Trump and the Ghosts of Totalitarianism

[hifiguy]

Great article by the always thoughtful and often brilliantly insightful Henry Giroux:

Trump is the embodiment of a political party and casino driven social order in which informed judgments, moral responsibility, and collective action disappear from the world of politics. Trump’s often insulting, humiliating, misogynist, and racist remarks signify more than the rantings of an antediluvian, privileged white man who is both savvy in the world of public relations and delusional in the world of politics. Trump represents the new face of what Hannah Arendt once called the “banality of evil.”[17] Unapologetic about the racist nature of his remarks, unreflective about an savage economic system that is destroying the planet and the lives of most of its inhabitants, and unaware of his own “criminal” participation in furthering a culture of fear and cruelty, he is typical of an expanding mass of pundits, anti-public intellectuals, and right-wing fundamentalists who live in a historical void and for whom emotion overtakes reason.

Clearly, the attack on reason, evidence, science, and critical thought has reached perilous proportions in the United States. A number of political, economic, social, and technological forces now work to distort reality and keep people passive, unthinking, and unable to act in a critically engaged manner. Politicians, right-wing pundits, and large swaths of the American public embrace positions that support Creationism, capital punishment, torture, and the denial of human-engineered climate change, any one of which not only defies human reason but stands in stark opposition to evidence-based scientific arguments. Reason now collapses into opinion, as thinking itself appears to be both dangerous and antithetical to understanding ourselves, our relations to others, and the larger state of world affairs. Under such circumstances, literacy disappears not just as the practice of learning skills, but also as the foundation for taking informed action. Divorced from any sense of critical understanding and agency, the meaning of literacy is narrowed to completing basic reading, writing, and numeracy tasks assigned in schools. Literacy education is similarly reduced to strictly methodological considerations and standardized assessment, rooted in test taking and deadening forms of memorization, and becomes far removed from forms of literacy that would impart an ability to raise questions about historical and social contexts.

***

Totalitarianism throws together authoritarian and anti-democratic forms that represent a new historical moment in American history. Economic fundamentalism now governs all of society rather than just the market and in doing so drives politics and sets polices that promote massive inequalities in wealth and power, produce huge amounts of suffering, and appear to delight in a culture of cruelty. Military fundamentalism points to a society that now militarizes everything from knowledge to schools. In this scenario, an increasing number of behaviors are criminalized, militarism feeds the punishing and incarceration state, and a kind of hyper masculinity now parades as the new model for legitimating aggression and violence in multiple spheres and against an increasing range of populations extending from women and black youth to Mexican immigrants. One of the most deadly fundamentalisms is education. 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 increase furthering what has been called by Mark Fisher the “empire of the self,” knowledge is transformed into the flow of non-stop 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 and the public spheres that support it.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/18/donald-trump-and-the-ghosts-of-totalitarianism/

[LakeVermilion]

1. Just substitute...

Jew for immigrant, or Syrian, or what ever group the Donald is baiting and you'll know where all of his and other Republicans rhetoric is headed.

[hifiguy]

2. That's what fascists

and proto-fascists have always done - find a scapegoat. Witches, heretics, Jews, the target changes to mesh with the tenor of the times but the tactics never do. And it almost always works, because to quote David Byrne "we (are) still monkeys deep down inside."

[hifiguy]

3. Kick. This is essential reading!

[jwirr]

4. Excellent read. Thank you. I read it all and I agree everyone

who cares about our world and the people in it should read this now.

[JEB]

5. K&R&bookmark

Excellent and insightful article.

[hatrack]

6. Nailed it to the wall with platinum spikes

Only can recommend once - damn!