disposable because they are at odds with a world run by bankers and the financial elite. Only a well-organized movement of young people, educators, workers, parents, religious groups, and other concerned citizens will be capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities responsible for turning the United States into a country in which it is almost impossible to recognize the ideals of a real democracy.
Learning to Remember
The rise of America’s disimagination machine and its current governing-through-punishment operating system suggest the need for a politics that not only negates the established order but imagines a new one, one informed by a radical vision in which the future does not imitate the present.83 Learning to remember means merging a critique of the way things are with a sense of realistic hope or what I call educated hope, and transforming individual memories and struggles into collective narratives and larger social movements. The resistance that young people are mobilizing against oppressive societies all over the globe is being met with state-sponsored violence that is about more than militant police brutality. This is especially clear in the United States, where the shift from social welfare to a constant warfare state has replaced a culture of civic responsibility and democratic vision with one of cruelty, fear, and commodification. Until educators, artists, intellectuals, and various social movements address how the metaphysics of casino capitalism, war, and violence currently permeate American society (and societies in other parts of the world) along with the savage social costs it has enacted, the forms of social, political, and economic violence that ordinary people are protesting against, as well as the violence waged in response to their protests, will become impossible to recognize and counteract.
If acts of resistance are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, universal forms of health care, models of direct democracy, and emancipatory modes of education. Education must become central to any viable notion of politics willing to struggle for a life and future outside of predatory capitalism and the surveillance state that protects it. Teachers, young people, artists, and other cultural workers must come together to develop an educative and emancipatory politics in which people can address the historical, structural, and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state as well as begin to imagine a different collective future.
The issue of who gets to define the future not only rests on the questions of who controls global resources and who establishes the parameters of the social state. It also depends on who takes responsibility for creating a formative culture capable of producing democratically engaged and socially responsible citizens. This is much more than a rhetorical issue. Urgently required are new categories of community, identity, thought, and action that can form the basis for educating the public and generating broad-based structural changes. At stake here is the need for a language of both critique and possibility. Such a discourse will be utterly crucial for developing a politics that restores the promise of democracy and makes it a goal worth fighting for and winning.
TWO
THE NEW AUTHORITARIANISM
A society consisting of the sum of its vanity and greed is not a society at all but a state of war.
—Lewis Lapham
Ongoing debates in Washington and the mainstream media over austerity measures, the realities of a fiscal cliff, and the ever deepening national debt have produced what the late sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “a politics of organized irresponsibility”1—not least of all by obscuring the authoritarian pressures that are intensifying efforts to subvert American democracy. For Mills, authoritarian politics developed by making the operations of power invisible, while weaving a network of lies and deceptions in which isolated issues became disconnected from the broader relations and historical contexts that gave them meaning. Today these isolated issues have become flashpoints in a cultural and political discourse that conceals not merely the operations of power but also the resurgence of authoritarian ideologies, modes of social control, policies, and social formations that put any viable notion of democracy at risk.2 Decontextualized ideas and issues coupled with an overflow of information produced by new electronic media make it more difficult to create coherent narratives that offer historical understanding, relational connections, and developmental sequences. The fragmentation of ideas and corresponding cascade of information reinforce new modes of depoliticization and authoritarianism.3
At the same time, important issues are buried in the fog of what Gerald Epstein has appropriately called manufactured crises. These crises are designed to stir popular sentiment but actually legitimize policies that benefit the wealthy and hurt working- and middle-class communities. For example, Epstein rightly argues that the debate about the fiscal cliff is
a debacle on the part of the Obama administration and for progressives and for workers and for families. It’s a real disaster . . . we shouldn’t be having to sit here talking about this; we should be talking about what are going to do about the employment cliff or the climate change cliff. But instead we’re talking about this fiscal cliff, which is a manufactured crisis.4
The fiscal cliff argument—rather than the so-called fiscal cliff itself—is possibly a real crisis in that it serves to divert attention away from pressing issues ranging from chronic mass unemployment and widespread impoverishment to unprosecuted crimes of economic mass destruction and the relationship between corporate predation and the housing crisis and the student debt bomb. And while neglecting the economic impacts on impoverished and middle-class families, this politics of distraction works assiduously to undermine any collective understanding of how economic, cultural, and social problems are interrelated ideologically and structurally as part of an assault by market fundamentalists on all aspects of public life that address and advance the common good.
In such a discourse of disconnection, the expanded reach of politics becomes fragmented. Private troubles are separated from public considerations, thereby narrowing our capacity to perceive the confluence of socio-economic-cultural interests and the prevailing issues of our particular political moment. For instance, the debate on gun control says little about the deep-rooted culture of symbolic and structural violence that nourishes America’s infatuation with guns and its attraction to spectacles of violence. Similarly, the mainstream debate over taxing the rich refuses to address this issue through a broader analysis of a society that is structurally wedded to perpetrating massive inequities in wealth, health, nutrition, education, and mobility along with the considerable suffering and hardships entailed by such social disparities.
In this denuded version of politics, the relationships between personal troubles and larger social realities are covered over. Very little foundation remains on which we can build connections between facts and wider theoretical frameworks in order to strengthen the public’s awareness of power and its operations. Under such circumstances, politics is stripped of its democratic elements. Informed modes of dissent are not only marginalized but also actively suppressed, as became obvious in 2011 with the federal surveillance of the Occupy movement and the police’s ruthless suppression of student dissenters on campuses across the country.
Anesthetized Publics in an Authoritarian Age
What is missing in the recurring debates that dominate Washington politics is the recognition that the real issue at stake is neither the debt ceiling nor the state of the economy, but a powerful form of authoritarianism that poses a threat to the very idea of democracy and the institutions, public values, formative cultures, and public spheres that nourish it.5 The United States nears a critical juncture in its history, one in which the rising forces of market extremism—left unchecked—will recalibrate modes of governance, ideology, and policy to provide fantastic wealth and legal immunity to an untouchable elite.
