America has entered one of its periods of historical
madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism,
worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more
disastrous than the Vietnam War.
– John le Carré
August 12, 2013
America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are
filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of
corruption and mayhem. The mainstream media spins stories that are
largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power
and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical
influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment. Unethical grammars of
violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for
mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant
pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic
hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in
or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals
dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge
more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the
while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism. Undermining
life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public
good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition
that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and
disengaged. Military forces armed with the latest weapons from
Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front
by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and
raid neighborhood poker games. Congressional lobbyists for the big
corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war
zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless
consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for
gated communities and for prisons alike.
The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth,
shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods
and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and
socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible. And yet
these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for
defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice,
and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by
corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the
damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming
more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by
the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.
The American public needs more than a show of outrage or endless
demonstrations. It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a
language of critique, possibility, and broad-based political change.
Such a project is indispensable for developing an organized politics
that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health
care, quality education, and communities of solidarity and support for
young people. At stake here is a politics and vision that informs
ongoing educational and political struggles to awaken the inhabitants of
neoliberal societies to their current reality and what it means to be
educated not only to think outside of a savage market-driven commonsense
but also to struggle for those values, hopes, modes of solidarity,
power relations, and institutions that infuse democracy with a spirit of
egalitarianism and economic and social justice. For this reason, any
collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center
of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life
outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism. As I have argued
elsewhere, too many progressives are stuck in the apocalyptic discourse
of foreclosure and disaster and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a
“sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people
see things.” This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities
that stretch from Chicago to Athens, and other dead zones of capitalism
throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the
institutions, values, and infrastructures that make critical education
and community the core of a robust, radical democracy. This is a
challenge for young people and all those invested in the promise of a
democracy that extends not only the meaning of politics, but also a
commitment to economic justice and democratic social change.
The stories we tell about ourselves as Americans no longer speak to
the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. There are no
towering figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. whose stories
interweave moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to
imagine a society that was never just enough. Stories that once
inflamed our imagination now degrade it, overwhelming a populace with
nonstop advertisements that reduce our sense of agency to the
imperatives of shopping. But these are not the only narratives that
diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated
with stories of cruelty
and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions
of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history,
social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once
circulated by our parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community
leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as
a nation are told by right-wing and liberal media that broadcast the
conquests of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians
who preach the mutually related virtues of the free market and a
permanent war economy.
These neoliberal stories are all the more powerful because they seem
to undermine the public’s desire for rigorous accountability, critical
interrogation, and openness as they generate employment and revenue for
by right-wing think tanks and policy makers who rush to fill the
content needs of corporate media and educational institutions.
Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories enshrine
both greed and indifference encouraging massive disparities in wealth
and income. In addition, they also sanctify the workings of the market,
forging a new f political theology that inscribes a sense of our
collective destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market
forces. Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rand’s dystopian
society, if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatcher’s nonfiction version
that preached the neoliberal gospel of wealth: there is nothing beyond
individual gain and the values of the corporate order.
The stories that dominate the American landscape embody what stands
for commonsense among market and religious fundamentalists in both
mainstream political parties: shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax
cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs
that help the poor, elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive
rights; attempts to suppress voter ID laws and rig electoral college
votes; full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of
everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical
thought itself; an ongoing attack on unions, on social provisions, and
on the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform. These
stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative
walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of
everyone they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the
millions incarcerated in our nation’s prisons.
All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle
of fulfillment.” That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the
public interest, they encourage a political and economic system
controlled by the rich, but carefully packaged in consumerist and
militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a
robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order
that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful and
inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers,
women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young
people. Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they
inflict on Americans marginalized by class and race uncertainty and
precarity, a world turned upside-down in which ignorance becomes a
virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege
rather than a resource for the public good.
Every once in a while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has
become in the narratives spun by politicians whose arrogance and quests
for authority exceed their interest to conceal the narrow-mindedness,
power-hungry blunders, cruelty, and hardship embedded in the policies
they advocate. The echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in
politicians such as Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who
believes that even assistance to those unemployed, homeless, and working
poor suffering the most in his home state should be cut in the name of
austerity measures. We hear it in the words of Mike Reynolds, another
politician from Oklahoma who insists that government has no
responsibility to provide students with access to a college education
through a state program “that provides post-secondary education
scholarship to qualified low-income students.” We find evidence of a
culture of cruelty in numerous policies that make clear that those who
occupy the bottom rungs of American society—whether low-income families,
poor minorities of color and class, or young, unemployed, and failed
consumers—are considered disposable, utterly excluded in terms of
ethical considerations and the grammar of human suffering.
In the name of austerity, budget cuts are enacted that fall primarily
on those individuals and groups who are already disenfranchised, and
will thus seriously worsen the lives of those people now suffering the
most. For instance, Texas has enacted legislation that refuses to
expand its Medicaid program, which provides healthcare for low-income
people. As a result, healthcare coverage will be denied to over 1.5
million low-income residents as a result of Governor Perry’s refusal to
be part of the Obama administration’s Medicaid expansion. This is not
merely partisan politics; it is an expression of a new form of cruelty
and barbarism now aimed at those considered disposable in a
neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest society. Not surprisingly, the
right-wing appeal to job-killing and provision-slashing austerity now
functions as an updated form of medieval torture, gutting myriad of
programs that add up to massive human suffering for the many and
benefits for only a predatory class of neo-feudal bankers, hedge fund
managers, and financiers that feed off the lives of the disadvantaged.
The general response from progressives and liberals does not take
seriously the ways in which the extreme right-wing articulates its
increasingly pervasive and destructive view of American society. For
instance, the views of new extremists in Congress are often treated,
especially by liberals, as a cruel hoax that is out of touch with
reality or a foolhardy attempt to roll back the Obama agenda. On the
left, such views are often criticized as a domestic version of the
tactics employed by the Taliban—keeping people stupid, oppressing women,
living in a circle of certainty, and turning all channels of education
into a mass propaganda machine of fundamentalist Americanism. All of
these positions touch on elements of a deeply authoritarian agenda. But
such commentaries do not go far enough. Tea Party politics is about more
than bad policy, policies that favor the rich over the poor, or for
that matter about modes of governance and ideology that represent a
blend of civic and moral turpitude. The hidden order of neoliberal
politics in this instance represents the poison of neoliberalism and its
ongoing attempt to destroy those very institutions whose purpose is to
enrich public memory, prevent needless human suffering, protect the
environment, distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public
good. Within this rationality, markets are not merely freed from
progressive government regulation, they are removed from any
considerations of social costs. And where government regulation does
exits, it functions primarily to bail out the rich and shore up
collapsing financial institutions and for what Noam Chomsky has termed
America’s only political party, “the business party.” The stories that
attempt to cover over America’s embrace of historical and social amnesia
at the same time justify authoritarianism with a soft-edge and weakens
democracy through a thousand cuts to the body politic. How else to
explain the Obama administration’s willingness to assassinate American
citizens allegedly allied with terrorists, secretly monitor the email
messages and text messages of its citizens, use the NDAA to arrest and
detain indefinitely American citizens without charge or trial, subject
alleged spies to an unjust military tribunal system, use drones as part
of a global assassination campaign to arbitrarily kill innocent people,
and then dismiss such acts as collateral damage. As Jonathan Turley
points out, “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of
authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can
take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights
become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive
will.”
At the heart of neoliberal narratives are ideologies, modes of
governance, and policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a
distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ state
violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a
collection of social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness
to homelessness. In the end, these are stories about disposability in
which growing numbers of groups are considered dispensable and a drain
on the body politic, the economy, and the sensibilities of the rich and
powerful. Rather than work for a more dignified life, most Americans now
work simply to survive in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which
getting ahead and accumulating capital, especially for the ruling elite,
is the only game in town. In the past, public values have been
challenged and certain groups have been targeted as superfluous or
redundant. But what is new about the politics of disposability that has
become a central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in
which such anti-democratic practices have become normalized in the
existing neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless power
disparities is now matched by a culture of cruelty soaked in blood,
humiliation, and misery. Private injuries not only are separated from
public considerations such narratives, but narratives of poverty and
exclusion have become objects of scorn. Similarly, all noncommercial
public spheres where such stories might get heard are viewed with
contempt, a perfect supplement to the chilling indifference to the
plight of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.
Any viable struggle against the authoritarian forces that dominate
the United States must make visible the indignity and injustice of these
narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural
conditions that produce them. This suggests a critical analysis of how
various educational forces in American society are distracting and
miseducating the public. Dominant political and cultural responses to
current events—such as the ongoing economic crisis, income inequality,
health care reform, Hurricane Sandy, the war on terror, the Boston
Marathon bombing, and the crisis of public schools in Chicago,
Philadelphia, and other cities—represent flashpoints that reveal a
growing disregard for people’s democratic rights, public accountability,
and civic values. As politics is disconnected from its ethical and
material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people
than to educate them. From the inflated rhetoric of the political right
to market-driven media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence
of these criminogenc and death-saturated forces in everyday life is
undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social
supports and restricting opportunities for democratic resistance.
Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives, the
neoliberal machinery of social death effectively weakens public supports
and prevents the emergence of much-needed new ways of thinking and
speaking about politics in the twenty-first century. But even more than
neutralizing collective opposition to the growing control and wealth of
predatory financial elites—which now wield power across all spheres of
U.S. society—responses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a
malignant characterization of marginalized groups as disposable
populations. All the while zones of abandonment accelerate the
technologies and mechanisms of disposability. One consequence is the
spread of a culture of cruelty in which human suffering is not only
tolerated, but viewed as part of the natural order of things.
Before this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take
hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions,
it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about
the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what
can be done to change them. It will not be enough only to expose the
falseness of the stories we are told. We also need to create alternative
narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our
children and ourselves. This demands a break from established political
parties, the creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce
democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is
educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the
world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what it might
mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Why are millions
not protesting in the streets over these barbaric policies that deprive
them of life, liberty, justice, equality, and dignity? What are the
pedagogical technologies and practices at work that create the
conditions for people to act against their own sense of dignity, agency,
and collective possibilities? Progressives and others need to make
education central to any viable sense of politics so as to make matters
of remembrance and consciousness central elements of what it means to be
critical and engaged citizens.
There is also a need for social movements that invoke stories as a
form of public memory, stories that have the potential to move people to
invest in their own sense of individual and collective agency, stories
that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and
transformative. If democracy is to once again inspire a populist
politics, it is crucial to develop a number of social movements in which
the stories told are never completed, but are always open to self- and
social reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of our
collective imagination and struggles against injustice wherever they
might be. Only then will the stories that now cripple our imaginations,
politics, and democracy be challenged and hopefully overcome.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV
Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. His most recent book is The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), His web site is www.henryagiroux.com
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