that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.142
What is particularly distinctive about the conjuncture of neoliberalism and fascism is how the full-fledged liberation of capital now merges with an out-and-out attack on the racially oppressed and vulnerable populations considered disposable. Not only do the oppressive political, economic, and financial structures of casino capitalism bear down on people’s lives, but there is also a frontal attack on the shared understandings and beliefs that hold a people together. One crucial and distinctive place where neoliberalism and fascism converge is in the undermining of social bonds and moral boundaries. Displacement, disintegration, atomization, social isolation, and deracination have a long history in the United States, which has been aggressively exploited and intensified by Trump, taking on a distinctive right-wing 21st century register. More is revealed here than the heavy neoliberal toll of social abandonment. There is also, under the incessant pedagogical propaganda of right-wing and corporate-controlled media, a culture that has become cruel and cultivates an appetite for maliciousness that undermines the capacity for empathy, making people willing participants in their violent exclusion.
While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability. Such cultures reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society. How else does one explain a long line of state-endorsed atrocities — the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of black people for profit and labor, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over those populations? The legacies of those horrific roots of US history are coded into Trumpist slogans, as I mentioned previously about “making America great again,” and egregiously defended through appeals to American exceptionalism.
More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in US politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or childcare, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.”143 As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”144
Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that permits him to delight in taunting black athletes, embrace the ideology of white nationalism, and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Wilhelm Reichian psycho-politics with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency, and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive within a culture of rancid racism: “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets, and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.”145 All of this suggests that fascism is more than faint memory unrelated to the present moment in American history.
Irish journalist, Fintan O’Toole, warns that fascism unravels the ethical imagination through a process in which individuals eventually “learn to think the unthinkable,” — followed, he writes, “by a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all.” He writes:
You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanized. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.146
What is often labeled as an economic crisis in American society is also a crisis of morality, of sociality, and of community. Since the 1970s, increasingly unregulated capitalism has hardened into a form of market fundamentalism that has accelerated the hollowing out of democracy through its capacity to reshape the commanding institutions of American society, making it vulnerable to the fascist solutions proposed by Trump. As an integrated system of structures, ideologies, and values, neoliberalism economizes every aspect of life, separates economic activity from social costs, and depoliticizes the public through corporate-controlled disimagination machines that trade in post-truth narratives, enshrine the spectacle of violence, debase language, and distort history. Neoliberalism now wages a battle against any viable notion of the social, solidarity, the collective imagination, the public good, and the institutions that support them. Wendy Brown rightly insists that democracy comes in many forms and does not offer any political guarantees, but without it, there is no acceptable future. She writes:
Without it, however, we lose the language and frame by which we are accountable to the present and entitled to make our own future, the language and frame with which we might contest the forces otherwise claiming that future.147
The Crisis of Reason and Fantasies of Freedom
As more and more power is concentrated in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, freedom is defined exclusively in market terms; inequality is cast as a virtue, and the logic of privatization heaps contempt upon civic compassion and the welfare state. The fatal after-
effect is that neoliberalism has emerged as the new face of fascism.148 With the 50 year advance of neoliberalism, freedom has become its opposite, a parody of its true meaning. Moreover, democracy — once the arc of civic freedom — now becomes its enemy since democratic governance no longer takes priority over the unchecked workings of the market. Neoliberalism undermines both social ties and the public good and, in doing so, weakens the idea of shared responsibilities and moral obligations. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, “ethical tranquillization” is now normalized under the assumption that freedom is limited to the right to only advance one’s own interests and the interests of the markets.149 Freedom in the neoliberal playbook disavows any notion of responsibility outside of the responsibility to oneself.
As Wendy Brown makes clear, democracy is now viewed as the enemy of markets and “politics is cast as the enemy to freedom, to order, and to progress.”150 Politics now becomes a mix of regressive notions of freedom and authority whose purpose is to protect market-driven principles and practices. What disappears in this all-encompassing reach of capital is the notion of civic freedom, which is replaced by securitization organized to protect the lawless workings of the profit motive and the savagery of neoliberal austerity policies. Moreover, as freedom becomes privatized, it feeds a lack of interest in politics and breeds moral indifference. Democratic passions are directed towards private pleasures, the demands of citizenship are undermined, and the public sphere withers as self-interest becomes one of the primary organizing principle of society. Under neoliberalism, the spheres of intimacy and interpersonal relations begin to disappear and are replaced by an ideological and economic system that constructs individuals as objects of capital within a system of harsh competitive relations and commercial exchange. As it becomes more difficult for people to think critically, the market provides them with a consumerist model that both infantilizes and depoliticizes people. As the terrain of politics, agency, and social relations loses its moral bearings, the passions of a fascist past are unleashed and society increasingly begins to resemble a war culture, blood sport and form of cage fighting.
In this instance, the oppressed are not only cheated out of history, they are led
