The dark times that haunt the current age are epitomized by the barbarians who echo the politics of a fascist past and have come to rule the United States, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, and elsewhere. [1] The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, critical education is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.
Democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege worldwide. Some of the latest examples of this can be found in the United States with the resurgence of vigilantes and right-wing militia groups along the southern border and the intrusion of tech-based educational practices into schools producing curricula that some parents claim turn kids into zombies. Trump’s continued attack on higher education offers another highly visible example: His proposed 2020-budget request would enact a staggering $7.1 billion reduction in the Education Department as part of a policy to dismantle the department itself.
At the same time, the promise of democracy is receding as present-day fascists work to subvert language, values, courage, vision and a critical consciousness. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination as the entrepreneurs of hate deploy right-wing pedagogical apparatuses to attack workers, Black youth, refugees, immigrants and others they consider disposable. In the midst of a moment when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself, there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of great restlessness. We are once again at a historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism are vying over the future.
We have arrived at such a moment in which two worlds are pitted against each other and a history of the present is poised at a point when “possibilities are either realized or rejected but never disappear completely.”[2] Two worlds are colliding: First, as a number of scholars have observed, there is the harsh and crumbling world of neoliberal globalization and its mobilizing passions that fuel different strands of fascism across the globe, including the United States. Power is now enamored with amassing profits and capital and is increasingly addicted to a politics of white nationalism and racial cleansing.[3]Second, there is the world of counter movements, which is growing especially among young people, with their search for a new politics that can rethink, reclaim and invent a new understanding of democratic socialism, untainted by capitalism.[4]
It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for making education central to politics. If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to develop a language of critique and possibility. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Brazil and a number of other countries in Europe plagued by the rise of neo-Nazi parties. In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without informed and critically engaged citizens.
The pedagogical lesson here is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals, and the emergence of the carceral state and the horrors of detention jails and camps. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion This is a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing to understand what it means to “assume a sense of political and social responsibility.”[5]
Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of fascist cultures, mythic historical narratives, and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, at a time when fascists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim critical pedagogy as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, particularly in the United States, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, hatred, social cleansing, the suppression of dissent, and white supremacy. Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, while often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.[6]
Cultural politics in the last 20 years has turned toxic as ruling elites increasingly gain control of commanding cultural apparatuses turning them into pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, Muslims, and others considered excess, wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion. The capitalist dream machine is back with huge profits for the ultra-rich, hedge fund managers, and major players in the financial service industries. In these new landscapes of wealth, fraud, and social atomization, a brutal and fanatical capitalism promotes a winner-take-all ethos, a culture of cruelty and white nationalism, aggressively undermining the welfare state while pushing millions into hardship and misfortune. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dream worlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance, and deregulation. Within this increasingly fascist landscape, public spheres are replaced by zones of social abandonment and thrive on the energies of the walking dead and avatars of cruelty and misery.
The writer Pankaj Mishra is right in arguing that neoliberalism has created a society in whicth compassion is now viewed with disdain and empathy in a market driven society becomes synonymous with a pathology. He writes:
The puzzle of our age is how [compassion as an] essential foundation of civic life went missing from our public conversation, invisibly replaced by the presumed rationality of individual self-interest, market mechanisms, and democratic institutions. It may be hard to remember this today, amid the continuous explosions of anger and vengefulness in public life, but the compassionate imagination was indispensable to the political movements that emerged in the nineteenth century to address the mass suffering caused by radical social and economic shifts. As the experiences of dislocation and exploitation intensified, a variety of socialists, democrats, and reformers upheld fellow feeling and solidarity, inciting the contempt of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that the demand for social justice concealed the envy and resentment of the weak against their naturally aristocratic superiors. Our own deeply unequal and bitterly polarized societies, however, have fully validated Rousseau’s fear that people divided by extreme disparities would cease to feel compassion for another…. One result of mainstreaming a bleak survivalist ethic is that “most people, as they grow up now,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor wrote in On Kindness, “secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers.”[7]
Education within the last three decades has diminished rapidly in its capacities to educate young people and others to be critical and socially engaged agents. Under neoliberal regimes now flirting with white supremacy, the apostles of authoritarianism have deemed the utopian possibilities formerly associated with public education as too dangerous to go unchecked. Increasingly public schools — which could have such a radical potential to promote social equality and support democracy — are falling subject to the toxic forces of privatization and mindless standardized curricula, while teachers are subjected to intolerable labor conditions. Higher education now mimics a business culture run by a managerial army of bureaucrats, drunk on market values, who resemble the high priests of a deadening instrumental rationality. The commanding visions of democracy are in exile at all levels of education. The struggle, however, is far from over. The good news is that there is an increasing wave of strikes by teachers, public servants, and workers both in the United States and abroad who are resisting the cruel machinery of exploitation, racism, austerity, and disposability unleashed by neoliberalism in the past forty years.
Critical thought and the imaginings of a better world present a direct threat to neoliberal rationality in which the future must always replicate the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression. This dystopian impulse thrives on producing myriad forms of inequality and violence—encompassing both the symbolic and the structural—as part of a broader attempt to define education in purely instrumental, privatized, and anti-intellectual terms. What is clear is that neoliberal modes of education attempt to mold students in the market driven mantras of self-interest, harsh competition, unchecked individualism, and the ethos of consumerism. Young people are now told to invest in their careers, pack their resumes, and achieve success at any cost. It is precisely this replacement of educated hope with an aggressive dystopian neoliberal project and cultural politics that now characterizes the current assault on public and higher education in various parts of the globe. Under neoliberalism, the mantra of privatization, deregulation, and the destruction of the public good is matched by a toxic merging of inequality, greed, and an obsession with profit.
It is crucial for educators to remember that language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation, it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. [8] Language can be a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies. Paul Gilroy argues correctly that it is crucial in the current historical moment to re-engage with fascism in order to restore it to its proper place in addressing the dark times, which threaten to push democracies across the globe into governments that mimic the fascist politics of the past.
I approach the concept of fascism with trepidation not just because it links together so many different historical and local phenomena. It has been engulfed by the way it has functioned as a term of general abuse and corrupted by the way it has been used to express a sense of evil that is frustratingly abstract but that remains hostage to fashionable contemporary fascination with obscenity, criminality, aggression, and horror. To re-” engage with the idea of generic fascism is, I hope, to work toward redeeming the term from its trivialization and restoring it to a proper place in discussions of the moral and political limits of what is acceptable….I think that pursuing a generic definition of fascism is not only possible and desirable but imperative…. It is essential, as living memory of the fascist period fades, to be able to identify these new groups and their influence on the volatile lives of postindustrial polities. Just maintaining a discussion about fascism as an ongoing heuristic project has additional value in a post-cold war setting from which the West has disappeared and where a reborn Europe must confront its past. [9]
Gilroy’s insight provides one more reason for educators to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political. The latter is crucial in order to recognize that pedagogy is always a struggle over agency, identities, desire, and values while also acknowledging that it has a crucial role to play in addressing important social issues and defending public and higher education as democratic public spheres. Making the political pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirm oppositional cultural work and pedagogical practices but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage coupled with direct mass action, against a ruthless casino capitalism and an emerging fascist politics. Such mobilization must oppose the glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. At the very least, critical pedagogy proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world and that it is capable of creating the possibilities for individual and social transformation.
Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue, to engage language in the pursuit of justice. As is well known, President Trump’s ignorance is on display daily. Not only is he a serial liar but his ignorance also serves as a tool of power to prevent power from being held accountable. In addition, it also functions as a way to rewrite the relationship between the demands of critical citizens and the demands of social and civic responsibility. Under such circumstances, thinking becomes dangerous and becomes the object of organized disgust for any vestige of the truth. However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy and the shrinking of political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.” [10] Moreover, the very conditions that enable people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, media becomes more corporatized, oppositional journalists are killed, and reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment. Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls“ethicide”: and Joshua Sperling defines as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.” [11]
Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of direct and indirect control. If educators and others are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society, and capitalism and democracy. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it. The move under neoliberal capitalism towards fascism echoes Max Horkheimer’s dictum of 1939 that “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.” [12]
After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United Stats and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The ruling elite and managers of extreme capitalism have used the crises of economic inequality and immigration and its “manifestly brutal and exploitative arrangements” to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy. [13] In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions in order to redirect their anger and despair through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance, and a militarized spirit of white nationalism.
In this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of casino capitalism” [14] with fascist ideals. These ideals include: the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity;[15] the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language; a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes, especially in the United States. [16]
The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing generation of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of colour, and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random, and in some cases trivialised through the monotony of repetition, it also serves as the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalised in a new forms of public pedagogy that amount to a legitimation of what I have called neoliberal fascism. [17]
Under such circumstances, critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics losses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged citizens. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.
As a matter of political and social responsibility, educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students. They also need to responsibly assume the role of civic educators within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and traditional modes of communicating. Communicating to a variety of public audiences suggests using opportunities for writing, public talks, and media interviews offered by the radio, Internet, alternative magazines, and teaching young people and adults in alternative schools to name only a few. Capitalizing on their role as public intellectuals, educators can address the challenge of combining scholarship and commitment by using a vocabulary that is neither dull nor obtuse, while seeking to speak to a broader audience. More importantly, as teachers organize to assert the importance of their role and that of education in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working with unions and traditional political formations.
Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world. If teachers are truly concerned about safeguarding education, they will have to take seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels. Critical pedagogy has an important role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres. In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself. Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies as they traverse local and national borders. In addition, pedagogy as a form of production and critique offers a discourse of possibility—a way of providing students with the opportunity to link understanding to commitment, and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice.
This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading the word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people and provide the conditions for them to become critical agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the dream of a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for providing those languages and values that point the way to imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present.
Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As difficult as this task may seem to educators, if not to a larger public, it is a struggle worth waging.
In an age of poisonous capitalism and an emerging fascist politics, educators, students, and other concerned citizens face the challenge of providing a language that embraces a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare to look beyond the horizon of the given. Fascism breeds cynicism and is the enemy of a militant and social hope. Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. Without hope, even in the most dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.
Hope is the affective and intellectual precondition for individual and social struggle. Hope, not despair, is the precondition that encourages critique on the part of intellectuals in and outside of the academy who use the resources of theory to address pressing social problems. Hope is also at the root of the civic courage that translates critique into political practice. Hope as the desire for a future that offers more than the present becomes most acute when one’s life can no longer be taken for granted. Only by holding on to both critique and hope in such contexts will resistance make concrete the possibility for transforming politics into an ethical space and a public act. And a better future than the one we now expect to unfold will require nothing less than confronting the flow of everyday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance and the unending project of democratic social transformation. At the same time, in order for resistance to take on the challenges posed by the rise of a fascist politics, it will have to develop an awakening of desire. This form of educated desire is rooted in the dream of a collective consciousness and imagination fueled by the struggle for new forms of community that affirm the value of the social, economic equality, the social contract, and democratic values and social relations.
The current fight against a nascent fascism across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also as Hannah Arendt points out a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.” [18] Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine alternative worlds and a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society. [19]
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.[20] Neoliberal capitalism strips hope of its utopian possibilities and thrives on the notion that we live in an era of foreclosed hope, and that any attempt to think otherwise will result in a nightmare. Yet, the fact remains that without hope there is no agency and without collective agents, there is no hope of resistance. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical agency; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.
Notes.
[1] I want to thank Dr. Rania Filippakou for her insightful editorial comments.
[3] See, especially, Stuart Hall, Chapter 1: “The Neoliberal Revolution,” The Neoliberal Crisis, ed. Edited by Jonathan Rutherford and Sally Davison,[London: Lawrence Wishart 2012]. Online: http://wh.agh.edu.pl/other/materialy/678_2015_04_21_22_04_51_The_Neoliberal_Crisis_Book.pdf; David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (Princeton University Press, 2008). Wendy Brown, “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, (New York: Zone Books, 2015).Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality(St. Martin’s Press, 2017); George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage (Verso Press, 2017); Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights 2018).
[4] Charles Derber, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance For Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times(New York: Routledge, 2017). Heinrich Geiselberger, ed, The Great Regression (London: Polity, 2017).
[5] Jon Nixon, “Hannah Arendt: Thinking Versus Evil,” Times Higher Education,(February 26, 2015). Online at: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/hannah-arendt-thinking-versus-evil/2018664.article?page=0%2C0
[7] Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty,” The New York Review of Books,[May 22, 2018]. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/22/the-culture-of-cruelty/
[8] Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, New Edition, 2001).
[9] Paul Gilroy, “Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line“, Chapter 4 -‘Hitler in Khakis: Icons, Propaganda, and Aesthetic Politics,’ (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 144-145, 146
[10] Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty,” The New York Review of Books,[May 22, 2018]. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/22/the-culture-of-cruelty/
[11] Joshua Sperling cited in Lisa Appignanesi, “Berger’s Ways of Being,” The New York Review of Books(May 9, 2019). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/john-berger-ways-of-being/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Tintoretto%20Berger%20Mueller&utm_content=NYR%20Tintoretto%20Berger%20Mueller+CID_22999ee4b377a478a5ed6d4ef5021162&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=John%20Bergers%20Ways%20of%20Being
[13] Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139.
[14] Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139.
[15] Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139.
[20] Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).
