White nationalism,armed culture and state violence in the age of Donald Trump

Abstract

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy and the state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives need to develop a more unified notion of the political in order to overcome the splintering nature of single issue movements, and that it is important to develop a broad-based social and political formation based on the promise of a radical democracy to come.

Keywords

militarism neo-fascism totalitarianism war white nationalism

Introduction: The plague

With Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, the scourge of authoritarianism has returned not only in the toxic language of hate, humiliation and bigotry, but also in the emergence of a culture of war and violence that looms over society like a plague. War has been redefined in the age of global capitalism.¹ This is especially true for the United States. No longer defined exclusively as a military issue, it has expanded its boundaries and now shapes all aspects of society. As Ulrich Beck observes, ‘the language of war takes on a new and expansive meaning today…The notions on which our worldviews are predicated and the distinctions between war and peace, military and police, war and crime, internal and external security’ have collapsed.² As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief and death, American culture has been transformed into a culture of war.

War culture reaches far beyond the machineries of war that enable the United States to ring the world with its military bases, produce vast stockpiles of weapons, deploy thousands of troops all over the globe, and retain the shameful title of ‘the world’s preeminent exporter of arms, with more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market controlled by the United States’.³ War culture provides the educational platforms that include those cultural apparatuses, institutions, beliefs and policies with the capacity to produce spectacles of violence, a culture of fear, military values, hyper-masculine ideologies and armed policies that give war machines their legitimacy, converting them into symbols of national identity, if not honored ideals. Under such circumstances, the national security state replaces any viable notion of social security and the common good. Under the Trump regime, armed power is elevated to the measure of national greatness as war and warriors become the most enduring symbols of American life. As a militarized culture is dragged into the center of political life, fear feeds a discourse of bigotry, insecurity and mistrust adding more and more individuals and groups to the register of repression, disposability and social death. Trump’s celebration of militarization as the highest of America’s ideals was evident in his speech to a joint session of Congress when he stated that ‘To those allies who wonder what kind of friend America will be, look no further than the heroes who wear our uniform’.⁴ The irony here lies in the gesture of a helping hand that hides the investment in and threat of an aggressive militarism. Needless to say, such militarism is on full display as Trump endorses policies that transform American society into a police precinct willing to use armed force to contain, control, banish and bar all those at odds with his white supremacist ideology.

Violent lawlessness no longer registers ethical and moral concerns and increasingly has become normalized. How else to explain Trump’s comment, without irony or remorse, during a campaign rally in Iowa that he ‘could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters’? Ruthlessness, narcissism and bullying are the organizing principles of Trump’s belief that only winning matters and that everything is permitted to further his reactionary ideological and economic interests. These are the values that underlie his call for ‘law and order’ – a code for lawlessness that has become normalized with the rise of a police state, accompanied by the withering of civic values. Another register of lawlessness is evident in the presence of a ruthless market-driven corporate culture marked by an economic and political system mostly controlled by the ruling financial elite. This is a mode of corporate lawlessness and criminogenic culture that not only hoards wealth, income and power but also reproduces a savage casino capitalism through the mechanisms of a national security state, mass surveillance, the arming of local police forces, a permanent war economy and an expansive militarized foreign policy.

While it would be irresponsible to underestimate Trump’s embrace of neo-fascist ideology and policies, he is not solely responsible for the long legacy of authoritarianism that took on a frontal assault with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, embraced by the Third Way politics of the Democratic Party, and solidified under the anti-democratic policies of the Bush–Cheney and Obama administrations. During this period, democracy was sold to the bankers and big corporations propelled by the emergence of a savage neo-liberalism, a ruthless concentration of power by the financial elites, and an aggressive ideological and cultural war aimed at undoing the social contract and the democratic, political and personal freedoms gained in the New Deal and culminating in the civil rights and educational struggles of the 1960s. In the face of Trump’s unapologetic authoritarianism, Democratic Party members and the liberal elite are trying to place themselves in the forefront of organized resistance to such dark times. It is difficult not to see such moral outrage and resistance as hypocritical in light of the role they have played in the last 40 years of subverting democracy and throwing minorities of class and color under the bus. Chris Hedges gets it right in revealing such hypocrisy for what it is worth – a carnival act. He writes:

Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not moral. It is self-exaltation disguised as piety. It is part of the carnival act.⁵

A blend of neo-liberal orthodoxy, religious fundamentalism, educational repression and an accelerating militarism found its end point in the election of Donald Trump. Trump represents the transformation of politics into a Reality TV show and the belief that the worth of a candidate can be judged only in terms of a mixture of one’s value as an entertainer and an advertisement for casino capitalism.⁶ Corporate money and the ideology of militarism define Trump’s embrace of a war culture. For instance, Trump’s cabinet appointments of neo-liberal elites such as Steven Mnuchin to be his Treasury Secretary, Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, to head the Commerce Department, and Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, as Secretary of State make clear that he intends to allow the managers of big banks, hedge funds and other major financial institutions to run the economy. This is an upgraded version of neo-liberalism on steroids which, as Cornel West points out, serves to ‘reinforce corporate interests, big bank interest, and to keep track of those of who are cast as peoples of color, women, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, and so forth…So, this is one of the most frightening moments in the history of this very fragile empire and fragile republic.’⁷ On the other hand, Trump has filled a number of his Cabinet appointments with a number of generals such as John Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security, James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and Army Lieutenant-General H. R. McMaster as his National Security Adviser, all of whom are known as ‘warrior thinkers’.

With the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the hate-filled discourses of intolerance, chauvinism and social abandonment will creep into the ever-widening spheres of society giving rise to a militarized war culture joined to a totalizing embrace of corporate capitalism. Under Trump, ignorance has been weaponized and will continue to be used to produce a profoundly disturbing anti-intellectualism that leaves little room for critical reflection. It is important to remember that in his various pre-election speeches, Trump’s endless lies emptied language of any meaning, giving credence to the charge that he was producing a kind of post-truth in which words did not count for anything any more, especially when informed judgements and facts could no longer be distinguished from opinion and falsehoods. Trump’s unending tweets suggest an assault on the ability of the wider public to fit things together in a coherent narrative while avoiding and discrediting those public spheres such as the media and press capable of holding him responsible for what he says.

Emulating the fascist embrace of the cultural spectacle, Trump language became a vehicle for producing sensationalism, emotions, shock and effects that mimicked the performances of tawdry Reality TV. He spoke and continues to speak from a discursive space in which everything can be said, the truth is irrelevant, and informed judgement becomes a liability. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to grasp what he knows about anything, except what is filtered through the narcissistic bubble-like world he inhabits. He steals words and discards their meaning, refusing to own up to them ethically, politically and socially. But there is more at work here than the registers of incoherence, ignorance, civic illiteracy and an attack on civic culture. There is a recklessness in Trump’s language that pushes far beyond the bounds of rationality making it receptive to the everyday fears and moral panics characteristic of an earlier period of fascism.

How else to explain his claims that Trump Tower was wiretapped by former President Obama, climate change is a hoax, the media is the ‘enemy of the American People’, terrorist attacks have taken place that no one knows about because they are covered up by the press, and America’s intelligence agencies are no different from Nazis? This whirlwind of irrationality emulates a fascist style that not only mimics the spectacle and theatricizes politics, it also suggest populist forms that are never far away from the political currency of white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and neo-fascism. What we are witnessing in the age of Trump is the resurgence of fascism in new forms. Both its living memory and distinctiveness are evident in Trump’s appeal to racial hatred, social cleansing and disposability along with his use of the symbols and language of ultra-nationalism so as to expand a culture of war and domestic terrorism.

This militarized culture serves to connect the war at home with wars abroad. This is an action-oriented mode of fascist ideology in which all thoughtfulness, critical thinking and dissent are subordinated if not cancelled out by the pleasure quotient and hyped-up sensationalism produced in the fog and fantasy of moral panics, a culture of fear, and the spectacle of violence. Trump’s discourse feeds the cultural formation of a right-wing populism that weighs in on the side of a militant racism and a racist militarism. For instance, the only moments of clarity in Trump’s discourse are when he uses the toxic vocabulary of hate, xenophobia, racism and misogyny to target those he believes refuse to ‘Make America Great Again’ or are fearful of his use of historically fascist-tinged slogans such as ‘America First’. This is a discourse that feeds off upheaval, political uncertainty and economic precarity through an appeal to authoritarian ideals and policies that offer fraudulently a sense of reassurance and certainty that mitigates radical doubts, feelings of exclusion, anger and anxieties. This might explain why the words ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ were absent from both his inaugural address and his speech to Congress.⁸

I Unapologetic racism and the withering of civic life

As Trump’s presidency unfolds, it appears that Americans are entering a period in which civic formations and public spheres will be modeled after a state of perpetual warfare. Appeals to war and violence were celebrated rhetorical referents used during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Not only did he provide a nativist language that targeted the most vulnerable in American society – unauthorized immigrants, Blacks, Muslims and Syrian refugees – he also provoked society’s darkest impulses which served to energize a range of extremist racist and anti-Semitic groups including the alt-right, white nationalists and other breeding grounds for a new authoritarianism. There can be little doubt that these anti-democratic and racist tendencies will play a major role in shaping his presidency. The call for regime change, a term used by the White House to designate overthrowing a foreign government, will intensify under Trump’s administration. This means a more militant foreign policy. But it also signals a domestic form of regime change as well since this authoritarian neo-liberal government will de-regulate, militarize and privatize everything it can. With this regime change will come the suppression of civil liberties and dissent at home through the expansion of a punishing state that will criminalize a wider range of everyday behaviors, expand mass incarceration and all the while enrich the coffers of the ultra-rich and corporate predators. Trump’s hate-filled discourse which has targeted Muslims, any unauthorized immigrants and other people of color has been followed by a surge of white supremacy, anti-Semitism and increasing acts of violence against individuals and groups considered other in the United States. As Chauncey DeVega points out in the website Salon:

Since the election of Donald Trump in November, there have been almost 1,000 reported hate crimes targeting Muslims, Arabs, African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color. At this same moment, there have been terrorist threats against Jewish synagogues and community centers as well as the vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries. These hate crimes have also resulted in physical harm and even death: An Indian immigrant was shot and killed by a white man in Kansas who reportedly told him, ‘Get out of my country.’ Several days ago a white man shot a Sikh man in Washington state after making a similar comment.⁹

Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, has stated that the increase in hate crimes in the United States can be directly related to Trump’s endless hate-filled discourse during the presidential primaries that included ‘xenophobic remarks, anti-immigrant remarks, anti-Muslim remarks, racist remarks, trading in anti-Semitic imagery and anti-women comments. Let’s not forget that during the campaign there were hate crimes committed – very severe ones in Trump’s name.’¹⁰ In addition, such violence has provided legitimation for erasing the history of genocidal brutality waged against Native Americans and Black slaves in the United States and its connection to the memory of Nazi genocide in Europe and the disappearance of critics of fascism in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. Trump’s white supremacist policies not only echo elements of a fascist past, they point to the need to recognize, as Paul Gilroy has observed, ‘how elements of fascism appear in new forms’, especially as ‘the living memory of the fascist period fades’.¹¹

What is urgent to recognize is that Americans are entering a historical conjuncture under President Trump in which racism will be a major ideological force for establishing terror as a powerful weapon of governance. Not only did Trump make ‘law and order’ a central motif of his presidential campaign, he also amplified its meaning in his attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and his depiction of Black neighborhoods as cauldrons of criminal behavior so that Blacks would be treated as enemy combatants. An especially disturbing sign of a war culture poised to shape every aspect of American life can be found in the militarized racist ideology that provides the common ground and organizing principle for hiring a number of intolerant and racist ideologues to top White House posts. Some of the most egregious thus far being the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Stephen Bannon as chief White House strategist, Mike Pompeo to head the CIA, and Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, all of whom will promote policies that will further increase the misery, suffering and policing of the vulnerable, sick and poor. Given the vice-president-elect’s abysmal record on women’s issues, there is little doubt that the war on women’s reproductive rights will accelerate under the Trump administration. As NARAL Pro-Choice America Senior Vice-President Sasha Bruce has observed:

With the selection of Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donald Trump is sending a clear signal that he intends to punish women who seek abortion care. Tom Price is someone who has made clear throughout his career that…he wants to punish us for the choices we make for our bodies, our futures, and our families.¹²

The repressive racial state will be intensified and expanded, especially under the ideological and political direction provided by Jeff Sessions. Sessions is a strong advocate of mass incarceration and the death penalty, and is considered a leading spokesperson for the Old South. The Nation’s Ari Berman observes that Sessions is a ‘white-nationalist sympathizer…the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s’.¹³ Sessions has often used racist language, insults and practices, including opposing the Voting Rights Act and addressing a Black lawyer as ‘boy’. He was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s because his colleagues claimed that he made, on a number of occasions, racist remarks. Sessions has also called organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP and the National Council of Churches ‘un-American’ because of their emphasis on civil rights, which he believed was being shoved down the throats of the American public. He was also accused of falsely prosecuting Black political activists in Alabama for voting fraud. Not only does Session share Trump’s dark vision of minority and foreign-born residents ‘as America’s chief internal threat’, he will also use the power of the Justice Department to issue orders – ‘to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a long-standing desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage’.¹⁴

Sessions’ racism often merges with his religious fundamentalism. As Miranda Blue observes, he has ‘dismissed immigration reform as “ethnic politics” and warned that allowing too many immigrants would create “cultural problems” in the country’. Earlier this year, he cherry-picked a couple of Bible verses to claim that the position of his opponents on the immigration issue is ‘not biblical’.¹⁵ As Andrew Kaczynski points out, Sessions made his religiously inspired racist principles clear while appearing in 2016 on Matt & Aunie’s radio talk show on WAPI. While on the program, Sessions praised Trump’s stance on capital punishment by pointing to his ‘1989 newspaper ads advocating the death penalty for five young men of color accused of raping a jogger in Central Park’.¹⁶ Sessions made these comments knowing full well that the Central Park Five were not only exonerated by DNA evidence after serving many years in jail, but were also awarded a wrongful conviction settlement, which ran into millions of dollars. Moreover, Sessions was aware that Trump had later criticized the settlement calling it a disgrace while suggesting the Central Park Five were guilty of a crime for which they should not have been acquitted in spite of the testimony of convicted felon Matias Reyes, who confessed to raping and attacking the victim.

Sessions’ racism was also on full display when he stated in the interview that Trump ‘believes in law and order and he has the strength and will to make this country safer’. He then added: ‘The biggest benefits from that, really, are poor people in the neighborhoods that are most dangerous where most of the crime is occurring.’¹⁷ Trump’s tweets falsely alleging voter fraud in order to defend the ludicrous claim that he won the popular vote are ominous because they suggest that in the future he will allow Sessions to make it more difficult for poor minorities to vote. Under Sessions, a racist militarism will serve as an organizing principle to legitimate a species of ultra-nationalism in order to create a society shaped by white nationalists, one that is eager to restrict the voting rights of minorities and stoke the fear of crime in order to increase the militarized presence of police in the inner cities. As the rhetoric of lawlessness and war is applied to inner cities, they are denied economic and social reforms and are transformed into crime-ridden outposts and war zones subject to military solutions and forms of racial sorting and cleansing. How else to explain Trump’s call to deport millions of unauthorized Mexican immigrants as a ‘military operation’?

Within the Trump administration, Sessions is far from an anomaly and is only one of a number of prominent officials appointed in the Trump administration who are overtly racist and run the gamut in arguing for a Muslim registry and suppressing voter rights to producing social and economic policies that target immigrants and poor Blacks. For example, Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as senior counselor and chief White House strategist is deeply disturbing. Bannon is an incendiary figure whom critics as politically diverse as Glenn Beck and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have accused of being a racist, a sexist and an anti-Semite. While the head of Breitbart News, the alt-right’s most popular website, Bannon courted white nationalists, neo-Nazi groups and other far-right extremists. In doing so, he not only provided a platform for the alt-right, but he helped to rebrand ‘white supremacy [and] white nationalism, for the digital age’.¹⁸

Bannon is on record as stating that only property owners should vote, saying to his ex-wife that he ‘did not want his twin daughters to go to school with Jews’, calling conservative commentator Bill Kristol a ‘Republican spoiler, renegade Jew’, and publishing incendiary headlines on Breitbart’s website such as ‘Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?’ and ‘Birth Control makes women unattractive and crazy’.¹⁹ Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, states that Trump’s racist campaign was confirmed with Bannon’s appointment.²⁰

What we see in Trump and his advisors and appointees is an America that embraces the values and ideals of an ultra-nationalist and militarized white public sphere. Even before Trump took office, the menace of authoritarianism was becoming visible, ‘exploding in our face, through racist attacks on school children, the proliferation of swastikas around the country, name-calling, death threats, and a general atmosphere of hate’.²¹

II Military mania

Trump’s appointment of warmongering, right-wing military personnel to top government posts and his ongoing bombast suggesting the need for a vast expansion of the military-industrial complex signal a further intensification of America’s war culture, one that inspired a Forbes article to be published with the headline: ‘For the Defence Industry, Trump’s win means Happy Days are Here Again’.²² William D. Hartung makes the latter point clear by citing a speech Trump gave in Philadelphia before the election in which he

…called for tens of thousands of additional troops, a Navy of 350 ships, a significantly larger Air Force, an anti-missile, space-based Star Wars-style program of Reaganesque proportions, and an acceleration of the Pentagon’s $1 trillion ‘modernization for the nuclear arsenal…[all of which] could add more than $900 billion to the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade.²³

Evidence for an updated and expansive war culture is also visible in Trump’s initial willingness to consider including in his administration a cabal of racist neo-conservatives, such as John Bolton and James Woolsey – both of whom believe that ‘Islam and the Arab world are the enemy of Western civilization’ and are strong advocates of a war with Iran.²⁴ He has welcomed disgraced military leaders such as David H. Petraeus, former 4-star army general and director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he has appointed as Secretary of Defense retired United States Marine Corps General James Mattis who opposed closing Guantanamo along with Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran. He was brusquely fired by the Obama administration as the Central Command boss. In a particularly worrisome appointment, Trump chose retired General Michael Flynn to become his National Security Advisor. Flynn was fired by Obama for abusive behavior, has been accused of mishandling classified information, and is a firm supporter of Trump’s pro-torture policies.²⁵ The New York Times reported that Flynn, who will occupy ‘one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy…believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem…describing it as a political ideology, not a religion’.²⁶ In other words, Flynn believes that 1.3 billion Muslims are the enemy of western civilization. He has also claimed ‘that Sharia, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States [it is not]. His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: they called them “Flynn facts”.’²⁷ Twenty-four days after taking up his position as National Security Advisor, it was revealed that Flynn had lied about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak while Obama was still in office, a fact he did not reveal to ‘the FBI, White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, and the vice-president, Mike Pence’.²⁸ He resigned in disgrace once it was discovered that he had covered up his conversation with the Russian ambassador.

Trump’s love of the military suggests that he will expand rather than cut back on America’s infatuation with its wars. Unsurprisingly, he has asked Congress to provide an additional $54 billion to expand an already bloated military. It goes without saying that he will do nothing to alter a dishonorable foreign policy standard that has propelled the USA into a permanent war status ‘for virtually the entire twenty-first century’ and since the latter part of 2001 has resulted in ‘something like 370,000 combatants and noncombatants [being] killed in the various theaters of operations where U.S. forces have been active’.²⁹ This is how democracy comes to an end.

Under Trump’s leadership, a war culture, a culture of aggression, and state violence will intensify. Not only will there be a suppression of dissent, similar to the police violence used against those protesting the Dakota Access pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota, along with the arrests of journalists covering the protests. It is reasonable to assume that under the Trump administration there will also be an intensification of the harassment of journalists similar to what of late happened to the Canadian Ed Ou, a renowned photojournalist who has worked for a number of media sources including The New York Times and Time Magazine. Ou was recently detained by US border officers while traveling from Canada to the USA to report on the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. According to Hugh Handeyside:

Ou was detained for more than six hours and subjected…to multiple rounds of intrusive interrogation. [The border officers] questioned him at length about his work as a journalist, his prior professional travel in the Middle East, and dissidents or ‘extremists’ he had encountered or interviewed as a journalist. They photocopied his personal papers, including pages from his handwritten personal diary.³⁰

In the end, he was refused entry into the USA. The harassment and suppressing of individual dissent are only one register of Trump’s authoritarianism. He and Steve Bannon have derided the critical media as ‘fake news’ and labeled them as the opposition party. Trump’s attack on the press is about more than discrediting traditional sources of facts and analysis or collapsing the distinction between the truth and lies, it is also about undermining the public’s grip on evidence, facts and informed judgement. Such attacks undermine the freedom of the press, destroy public spheres that make dissent possible and simultaneously infantilize and de-politicize the American public. Given Trump’s insistence that protesters who burn the American flag should be jailed or suffer the loss of citizenship, his hostile criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement, and his ongoing legacy of stoking white violence against protesters, it is not unreasonable to assume that his future domestic policies will further legitimate a wave of repression and violence waged against dissenters and the institutions that support them. For instance, his tweeted threats regarding the burning of the American flag can be read as code for threatening dissent, or, worse, unleashing the power of the state on them. How else to explain the motive behind Trump’s consideration of Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke as a potential candidate for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security? Clarke has referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as ‘Black Lies Matter’ and compared it with ISIS. He has ‘proposed that terrorist and ISIS sympathizers in America need to be rounded up and shipped off to Guantanamo, and has stated that “It is time to suspend habeas corpus like Abraham Lincoln did during the civil war”…He guessed that about several hundred thousand or even a million sympathizers were in the United States and needed to be imprisoned.’³¹ It is difficult to believe that this type of egregious call for repressive state violence and a disregard for the constitution support rather than disqualify somebody for a high-ranking government office.

Expanding what might be called his Twitter battles, Trump has made a number of critical comments regarding what he views as dissenting criticism of either him or his administration. For instance, after Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor in Hamilton, the Broadway play, addressed Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, after the curtain call, stating, in part, that ‘We are diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable right’, Trump tweeted that Pence was harassed by the actor and that Dixon should apologize. Trump also took aim at a Saturday Night Live episode in which Alec Baldwin satirized a post-election Trump in the process of trying to figure out what the responsibilities of the presidency entail. Trump tweeted that he watched ‘Saturday Night Live last night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show – nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?’

As cyberbully in chief, he has taken to Twitter to launch tirades not only against the cast of the play Hamilton and Saturday Night Live, but also Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999. Trump’s verbal takedown of the union chief was the result of Jones’ accusing Trump of lying about the number of jobs he claimed he saved in Indiana at Carrier Corporation from being shipped to Mexico. Actually, since 350 jobs were slated to stay in the USA before Trump’s intervention, the number of jobs saved by Trump was 850 rather than 1,100. To some this may seem like a trivial matter, but Trump’s weaponizing of Twitter against critics and political opponents not only functions to produce a chilling effect on critics, but gives legitimacy to those willing to suppress dissent through various modes of harassment and even the threat of violence. Frank Sesno, the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, is right in stating that ‘Anybody who goes on air or goes public and calls out the president has to then live in fear that he is going to seek retribution in the public sphere. That could discourage people from speaking out.’³² Such actions could also threaten their lives as Chuck Jones found out. After the president called him out, he received an endless stream of harassing phone calls and online insults, some even threatening him and his children. According to Jones, ‘Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids…We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.’³³

Trump has more than 16 million Twitter followers and has no trouble in mobilizing them to carry out his revenge fantasies against potential enemies. His ongoing exchange and battle with Fox host Megyn Kelly, especially after her questioning of Trump in the first Republican primary debate, provides a vivid example of how he has weaponized his Twitter account. After Trump started attacking her on his Twitter, she told Terry Gross on Fresh Air ‘that every tweet he unleashes against you…creates such a crescendo of anger’, if not danger. She then goes on to spell out the living hell she found herself in as a result of being one of Trump’s targets for humiliation and derision. She writes:

The c-word was in thousands of tweets directed at me – lots of threats to beat the hell out of me, to rape me, honestly the ugliest things you can imagine. But most of this stuff I was able to just dismiss as angry people who are trying to scare me, you know. However, there were so many that rose to the level of ‘OK, that one we need to pay attention to’, that it did become alarming. It wasn’t like I walked down the street in constant fear of someone trying to take my life, but I was very aware of it. The thing I was most worried about was that I have a 7- and a 5- and a 3-year-old, and I was worried I’d be walking down the street with my kids and somebody would do something to me in front of them; they would see me get punched in the face or get hurt.³⁴

Between Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, Trump has direct communication with close to 36 million people. I am not convinced that these tweets are simply an impetuous outburst of an adult who has the temperament of a bullying 12-year-old. It seems more probable that his right-wing advisors, including Stephen Bannon, view the tweets as part of a legitimate tool to attack their perceived political foes and in this case the attack was not simply on Jones but on unions that may rebel against Trump’s policies in the future. Trump is at war with democracy and his online attacks will take place not only in conjunction with ongoing acts of state repression but also with the production of violence in the culture at large, which Trump will orchestrate as if he is producing a Reality TV show.

At first glance, these responses seem as thoughtless as they are trivial given the issues that Trump should be considering, but Frank Rich may be right in suggesting that Trump’s tweets, which amount to an attack on the First Amendment, are part of a strategy engineered by Bannon designed to promote a culture war that riles ‘up his base and retains its loyalty should he fail, say, to deliver on other promises, like reviving the coal industry’.³⁵ In addition, such attacks function to initiate a culture war that serves both to repress dissent and to divert the public from more serious issues, all the while driving up ratings for a supine media that will give Trump unqualified and uncritical coverage. Referring to the Dixon incident, Rich writes:

It’s possible that much of that base previously knew little or nothing about Hamilton, but thanks to Pence’s visit, it would soon learn in even the briefest news accounts that the show is everything that base despises: a multi-cultural-ethnic-racial reclamation of ‘white’ American history with a ticket price that can soar into four digits – in other words, a virtual monument to the supposedly politically correct ‘elites’ that Trump, Bannon, and their wrecking crew found great political profit in deriding throughout the campaign. Pence’s visit to Hamilton was a sure-fire political victory for Trump even without the added value of a perfectly legitimate and respectful curtain speech that he could trash-tweet to further rouse his culture-war storm troopers. The kind of political theater that Trump and Bannon fomented around Hamilton is likely to be revived routinely in the Trump era.³⁶

Trump’s tweet-trashing embrace of a war culture mimics the often hate-filled discourse and threats of violence in which he engaged during the presidential primary campaign. Only now he has a much broader audience. Americans are already witnessing a growing climate of violence across the United States, spurred on by Trump’s previous support of such actions, aimed at Muslims, immigrants, Blacks, foreign students and others deemed expendable by Trump’s white ultra-nationalist supporters. Of course, none of this should seem surprising given the long legacy of such violence along with the decline of the Welfare State and the rise of the punishing state since the 1970s. What is distinctive is that the formative culture, organizations and institutions that support such violence have moved from the fringe to the center of American politics.

Where this merging of suppression and violence might lead the United States under Trump is difficult to predict, though in an age of vast inequities, a poisonous economic system, a growing moral blindness, the rise of state violence, and the withering of public trust and life, the future looks ominous. How far Trump might go in using state violence is not clear, but a frightening indication of his views on the illegitimate use of state violence can be glimpsed in a post-election conversation he had with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Duterte has been condemned by UN officials and human rights organizations across the globe for conducting a brutal anti-drug campaign in which over 2,000 people have been killed by the police and vigilantes. According to Felipe Villamor of the Washington Post, ‘Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs’.³⁷ Villamor goes on to write that Duterte stated that

Donald J. Trump had endorsed his brutal antidrug campaign, telling Mr. Duterte that the Philippines was conducting it ‘the right way.’ Mr. Duterte, who spoke with Mr. Trump by telephone…said Mr. Trump was ‘quite sensitive’ to ‘our worry about drugs. He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way,’ Mr. Duterte said.³⁸

It is terrifying to believe that President-elect Trump would endorse such policies. Trump’s alleged support of Duterte also raises questions about how much violence he would use in the United States against dissident journalists. For instance, Duterte is a ruthless dictator who has not only savagely instituted a reign of terror in his country, he has also told journalists that ‘you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch’.³⁹ David Kaye, a UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, stated in response to Duterte’s threat that ‘justifying the killing of journalists on the basis of how they conduct their professional activities can be understood as a permissive signal to potential killers that the murder of journalists is acceptable in certain circumstances and would not be punished’.⁴⁰

III Landscapes of a war culture

As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presciently acknowledged, the veneration of war in the United States has now reached a dangerous end point, and has become the foundation of politics itself. This is especially true as Americans entered into what is so far one of the most appalling and threatening periods of the 21^st century. They write:

What is specific to our era…is that war has passed from the final element of the sequences of power – lethal force as a last resort – to the first and primary element, the foundation of politics itself. Imperial sovereignty creates…a regime of disciplinary administration and political control directly based on continuous war action. The constant and coordinated application of violence, in other words, becomes the necessary condition for the functioning of discipline and control. In order for war to occupy this fundamental social and political role, war must be able to accomplish a constituent or regulative function: war must become both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life.⁴¹

The violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the deployment and celebration of violence abroad and at home. At a policy level, an arms industry fuels violence abroad while domestically a toxic gun culture contributes to the endless maiming and deaths of individuals at home. Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart in the growth of a carceral and punishing state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the United States.⁴² As John Kiriakou makes clear, according to

…[t]he non-profit Marshall Project…things will likely change quickly under Sessions. The new attorney general ‘helped block broader drug sentencing reform in the Senate this year despite wide bipartisan support, saying it would release “violent felons” into the street.’ He will also be tasked with carrying out the new president’s policies on private prisons. The Marshall Project noted that candidate Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in June that ‘I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons. It seems to work a lot better.’ Just weeks before the election, Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, hired two former Sessions aides to lobby in favor of outsourcing federal corrections to private contractors.⁴³

Since the Nixon era, a ‘political culture of hyper punitiveness’⁴⁴ has served not only to legitimate a neo-liberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, but also a racist system of mass incarceration that functions as the default welfare program and chief mechanism to ‘institutionalize obedience’.⁴⁵ The police state has increasingly targeted poor people of color turning their neighborhoods into war zones, making it difficult for Blacks to distinguish the police from an invading army – all the while serving a corporate state that has no concern whatsoever for the social costs inflicted upon millions as a result of its predatory policies and practices. The persistent killing of Black youth testifies to a long history and domestic terrorism representing ‘an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes’.⁴⁶ The historical backdrop to the current killing of Black youth, men and women must be coupled with the shameful truth that ‘11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year’.⁴⁷ Moreover, the United States ‘imprisons the largest proportion of people in the world [and] that, with 4% of the global population, it holds 22% of the world’s prisoners’ and that 70% of these prisoners are people of color.⁴⁸ These figures testify not only to the emergence of a police state, but also to a justice system that has a long legacy of being driven by racism.

Under such circumstances, important distinctions between war and civil society collapse as the police function as soldiers, cities are transformed into combat zones, shared responsibilities are replaced by shared fears, the boundaries disappear between innocent and guilty, and public safety is defined increasingly as a police matter. Neo-liberal society has ceded any vestige of democratic ideals to a social formation saturated with fear, suspicion and violence. Americans are terrified by the threat of terrorism and its ensuing violence; yet, they are more than willing to protect laws that privilege the largely unchecked circulation of guns and the toxic militarized culture of violence that amounts to ‘58 people who die a day because of firearms’.⁴⁹

Acts of intolerable violence have become America’s longest-running, non-stop, cinematic production, overloading both the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. Representations of violence saturate American culture as unending coverage appears daily about mass shootings, children shot by gang members, people killed by gun-related injuries, and the police wantonly shooting and often killing unarmed Black people with impunity. All the while, the distinction between moral repulsion and voyeuristic pleasure is blurred.

Violence now acts as both a monstrous political weapon in the service of oppressive relations of power and as a spectacle fueling an aesthetic that floods the culture with what Brad Evans and I have previously described as ‘a kind of hallucinatory form of entertainment in which violence provides one of the truly last possibilities for feeling passion, pleasure and a sense of control’.⁵⁰ The line has become blurred between real acts of violence and mythical appeals to violence as cleansing and restorative, as is evident in Donald Trump’s emotional appeal to his audience’s rage and fear. Dystopian violence is now legitimated at the highest level of politics both in its use as a spectacle fueling a presidential campaign that ended with the election of Donald Trump and as a policy of terror, torture and the killing of innocent people initiated most specifically in the murderous rampage of drone warfare. Consequently, politics is now an extension of the culture of war and violence both as spectacle and real, it is a galvanizing and embolding force in the production of everyday life. Trump now offers his followers an imagined community organized around the symbols of fear and disposability in which the nation is deemed synonymous with a white Christian public sphere.

IV Normalizing violence

The normalization of violence in American society is not only about how it is lived and endured, but also about how it becomes the connective tissue for holding together different modes of governance, policies, ideologies and practices. All of these come to resemble military activities. And it is precisely such activities that serve to legitimate the war on terror, the use of mass surveillance, the weaponizing of knowledge, and the merging of a war culture and a warfare state. In the aftermath of the transition from the Welfare State in the 1960s to the current warfare state, the appeal to fear on many political fronts became paramount in order to legitimate a carceral state that increasingly governed through what can be termed the war on crime, especially affecting marginalized citizens, such as poor Blacks.⁵¹

Violence, however grotesque, has been relegated to the most powerful force mediating human relations and used to address pressing social problems. It is a habitual response by the state in almost every dilemma. Police violence is only one register of the landscape of everyday violence, but at the same time it is an important and visible indication of how violence has been ‘dragged into the heart of political life…turning [America] into a military state’.⁵² The hidden structure of violence is not only on full display in the killing of unarmed Black people; it can also be found in a range of largely invisible sites of brutality that include debtors’ prisons for children, racist juvenile courts, schools modeled after prisons, a systemic debt-machine, and municipal governments that function as extortion factories and inflict misery and penury upon the poor.

A sickening brutalism appears to have taken over American society and is partly reflected in various statistics that present a chilling measure of a society slipping into a lethal culture of sanctioned violence. The numbers are staggering and include ‘everything from homicides and multiple-victim gang assaults to incidents of self defense and accidental shootings’.⁵³ In 2015, ‘36 Americans were killed by guns’ on an average day, and ‘that excludes most suicides…From 2005 to 2015…301,797 people were killed by gun violence.’⁵⁴ What is often not reported in the mainstream media is that more than half of American gun death victims are poor men of color, living in dilapidated segregated neighborhoods far from the gaze of the mainstream media, tourism and the American public.

At a subtler level, the registers of militarization produce both armed knowledge through university research funded by the military–industrial–Pentagon complex and in a growing culture of political purity in which the personal becomes the only politics there is housed within a discourse of ‘weaponized sensitivity’ and ‘armed ignorance’. Empathy for others extends only as far as recognizing those who mirror the self. Politics has collapsed into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public discourse and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as irrelevant to fostering a substantive democracy.⁵⁵ This was made clear in Trump’s repeated support use of language in the service of violence at his pre-election rallies.

War culture is legitimated ideologically by collapsing public issues into private concerns. This is a powerful pedagogical tool that functions to de-politicize people by de-coupling social problems from the violence inherent in the structural, affective and pedagogical dimensions of neo-liberalism. Capitalism is about both winning at all costs and privileging what Zygmunt Bauman calls a ‘society of individual performance and a culture of sink-or-swim individualism [in which individuals are] doomed to seek individually designed and individually manageable solutions to problems generated by society’.⁵⁶ Not only does the individualization of the social hide capitalism’s structural violence, it also collapses politics into the realm of the personal, substituting the discourse of power, racism and class into the vocabulary of a paralysing and de-politicizing notion of therapy, trauma, character and lifestyles, which coexist with rather than displacing iniquitous and oppressive forms of domination.

This mode of individualized politics functions as a weapon of fear that trades off conditions of precarity in order to amplify the personal anxieties, uncertainties and misery produced through life-draining austerity measures and the destruction of the bonds of sociality and solidarity. Abandoned to their own resources, individuals turn to what Jennifer Silva calls a ‘mood economy’ in which they seek relief from their misery and immiseration through ‘emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation’.⁵⁷ Trauma and pain become the starting and end points for a politics that mimics a self-help culture in which the task of self-transformation and self-help replaces any attempt at structural transformation and political liberation. The current regime of neo-liberal pedagogy, which hides behind its anonymity, masks a structure of violence and a deeply anti-democratic ethos that maims and contains the critical modes of agency necessary for real change, while ‘the interaction between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience’.⁵⁸

At the same time, neoliberal pedagogy redefines the pathologies of poverty, patriarchy, structural racism, police violence, homophobia and massive inequities in income and power as personal pathologies and shortcomings to be overcome by support groups, safe spaces and other reforms that ignore fighting for what Robin D. G. Kelley calls ‘models of social and economic justice’.⁵⁹ This is the politics of an insidious form of learned helplessness that produces a de-politicized passivity and an absorption with the cruel and narcissistic dimensions of a consumer-based society that we see everywhere.

V Towards a comprehensive politics

Any attempt to resist and restructure the intensification of a war culture with its white supremacist, ultra-nationalist underside in the United States necessitates a new language for politics. Such a discourse must be historical, relational, ethical and as comprehensive as it is radical. Historically, the call for a comprehensive view of oppression, violence and politics can be found in the connections that Martin Luther King, Jr, drew near the end of his life, particularly in his speech ‘Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break the Silence’.⁶⁰ King made it clear that the United States uses ‘massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted’, and that such violence could not be clearly addressed if limited to an analysis of single issues such as the Vietnam War.⁶¹ On the contrary, he argued that the war at home was an inextricable part of the war abroad and that matters of militarism, racism, poverty and materialism mutually informed each other and cut across a variety of sites. For instance, he understood that poverty at home could not be abstracted from the money allotted to wars abroad and a death-dealing militarism. Nor could the racism at home be removed from those ‘others’ the United States demonized and objectified abroad, revealing in their mutual connection a racism that drove both domestic and foreign policy. For King, ‘giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism’ had to be resisted both through a revolution of values and a broad-based, non-violent movement at home aimed at a radical restructuring of American society.⁶² One ethical referent for King’s notion of a radical restructuring was his moral and political abhorrence over the millions of children killed at home and abroad by a war culture and its ruthless machineries of militarism and violence.

Michelle Alexander has also argued that what we can learn from King is the need to connect the dots among diverse forms of oppression.⁶³ A totalizing view of oppression allows us to see the underlying ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work in the United States. For instance, Alexander raises questions about the connection between ‘drones abroad and the War on Drugs at home’.⁶⁴ In addition, she argues for modes of political inquiry that connect a variety of oppressive practices enacted in order to accumulate capital – such as the workings of a corrupt financial industry and Wall Street bankers, on the one hand, and the moving of jobs overseas, the foreclosing of homes, the increase in private prisons, and the caging of immigrants, on the other. Similarly, she calls for ‘connecting the dots between the NSA spying on millions of Americans, the labeling of mosques as “terrorist organizations,” and the spy programs of the 1960s and 1970s – specifically the FBI and COINTELPRO programs that placed civil rights advocates under constant surveillance, infiltrated civil rights organizations, and assassinated racial justice leaders’.⁶⁵ More recently, we have seen the call for such connections emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement and a range of other grass-roots movements whose politics go far beyond an agenda limited to single issues such as the curbing of anti-Black violence. This type of comprehensive politics is exemplified in the policy document ‘A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice’, created by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over 60 organizations.⁶⁶

It is worth noting that Angela Davis has for years been calling for progressives to build links to other struggles and has talked about how what has happened in Ferguson must be related to what is happening in Palestine. This type of connective politics might raise questions about what the US immigration policies and the racist discourses that inform them have in common with what is going on in authoritarian countries such as Hungary. Another example is illustrated in Davis’ asking what happens to communities when the police who are supposed to serve and protect them are treated like soldiers who are trained to shoot and kill? How might such analyses bring various struggles for social and economic justice together across national boundaries? She argues that such connections have to ‘be made in the context of struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against police racism you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world [including] structural connections.’⁶⁷ Davis’ politics embraces what she calls the larger context, and this is clearly exemplified in her commentary about prisons. She writes:

We can’t only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger framework. That means asking: Why is there such a disproportionate number of Black people and people of color in prison? So we have to talk about racism. Abolishing the prison is about attempting to abolish racism. Why is there so much illiteracy? Why are so many prisoners illiterate? That means we have to attend to the educational system. Why is it that the three largest psychiatric institutions in the country are jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Rikers Island, Cook County Jail, and L.A. County Jail? That means we need to think about health care issues, and especially mental health care issues. We have to figure out how to abolish homelessness.⁶⁸

We need a new political vocabulary for capturing the scope and interconnections that comprise the matrix of permanent war and violence that shapes a variety of experiences and spheres in American society, all of which will expand under the Trump presidency. While the current focus on police killings, gun violence, mass shootings and acts of individual bloodshed is important to analyse, it is crucial not to treat these events as isolated categories because by doing so we lose a broader understanding of the ways in which American society is being held hostage to often invisible but formative modes of intolerable violence that are distributed across a range of sites on a daily basis. This is especially true as Americans enter into a historical moment in which the highest reaches of government will be run by a group of officials who support a president who has condoned torture, wants to increase the numbers and power of the police, views Black neighborhoods as manifestations of a criminal culture, staffs his cabinet appointments with racists and views violence as a legitimate tool for dealing with dissent. Noam Chomsky is right in calling Trump, his generals and the Republican Party ‘the most dangerous organization in the world’.⁶⁹

Intolerable violence is most visible when it attracts the attention of mainstream media and conforms to the production of what might be called the spectacle of violence, that is, violence that is put on public display in order to shock and entertain rather than inform.⁷⁰ Yet, such violence is just the tip of the iceberg and is dependent upon a foundation of lawlessness that takes place through a range of experiences, representations and spaces that make up daily life across a variety of sites and public spaces. Those spaces of lawlessness are on the rise and the dark shadow of authoritarianism is at our doorstep. Yet, such forces cannot be allowed to cancel out the future and promises of a radical democracy.

VI Militant hope and the politics of resistance

It is worth repeating that at the core of any strategy to resist the further descent of the United States into authoritarianism must be the recognition that stopping Trump without destroying the economic, political, educational and social conditions that produced him will fail. In part a successful resistance struggle must both be comprehensive and at the same time embrace a vision that is as unified as it is democratic.⁷¹ Instead of reacting to the horrors and misery produced by capitalism, it is crucial to call for its end while supporting a notion of democratic socialism that speaks to the needs of those who have been left out of the discourse of democracy under the financial elite. Such a task is both political and pedagogical. Not only do existing relations of power have to be called into question, but notions of neo-liberal common-sense learning have to be disconnected from any viable sense of political agency and notion of civic literacy. Instead of mounting resistance through a range of single issue movements, it is important to bring such movements together as part of a broad-based political formation. Rather than engaging in a politics of shaming, progressives have to produce a discourse in which people can recognize their problems and the actual conditions that produce them. This is not just a political but a pedagogical challenge in which education becomes central to any viable notion of resistance. For instance, climate change can be addressed not simply by listing all the ways in which it is killing the ecosystem, but also how it functions as a public health problem endangering children, the elderly and other vulnerable populations.

The first step in any form of collective resistance is to recognize the seriousness of the threat of the political, social and economic conditions that a Trump administration poses to American democracy, however fragile. Second, while American society may be slipping away into the dark shadows of authoritarianism, it is imperative to think politics anew in order to wage more formidable struggles in the name of economic and social justice. All societies contain sites of resistance and progressives need desperately to join with those who have been written out of the script of democracy to rethink politics, find a new beginning and develop a vision that is on the side of justice and democracy. Hope in the abstract is not enough. We need a form of militant hope and practice that engages with the forces of authoritarianism on the educational and political fronts so as to become a foundation for what might be called hope in action; that is, a new force of collective resistance and a vehicle for anger transformed into collective struggle – a principle for making despair unconvincing and struggle possible. Education must become central to any politics of resistance because it is fundamental to how subjectivities are produced, desire is constructed and behavior takes place. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, was right in insisting that subjectivity is both the material of politics and the platform where the struggle over consciousness and resistance takes place. Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, was also right in arguing that at the heart of political struggle is a war of position, a struggle in which matters of education, persuasion, language and consciousness were fundamental to creating the formative culture that made radical change possible. This is a struggle in which inner worlds are made and remade not only under the weight of economic structures but also through the pedagogical mediums of belief, moments of recognition, and identification.

While we may be entering a period of counter-revolutionary change, it must be remembered that such historical moments are as hopeful as they are dangerous. Hope at the moment resides in struggling to reclaim the radical imagination, bringing together an array of disparate, single issue movements, while working to build an expansive broad-based social movement for real symbolic and structural change. Central to such a task is the need to build alternative public spaces that offer fresh educational opportunities to create a new language for political struggle along with new modes of solidarity. At stake here is the need for progressives to make education central to politics itself in order to disrupt the force of a predatory public pedagogy and common sense produced in mainstream cultural apparatuses that serve as glue for the rise of right-wing populism. This is not merely a call for a third political party. Any vision for this movement must reject the false notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. Democratic socialism is once again moving a generation of young people. We need to accelerate this movement for a radical democracy before it is too late.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.