Political Frauds and the Ghost of Totalitarianism

[kpete]

Political Frauds and the Ghost of Totalitarianism
by Henry Giroux |

The concepts that now guide our understanding of US society are dominated by a corporate-induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

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What is clear in this case is that a widespread avoidance of the past has become not only a sign of the appalling lack of historical consciousness in contemporary US culture, but a deliberate political weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and ignorant of the truth, if not reduced to a discourse drawn from the empty realm of celebrity culture.

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We now live in a world in which illiteracy has replaced literacy and civic values have gone the way of the typewriter. As the orbits of privatization further what Mark Fisher has called the "empire of the self," knowledge is transformed into the flow of nonstop information just as education collapses into training. Students are now defined as test-takers and celebrity culture has overtaken any viable notion of a critical, questioning and informed culture. Trump's rise in the polls is tantamount to the collapse of civic literacy, historical memory and the public spheres that support them. His penchant for responding to critiques by humiliating his opponents suggests more than an over-the-top rudeness. Such dismissals point to a hatred of dissent, dialogue and thoughtfulness coupled with an embrace of unchecked loyalty.

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Totalitarianism's curse finds public and political support for a mode of non-thinking that rails against any attempt to ask what it might mean to use knowledge and theory as a resource to address social problems and events in ways that are meaningful and expand democratic relations. This is a form of illiteracy marked by the inability to see outside of the realm of the privatized self, an illiteracy in which the act of translation withers, reduced to a relic of another age. The United States has become a country in which a chronic and deadly form of civic ignorance finds its most visible expression in a disimagination machine that celebrates the Donald Trumps of the world. The world of politics is far from clownish and in fact points to a poisonous future at a time in which the educational force of the culture is being used to promote a poisonous form of civic illiteracy. Donald Trump is not the singular clown who has injected bizarre and laughable notions into US politics; he is the canary in the mineshaft warning us that totalitarianism relies on mass support and feeds on hate, moral panics and "the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude."

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Progressives need to develop a new radical democratic imaginary that challenges the notion that a market economy is synonymous with democracy. Capitalism and democracy are antithetical and the ways in which democracy is undermined by casino capitalism needs to be endlessly addressed as part of the pedagogical and political task of rupturing what might be called neoliberal common sense, especially regarding the assumption that the market should govern all of social life. The greatest threat posed by authoritarian politics is that it makes power invisible and hence defines itself in universal and common sense terms, as if it is beyond critique and dissent. Moreover, disposability has become the new measure of a savage form of casino capitalism in which the only value that matters is exchange value. In an age of increasing precarity and state violence, more and more disadvantaged individuals, from poor youth of color and the elderly to those groups who do not contribute to the economy and the bottom line, are considered excess, redundant, superfluous and condemned to zones of terminal exclusion.

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WAY MORE (with action items):
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/henry-giroux/63861/political-frauds-and-the-ghost-of-totalitarianism