appropriate, serve as a check on unconstitutional executive power.

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed that “the worst 1% of appointed judges be fired every year,” and demanded the impeachment of judges that have blocked him from accessing sensitive Treasury Department files. No doubt, under Mr. Musk’s rule, it will be him and his billionaire friends who determine who the “worst” judges are. And no, Mr. Musk, you don’t impeach judges who rule against you. You may or may not know this, but under the U.S. Constitution, we have a separation of powers, brilliantly crafted by the founding fathers of this country in the 1770s.

So, we are seeing an organized attack on Congress and the courts.

But Trump and his friends aren’t just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government – Congress and the courts. They are also going after the media in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country.

Every member of Congress will tell you that people in the media, and media organizations, are not perfect. They, like everyone else, make mistakes every day. But I hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy without an independent press – non-intimidated journalists who can write it and say it the way they see it. And in that regard, I want to remind my colleagues what this president has done in recent months.

President Trump has sued ABC and received a $15 million settlement. He has sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and received a $25 million settlement. He has sued CBS, and its parent company Paramount, is apparently in negotiations over a settlement. He has sued the Des Moines Register, and his FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR.

In other words, we have a President of the United States who is using his power to go after media in this country who are saying and doing things he doesn’t like. How are we going to have an independent media if journalists are looking over their shoulders, fearful that their reporting will trigger a lawsuit from the most powerful man in the world?

Now is the time to ask a very simple question. What do Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and their fellow billionaires really want? What is their endgame?

And in my view, the answer is not complicated. It is not novel. It is not new. It is what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have always believed is theirs by right: more power, more control and more wealth. And they are determined to not allow democracy and the rule of law to get in their way.

For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to. That is what they really believe.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this in our country’s history.

In pre-revolutionary America, before the 1770s, the ruling class of that time governed through a doctrine called the “divine right of kings,” the belief that the King of England was an agent of God, God appointed him, and he was not to be questioned by mere mortals.

In modern times we no longer have the “divine right of kings.” What we NOW have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs which says that as very, very wealthy people – often self-made, often the masters of revolutionary new technology and as “high-IQ individuals,” it is THEIR absolute right to rule. In other words, the oligarchs of today are our modern-day kings.

And it is not just power that they want. Despite the incredible wealth they have they want more, and more and more. Their greed has no end. Today, Mr. Musk is worth $402 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth $252 billion and Mr. Bezos is worth $249 billion. With combined wealth of $903 billion, these 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society — 170 million people.

Not surprisingly, since Trump was elected, their wealth has soared. Elon Musk has become $138 billion richer, Zuckerberg has become $49 billion richer and Bezos has become $28 billion richer – since Election Day.

Meanwhile, while the very rich become much richer, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or under-insured, 25% of seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 or less, 800,000 are homeless and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. And real, inflation adjusted wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for 50 years.

Do you think the oligarchs give a damn about these people? Trust me, they don’t. Musk’s decision to dismember U.S. AID means that tens of thousands of the poorest people around the world will go hungry or die of preventable diseases.

But it’s not just abroad. Here in the United States they’ll soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country – all so that Congress can provide huge tax breaks for them and their fellow billionaires. As modern-day kings, who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people to protect their privilege.

Further, they will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they “entertain us to death.” Mr. Musk owns twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Meta – which includes Facebook and Instagram – and Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Further, they and their fellow oligarchs, will continue to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.

Bottom line: The oligarchs, with their enormous resources, are waging a war on the working class of this country, and it is a war they are intent on winning.

Now, I am not going to kid you — the problems this country faces right now are serious and they are not easy to solve. The economy is rigged, our campaign finance system is corrupt and we are struggling to control climate change — among many other important issues.

But this is what I do know:

The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans — Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old — come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.

Their oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.

Will this struggle be easy? Absolutely not.

And one of the reasons that it will not be easy is that the ruling class of this country will constantly remind you that THEY have all the power. They control the government, they own the media.

But our job right now, in these difficult times, is to not forget the great struggles and sacrifices that millions of people have waged over the several centuries to create a more democratic, just and humane society. Think about what people THEN were saying.

• Overthrowing the King of England to create a new nation and self-rule. Impossible.
• Establishing universal suffrage. Impossible.
• Ending slavery and segregation. Impossible.
• Granting workers the right to form unions and ending child labor. Impossible
• Giving women control over their own bodies. Impossible.
• Passing legislation to establish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a minimum wage, clean air and water standards. Impossible.

In other words, as Nelson Mandela told us, everything is impossible until it is done.

First Published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

BY PATRICK MAZZA
MARCH 28, 2024

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The converging crises facing our world today shout out the fact that their roots are systemic. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve these problems, because they are embedded in the systems logic itself. The climate crisis is the signature of this. While definite progress has been made in deploying low-carbon energy technologies, overall carbon pollution has continued to increase because of the systemic economic and political assumptions under which dominant institutions operate.

The same is true of the general crisis of ecological overshoot in which climate is a major factor but by no means the whole picture. Scientists led by the Stockholm Resilience Center have been looking at ecological boundaries which mark out the safe space for human civilization and the Earth as a whole. Last September they announced the results of the first-ever evaluation of all 9 processes that preserve stability and resilience. Six boundaries have already been breached including the condition of climate, land, water and the biosphere, as well as overloading of phosphorus and nitrogen, and introduction of novel entities such as microplastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. This all suggests, scientists wrote, “that Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity.”

These facts underscore the necessity for transformative change in economic and political systems. Massive resources must be devoted to transforming the basic elements of human society, including how we gain energy and materials to produce goods and services, how we grow our food, how we get around, how we build our buildings, how we deal with waste products. That entails redirection in how we invest capital.

Two significant indicators that our world is not getting it are the dramatic accumulation of wealth upwards and record military spending. Over the past 4 years billionaire wealth in the U.S. alone has shot up 88%, from $2.9 trillion in 2020 to $5.5 trillion today. The top 10, led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, account for $1.4 trillion of that. Globally, as a 2022, the richest 1% owned 46% of world wealth. No doubt that percentage has increased since. Would the planet be going into ecological overshoot if these people were investing in a way that created a resilient future? Obviously, they’re not. Sure, some are putting money into low-carbon technologies and environmental philanthropy, but the overwhelming preponderance of their investments and businesses still propels overshoot. Whatever they are doing does not address the systemic roots of the crisis.

Meanwhile, world militaries gobbled a record $2.2 trillion in 2023, up 9% over 2022, and another record is expected in 2024, the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported. That no doubt is a lowball, since real spending by the largest military power, the U.S., was estimated at $1.5 trillion in 2022, double the nominal budget. All the while wars rage on in Europe, the Mideast and Africa, and direct conflict between great powers is predicted. The frightful words World War III are increasingly on people’s lips.

All this indicates a world desperately in need of transformative change is moving in the diametrically opposite direction. It’s enough to crush hope and leave people who care for the future in despair. Where do you gain leverage to change such an interlocked global system? We need a way to take hold and begin to put a new system in place.

Restoring the Commons

The first step is to understand the essence of the systemic transformation that is required. The common thread in our multiple global crises is the elevation of narrow interests over the common good. Certainly, the crisis of ecological overshoot reflects blindness towards our dependence on the planetary commons. For instance, making the atmosphere a dump for fossil fuel pollution while cutting down forests and tearing up soils are major drivers of climate disruption. Increasing global conflict and military expenditures reflect putting national interests over those of the world as a whole, despite the threat of nuclear extermination. The obscene and increasing concentration of the world’s wealth in so few hands screams out the prevalence of private interests over the common good.

Thus, the necessity is to restore the balance in society by rebuilding our sense of the common good, and the institutional frameworks that express it. That is the core of the transformation that is required. Self-interest is a powerful factor in human life, and will remain so. It is a part of human nature. But we also have a strongly cooperative and social side that must be emphasized if we are to navigate our convergent crises.

Over the past 4 or 5 decades, a philosophy known as neoliberalism has prevailed. It is built on a belief that if we each pursue our own self-interest, it will result in optimal results for society. The record has proved this wrong. The crises cited above, ecological overshoot, increased global conflict, and widening disparity of wealth, all testify to the need to restore a sense of the common good and common enterprise.

Neoliberalism has downgraded and denied these necessities and the institutions we have created to promote the public good. The general diminishment of the public sector, with the widespread evasion of just taxation by the wealthy classes, is central to this.

On my home turf of Washington state, we have a poster.  We just lost a billionaire. That world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, just evaded around a quarter-billion dollars in payments under a newly enacted state capital gains tax by moving his legal residence to Florida. This is a man whose Amazon wealth depends on deliveries through public road and aviation infrastructure, and whose computer-based business is built on digital innovation publicly funded during World War II and the Cold War.

Capture of public institutions by private interests is the other aspect of the neoliberal era that makes them so ineffective at dealing with our crises. The fossil fuel industry and allies such as big agriculture and railroads have frustrated sufficient action on climate. The military-industrial complex promotes conflict and war. The wealthy fight just taxation. The list could go on.

The balance to this situation is people power democratically organized to advocate for the common good. That is why we need leverage points where people power can begin to make change, to reinforce existing institutional frameworks and build new ones that promote the common good. We need to build resilient economies that address the imperative to come back within planetary boundaries while meeting basic human needs.

Restoring the Common Good in place

Inherent in the idea of the common good is community. Restoring the common good and restoring community are one and the same. This directs us to the logical place to begin the process, the communities in which we live. This is where we can begin the work of transformation, of putting new systems in place. Our communities are where we develop the deepest connections and sense of commonality. Our surroundings, the social and natural environments in which we live, are where we can best envision and work for the conditions that promote the common good.

A key insight is that you can’t change everything at once. You have to build a new system within the shell of the old, using elements of the old system that nonetheless embody the changes you want to make. In the case of building the future in place, local and sub-national state and provincial governments are vital. These are the institutions charged with maintaining the public sphere, and powerful in crucial areas including transportation, building and zoning codes, public green spaces, waste management, water supplies, pollution control, and economic development. In many areas they own energy utilities, while private utilities are regulated by state commissions. In other words, local and sub-national jurisdictions play central roles in many of those areas requiring transformation. In fact, much of the progress made toward a more sustainable society has been accomplished at these governmental levels.

But we need something more. We need to coalesce a broader political movement with a vision for transformative change, and to reclaim capital flowing out of our communities for investment in public and community-based institutions that address basic human needs. We need a kind of evolutionary revolution that builds the common good, one which makes systemic, transformative changes in specific places, in that way building models and constituencies for changes on broader scales, creating networks that are both horizontal with other places and vertical up to national and global levels.

Many of these concepts go under the rubric of municipalism, a fundamental idea of which is not only leveraging existing governing institutions for change, but also creating a more participatory and inclusive context. This entails creating community assemblies or congresses that draw together diverse groups and movements to create visions for transformative change and build the political power to make them happen.

This strongly suggests that building a future based on the common good, on restoring community in place, begins by drawing together the many organized groups working for specific changes in localities into discussions aimed at coalescing their forces around a common agenda. One can envision stages beginning with conversations among group organizers leading to community congresses that agree on unified platforms and prioritize steps to realize them through work with local governments and civil society. Election of local officials who remain accountable to the will of community congresses, who will work to enact the agenda, is a key element. Many of these actions have already been modeled in places such as Barcelona, where for some years a civic movement made significant gains based on organizing through neighborhood and citywide assemblies. Though the movement there has seen setbacks, it still remains an influential model.

Beyond building a new political base, the key priority is to build a new economic base, one based on peace rather than war, which meets real human needs. That is why the growing movement for public banking is foundational. In the U.S., banking is largely a private enterprise built on bottom-line considerations. An exception is the state bank in North Dakota, a legacy of the populist era. So individuals, businesses and governments keep their money in institutions that send it around the world in search of the greatest profit opportunities, often undermining the interests of their depositors. Banks also have the power to create money, being able to lend beyond their reserves on the calculation most loans will be repaid.

A public banking system would treat money as a public utility, to be invested and created by social, economic and environmental criteria that promote the common good. Public banks created at local and subnational levels could fund public infrastructure, and eliminate interest paid to private banks. They could also fund needed community institutions such as social housing and worker coops. They could focus investments in areas crucial for sustainability at all levels, such as public transit, food production and distribution, clean energy, and materials recycling and recovery. Cities and states could become dynamic actors in building community-based economic institutions that meet needs where the private sector is falling short.

A political strategy for all seasons

Of course, such an agenda will be opposed by the same narrow private interests that obstruct progress at broader levels. Local business interests are powerful, and generally well organized and well funded. That is why we need coherent political movements with their own institutional infrastructures and visions and agendas for transformative change. The place such people power movements have the greatest potential to gain leverage is local areas. And where there are powerful local movements, the ability to move state and provincial governments is greatest. They can also coalesce into bioregional networks that build a new sense of identity and common purpose around place defined by nature.

Obviously, the multiple crises facing us require transformative change at all levels. The interest group politics that maintains a stranglehold on national governments must be dislodged. A new level of international cooperation must be achieved. These are necessities. Local focus allows us to build models that are truly transformative, and networks to spread them more widely and achieve broader gains. Local and regional communities are where people power politics can gain the most traction to begin re-balancing society and politics for community and the common good.

Ultimately, we need a politics for all seasons, one that can address all exigencies, a no-regrets political strategy that prepares for worst case scenarios, within reason, but which will work and provide gains under all scenarios. One which provides effective routes for transformative change through people power organizing. Which begins to re-balance who has power in society, turning around the trend to increased concentration of economic and political power by distributing power more widely. And which effectively addresses our convergent crises by beginning to restore the common good in economy and society.

Many fear, and even consider inevitable, that systemic collapse will be upon us in coming years. Ecologically, in the form of intensifying climate disruption and connected breakdowns of vital systems such as food production. Economically, in the form of a new great depression. Politically, in the form of deepening social conflicts and electoral outcomes that push national unity beyond the breaking point. All this speaks to the need to build strong, resilient communities. A political strategy that builds a future based on the common good beginning in the places where we live can meet this need, and potentially help avert worst case scenarios.

If humanity survives the current age, it will be recalled how we as a species navigated a time of great disruption on multiple levels. Certainly, we will have left a legacy of disrupted climate and ecosystems. We will have experienced consequences that are now unavoidable, but will somehow have avoided total civilizational collapse and nuclear warfare. I believe that when that story is told, it will be one of rediscovery of the common good, building a future based on community, human solidarity and mutual aid. Begining by building the future in place.

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This first appeared on The Raven.

Shared via Creative Commons.

By HENRY GIROUX
December 16, 2022

The Politics and Culture of Cruelty

Cruelty has always had a special place in fascist politics. Not only did it embody a discourse of hate, bigotry, and censorship, it also initiated a practice of cruel power in order to eradicate those ideas, dissidents, and human beings considered unworthy. Legacies of fascism in Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy, among others, mixed a language of dread, fear, and contempt with wide-spread practices of suppression and the repressive power of the state in order to eliminate any just concept of politics and the structural conditions and ideological possibilities for developing civic and democratic communities.

Under fascist regimes, however diverse, cruelty and its transformation into extreme violence occupied the very core of everyday life.[1]  Cruelty as a form of extreme violence was structured in relations of domination and traded in fear, insecurity, corruption, forced precarity, and the production of what Etienne Balibar calls “death zones.”[2]  Under such circumstances, politics and violence permeated each other, and in doing so transformed all vestiges of the social state into a punishing state. Fascist politics represented a war waged not only against democracy, but against the social contract, public goods, and all social bonds rooted in “movements of emancipation aimed at transforming the structures of domination.”[3] The social does not disappear in this context but is simply removed from democratic values and ruthlessly subjected to the workings of capital.[4]

Fascist regimes not only emptied politics of any substantive meaning, they pushed it towards its own destruction, reducing it to a form of barbarity.[5]  In retrospect, fascist regimes made the culture of hardness and cruelty central to their politics – a politics that menaced all aspects of society, functioning as a disimagination machine that destroyed civic culture, any viable sense of inclusive citizenship, and critical thought. Delight in the misery and suffering of others was normalized as part of a wider war on social responsibility and critical institutions, creating the conditions necessary for the triumph of ignorance, irrationality, and  the legitimation of what I call the politics of disposability.[6] The merging of violence and politics did more than test the limits of democracy and social justice, it also pushed at the limits of the unthinkable and unimaginable. As the bar for civic tolerance and social justice disappeared, a form of totalitarian terror emerged in which groups were marked out for terminal exclusion, social abandonment, and in the worse case scenario, extermination. One consequence of the embrace of a culture cruelty by fascist regimes was what the French Philosopher Etienne Balibar calls “production for elimination.” He is worth quoting at length:

In the face of the cumulative effects of different forms of extreme violence or cruelly that are displayed in what I called the “death zones” of humanity, we are led to admit that the current mode of production and reproduction has become a mode of production for elimination, a reproduction of populations that are not likely to be productively used or exploited but are always already superfluous, and therefore can be only eliminated either through “political” or “natural” means—what some Latin American sociologists provocatively call poblacion chatarra, “garbage humans,” to be “thrown” away, out of the global city. If this is the case, the question arises once again: what is the rationality of that? Or do we face an absolute triumph of irrationality?[7]

The culture of cruelty has a long history in the United States. Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, reminds us of the catalogues of cruelty on display in the Museum of African American History and Culture. He points to artifacts of inhumanity that include slave shackles worn by children, the mutilated bodies of lynched Black men, and photos of grinning whites who took enormous pleasure in the torturing of those bodies considered worthless, of no value, and objects of racial contempt. In the more contemporary moment, we have examples of bodies kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned in black holes by the Bush administration.[8]  Of course, it is well known that the Trump presidency made cruelty a central policy in its dealings with migrants, people of color, and the separating of children at the border from their parents. The latest exercise in unqualified cruelty, worn like a badge of honor, comes from a number of GOP governors, especially Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who are waging an attack on trans children, using migrants as political pawns, and reviving a culture of overt white supremacy.[9]

The Trump regime also produced a range of policies that rejoiced at the anguish of others evident in the cutting of the safety net and programs that included support for Habitat for Humanity, the homeless, the meals on wheels program, energy assistance to the poor, legal aid, and a number of anti-poverty programs. By injecting violence into politics, moving it from the margins to the center of power, Trump and his followers advanced the descent of the US into barbarism. Violence is now so deeply rooted in American culture that it appears to have been normalized.[10] According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, there have been over 600 mass shootings per year in the U.S. since 2020.[11]  Mass shootings now take place daily and are barely acknowledged, and if they are noted, it is almost in purely personal terms, reduced to examining the personal lives of the perpetrators and victims. Larger systemic causes of violence are no longer part of the analysis. Violence has become so arbitrary and thoughtless that it no longer warrants sober reflection regarding its causes or consequences. This is especially true regarding violence, both symbolic and real, waged in the name of white supremacy by a Republican Party that is deeply racist and authoritarian. Violence, as Jonathan Schell once noted, has “steadily gained ground along with a growing faith in force as the solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad. Enthusiasm for killing is an unmistakable symptom of cruelty.”[12]

Rarely is this current descent into the culture of cruelty connected to the legacy of fascism and its updated version of authoritarian capitalism or what I have called neoliberal fascism. What is new in the current historical moment is the visibility and normalizing of extreme violence and cruelty—a visibility produced in social media, media coverage, and in all aspects of the entertainment industry. Violence has become part of a staged performance and mode of political theater that harks back to the fascist integration of aesthetics into the mesmerizing spectacle of violence and intense auras and displays of cruelty.[13]  Violence has become apocalyptic and spectacularized. A theater of cruelty and violence now functions to consolidate power, shatter the bonds of solidarity, and create a culture of white supremacy and Christian extremism.

The ghosts of fascism are back.

With the reappearance of fascism, democracy turns phantom-like and dark, and Americans face the plague of a hate-filled politics with its lethal and expanding politics of disposability–a politics in which some individuals and groups are regarded as non-human, treated as excess and human waste, presented as faceless, superfluous, and symbols of fear, disease,  morally incorrigible, and unworthy of human rights and dignity.[14]  When fascism’s attributes are isolated and removed from history, there is no analysis here of broader systemic power relations, no overlapping, or comprehensive understandings of how an emerging fascist politics is part of a new totalizing formation that  permeates every aspect of the social order. Following the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, there is no holistic mode of inquiry; that is, there is no broad-based analysis that moves beyond focusing on specialized issues, isolated problems, and individual events—such as removing the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband from a wider culture of violence that provides the conditions for such events to occur. Or comprehensive analyses that relate such violence to an indictment of gangster capitalism in general. What remains are isolated and disconnected expressions of oppression, unrelated social movements, and narrow modes of analysis caught in a paralyzing and limiting modes of inquiry. Such disconnected and fractured approaches avoid and often refuse to examine how the present historical moment bears the weight of history, requires a broader systemic politics, and necessitates developing the  theoretical and political tools essential to resist and demolish the threat of a fascist future. The catastrophes of our time are increasing normalized by the refusal on the part of intellectuals, academics, pundits, and various media platforms to provide any comprehensive account for developing a critical vocabulary and analytics for understanding how major social problems are interrelated, how they are manifested in relations to other forms of oppression, and  how they overlap and reinforce each other, and what this totalizing form of terror means for the present and future.

Neoliberalism as a Phase of Gangster Capitalism.

In recent times the United States has entered into an apocalyptically dystopian historical period. It is a period marked by a new phase of economic savagery–one that since the 1970s has  embraced the ideology that all social life should be shaped by market forces, and that any political, social, or economic institution that puts a curb on corporate and private interests, unregulated markets, the amassing of personal wealth, and unchecked individual and property rights, among other issues, is the enemy of freedom. Under this regime of economic tyranny, social needs and social responsibility have been held in contempt along with the welfare state, the common good, and society itself. This was echoed in former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim that “There is no such thing as society. There is only the individual and his [sic] family.” It is precisely this regressive individual conception of self-hood with its unchecked notion of self-interest, agency, and freedom that defines neoliberalism.[15] Social problems, precarity, alienation, despair, suffering, and misery are now “individualized, and experienced as normal and inevitable.”[16]  Moreover, the collapse of ethics is complete in a fundamental neoliberal notion that any concern about social costs is the enemy of the market.

Language has been hollowed out, transformed into a consumer advertising pitch, wedded to the spectacle of game shows, made dumb by celebrity culture, weaponized as part of a war on social responsibility, and censored in schools by right-wing propagandists who are wedded to using violence as a way to achieve political goals. The language of politics is written in the language of capital, not ethics, justice, and compassion, making it easier to connect violence with the most lethal workings of power. Violence is now facilitated by a glut of manufactured ignorance, accelerated through the degradation of language. In the age of dwindling attention spans, language succumbs to a mediated culture of immediacy, tweets, and a degrading commercial culture that limits the imagination, politics, civic life, and democracy itself. In the age of rebranded fascism, political culture is no longer a critical culture, and now functions to undermine those civic and critical institutions and spaces in which an anti-capitalist consciousness can be developed.[17]

Under an emerging fascist politics, violence is no longer hidden behind a wall of silence, it is now worn like an honorary badge by far-right extremists in the Republican Party along with their supporters. Learned helplessness in America has morphed into learned cruelty and a retreat from the discourse of compassion, care, and truthfulness. Social bonds disappear in a neoliberal world of dwindling interconnections, atomized subjects, fractured communities, the suppression of historical memory, and civic disintegration. Facing life’s problems is now a solitary affair reinforced by both the ongoing right-wing attack on historical memory and its increasing degeneration. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, in her lyrical and passionate commentary on “The Mystic of Mar-a-Lago,” captures the shattering ideological architecture of this collapse of consciousness, integrity, and meaningful social bonds. She writes:

These days, so many of us speak the language of emergency, but where is the language of integrity, sincerity, and dedication? Gone is the ability to bear down, to think beyond ourselves, even in the most basic ways. Instead, we have been left to navigate a disabling pandemic on our own, with the most vulnerable left to their own resources. We are becoming a country anesthetized to people saying, “I am afraid for my life.” The war on one another demands that we not stop to ask, “Why are you afraid?” but rather that we bear our right to be callous and to keep on. Mr. Trump gave people something to coalesce around as a communion of disdain, but it signified nothing at the end of the day.[18]

What has changed since the severe global economic crisis of 2007-2008 is that neoliberalism has fallen victim to a legitimation crisis. But American society has experienced more than a crisis, it has entered into what Stuart Hall calls a new historical conjuncture.[19]  That is, a period when different social, political, economic, and ideological forces come together in society and give it a specific and distinctive shape. This new conjuncture is important to name and understand in order to resist it. As a rebranded form of politics, it does more than give free reign globally to finance capital, it also unleashes generic elements of a fascist past with its legacy of racial cleansing, rabid misogyny, mass violence, and a politics of disposability. This new historical moment or conjuncture represents the end of one period and the rise of another, which I label as neoliberal fascism. This new conceptual identity with its brutalizing ideological and economic baggage represents a new and relentless turning away from democracy, and signals that the old period of the social welfare state, social contract, and emphasis on constitutional rights is no longer the defining politics of American society. In fact, it is currently the object of a white supremacist war to eliminate this older liberal period of American history and politics. The Trumpist slogan Make American Great Again [MAGA] rightly captures this new historical moment.

Neoliberalism no longer appeals to the old economics of private wealth creation and trickle-down benefits to either justify economic inequality or the promises of social mobility.[20]  It has no solutions for mass poverty, the defunding of essential public goods such as schools, the crisis of social services, the deterioration of the public health sector, runaway drug prices, or staggering levels of inequality in wealth and power. Whatever economic growth took place benefited the financial elite. All the while, economic power translated into political power, further eroding the basic foundations of the democratic state and governance. [21]

Neoliberalism turns a blind eye to poverty and inequality and no longer offers a defense of its death-dealing ideology.[22] As Pankaj Mishra has noted, it cannot “improve material conditions and bring about measure of social and economic equality.”[23] Incapable and unwilling to defend the misery it imposes on the American public, it now appeals to overt racism and ultra-nationalism, claiming that liberal democracy is responsible for the ongoing economic and political crises that amount to “an abyss of failed sociality.”[24] Parading as a species of illiberal democracy, neoliberal fascism rejects democracy “as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.”[25] Instead, immersed in the “pornography of power,” mass-produced misery, and the bogus fantasy of unaccountability, neoliberalism updates itself, unabashedly aligning itself with anti-democratic forces across the globe that demonize, censor, and punish racial, gender, religious, and sexual minorities. [26] Dehumanization, racial cleansing, and repression are the new legitimating tools of this updated form of neoliberal fascism. Paul Mason captures this new alignment of neoliberalism and fascism. He writes:

Neoliberalism’s collapse has stripped the current model of capitalism of all meaning and justification….the vacuum is being filled by an ideology hostile to human rights, to universalism, to gender and racial equality; an ideology that worships power, sees democracy as a sham, and wishes for a catastrophic reset of the entire global order. Worse, the number one weapon for the US right is that self-same “eighteenth-century philosophy” that [allegedly] had given Americans immunity from totalitarian rule: their individualism, which has been turned against them during thirty years of free-market rule, and their belief that economic choice constitutes freedom.

Freedom has turned ugly in America.[27]  Michael Tomasky rightly observes how freedom in right-wing discourse has become detached from any sense of social responsibility. He illustrates the point arguing that one measure of freedom’s detachment from social responsibility can be in the shameful argument by right-wing conservative at the heart of the pandemic “that freedom included the right to cough on strangers in the grocery store.”[28] Relatedly, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic-elect Governor of Pennsylvania (far from being on the left) provides a trenchant contrast of some of the ugly freedoms espoused by right-wing Republican Party politicians, such as the Christian nationalist, Douglas Mastriano, the far-right extremist he defeated in the race, and his conception of what he terms “real freedoms.” Shapiro writes:

It’s not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed to do with their bodies. That’s not freedom. It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. It’s not freedom when [ Mastriano] gets to decide who you’re allowed to marry. I say love is love! It’s not freedom to say you can work a forty-hour work week, but you can’t be a member of a union. That’s not freedom. And it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say you can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner. That’s not freedom. That’s not freedom. But you know what? You know what we’re for? We’re for real freedom. And let me tell you what, let me tell you what real freedom is. Real freedom is when you see that young child in North Philly and you see the potential in her, so you invest in her public school. That’s real freedom. That’s real freedom. Real freedom comes when we invest in that young child’s neighborhood to make sure it’s safe, so she gets to her eighteenth birthday. That’s real freedom.[29]

It is worth noting some earlier ideological conceptions of the neoliberal notion of freedom and how they have been appropriated by the extremist elements of the Republican Party. For example, Friedrich Hayek, highly influential Anglo-Austrian economist and neoliberal arch-theorist, argued in the early 1960s that the freedom of the individual can only be equated with the freedom of the market.[30]  Freedom in this discourse reproduces the notion that social justice and ethics are irrelevant, if not dangerous to market freedoms. Freedom is removed from any notion of either social responsibility or solidarity. Collective freedom either disappears or is considered pathological or dangerous. Reduced to the radical individualism and interests of the financial elite, these earlier neoliberal notions of freedom wage war against any collective notion of political and social agency and the institutions that enable them. Related to this view is the iron-clad neoliberal view that no activity should be concerned with social and economic costs. As the one of the American apostles of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, once stated, without remorse or irony, the call to social responsibility is tantamount to “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism [and that] the use of the cloak of social responsibility, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society.”[31]  In this context, the crisis of social responsibility is connected to both the crisis of agency and the crisis of politics.

Under neoliberalism, the marriage of human capital and unfettered corporate interests is all that matters. As Caleb Crain has noted, relying on the insights of the émigré Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, neoliberalism has morphed into a form of fascism that “strips democratic politics away from human society so that ‘only economic life remains,’ a skeleton without flesh.”[32]  With the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascist politics in the U.S, especially among the leaders of the Republican Party, moral, social, and ethical considerations have become objects of intense disdain, elevating a culture of cruelty and violence to unthinkable heights as a political tool and organizing principle of society.

At the heart of the violence sweeping across the United States is a contempt for human rights, equality, and justice. In this logic, compassion for the other disappears, the connections that tie human beings together are scorned, and the institutions that offer the possibility of a just society are eliminated. Identities and desires are now defined through a market logic that favors self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human relations, if not freedom itself. In a society of winners and losers, the movement from hatred of the other to violence against the other is easily normalized. Not only is this type of neoliberalism deeply rooted in a fascistic form or irrationality, it also embraces totalitarian impulses that legitimate and produce relentless acts of both mass violence and the daily violence and misery waged under the rule of gangster capitalism.

In the age of a coarsening neoliberal fascism, violence appears without limits and intrudes on every imaginable aspect of everyday life, not just in attention-grabbing, relentless mass shootings. Not only has it produced a massive degree of fear, insecurity, and aggression, it has also, because of its pervasive and often spectacularized presence, diverted attention from the conditions that produce it. Aligned with a permanent war culture, neoliberal fascism now merges entertainment with political theater. In doing so, it widens the traditional sphere of politics in order to further expand the boundaries of its white supremacist and ultra-nationalist ideology and hatred of democracy. Selfishness and greed now merge with a mode of militaristic violence in which the suffering and death of those considered excess and disposable becomes a source of entertainment and pleasure—a rancid source of amusement, which obscures policies of raw contempt. Under neoliberal fascism, the aestheticization of politics has become complete.

This ecology and mass production of an image-based hate-politics provides the conditions for accelerating the turn to militarized violence by right-wing extremists. One distinctive feature of neoliberal fascist violence is its use of the old and new media as a form of theater that manipulates people’s feelings and emotions along with their personal fears and anxieties. Right wing media have become echo chambers that serve as a staging ground for normalizing and enabling the increasing political violence, mass shootings, and militarization of American society. As the social sphere is shredded, politics experiences its own destruction, accompanied by the rise of extremist groups and a public drawn to a racist and xenophobic rhetoric and actions. In this instance, violence is increasingly aligned with a politics of cultural and racial  purification. As violence is disconnected from critical thought, ethical sensibilities are neutralized making it easier for right wing extremists to appeal to the alleged exhilaration and experience of pleasure and gratification provided by the abyss of moral nihilism, lawlessness, and the operation of power in the service of mass aggression.

The Militarization of American Society.

The militarization of American society is almost complete, representing what William J. Astore calls peculiar form of collective madness.”[33]  Rather than a source of alarm, it is a source of pride as force has replaced not only democratic idealism as the main source of U.S. influence abroad, it has also been normalized as an organizing principle of American society.[34] There is no longer any difference from the militarization applied abroad from the militarization now applied at home. A weapons culture has replaced a culture of shared democratic values. Safety is regressively associated with personal security, surveillance industries, and unconstrained gun rights. The prison and its lockdown rituals now provide the model for public schools, social services, airports, and increasingly malls, churches, supermarkets, and synagogues. Right-wing Republicans view the Social Security administration and its programs with contempt while celebrating nativistic-inspired borders and Homeland Security.

There are no protective spaces left in America. The foreign terrorists that the U.S. has fought abroad have now come home. As the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out, “over the past decade… about 450 U.S. murders [have been] committed by political extremists. Of these 450 killings, right-wing extremists committed about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent…Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists.”[35]  Homegrown extremists now pose the greatest threats of violence to Americans. A militarized and violent American now presents itself as a pure distillation of white supremacy, radical Christian nationalism, and bigotry.

A permanent war culture has collapsed the line between domestic terrorism and the violence produced in the name of a war on terror abroad. Military weapons are now in the hands of the police. Domestic terrorists rather than foreign terrorists represent the greatest threats of violence in the U.S. The war against the planet and the threat of nuclear war cannot be separated from a permanent war mentality that now shapes both domestic and foreign policies. War fever dominates the public imagination and has become heroic. It is embodied not only in the language of right-wing ultra-nationalism but also in the authoritarian nationalism embraced by far-right neo-Nazis, the leadership of the Republican Party, white supremacists, and white Christian fundamentalists.[36]   

Conclusion.

Neoliberalism expands the war machine along with the mentality that supports it. In its upgraded form of fascist politics, it produces new nuclear stealth bombers, such as the B-21 Raider,  that threaten humanity and cost close to $750 million apiece. The newly passed military budget amounts to $858 billion and is a symbol of both political insanity and a psychological addiction to apparatuses of death. The latter is one element of a war machine that ignores problems such as staggering levels of poverty, homelessness, a crumbling health care system, a punishing carceral state, and a collapsing ecosystem. But it does more. It also poisons everyday life by banning abortions and books, gutting social security and social services, expanding an overly militarized police force, and increases the growth of jails while cutting funding for public schools. Also at risk under the banner of neoliberal policies are women’s rights,environmental protections, trade-union rights, and civil rights. [37]

Cruelty now parades as theater in the media matched only by policies that steal people’s time, dignity, and lives. The time has come to take fascism down, not simply through the ballot box, but through a massive collective struggle and uprising that can bring this deadly politics and the gangster capitalism that supports it to a halt. This call for a full-fledged attack on fascist politics is especially relevant at a time in which socialist ideals are being revised. Calls for a universal income, defunding the police, health care for all, a renewed recognition of the structural nature of racism, state violence, and staggering levels of inequality–all point to a growing socialist consciousness in the U.S. Capitalism is a laboratory for fascism, and any viable mode of resistance must begin by calling for eliminating rather than reforming it. But to do so, as Barbara Epstein has noted, it is crucial for any viable resistance movement to move beyond a “fragmented Left held together by a vague commitment to a more just, egalitarian, and sustainable world…lacking a common focus or basis for coordinated action.”[38]  The starting point for fighting neo-fascism lies in rebuilding a critical mass consciousness and a progressive multiracial movement capable of dismantling the oppressive ideological and structural regimes of neoliberal fascism.

As David Harvey has stressed, the fundamental problems of capitalism “are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we are going to go anywhere without a very strong anti-capitalist movement.”[39]  Now is the time for  abolishing  neoliberal fascism rather than attempt to soften its policies. The notion of a compassionate capitalism as preached by President Clinton’s former Secretary of the Treasury, Robert B. Reich is an oxymoron.[40] The time has come for a strong anti-capitalist movement capable of re-imagining and acting on how society should be organized along socialist democratic principles and what it means for ourselves and future generations. America needs a massive, sustained uprising fueled by mass collective resistance and the strategy of direct action  for fundamental social transformation. It needs a radical vision along with what C. Wright Mills once called “big ideas” in order to give shape to a unified single revolutionary movement. It needs a new militancy that draws from struggles of the past in order to forge the appropriate weapons needed to fight this neo-fascist scourge in the present.

Fascism is on the rise across the globe along with the atrophy of civic culture and the political imagination. Without a politically radical educational and political movement to fight it, the deadly virus of fascism will reach its endpoint and democracy, even in its most tepid forms, will cease to exist. One source of hope comes from the words of James Baldwin written in another time of crisis. He writes: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  The urgency of the times demands that we remove the blinders before it is too late and face the impending fascist threat. The urgent question of what kind of world we want to live in is no longer rhetorical, it demands an urgent call to action. Collective resistance is no longer an option waiting to unfold, it is a necessity with no time to spare.

First published on Counterpunch.

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Notes.

[1] See, for example, Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933-1941(New York: Modern Library 1999); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986),

[2] Etienne Balibar, “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 127.

[3] Ibid., Etienne Balibar, “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” pp. 117.

[4] Henry A. Giroux, Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (New York: Routledge, 2012).

[5] Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1958).

[6] Bard Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015). Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006).

[7] Ibid., Etienne Balibar, “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” pp. 128.

[8] See for instance Henry A. Giroux, Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (New York: Routledge, 2010). Robert J. Lifton “American Apocalypse,” The Nation (December 22, 2003). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/american-apocalypse/

[9] Eric Alterman, “ Altercation: Ron DeSantis Is an Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist,” The American Prospect (September 2, 2022). Online:https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-ron-desantis-is-an-honest-to-god-semi-fascist/

[10] For an informative series of interviews on violence, see Brad Evans and Adrian Parr, Conversations on Violence: An Anthology (London: Pluto Press, 2021). Also, for a brilliant discussion of violence, Brad Evans, Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

[11] See GUN VIOLENCE ARCHIVE 2022. Online: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

[12] Jonathan Schell, “Cruel America,” The Nation, (September 28, 2011); online: http://www.thenation.com/article/163690/cruel-america

[13] Lutz Koepnick, “Aesthetic Politics Today – Walter Benjamin and Post-Fordist Culture,” Critical Theory – Current State and Future Prospects, Edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl & Jaimey Fisher, (New York: Berghahn Books:  January 2002), pp. 94-116

[14] Bard Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015). Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006).

[15] There are numerous books and articles addressing neoliberalism, a selected few include: Pierre Bourdieu,  Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1998); Pierre Bourdieu, et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Alain Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism, (London: Polity Press, 2001);  David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);  Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (New York: Routledge, 2008); Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, Belknap, 2020);    Noam Chomsky, The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (New York: Penguin, 2021) and Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (CounterPunch Books, 2022).

[16] Jeremy Gilbert, “What Kind of Thing Is ‘Neoliberalism’?” New Formations, (F.80/81, 2013), p. 15.

[17] I have developed this argument in detail in Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

[18] Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, “The Mystic of Mar-a-Lago,’ New York Times(November 20, 2022). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opinion/trump-maga-fetish.html

[19] Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No. 6, (November 2011),  p. 705

[20] Prabhat Patnaik, “Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists,” Boston Review, [July 13, 2021]. Retrieved from https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/prabhat-patnaik-why-neoliberalism-needs-neofascists

[21] See, for instance, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century(Cambridge, Belknap, 2017); Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology(Cambridge, Belknap, 2020);  Robert Kuttner, “Free Markets, Besieged Citizens.” The New York Review of Books, [July 21, 2022]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/free-markets-besieged-citizens-gerstle-kuttner/

[22] Pankaj Mishra, “The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery in Our Time.” New York Times, (November 13, 2016) Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/the-incendiary-appeal-of-demagoguery-in-our-time.html

[23] Pankaj Mishra, “The New World Disorder: The western model is broken,” The Guardian (October 14, 2014). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/-sp-western-model-broken-pankaj-mishra

[24] Alex Honneth, Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 188.

[25] Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, “Translators Note,” in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy,  (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. ix

[26] Ibid., Pankaj Mishra, “The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery in Our Time.”

[27] See, for instance, Elisabeth R. Anker, Ugly Freedoms ( Durham, Duke University Press, 2022).

[28] Michael Tomasky, “Looming Questions for the Democrats,” The New York Review of Books (December 22, 2022). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/12/22/looming-questions-for-the-democrats-michael-tomasky/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%2012-01-22%20Haslett%20Neressian%20Tomasky%20Greenblatt&utm_content=NYR%2012-01-22%20Haslett%20Neressian%20Tomasky%20Greenblatt+CID_34124ac284f100822e9a8a070b415b22&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Looming%20Questions%20for%20the%20Democrats

[29] Josh Shapiro speech can be found on Politico: https://www.politico.com/video/2022/11/09/pennsylvania-governor-shapiro-gives-victory-speech-a-womans-right-to-choose-won-765444

[30] Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944).

[31] Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, [September 13, 1970] .Online: http://umich.edu/~thecore/doc/Friedman.pdf

[32] Caleb Crain, “Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy?,” The New Yorker, [May 14, 2018] Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/is-capitalism-a-threat-to-democracy

[33] William J. Astor, “One Peculiar Form of American Madness,” LAP progressive(December 2, 2022). Online: https://www.laprogressive.com/defense/american-madness

[34] See various books by Andrew J. Bacevich. Also, see “America’s Militarism Will Be Its Downfall,” The Nation (April 18, 2022). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/america-militarism-ukraine-king/

[35] David Leonhardt, “The Right’s Violence Problem,” New York Times (May 17, 2022). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/briefing/right-wing-mass-shootings.html

[36] Anthony DiMaggio, “Christian White Supremacy Rising: The Fascist Connection.” CounterPunch [September 28, 2022]. Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/28/christian-white-supremacy-rising-the-fascist-connection/

[37] Bill Blum, “Democracy on the Ballot,”  Truthdig (November 7, 2022). Online: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/democracy-on-the-ballot/

[38] Barbara Epstein, “Prospects for a Resurgence of the US Left,” Tikkun, Vol. 29, No. 2. Spring 2014. pp. 42.

[39] David Harvey, “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project.” Jacobin, [July 23, 2016]. Online: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/

[40] See, for instance, Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Vintage, 2016).

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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 are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2018), and the American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury), and Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021). His website is www. henryagiroux.com.

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