for policies but also because they function as pedagogical tools to define social relations, mobilize desires, create modes of identification, and shape one’s relationship to others and the larger world. Thus, Trump’s racist language has enabled the rise and increasing normalization of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and a surge of white nationalism. His rhetorical attacks on the critical press, journalists, and others who criticize him send a chill through American society and undermine the foundations of dissent. His verbal attacks on undocumented immigrants and Muslims enable and encourage the proliferation of hate crimes. His impetuous insults aimed at allies work to undo the liberal international order. His praise for the uber-rich and corporate elite breathes new life into a criminogenic casino capitalism.52 As Hannah Arendt has argued, language is a form of action, and that action is often pedagogical. Trump’s discourse makes clear that education is at the heart of politics; it carries the weight of weapons forged in the realm of the symbolic and pedagogical, and changes how people see things, how they invest in themselves and others.
As Jeffrey C. Isaac notes, whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance; more important is the threat he poses to the DACA children and their families, to poor, undocumented immigrants, and a range of others.53 The oppressive and regressive policies already put into place by the Trump administration — the expansion of the military-industrial complex, the elimination of Obamacare’s individual mandate, the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and a range of deregulations that will impact negatively on the environment for years to come — will have long-term effects on United States and the world. As Richard J. Evans has noted, “Violence indeed was at the heart of the Nazi enterprise,” and “Every democracy that perishes dies in a different way, because every democracy is situated in specific historical circumstances.”54 Our circumstances include the threat of a nuclear war, the disappearance of health care for the most vulnerable, the attack on free speech and the media, the rise of the punishing state and the increasing criminalization of social problems, the destruction of the environment, and other forms of violence.
American society has entered a dangerous stage in its history. After 40 years of neoliberalism and many more of systemic racism, many Americans lack a critical language to understand the growing rootlessness, gutted wages, lost pensions, collapsing identities, feelings of disposability, the loss of meaningful work, the demise of shared responsibilities, an epidemic of loneliness, and a culture of violence, cruelty, and greed. Since 9/11, Americans have been bombarded by a culture of fear that, in dampening their willingness to be critical agents, ultimately depoliticizes them. Shared fears rather than shared responsibilities undermine the basic foundations of the social ties necessary in a substantive democracy. Everyone is now a suspect or a consumer but hardly a critically engaged citizen. The ravages of debt, poverty, and the daily struggle to survive — problems made worse by Trump’s tax and health policies — depoliticize some, too. Trump’s aim to eviscerate public institutions, from education to the media, have made it all the more difficult for many people to become informed citizens and recognize how the “crystalized elements” of totalitarianism have shaped an American-style fascism,55 which is not a relic of the past or an idea, but our emerging reality.
Trump is not in possession of storm troopers and concentration camps, or concocting plans for genocidal acts, at least not at the moment. But as Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and others theorists of authoritarianism have taught us, totalitarian regimes come in many forms and their elements can come together in different configurations. Under Trump, democracy has become the enemy of power, politics, and finance. More importantly, since Trumpism will not simply fade away in the end, the comparison between the current historical moment and fascism is much needed. Adam Gopnik agrees:
Needless to say, the degradation of public discourse, the acceleration of grotesque lying, the legitimization of hatred and name-calling, are hard to imagine vanishing like the winter snows that Trump thinks climate change is supposed to prevent. The belief that somehow all these things will somehow just go away in a few years’ time does seem not merely unduly optimistic but crazily so. In any case, the trouble isn’t just what the Trumpists may yet do; it is what they are doing now. American history has already been altered by their actions — institutions emptied out, historical continuities destroyed, traditions of decency savaged — in ways that will not be easy to rehabilitate.56
There is nothing new about the possibility of authoritarianism in a particularly distinctive guise coming to America. Nor is there a shortage of works illuminating the horrors of fascism. Fiction writers from George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, and Aldous Huxley to Margaret Atwood, Philip Dick, and Philip Roth have sounded the alarm in often brilliant and insightful terms. Politicians such as Henry Wallace wrote about American fascism, as did a range of theorists such as Umberto Eco, Hannah Arendt, and Thomas O. Paxton, who tried to understand its emergence, attractions, and effects. What they all had in common is an awareness of the changing nature of tyranny and how it could happen under a diverse set of historical, economic, and social circumstances. They also seem to share Philip Roth’s insistence that we all have an obligation to recognize “the terror of the unforeseen” that hides in the shadows of censorship, makes power invisible, and gains in strength in the absence of historical memory.57 A warning indeed.
Trump represents a distinctive and dangerous form of American-bred authoritarianism, but at the same time, he is the outcome of a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed, and engaged for the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has Trump “normalized the unspeakable” and in some cases the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and, yes, courage itself.58 In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship, and justice that has real substance. This cannot happen without a revolution in consciousness — one that makes education central to politics. One element central to developing a critical consciousness is to confront the horrors of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism under Trump. At the very least, this would involve developing a formative and sustainable anti-capitalist movement.
Moreover, as Fred Jameson has suggested, such a revolution cannot take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the “impossible present.”59 Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves to a language of critique and a narrow focus on individual issues. What is needed is also a language of possibility and a comprehensive politics for the future that does not imitate the present.
And by “the present,” I do not just mean Trump. Neoliberalism has sanctioned a hyper-individualism, the destruction of the welfare state, the privatization of everything, and massive inequalities in wealth and power. It has become difficult, given the neoliberal order’s power to control not only markets and economics but all of social life, to imagine any other kind of economic system or society. Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” has been normalized. Neoliberalism has colonized memory, undercutting the capacity to remember or envision a world radically different from the present. Naomi Klein is right in arguing that what is missing from too many social movements in the United States is an inability to get beyond saying no.60
William Faulkner once remarked, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Trump is living proof that we are living with the ghosts of a dark past, and not only can it return, “it’s not even past.” The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice and collective courage in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy. The stakes are too high to remain complacent, cynical, or simply outraged. A crisis of memory, history, agency, and justice has mushroomed and opened up the abyss of a fascist nightmare. Now is the time to talk back, embrace the radical imagination in private and public, and work until radical democracy becomes a reality. There is no other choice.
Chapter 2
Beyond the Language of Hate
in Dark Times
I imagine one of the reasons people cling
