called “memories of terror … parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany … executions, torture, imprisonment, persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too.”111 Dorfman also sees in the Trump era echoes of policies carried out under the dictator Pinochet in Chile. According to Dorfman:
Indeed, many of the policies instituted and attitudes displayed in post-coup Chile would prove models for the Trump era: extreme nationalism, an absolute reverence for law and order, the savage deregulation of business and industry, callousness regarding worker safety, the opening of state lands to unfettered resource extraction and exploitation, the proliferation of charter schools, and the militarization of society. To all this must be added one more crucial trait: a raging anti-intellectualism and hatred of “elites” that, in the case of Chile in 1973, led to the burning of books like ours.112
The language of fascism revels in forms of theater that mobilize fear, intolerance, and violence and legitimates authoritarian impulses and further expands the power of the punishing state. Sasha Abramsky makes this point clear in his analysis of Trump’s endorsement of torture, his offering of cathartic violence to his audiences, his declaring “entire races and religions to be the enemy,” and his “interweaving of a host of fears — of immigrants, of Muslims, of domestic crime and criminals, of changing cultural mores, of refugees, of disease — and a host of deeply authoritarian impulses.”113 Abramsky is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans. Instead, his language comes “with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society. They give the imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence.”114 Surely, the increase in hate crimes during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.
The history of fascism teaches us that language can operate in the service of violence, desperation, and the troubling landscapes of hatred; moreover, it carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history. By undermining the concepts of truth and credibility, fascist-
oriented language disables the ideological and political vocabularies necessary for a diverse society to embrace shared hopes, responsibilities, and democratic values. Trump’s language — like that of older fascist regimes — mutilates contemporary politics, empathy, and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power. Trump’s language not only produces a litany of falsehoods, fears, and poisonous attacks on those deemed disposable, it also works hard to prevent people from having an internal dialogue with themselves and others, reducing self-reflection and the ability to question or judge to a scorned and discredited practice.
Trump’s fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, a toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, and racism. Pathological “levels of hubris, demagoguery, and megalomania” are all present in his discourse, suggesting that the Trump administration marks a destructive moment in American history.115 What was once an anxious discourse about what Harvey Kaye calls the “possible triumph in America of a fascist-tinged authoritarian regime over liberal democracy” is no longer a matter of speculation but a dark reality.116 Trump’s assault on the truth uses language to discredit the media while labeling his enemies as agents of fake news. Unencumbered by knowledge, Trump is not simply hostile to those who rely on facts and evidence, he works hard to prevent people from being able to distinguish between truth and falsehoods while undermining the institutions vital to a democracy that enable informed judgments. Trump is addicted to the language of a war culture, one that promotes a culture of aggression and fear in the service of violence. Language for Trump is part of a sustained state of war on the cultural front.
Any resistance to the new stage of American authoritarianism has to begin by analyzing its language, the stories it fabricates, the policies it produces, and the cultural, economic, and political institutions that make it possible. Questions have to be raised about how right-wing educational and cultural apparatuses function both politically and pedagogically to shape notions of identity, desire, values, and emotional investments in the discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s language both shapes and embodies policies that have a powerful consequences on peoples’ lives, and such effects must be made visible, tallied up, and used to uncover oppressive forms of power that often hide in the shadows. Rather than treat Trump’s lies and fear-mongering as an expression of merely a petulant and dangerous demagogue, it is crucial to analyze their historical roots, the institutions that reproduce and legitimate them, the pundits who promote them, and the effects they have on the texture of everyday life.
Trump’s language has a history that must be acknowledged, made known for the suffering it produces, and challenged with an alternative critical and hope-producing narrative. Such a language must be willing to make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods, and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the diverse modes of oppression that characterize the dark times that have overtaken the United States and, increasingly, many other countries. Progressives need a language that both embraces the political potential of diverse forms racial, gender, and sexual identity and the forms of “oppression, exclusion, and marginalization” they make visible while simultaneously working to unify such movements into a broader social formation and political party willing to challenge the core values and institutional structures of the American-style fascism.117 No form of oppression, however hideous, can be overlooked. In addition, with that critical gaze there must emerge a critical language about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States. At the same time, there is a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres as sites of critical learning. There is also a need to encourage artists, intellectuals, academics, and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible, and challenge the normalizing discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and fascism. There is no room here for a language shaped by political purity or limited to a politics of outrage. A truly democratic vision has a broader and more capacious overview.
Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an essential element of politics, and in part, this can be done with a language that unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. Language is a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. We would do well to heed the words of the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J. M. Coetzee, who, in a piece of fiction, states that “there will come a day when you and I will need to be told the truth, the real truth….no matter how hard it may be.”118 Too much is at stake in the current historical conjuncture for the truth not to be told. A critical language can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms.119 The search and use of such a language can also reinforce and accelerate the need for young people and others to continue creating alternative public spaces in which critical dialogue, exchange, and a new understanding of politics in its totality can emerge. Focusing on language as a strategic element of political struggle is not only about the search for the truth, it is also about power — both in terms of grasping how it works and using it as part of ongoing struggles that merge the language of critique with the language of possibility, and theory with action. While a critical language does not translate automatically into collective action, it is the precondition for a politics that is more than a short-lived protest, demonstration, or cathartic display of outrage. A truly critical language provides a segue to not look away and remain silent, but to take the risk of imagining a movement for the elimination of neoliberal capitalism rather than simply a call to reform it.
As Wen Stephenson observes, the writings of Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism
