The United States is haunted by a specter of a coming fascism. But it also includes the inability of conscience and morality to keep up with reality. The United States is increasingly on the brink of falling into the clutches of fascist politics. Recent indicators include how the GOP is You are looking to become a vigilanteThe ongoing evidence proving that Republicans are actively trying to stop abortion seekers from leaving their home states to seek abortions elsewhere has further supported the claim that Republicans are Actively setting the stage for the 2024 election stealerThey lose and new information about them emerges Right-wing brainwashing in K-12 EducationThe enactment voter suppression laws, banning books, and the normalizing of “white replacement theory,” Attacks on LGBTQ youth, Threats against librariansFor refusing to remove censored materials from their library shelves.
Even more disturbing is The simultaneous crisis in political agency and historical consciousness, as well as the collapse of civic responsibilityThat This has made it possible that the threat to democracy can reach such a dangerous moment.
The U.S. politics is no longer based in mutually-informing regard for its residents as well as the institutions that provide for their well being, freedoms, and a wide array of civic rights. With the fall of conscience came the destruction of politics as the foundation for democracy.
As Freedom HouseThe Economist Intelligence UnitAccording to reports, democracy is losing ground worldwide as more people become more inclined to support authoritarian leaders. The most recent examples of this global trend can be found in the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S., Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines and Narendra Modi in India, among others. According to Freedom House, in 2020, “nearly 75 percent of the world’s population lived in a place that saw a decline in rights and freedoms.” Moreover, the report found that the United States saw “an 11-point decline in freedom since 2020, making it one of the twenty-five countries to suffer the steepest drops over the 10-year period.”
The United States’ current trend toward fascist politics has its roots in genocide of Native Americans, Jim Crow violence, Jim Crow violence, the erasure and updating of historical memory and systemic racism. This is a result of white supremacy, the rise and fall of the punishing State, staggering inequality, unchecked corruption and a culture of fear, insecurity, and white supremacy. The Republican Party is blinding history with an intentional erasure and destruction of social and political memory. This has unleashed a terrible plague on civic lives and proved that fascism exists in every culture and that all it takes to ignite it. The Republican Party elite views historical memory as too dangerous to invoke and learn from.
GOP’s goal is to destroy memory in order to make it impossible for critical agency to function and to break the link between what we know and how our actions are. The far right’s attempt to erase history presents itself as a form of patriotism whose actual purpose is to control historical knowledge in order to normalize white supremacy and legitimate the poisonous furies of authoritarianism. This repressive history can only serve the purpose of learned helplessness, manufactured ignorance, and history. The institutions and conditions that allow for critical forms of collective and individual agency, as well as language, dissent, democracy, and other human rights, are eroded and suppressed. Politics becomes more brutal and dangerous as normalization and depoliticization work together to disengage political agency from any sense or social responsibility. Angela Davis correctly asserts that the attack on historical consciousness is first and foremost an attack on education, an attack that must not be taken lightly. She writes:
We are witnessing efforts by the forces of white supremacy in order to regain control they had in the past. I believe it is vital to make the necessary efforts to stop them from gaining a victory in education. We, who are part of the abolitionist movement, see education as central in the process to dismantle the prison and as central to the creation of new forms of safety that can replace the violence of police.
In an age of demagogues and aspiring autocrats, not only do democratic norms, values and institutions wither, but in their absence, the pathological language of nativism and unchecked lawlessness is reinforced through “vivid images of invasion and demographic warfare [that enhance] the allure of the rebranded fascism,” as Paul Gilroy has noted. While Trump has become a flashing signpost for white supremacy, he is only symptomatic of the party’s deep-seated racism. The racism that drives the Republican Party has never been below the surface. Remember, as Thom Hartmann observed, that “the #2 guy in the Republican House Caucus, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, [once stated] that he was ‘David Duke without the baggage,’ and … Reagan’s Education Secretary, Bill Bennett, [stated] that, ‘If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.’” How else to explain the Republican Party’s “love of white supremacist militias and their embrace of both Nazi and Confederate iconography,” or their aggressive systemic policies of voter suppression, their racialized language of “law and order,” and their relentless attacks on transgender youth and their guardians? How else to explain Trump’s and his political allies either defense or dismissal of the violenceThat took place on January 6, against the U.S. Capitol.
Alarming echoes of the past have long been evident in a Republican Party that supports Trump’s description of undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border as “animals, “rapists” and “vermin.” They were silent (if not overtly supportive) when he disparaged Black athletes, claimed that all Haitians have AIDS, and repeatedly used the languageAs a badge of identity, white nationalism and white superiority were used by Adolf Hitler to mobilize his followers. It is worth recalling that Adolf Hitler referred to Jews, LGBTQ persons, and political enemies in the same terms in a different historical context. Demagogues created a discourse and culture that allowed people to think the impossible, in both historical and contemporary instances. The conditions that produced fascism in the past, such as militarized hatred, bigotry, and white nationalism, are present again. Primo Levi noted, that, “Every age has its own fascism.” Again, Gilroy gets it right in stating that there is a need to understand “Fascism as a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon.”
In the face of the Republican Party’s attack on electoral integrity, judicial independence, critical education and voter rights, coupled with its unabashed defense of corruption, white nationalism and support for oligarchs such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the U.S. has become more closely aligned with the nightmare of fascism. As language is stripped of any substantive meaning, and reason is undermined by conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation produced by the right’s disimagination machine, the ideological and institutional guardrails designed to protect democracy begin to collapse. More specifically, the GOP and its followers are not simply weakening the ideals of democracy and their promises. The threat is far greater because democracy is being replaced shamelessly by the dangerous plague fascist political. The rule of capital and economic sovereigntyThis is now coupled with ruthless assaults on gender, sexuality and reproductive rights and a reenergized umbrella of white supremacist ideology, and white terrorist policies. The poisonous roots racial capitalism’s inequalities and their numbing lack compassion can no longer be criticised for their casual nihilism, numbing lacks of compassion or detachment form the social contract. Instead, they have surpassed these social disorders and tipped into the ruthless abyssal abyssof fascist political.
Today’s Fascism is proud to once more wear the trappings and power of white supremacy. Neoliberalism is a neoliberalism that rejects democratic values and blames the victim. It easily bonds with white supremacy.To divert attention away from its own economic failures and political failures. Instead of appealing for a free-market utopia, which has lost its legitimacy because of its ruthless policy of austerity and deregulation, destruction the welfare state, galloping imperium, scorn for any vestigee of government responsibility, neoliberalism now combines with fascist politics. This discourse blames all social problems, even the ones that are caused by neoliberalism. absurd claimWhite people are victims to racism. This includes people of color, antiracist discourse, progressive movements, and any other source that could hold power responsible.
Neoliberal ideology has as its central feature the normalizing tactic that claims there is no alternative for gangster capitalism. This has been a powerful pedagogical tool. It is supported by the reduction in political problems to personal matters, which serve to infantilize people and offer them few opportunities to transform private issues into systemic consideration. Although neoliberalism has been discredited in the economic sphere, this depoliticizing pedagogical tactic still holds immense power in dismantling the capacity for self-reflection as well as forms of critical analysis that are crucial to a vibrant democratic polity. As Viktor Frankl argued in a different historical context, such reductionism is “the mask of nihilism.” Gilroy advances this argumentHe states that in such circumstances democracy is dangerous. He writes:
As ailing capitalism is freed from democratic regulation, ultranationalism, populism and xenophobia have become more visible and assertive, and are a greater threat to political culture. The widespread appeal to racism and racialized group identity has played a key role in our current situation, in which our notions of truth, law, and government are in danger. Many places have seen a combination of a pathological hunger for national revival and the restoration of an earlier time in politics. These combined with resentful and authoritarian responses to alterity as well as the expectation of hospitality.
Paul Gilroy, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley all warn of dangers. What kind of society would Americans like to live in?
The question of what kinda future we see for the future generations is another. This is especially true in a world where such questions are being ignored or relegated by politicians, pundits, and propaganda machines, which have a contempt for democracy. The horrors of the past are forgotten as culture is weaponized. Republican legislatures across the country have banned books that address social injustice and speak out against freedom struggles.
As Robin D. G. Kelley is an observer, the lesson here is that such practices have no interests in exposing children to historical narratives in which “courageous people risked their lives to ensure freedom for themselves and others.… The implication of this right-wing logic is that America is great, slavery was a good idea, and anti-racism sullied our noble tradition.”
These policies are more than just suppressing dissent and academic freedom. This is a more radical goal. It seeks to destroy the formative culture that allows individuals to learn, think, dialogue, criticize, value, and act collectively to build a radical democracy. In such circumstances, warning signs of fascism can be ignored or even accepted as normal.
In this historical moment, the ethical horizons of politics are shrinking and have taken on a deeply perilous stance. Trump and his political allies have a growing support base that disapproves of democracy and a sustainable future. They also embrace the most disturbing antidemocratic tendencies, including ultra-nationalism and white supremacy.
It is crucial to note that Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” because it highlights theoretically those forms of power and violence “that occur gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed over time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” The slow violence of authoritarianism is evident in voter suppression laws, the subversion of election machinery, the embrace of white supremacist policies to define who counts as a citizen, and the use of Republican legislatures to purge critical thinking from public schools and undermine the courts. Trumpist calls to “restore greatness” are code for restoring the U.S. to a time when only white people had access to spaces of power, politics and citizenship.
Weaponized disposability and its language is unbridgeable identities are present in the misery that has not been mentioned as a result the staggering inequality created by neoliberal capitalism. While such violence is destructive of democracy, it is not the type that immediately grabs attention due to its horrific visibility. As Nixon points outEven though it may be quite toxic, such violence is rarely covered in the news. It is important to rethink power and its workings as part the hidden curriculum for violence. This can only be done through a deep historical and relational understanding and appreciation of politics and the forces that influence it. Slow violence is often hidden in a multitude of events. This can only be seen through a comprehensive politics that connects often disparate and isolated forms oppression. If the right-wing attack against schools that require students not to wear masks in school is viewed as an isolated incident, it misses the bigger issue at stake, which is the goal for privatizing (or eliminating) public education.
The fast and catastrophic brutality of authoritarianism embraces violence as a legitimate tool of political power, opportunism, and a vehicle to squelch dissent and terrorize those labeled as “enemies” because they are either people of color or insufficiently loyal to Trumpism — or oppose the white Christian reactionary view of women, sexual orientation and religious extremism. In this case, fast violence is not hidden. It is used by the Republican Party, the financial elite, as both a threat and a spectacle to mobilize public emotion. Theater is more important in this context than reason, truth, justice and measured argument. Violence and lies work together to destroy facts, evidence, democratic value, and shared visions. As James Baldwin once observed in “A Talk to Teachers,” Americans “are menaced — intolerably menaced — by a lack of vision [and] where there is no vision the people perish.” This 21stThe century model of fascism legitimizes an ideological and political defense of an insurrection to overthrow the 2020 Presidential Election, and the vile claim Joe Biden had not fair won the presidency. This is a form lethal violence that is both accepted and debunked, often with lies to hide its deadly consequences.
As the U.S. House Select Committee investigation revealed, there was a January 6 attack on Capitol. mounting evidence that the former president’s claim of a stolen election was the animating cause of the attempted coup, and that he and other high-ranking members of his party were criminally responsible for the murderous violence that took place. They also plotted to launch a larger coup prior to the attack in order to undermine the 2020 presidential election results as well as any remaining American democracy. Trump and his political aides made a mockery of the lawBy putting pressure on the Justice Department, state officials, Vice President Mike Pence, election officials, and others into aiding his goal of reversing Biden’s election. Trump and his corrupt cohorts in the Republican Party did more than engage in seditions conspiracy — they normalized crime, corruption, state terrorism, fraud, lies and violence.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House Chief Of Staff Mark Meadows aide, stated in her deposition that Trump both encouraged and incited violence on January 6. She told the committee that, “Trump knew a mob of his supporters had armed itself with rifles, yet he asked for metal detectors to be removed.” She also recounted how his desire to lead them to the Capitol caused a physical altercation with the Secret Service. The security set up by the Secret Service was implemented to prevent Trump’s armed supporters from attending the rally space outside the Ellipse where he was scheduled to speak. As David Graham points out, drawing on Hutchinson’s testimony, “Trump didn’t care. ‘They’re not here to hurt me,’ he said. He demanded that the Secret Service ‘take the fucking mags away [referring to the magnetometers used to detect metal weapons],’ and added, ‘They can march to the Capitol after this is over.’”
Trump once again referred to the rhetoric of mass violence as political opportunism. Unfortunately, Trump’s call for the public to arm themselves in order to overturn a stolen election was reinforced by the recent Supreme Court rulingallowing the carrying of guns in public. This does not mean that the Supreme Court authorized the violent coup. Instead, the Supreme Court legitimized the conditions that both encourage and make mass violence by allowing people to conceal weapons without having to apply for a permit or due reason.
Let’s not forget that the January 6th insurrection, now revealed to be an organized coup, caused the deaths of at most five people and injured 140 officers. More than 840 rioters have been arrested with a crime. Trump’s response to assault on the Capitol and the ensuing violence was to claim that the mob was engaging in a form of legitimate political discourse and that the attack “was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our country to Make America Great Again.” Peter Wehner rightly notes that such comments and actions suggest that Trump was not simply “a criminal president, but … a seditious madman.” Bennie Thompson, the House Select Committee chair, stated that Trump was a traitor to his country who “engaged in an attempted coup. A brazen attempt … to overthrow the government. Violence was not accidental. It represented Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
Yet, in spite of the growing revelations about Trump’s penchant for corruption, sedition, lying, violence, willingness to overthrow democracy, and the almost irrefutable image of him as a would-be dictator willing to do anything to secure power, his “polling position with Americans overall is one of his best, and he remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.” Incredulously, a recent NBC NewsPoll found that “a majority of Americans (55%) now believe that Trump was either not or only partially responsible for the rioters who overtook the Capitol…. That’s up from 47% in January 2021.”
What seems lost in much of the January 6 coverage is that it cannot be solely attributed to Trump and Trumpism — his revised brand of fascism. The roots of this violence and the politics that underpin it are deep in U.S. History and its racist machinery for elimination and terminal exclusion. The U.S. has a deep affinity for violence, but it is also rooted in its brutal neoliberal capitalist system, which has created massive inequality, misery and violence, and threatened the future of a whole generation. The roots of the current age are also found in the falsification, degradation of language, attack on the ethical imagination and massive abuse of power.
In a climate of denial, counterattacks and ambiguity, history is once more revealing its harsher lessons. It is dangerous to ignore the lessons of history. They provide a glimpse into the conditions that lead to the terror and cruelty that are endemic in authoritarianism and also serve as warning signs about what the end of morality and justice might look like. It is crucial to recognize the warning signs of fascist politics. They make it clear that there are common characteristics of fascism, such as ultranationalism and racial purity, nativism and the politics of disposability. Fascism and its threat are made more apparent when individuals give up their agency, ability to critique, morality, humanity, and willful complicity in totalitarianism. These dangers make it more important to understand the pedagogical forces that undermine political agency, increase lawlessness, and open the door for what Adorno called the authoritarian personality. What is being promoted in the current counter-revolutionary moment is an attack on historical consciousness, memory and remembrance, which are elements of history that keep alive traditions that speak to human suffering, moral courage, and the struggle for democratic rights, public goods and social responsibilities.
If fascism is to be stopped and defeated in the United States, and elsewhere around the globe, it is important to learn a new language and understand how agency, identity, and consciousness are shaped in both repressive as well as emancipatory terms. This shows that the struggle to control agency cannot be separated from the struggle to control consciousness, power, identity, and politics. Political definitions are as much determined by the educational power of culture as by traditional markers of society, such as economics and laws. The poison of bigotry is ingrained and cannot be removed from culture, education and institutions that work in shaping identities and consciousness.
There is a long tradition of politicians and theorists who have argued that culture is not secondary, but fundamental to politics and society. In different ways, they all stated that politics follows cultural in that it is a pedagogical basis for how subjectivities are created and inhabited. Paulo Freire, one of the leading theorists, has rightly argued that the concepts of agency, subjectivity, culture are essential to understanding how authoritarianism and repressive forms of it become normalized and internalized. I think Havel was especially right to recognize that power in the 20th Century has changed, especially with the merging of culture with modern technologies like the internet and social media. He was astonished by this transformation. statedIt was clear that power was inseparable form culture, and that it was:
It is grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction that can rationalize everything without ever having against the truth. [In addition, he states that]The power of ideologies and systems, apparats, bureaucracy artificial languages, and political slogans [have reshaped] the horizons of our existence…. We must resist its complex and wholly alienating pressure, whether it takes the form of consumption, advertising, repression, technology, or cliché — all of which are the blood brothers of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought depriv[ing] us — rulers as well as the ruled — of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity.
Culture’s role as an educational force raises important questions, even though they are often overlooked, about the relationship between power, politics, and agency. What ideological and structural factors are at play in corrupting the public imagination and infantilizing a large public, prioritizing fear over democratic principles, and transforming robust forms and political agency into an abyss filled with depoliticized followers. What factors created the conditions that individuals were willing to give up their ability to distinguish truth from lies, good from evil, if not will? How are such pathologies created in the public spaces and cultural apparatuses that shape meaning, identities and society in this historical moment? What role does culturally produced civic literacy play in depoliticizing forces? And what institutions produce it? What forms of slow violence are responsible for the destabilization of democratic norms in the country?
It is crucial to address these questions by recognizing not only the endpoints of democracy’s transformation into a fascist regime, but also the power tools that make it possible. Important questions must be raised about the need to develop a language that can both understand these underlying conditions and how they are being sustained in service of totalitarianism. Language must be reimagined to serve justice and social change. Language should also function in the interest of critique and militant possibility. This suggests, in part, the need for a language to inform resistance in which education becomes centrally political and furthers efforts to create new and more democratic forms for collective struggle and agency.
It is important to remember that I am not suggesting language is all that is necessary for power. Language is defined by literacy, civic culture, shifting symbolic and material contexts. Language is not the only thing that is powerful. Power is also present in the institutions and economic forms in which language is produced, legitimized, constrained, and empowered. It is impossible to use language and civic literacy to take away the power of self determination, critical agency, self-reflection or self-determination. At its core and against the discourse of authoritarianism, cultural politics should be addressed from the point of view of emancipation — a discourse about education, power, agency and their relationship to democracy. Cultural politics should not be dismissed as a pedagogical project, but rather as part of a wider political offensive to fight for radical democracy and its sustaining structures.
The United States is witnessing a serious threat to democracy. It is also a modernized, dangerous expression of right-wing extremeism that is a precursor to fascist politics.Paul Morrow, who cites Hannah Arendt, is one of the most important starting points for mass resistance. argues that authoritarian societies do “everything possible to uncouple beliefs from action, conviction from action.”
The conditions for resistance must be created in a way that teaches agency and action. The great Frederick Douglass understood this when he stated that “knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” While it is generally accepted that power cannot be divorced from knowledge, it is often forgotten that this suggests that agency is a central political category and that at The heart of authoritarianism lies in the uninformed, often isolated and depoliticized subject that has given up their agency to the cults of the strongman. Consequently, to resist authoritarianism means acknowledging the power of cultural politics to connect one’s ideas and beliefs to those vital human needs, desires and hopes that will persuade people to assert their voices and actions in the building of a new mass movement and a democratic socialist society.
