“As Black, I am apparently excrement, waste, refuse. That is an attack on my humanity. . . . That is an attack on all Black life. . . . but not beyond the facts of American history and not beyond the pale of the white imaginary to enact forms of grave physical violence.”
—George Yancy
Confronting an increasingly authoritarian system means bringing attention to how systemic injustices are lived and experienced, and how iniquitous relations of power impact millions of American families with increased debt, illness, and neglect. The political economy is openly robbing communities of a decent life, dignity, justice, and hope. We live in an age of gangster capitalism, an age where fascism takes new, increasingly corporate, commercialized forms. The lines between self-enrichment and governance blur under the Trump regime. As the Panama and Paradise papers make clear, the global elite park millions in offshore accounts while instructing their political hacks in Congress to lower their taxes. Corporate self-interest, greed, and commercialism now drive politics and everyday life in the United States. Oxfam reports that “eight men own as much as the poorest half of the world,” and that “the wealth of 3.5 billion people is the equivalent to the combined net worth” of eight businessmen, six of whom are from the United States.1 Such gaps in wealth and power turn politics into acts of war and repression.
Instances of politics becoming an extension of war and civic death have been rife during Trump’s time in the White House.2 Such instances include Trump’s threat to deport the Dreamers, his refusal to mobilize the government’s full resources to aid the people of Puerto Rico in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and his silence regarding gun reforms after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. All three of these events are treated as unrelated incidents; examples of life’s uncertain twists of fate. The consequences of government’s underwhelming response to such crises are further intensified by the neoliberal doctrine that individuals are solely responsible for the ill fortune they experience. This feral ideological assumption is reinforced by undermining any critical attention to the conditions produced by stepped-up systemic lawlessness, state violence, or the harsh consequences of a capricious and cruel head of state.
Progress and dystopia have become synonymous. State-endorsed social provisions and government responsibility are exiled by the neoliberal valorization of freedom construed as the unbridled promotion of self-interest. This narrow celebration of choice ignores constraints and context; it is a wild-eyed emphasis on individual responsibility and its attendant internalization of failure, blind to broader systemic structures and socially produced problems. Existential security no longer rests on collective foundations but on privatized solutions and facile appeals to moral character. Social and economic determinants now disappear in a political backdrop in which social provisions are eliminated, reinforced by the oppressively stupid babble of celebrity culture and self-help talk shows such as Dr. Phil and Oprah Winfrey, all of which appeal to corporate sentiments of total self-reliance and a crippling emphasis on individual responsibility. Mainstream cultural pathways now combine a depoliticizing illiteracy with a spectacle of violence that creates the invisible architecture of social relations, desires, and values through which anti-democratic sentiments gain legitimacy. Under such circumstances, a politics of disposability has merged with an ascendant authoritarianism in the United States in which the government’s response to such disparate issues as the DACA crisis, the devastation of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria, and the mass shooting in Las Vegas are met uniformly with state-sanctioned violence.
Under Trump, the politics of disposability and the war against democracy have taken on a much harder and crueler edge. In fact, there has been a radical shift in both the investment in government-sponsored violence and the creation of a social order designed to cancel out any promise of a democratic future, especially for young people. Violence is now sown everywhere with an unapologetic and punishing arrogance. The police are being armed with weapons from the battlefields of Afghanistan, young people are being pushed through the school-to-prison pipeline, legislation is used to further disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos, connective forms of justice are dismantled, the police are urged by the president to take the gloves off when dealing with people suspected of crimes, and the attorney general has called for a law-andorder campaign that is steeped in racism.
Today’s strain of neoliberal capitalism accelerates the mechanisms by which vulnerable populations are rendered unknowable, undesirable, and unthinkable, considered an excess cost, and stripped of their humanity. Relegated to zones of social abandonment and political exclusion, targeted populations become incomprehensible, civil rights disappear, hardship and suffering are normalized, and human lives are targeted and negated by machineries of violence. For those populations rendered disposable, ethical questions go unasked as the mechanisms of dispossession, forced homelessness, and forms of social death feed corrupt political systems and forms of corporate power removed from any sense of civic and social responsibility. As I stated in the last chapter, the Trump administration is the new face of a politics of disposability that thrives on the energies of the vulnerable and powerless while accelerating what João Biehl calls “the death of the unwanted.”3 Under such conditions, power is defined by the degree to which it is abstracted from any sense of responsibility or critical analysis.
Evidence of this type of disposability is especially visible under the influence of Trump. Not only is it obvious in his discourse of humiliation, bigotry, and objectification, but also in policies designed to punish those populations who are the most vulnerable. These include the victims in Puerto Rico of Hurricane Maria, and illegal immigrant children no longer protected by DACA; a state-sanctioned culture of violence has become the driving force for expanding the armed forces and para-militarizing local police forces throughout the country as part of a race-based law and order policy. Trumpism is fomenting a war culture in which state-sanctioned violence is becoming the baseline for creating a society soaked in fear, manufactured ignorance, and pervasive loathing of those typecast as weak, parasitic, disloyal, or not contributing to making America great again.4
Fear no longer prompts the U.S. government to address real dangers, now posed as inescapable. On the contrary, fear now “evokes an insomnia full of nightmares,”5 and is framed mostly within a discourse of threats to personal safety, serving to increase the criminalization of a wide range of everyday behaviors while buttressing the current administration’s call for “law and order.” Fear has become a petri dish for racism and state-sanctioned dogmatism, and has spurred the increased development of gated communities, a mass incarceration state, schools modeled after prisons, and the call for walls and sealed borders. Such fears further reinforce a punishing state wedded to the growth of a militarized culture, state violence, and expanding authoritarianism. America has reached a political and ethical low point, and has become a society saturated in acute violence, ethical indifference, and impunity.
Under such circumstances, America’s fascist drift not only produces harsh and dire political changes but also a failure to address a continuous series of economic, ecological, and social crises. At the same time, the machinery of disposability and death rolls on in both punishing entire populations and making them disappear, conferring upon them the status of the living dead and catapulting them out of a moral universe that acknowledges what it means to live with dignity, but also what it means to be human. The death-dealing logic of disposability has been updated and now parades in the name of freedom, choice, efficiency, security, progress, and, ironically, democracy. Disposability has become so normalized that it is difficult to recognize it as a distinctive if not overriding organizing principle of the new American authoritarianism. As a result, it becomes difficult, as Judith Butler argues, to recognize that some lives are not grievable. She notes that
certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. . . . Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object.6
While the politics of disposability has a long legacy in the United States, Trump has given it a new and powerful impetus, and it differs from the past both in terms of an unapologetic embrace of the ideology of white supremacy and its willingness to expand state-sanctioned violence and death as part of a wider project of America’s drift from authoritarianism to fascism. Running through these events is a governmental response that has abandoned a social contract designed, however tepidly, to prevent hardship, suffering, and death. Relentless right-wing attacks on the Affordable Care Act and the elderly and infirm whose lives depend on it, demonstrate this abandonment in the starkest terms. In fact, at work here is the haunting specter of a politics of disposability in which people are catapulted out of the moral universe of human beings for whom the government has any responsibility. Such populations, inclusive of such disparate groups as the residents of Puerto Rico and the Dreamers, are left to fend for themselves in the face of natural or man-made disasters—considered collateral damage in the construction of a neoliberal order in which those marginalized by race and class become the objects of a violent form of social engineering relegating its victims to what Richard Sennett has termed a “specter of uselessness,” whose outcomes are both tragic and devastating.
Puerto Rico as a Zone of Social and Political Abandonment
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm with 155-mile-an-hour winds slammed into and devastated the island of Puerto Rico. In the aftermath of a slow government response, conditions in Puerto Rico reached unprecedented and unacceptable levels of misery, hardship, and suffering. As of October 19, over one million people were without drinking water, 80 percent of the island lacked electricity, and ongoing reports by medical staff, nurses, and other respondents indicated that increasing numbers of people were dying.7 Thousands were living in shelters, lacked phone service, and had to bear the burden of a health-care system in shambles.
Such social immiseration is complicated by the fact that the island is home to twenty-one hazardous Superfund sites, places of severe contamination and toxicity that pose serious risks to human health and the environment. Families that had lost everything found themselves facing the further horror that their source of drinking water had been contaminated by the flooding.8 Lois Marie Gibbs ominously reported that waterborne illnesses were spreading just as hospitals were running low on medicines. Caitlin Dickerson observed that the water shortages were so severe that people were in desperation:
[It was] a perpetual game of cat and mouse, scouring the city for any hints of places with water to sell. People are so desperate that . . . the Environmental Protection Agency cited reports of residents trying to obtain drinking water from wells at hazardous Superfund sites. These are wells that were once sealed to avoid exposure to deadly toxins. 9
The governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, warned that a number of people have died from Leptospirosis, a bacterial disease spread by animal urine.10
The Trump regime’s response has been unforgivably slow, with conditions worsening. Given the accelerating crisis, the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, made a direct appeal to President Trump for aid, stating with an acute sense of urgency: “We are dying.”11 Trump responded by lashing out at her personally, telling her to stop complaining. While meeting with Jon Lee Anderson, a reporter from The New Yorker, Cruz became emotional when referring to elderly and ill victims of Maria whom she could not reach and who were “still at great risk in places where relief supplies and medical help had yet to arrive.”12 Cruz said the situation for many of these people was “like a slow death.”13
Stories began to emerge in the press that validated Cruz’s concerns. Many seriously ill dialysis patients either had their much-needed treatments reduced or could not get access to health-care facilities.14 Because of the lack of electricity, Harry Figueroa, a 58-year-old teacher “went a week without the oxygen that helped him breathe,” and eventually died. “His body went unrefrigerated for so long that the funeral director could not embalm his badly decomposed corpse.”15
Scholar Lauren Berlant has used the term “slow death” in her own work to refer “to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.”16 Slow death captures the colonial backdrop and structural oppression deeply etched in Puerto Rico’s history. The scale of suffering and devastation was so great that Robert P. Kadlec, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response, stated: “The devastation I saw, I thought was equivalent to a nuclear detonation.”17
Puerto Rico’s tragic and ruinous problems brought on by Hurricane Maria are amplified both by its crippling $74 billion debt burden, an unending economic crisis, and by the legacy of its colonial status and continuous lack of political power in representing its sovereign and economic rights in Washington. With no federal representation and lacking the power to vote in presidential elections, it is difficult for Puerto Ricans to get their voices heard, secure the same rights as U.S. citizens, and politically advocate and lobby on their own behalf.18 Prior to the storm, people in Puerto Rico suffered a poverty rate of 46 percent, a depressing household median income of $19,350 (compared to the U.S. median of $55,775), and a crippling debt. In fact, the debt burden is so overwhelming that “pre-Maria Puerto Rico was spending more on debt service than on education, health, or security. Results included the shuttering of 150 schools, the gutting of health care, increased taxes, splitting of families between the island and the mainland, and increased food insecurity.”19 Amy Davidson Sorkin was right in arguing that “the crisis in Puerto Rico is a case study of what happens when people with little political capital need the help of their government.”20
Not only did Trump allow three long weeks to saunter by before asking Congress to provide financial aid to the island, but his request reeked of indifference. Instead of asking for grants, he asked for loans, which, as Paul Krugman points out, “is mind-boggling when you bear in mind that the territory is effectively bankrupt.”21 Throughout the crisis, Trump released a series of tweets in which he suggested that the plight of the Puerto Rican people was their own fault and threatened to cut off aid from services proclaiming that the federal government “cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders . . . in P.R. forever.”22 Adding insult to injury, he also said that they were “throwing the government’s budget out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.”23 He lambasted local officials for not doing enough, “scolded them for their alleged profligacy and indolence,” and shamelessly stated that they should do more to help themselves rather than rely on aid from the federal government.24
Trump also suggested that the crisis in Puerto Rico was not a real crisis when compared to Katrina, because the latter had a much higher body count. Trump’s view of Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens was exposed repeatedly in an ongoing range of tweets and comments that extended from the insulting notion that “they want everything to be done for them” to the visual image of Trump throwing rolls of paper towel into a crowd as if he were on a public relations tour. Throughout the crisis, Trump has repeatedly congratulated himself on the government response to Puerto Rico, falsely stating that everybody thinks we are doing “an amazing job.”25 A month after the crisis, Trump insisted, without irony or a shred of self-reflection, that he would give himself a “perfect ten.”
These responses suggest more than a callous expression of narcissistic self-delusion and sociopathic indifference to the suffering of others. Trump’s callous misrecognition of the magnitude of the crisis in Puerto Rico and extent of the islanders’ misery and suffering, coupled with his insults and demeaning tweets, demonstrate the convergence of race and class divisions in his governance. There is more being put into place here than a disconnection from the poor, there is also a white supremacist ideology that registers race as a central part of both his politics and a wider politics of disposability. It is difficult to miss the racist logic of malign neglect and reckless disregard for the safety and lives of Puerto Rican citizens, bordering on criminal negligence, that simmers just beneath the surface of Trump’s rhetoric and actions. Hurricane Maria revealed more than an island unprepared for a natural disaster, it exposed a long history of racism and a stupefying lack of sympathy for people of color who are in need, impoverished, elderly, or ill. The inadequate government response to Hurricane Maria makes visible the hidden face of a politics of disposability and death-dealing racism.
Trump not only embodies the shortcomings of a neoliberal power structure that fails to protect its citizens but also reveals the full spectrum of mechanisms to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Trump’s utterly failed response to the disaster in Puerto Rico reinforces Ta-Nehisi Coates’s claim that the spectacle of bigotry that shapes Trump’s presidency has “moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.”26 What has happened in Puerto Rico not only exposes the great class and racial animus that drives Trump’s policies, it also reveals the frightening marker of a politics of disposability in which any appeal to democracy loses its claim and becomes hard to imagine, let alone enact, without the threat of violent retaliation.
Revoking DACA and the Killing of the Dream
Trump’s penchant for cruelty in the face of great hardship and human suffering is evident not only in his slow response to the devastation Puerto Rico suffered after Hurricane Maria. It is also strikingly visible in the racial bigotry that has shaped his cancellation of the DACA program [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], instituted in 2012 by former President Obama. Under the program, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 had been allowed to live, study, and work in the United States without fear of deportation. The program permitted these young people, known as Dreamers, to have access to Social Security cards and drivers’ licenses, and to advance their education, start small businesses, and become fully integrated into the fabric of American society. Seventy-six percent of Americans believe that Dreamers should be granted resident status or citizenship. In revoking the program, Trump has made clear his willingness to deport individuals who came to the United States as children through no actions of their own, and for whom the United States is their only home. Trump’s actions are both cruel and racist, given that 78 percent of DACA residents are from Mexico: these are the same people Trump once labeled as rapists, drug addicts, and criminals.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the more visible symbols of Trump’s white supremacist commitment, was called upon to be the front man in announcing the cancellation of DACA. In barely concealed racist tones, Sessions argued that DACA had to end because “the effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences . . . denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens” and had to be rescinded because “failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism.”27 None of these charges were true.
According to Juan Cole, “Dreamers are 14 percent less like to be incarcerated than the general population . . . are from unusually educated families and are themselves disproportionately well educated . . . and 91percent of Dreamers are employed.”28 As William Finnegan has observed, “Connecting Dreamers, moreover, to crime, violence, and terrorism is both absurd—anyone convicted of a serious crime is ineligible—and a tactic drawn straight from the nativist-demagogue playbook.”29 Rather than taking jobs from U.S. workers, Dreamers add an enormous economic benefit to the economy and “it is estimated that the loss of the Dreamers’ output will reduce the G.D.P. by several hundred billion dollars over a decade.”30 Sessions’ claim that DACA contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors at the border is simply an outright lie given that the surge began in 2008, four years before DACA was announced, and was largely due, as Mark Joseph Stern points out, “to escalating gang violence in Central America, as well as drug cartels’ willingness to target and recruit children in Mexico. . . . [A] study published in International Migration . . . found that DACA was not one of these factors.”31
Trump’s move to snuff DACA was politically indefensible and heartless. Only 12 percent of Americans want the Dreamers deported, and this support is drawn mostly from Trump’s following of ideological extremists, religious conservatives, ultra-nationalists, and angry white males. This would include Steve Bannon, still an advocate for Trumpism, who helped bring white supremacist and ultranationalist ideology from the fringes of society into national politics.32 On a segment of 60 Minutes, Bannon told Charlie Rose that the DACA program shouldn’t be codified, adding, “As the work permits run out, they self-deport. . . . There’s no path to citizenship, no path to a green card and no amnesty. Amnesty is nonnegotiable.” Bannon’s comments are cruel but predictable, given his support for the uniformly bigoted policies Trump has pushed before and after his election.
Since revoking DACA, Trump has wavered between attempts to work with Democrats to renew the program and flatly stating that without the latter’s support for building a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border, he will not approve of a policy saving DACA. That demand appeared to effectively kill any hope of a political solution to the problem. After the government shutdown, Trump equivocated again claiming he was in favor of eventually giving citizenship to Dreamers if he could reach a deal with the Democratic Party. Senator Schumer was right when he said “Negotiating with this White House is like negotiating with Jell-O.”33 Things took another turn in January 2018 when a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restart DACA, which would prevent “young, undocumented immigrants from deportation.”34 On the downside, the judge stated that the “government will not be required to accept new applications from immigrants who had not previously submitted one. The judge also said the administration could continue to prevent DACA recipients from returning to the United States if they leave the country.”35 Trump responded by attacking the U.S. court system as unfair.
The call to end DACA is part of a broader racist anti-immigration policy aimed at making America white again, a throwback to the Jim Crow era in which white supremacy was socially, culturally, and legally overt. The current push against people of color and immigrants not only reminds us of our own racist national history, but also resonates with the varieties of social intolerance experienced under the totalitarian regimes that emerged in Germany in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1970s.
Las Vegas and the Politics of Violence
On Sunday, October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock, a lone gunman, ensconced on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino Hotel in Las Vegas, opened fire on a crowd of country and western concertgoers below, killing fifty-eight people and wounding more than five hundred. While the venues for such shootings differ, the results are always predictable. People die or are wounded, and society weighs in on the cause of the violence. If the assailants are people of color or Muslim, they are labeled terrorists, but if they are white, they are often labeled mentally disturbed or even racist, as was the case with Dylann Roof, an admitted white supremacist who was sentenced to death after killing nine members of an African American church. Paddock was immediately branded by President Trump a “sick” and “deranged man” who had committed an act of “radical evil.”
Trump’s characterization of the shooting as an act of radical evil is more mystifying than assuring, and it did little to explain how such an egregious act of brutality fits into a broader pattern of civic decline, cultural decay, political corruption, and systemic violence. Or, as Jeffrey St. Clair observes, how “state-sponsored violence propagates violence within the state.”36 Connecting the dots appears to be one of great absences from corporate media that trade in isolated spectacles. Rarely is there a connection made in the mainstream media, for instance, between the fact that the United States is the largest arms manufacturer with the biggest military budget in the world and the almost unimaginable fact that there are more than 300 million guns in the United States, which amounts to “112 guns per 100 people.”37 While the Trump administration is not directly responsible for the bloodbath in Las Vegas, it does feed a culture of violence in the United States, and in doing so has contributed to priming “the mind which did and made accessible the machinery of death.”38
Many Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, reinforced the lack of civic and ethical courage that emerged in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre by arguing that it was “particularly inappropriate” to talk about gun reform or politics in general after a mass shooting. When the issue of politics is eliminated from the discussion, the power of gun manufacturers to flood the country with guns disappears, as does the power of lobbyists to ensure that gun-safety measures do not become part of a wider national conversation. Excluding politics from the Las Vegas mass shooting makes it easier to erase the conditions that made it possible for Paddock to amass forty-nine guns with various killing capacities, including a bump-stock that allowed him to turn rifles into automatic weapons and massively increase the amount of carnage. This depoliticizing logic also enabled most discussion about Paddock to center on him as an aberration—a person whose “wires are screwed up,” according to Trump.
The corporate press, with few exceptions, was unwilling to address how and why mass shootings have become routine in the United States, and how everyday violence benefits a broader cultural commercialization of violence.39 There was no reference to how young children are groomed for violence by educational programs sponsored by the gun industries, how military recruiting and training have moved into public schools, how video games and other aspects of a militarized culture are used to teach youth to be insensitive to the horrors of real-life violence, how the military-industrial complex “makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.”40 Or, how war propaganda provided by the Pentagon influences not only pro-sports events and Hollywood blockbuster movies but also reality TV shows such as American Idol and The X-Factor. John W. Whitehead puts the militarizing of American culture in perspective. He writes:
U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows. And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios. This is how you acclimate a population to war. This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.41
In this instance, the culture of violence cannot be separated from the business of violence. Similarly, popular culture does more than sanitize killing, it also creates conditions for what Cornelius Castoriadis once termed “the shameful degradation of the critical function” and a flight from responsibility, and allows people to view themselves as exempt from the realm of moral responsibility and evaluation.42 In the event of mass shootings, the hidden structures of violence disappear in the narratives of personal sorrow, the call for prayers, and the insipid argument that such events should not be subject to political analysis. Trump’s dismissive comments on the Las Vegas massacre as an act of evil misses the fact that what is evil is the pervasive presence of violence throughout U.S. history, and the how commonplace extreme violence and mass shootings have become on college campuses, in elementary schools, at concerts, in workplaces. Mass shootings are now perpetrated daily in the United States, but the deeper issue is the fact that such violence has become a normal and routine aspect of the American experience.
Militant Neoliberalism in Armed America
American dreams have turned into nightmares, white supremacy has become normalized at the highest levels of power, and militarized responses have become the primary medium for addressing, if not the solution to solving, all social problems, rendering critical thought less and less probable, less and less relevant. Science and evidence are under siege, a resurgent nationalism has produced what Wendy Brown calls an “apocalyptic populism,”43 and willful ignorance has gained its most powerful and toxic expression in President Trump, who as Ariel Dorfman argues, exhibits “a toxic mix of ignorance and mendacity [as well as a] lack of intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigorous analysis.”44 This lethal mix of anti-intellectualism, ideological fundamentalism, and retreat from the ethical imagination become a perfect storm for what can be labeled a war culture, one that trades democratic values for a machinery of social abandonment, misery, and death.
American society is armed and radiates violence. War as an extension of politics fuels a spectacle of violence that has overtaken popular culture while normalizing concrete acts of gun violence that kill ninety-three Americans every day.45 Traumatic events such as the termination of DACA, impacting grown young people, or the refusal on the part of the government to quickly and effectively respond to the hardships experienced by the people of Puerto Rico, no longer appear to represent an ethical dilemma to those in power. Instead, these groups represent disposable populations who inhabit frontier zones whose borders are shaped by racism and economic inequality.
In America’s new space of disposability, a liminal purgatory of social homelessness is experienced by those who are deemed excess, and marked for terminal exclusion. Fueled by a retreat from any sense of ethical responsibility and accelerated by a punitive culture of lawlessness and state-legitimated violence, the politics of disposability has intensified and seeped into everyday life with a vengeance. What is distinctive about the politics of disposability, especially when coupled with the transformation of governance into a legitimation of violence and cruelty under Trump, is that it has both expanded a culture of extreme violence and has become a defining feature of American life. Chris Hedges has argued convincingly that “violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma.”46 This insight has taken on a more ominous register as the state, corporations, and individuals choose violence as a primary mode of engagement. For people immersed in a “death culture” such choices imprison rather than educate. They legitimate the militarizing of every major public institution from schools to airports. The carceral state now provides the template for interacting with others in a society addicted to persistent rituals of violence both as entertainment and in real life.
Under a global regime of neoliberalism, the political and ethical vigor that historically has driven social movements to embrace the promise of a radical democracy has given way to the vitalities of the living dead and what Adorno once called “authoritarian irrationality,” the dark and menacing underside of a racist, anti-democratic and totalitarian politics and psychology. The flirtation with elements of totalitarianism haunts existing notions of ideology, power, and politics, spreading across much of Europe and the United States. All these modes of authoritarianism undermine democracy and feed on fear and uncertainty. Uncertain possibilities now abound in the age of extreme privatization and commodification, accompanied by a new sense of meaninglessness that produces the widespread social atomization endemic to neoliberal capitalism. As Josep R. Llobera has observed, Darwin’s expression “‘survival of the fittest’ [has been] transformed into an ideological component that incorporate[s] racial inequality and struggle for existence.”47 It also gives rise to monstrous forms of barbarism in which brutality becomes more “rational” and fascist ideas more normalized. One consequence, in terms of state action, is that the boundaries between the acceptable and forbidden collapse.
Democracy is becoming all the more irrelevant in the United States under the Trump administration, especially in light of what Robert Weissmann, president of the watchdog group Public Citizens, calls “a total corporate takeover of the U.S. government on a scale we have never seen in American history.”48 Corporate governance and economic sovereignty has replaced state sovereignty. Democratic values and civic culture are under attack by a class of political extremists who embrace without reservation the cynical instrumental reason of the market, while producing on a global level widespread mayhem, suffering, and violence. How else to explain the fact that over 70 percent of Trump’s picks for top administration jobs have corporate ties or work for major corporations? Almost all of these people represent interests diametrically opposed to the agencies for whom they now lead and are against almost any notion of the public good. Hence, under the Trump regime, we have witnessed a slew of rollbacks and deregulations, and a shift on toxic chemicals that will result in an increase of pollution, thus putting at risk children, the elderly, and others who might be exposed to hazardous toxins. The New York Times has reported that one E.P.A. appointee, Nancy Beck, a former executive at the American Chemistry Council, has initiated changes to make it more difficult to track and regulate the chemical perfluorooctanoic acid, which has been linked to “kidney cancer, birth defects, immune system disorders and other serious health problems.”49
The link between violence and authoritarianism increasingly finds expression not only in endless government and populist assaults on immigrants, Blacks, and other vulnerable groups, but also in a popular culture that turns representations of extreme violence into entertainment. In addition, a powerful and unaccountable gun culture now feeds what Hedges calls “vigilante violence” against those protesting white supremacy, as well as the rise of neo-fascism and populist racist delusions aimed at ridding the country of Muslims and Mexican immigrants, however lawless the actions might be.50
America has become a society organized both for the production of violence and the creation of a culture brimming with fear, paranoia, and social atomization. Under such circumstances, the murderous aggression associated with authoritarian states becomes more common in the United States and is increasingly mirrored in the everyday actions of citizens. Mass shootings in the United States have become as ubiquitous as they are now mundane, with chances of gun control more remote than ever, even as an incomplete reform. If the government response to crisis that enveloped DACA and Puerto Rico points to a culture of state-sanctioned violence and cruelty, the mass shooting in Las Vegas represents the endpoint of a culture newly aligned with the rise of authoritarianism.
The shooting in Las Vegas does more than point to a record-setting death toll for vigilante violence, it also provides a signpost about a terrifying new political and cultural horizon in the relationship between violence and everyday life. The Las Vegas massacre represents more than another act of senseless violence, it also points to an expression of absolute lawlessness that has become all too common in the United States. At the same time, such lawlessness and its accompanying culture of cruelty point to increasingly dark expressions of individual brutality that push the boundaries of violence to levels that heretofore seemed unimaginable. What is difficult, yet crucial, to comprehend is the connection between the state-sanctioned violence at work in ending DACA, the inadequate government response to the disaster in Puerto Rico, and the mass shooting in Las Vegas. All of these incidents must be understood as a surface manifestation of a much larger set of issues endemic to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States.
These indices of violence offer pointed and alarming examples of how inequality, systemic exclusion, and a culture of cruelty define American society, even, and especially, as they destroy it. Each offers an individual snapshot of how war culture and violence merge, and are experienced and distributed across different sites. As part of a broader category indicting the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, they make visible the pervasiveness of violence as an organizing principle of American life. While it is easy to condemn the violence at work in each of these specific examples, it is crucial to address the underlying economic, political, and structural forces that create these conditions.
In the face of this epidemic of violence, there is an urgent need for a broader awareness of the scope, range, and effects of violence in America as well as the relationship between politics and disposability, one that offers a warning against limiting such criticism to isolated issues of brutality and aggression. Only then will America be able to address the need for a radical restructuring of its politics, economics, institutions, and a refashioning of its citizens. Violence in the United States has to be understood as part of a wide-scale epidemic that is an outgrowth of a crisis in politics and culture defined by meaninglessness, helplessness, neglect, and commercial disposability. Historically, expressions of violence created moral outrage, but such outrage is less visible today and less effective. Today, resistance to such violence should also produce widespread thoughtful, informed, and collective action over the fate of civilian society itself. This suggests the need for a shared vision of economic justice, class, race, and gender—one that offers the promise of a new understanding of politics and the need for creating a powerful coalition among existing social movements, youth groups, workers, intellectuals, teachers, and other progressives.
Under Trump, a mounting attitude of scorn is developing toward the increasing number of people caught in the web of marginalization and misfortune. This scorn is fueled by right-wing influence operations that endlessly spew out rhetoric of intolerance. These conditions pose a serious challenge to U.S. society, especially since they are openly fostered by the president himself. There will, no doubt, continue to be an increase of repression under Trump. The conditions required for countering such repression will require not only understanding the roots of authoritarianism in the United States, but also eliminating the economic, political, and cultural forces that have produced its long history and ascendancy, one that, as the renowned historian Robert O. Paxton points out, began with the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan in the United States.51 Addressing these forces will be more complicated than simply getting rid of Trump. We must resist efforts that equate corporate commercialism with democracy. The same goes for U.S. acts of aggression and military interventions abroad. We must stand in solidarity, not just against Trumpism but against a two-party system that seems to consistently prioritize corporate power and financial interests over social injustice and the common good.