Stephenson writes:
… [Arendt] warn[s] against the tendency of her contemporaries to look numbly away, to minimize the horrors, to move on, she insists upon squarely confronting the new facts, if only to try to comprehend them. The kind of comprehension she has in mind, though, would come not by taking refuge in old “commonplaces.” It requires … “examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.”120
Without a faith in intelligence, critical education, and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that casino capitalism, fascism, and right-wing populism pose to the world. All forms of fascism aim at destroying standards of truth, empathy, informed reason, and the institutions that make them possible. The current fight against a nascent fascism in the United States is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also, as Arendt points out, a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.”121 Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine alternative worlds and a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.122
Progressives need to formulate a new language, alternative cultural spheres, and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity, and the promise of a real socialist democracy. We need a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism and democracy, or to normalize greed and excessive competition, or to accept individual interests tied exclusively to monetary accumulation as the highest form of motivation. We need a language and critical comprehension of how power works to enable the conditions in which education is linked to social change and the capacity to promote human agency through the registers of cooperation, compassion, care, love, equality, and a respect for difference. Ariel Dorfman’s ode to the struggle over language and its relationship to the power of the imagination, collective resistance, and civic courage offers a fitting reminder of what needs to be done. He writes:
We must trust that the intelligence that has allowed humanity to stave off death, make medical and engineering breakthroughs, reach the stars, build wondrous temples, and write complex tales will save us again. We must nurse the conviction that we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer and we will find a way to convince.123
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.
Chapter 3
The Politics of Neoliberal Fascism
Every age has its own fascism.
— Primo Levi
Introduction
The nightmares that have shaped the past and await return slightly just below the surface of American society are poised to wreak havoc on us again. America has reached a distinctive crossroads in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged to produce what Philip Roth once called “the terror of the unforeseen.” Since the 1970s, American society has lived with the curse of neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest and most extreme stage of predatory capitalism. As part of a broader comprehensive design, neoliberalism’s overriding goal is to consolidate power in the hands of the financial elite. As a mode of rationality, it functions pedagogically in multiple cultural sites to ensure that no alternatives to its mode of governance can be either imagined or constructed. Central to its philosophy is the assumption that the market drives not just the economy but all of social life. It construes profit-making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of agency. It redefines identities, desires, and values through a market logic that privileges self-interest and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human freedom.
As an economic policy, neoliberalism creates an all-encompassing market guided by the principles of privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the free flow of capital. Advancing these agendas, it weakens unions, radically downsizes the welfare state, and wages an assault on public services such as education, libraries, parks, energy, water, prisons, and public transportation. As the state is hollowed out, big corporations take on the functions of government, imposing severe austerity measures, redistributing wealth upward to the rich and powerful, and reinforcing a notion of society as one of winners and losers.124 Put simply, neoliberalism gives free rein to finance capital and seeks to liberate the market from any restraints imposed by the state. At present, governments exist primarily to maximize the profits, resources, and the power of the wealthy. As a political project, neoliberalism empties politics of any substance and denounces any viable notion of the social contract. This is evident as a market society replaces a market economy and the language of politics is replaced by market-based discourses and values. Moreover, neoliberalism produces widespread misery and suffering as it weakens any vestige of democracy that interferes with its vision of a self-regulating market. In a winner-take-all society, the burden of merely surviving prevents many people from sharing in the power to govern.
Theoretically, neoliberalism is often associated with the work of Friedrich August von Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, and most infamously with the politics of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, President Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England. Politically, it is supported by various right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and by billionaires such as the Koch Brothers. The legacy of neoliberalism cannot be separated from its attempt to impose a new narrative in which the logic of the market is more important than the ideals that define a substantive democracy. Moreover, any efforts to “create a more equal society are [considered] both counterproductive and morally corrosive.”125 In this narrative, capital is the subject of history, everything is for sale, the rich get what they deserve, and those who fail to accumulate wealth and power are dismissed as losers, making it easier to refigure massive inequality as virtuous and responsibility as an individual choice. Neoliberalism not only takes aim at the welfare state, social provisions, and public goods, it also cancels out the future. It has produced with a kind of fraudulent weight an all-consuming narrative that treats human misery as normal and its fictional portrayals of those it considers disposable as the apogee of common sense.
Neoliberalism’s hatred of democracy, the common good, and the social contract has unleashed generic elements of a fascist past in which white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, and rabid misogyny come together in a toxic mix of militarism, state violence, and a politics of disposability. Modes of fascist expression adapt variously to different political historical contexts assuring racial apartheid-like forms in the postbellum United States and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany. Fascism — with its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful cult figure, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and the superiority of a select ethnic or national group — has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, free market orthodoxy, and ethical somnambulance, a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.
Neoliberalism as the New Fascism
The war against liberal democracy has become a global phenomenon. Authoritarian regimes have spread from Turkey, Poland, Hungary,
and India to the United States and a number
