Beyond Orwellian Nightmares and Neoliberal Authoritarianism
Wednesday, 15 October 2014 00:00 By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis- font size
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(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Those who fight against neoliberalism must not settle for reforming a system that is as broken as it is dangerous. Any viable, transformative struggle will need a boldly democratic vision; durable, longstanding organizations and strategies that make politics meaningful.To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
- George Orwell
Central to George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society was a government so powerful that it not only dominated all of the major institutions in a society, but it also was quite adept at making invisible its inner workings of power. This is what some have called a shadow government, deep state, dual state or corporate state. (1) In the deep state, politics becomes the domain of the ultra-wealthy, the powerful few who run powerful financial services, big corporations and the imperious elite of the defense industries and other components of the military-industrial complex. Corporate interests such as ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies, megabanks such as Bank of America, and defense industries such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are powerful lobbying groups and as such have control of the major seats of political power and the commanding institutions necessary to insure that the deeply anti-democratic state rules in the interests of the few while exploiting and repressing the many.
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A recent Princeton University study analyzed policy initiatives passed under the influence of the deep state from 1981 to 2002 and concluded that rather than being a democracy, however weak, the United States had become an oligarchy where power is effectively wielded by "the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military." (2) Bill Blunden adds to this description with a useful map of the interpenetrating elements and overlapping layers of interest that make up the deep state. He writes:
The American Deep State, or what Colonel Fletcher Prouty called the Secret Team, is a structural layer of political intermediaries: non-governmental organizations (e.g. National Endowment for Democracy, Ford Foundation), lobbyists (e.g. Chamber of Commerce, AIPAC), media outlets (e.g. Time Warner, News Corp), dark money pits (e.g. Freedom Partners, NRA), and private sector contractors (e.g. Booz Allen, SAIC) that interface with official government organs (CIA, Department of Defense). This layer establishes a series of informal, often secret, backchannels and revolving doors through which profound sources of wealth and power outside of government can purchase influence. . . . the American Deep State is a fundamentally anti-democratic apparatus that caters to the agenda of heavily entrenched elites. (3)
This is a state in which people participate willingly in their own oppression, often out of deep insecurity about their freedom and the future. This is a mode of governance in which individual and social agency are in crisis and begin to disappear in a society in which 99 percent of the public, especially young people, low-income groups and minorities of class and color are considered disposable. The rulers of the deep state no longer care about the social contract and make no concessions in their ruthless pursuits of power and profits. One consequence is the creation of a state and society that no longer believes in social investments and is more than willing to condemn young people, often paralyzed by the precariousness and instability that haunts their lives and future, to a savage form of casino capitalism.
The rulers of the deep state no longer care about the social contract and make no concessions in their ruthless pursuits of power and profits.
Poverty, joblessness, low wage work and the threat of state-sanctioned violence produce among many Americans the ongoing fear of a life of perpetual misery and an ongoing struggle simply to survive. Insecurity coupled with a climate of fear and surveillance dampens dissent and promotes a kind of ethical tranquilization fed daily by the mobilization of endless moral panics, whether they reference immigrants flooding the American Southwest, ISIS thugs blowing up malls or Ebola spreading through the homeland like a mad, out-of-control, death-dealing infectious disease. Such conditions more often than not produce withdrawal, insecurity, paranoia and cynicism rather than rebellion among the US populace. Under such conditions, the call for collective rebellion appears more like a joke for late-night comics than a serious rethinking of politics and an attempt to engage in collective actions fuelled by the need to reclaim and struggle over the promises of a radical democracy.
Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is evident in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech and constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness wraps itself in government dictates such as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, Military Commissions Act and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the "right of the president "to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists," (4) use secret evidence to detain individuals indefinitely, develop a massive surveillance Panopticon to monitor every communication used by citizens who have not committed a crime, employ state torture against those considered enemy combatants, and block the courts from prosecuting those officials who commit such heinous crimes. (5) The ruling corporate elites have made terror rational and fear the modus operandi of politics.
The "deep state" empties politics of all vestiges of democratic rule while attempting, on the one hand, to make its machinery of power invisible and, on the other, to legitimate neoliberal ideology as a matter of common sense.
Power in its most repressive forms is now deployed not only by the police and other forces of repression such as the 17 US intelligence agencies, but also through a predatory and commodified culture that turns violence into entertainment, foreign aggression into a video game and domestic violence into goose-stepping celebration of masculinity and the mad values of militarism. Meanwhile, the real violence used by the state against poor people of color, women, immigrants and low-income youth barely gets mentioned, except when it is so spectacularly visible that it cannot be ignored, as in the shooting death by a white police officer of the young black man, Michael Brown. The "deep state" empties politics of all vestiges of democratic rule while attempting, on the one hand, to make its machinery of power invisible and, on the other, to legitimate neoliberal ideology as a matter of common sense. The decisions that shape all aspects of the commanding institutions of society are made largely in private, behind closed doors by the anonymous financial elite, corporate CEOs, rich bankers, the unassailable leaders of the military-industrial complex, and other kingpins of the neoliberal state. At the same time, the cultural apparatuses of casino capitalism wage an aggressive pedagogical assault on reason, thoughtfulness, critical dialogue and all vestiges of the public good. Valuable resources and wealth are extracted from the commons in order to maximize the profits of the rich while the public is treated to a range of distractions and diversions that extend from "military shock and awe overseas" to the banalities of a commodified culture industry and celebrity-obsessed culture that short-circuits thought and infantilizes everything it touches.
Underlying the rise of the authoritarian state and the forces that hide in the shadows is a hidden politics indebted to promoting the fog of historical and social amnesia. The new authoritarianism is strongly indebted to what Orwell once called a "protective stupidity" that corrupts political life and divests language of its critical content. (6) Neoliberal authoritarianism has changed the language of politics and everyday life through a poisonous public pedagogy that turns reason on its head and normalizes a culture of fear, war and exploitation. Even as markets unravel and neoliberalism causes increased misery, "the broader political and social consensus remains in place," suggesting that the economic crisis needs to be matched by a similar crisis in consciousness, ideas, language and values. (7)
Yet, even as the claims and promises of a neoliberal utopia have been transformed into a Dickensian nightmare and the United States succumbs to the pathologies of political corruption, the redistribution of wealth upward into the hands of the 1%, and the use of the criminal justice system as the default machinery of the punishing state for dealing with the United States' social problems, Orwell's dark fantasy of a fascist future continues without massive opposition. With the rise of what John Feffer calls "participatory totalitarianism," (8) the rich get more powerful just as the middle and working classes sink into economic and existential despair and young people are saddled with debts and the prospect of a future of low-skill jobs and a limited sense of dignity and hope. What all of this suggests is that the real crisis is not simply around the growing inequality in wealth and power accompanied by the more visible use of state violence and an arrogant display of hatred for both democracy and the disadvantaged, but also a dismantling of what Hannah Arendt called "the prime importance of the political." (9)
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