“In this country we are menaced—intolerably menaced—by a lack of vision. . . . ”
—James Baldwin
Martin Luther King Jr., in his speech at the Riverside Church, spoke eloquently about what it meant to use nonviolent direct action as part of a broader struggle to connect racism, militarism, and war. His call to address a “society gone mad on war” and the need to “address the fierce urgency of now” was rooted in an intersectional politics, one that recognized a comprehensive view of oppression, struggle, and politics itself.1 Racism, poverty, and disposability could not be abstracted from the issue of militarism and how these modes of oppression informed each other. This was particularly clear in the program put forth by the Black Panther Party, which called for “equality in education, housing, employment and civil rights” and produced a 10 Point Plan to achieve its political goals.2 A more recent example of a comprehensive engagement with politics can be found in the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to connect racially motivated police violence to wider forms of state violence, allowing such a strategy to progress from a single-issue protest movement to a full-fledged social movement.3
Such struggles at best should be about both educating people and creating broad-based social movements dedicated not merely to reforms but to transforming the ideological, economic, and political structures of the existing society. Social transformation has to be reconnected with institutional change.4 This means rejecting the notion that global capitalism can be challenged successfully at any one of these levels alone, especially if such resistance, however crucial, is not connected to a comprehensive understanding of the reach of global power. Lacino Hamilton is right in arguing that “institutional patterns and practices will not change unless protesters go beyond rallying, marching, and what usually amounts to empty slogans. The function of activists is to translate protest into organized action, which has the chance to develop and to transcend immediate needs and aspirations toward a radical reconstruction of society.”5
Resistance to the impending reality of neo-fascist domination is more urgent than ever and necessitates challenging not only the commanding structures of economic power but also those powerful cultural apparatuses that trade in the currency of ideas. An effective resistance movement must work hard to create a formative culture that empowers and brings together the most vulnerable along with those whose activism is currently limited to single issues. For many progressives, their political landscape lacks connections to a variety of single-issue movements such as resistance to police violence, militarism, denying abortion rights, climate change, right-wing school reform, and the rejection of decent health care for all. All of these issues are crucial, but they exist in a fractured political environment that impedes a broader ethical and radical movement from harnessing the energies of progressives, liberals, and leftists under one political tent and fighting for a comprehensive politics in the name of a radical democracy or form of democratic socialism. While there has been an increase in the number of resistance movements—close to 5,000 individual groups—since Trump’s election, “there is no common indivisible national agenda, nor is there a common organization to set a coherent strategic direction.”6
The power of such a broad-based movements could draw inspiration from the historically relevant anti-war, anti-racist, and civil rights movements of the past, including the Black freedom movement of the 1960s and the ACT UP movement of the late 1980s. The theoretical and political agenda for such movements has a long history and is available in the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., Vaclav Havel’s well-documented resistance to Soviet tyranny, the history of the Black Panther Party, and Gene Sharp’s conceptual framework for liberation in From Dictatorship to Democracy, to name just a few sources.7 At the same time, current social movements such as Podemos in Spain also offer the possibility of creating new political formations that are anti-fascist and fiercely determined to both challenge authoritarian regimes such as Trump’s and dismantle the economic, ideological, and cultural structures that produce them. What all of these movements reveal is that diverse, interlocked forms of oppression, ranging from the war abroad to the racist and homophobic wars at home, are symptomatic of a more profound illness and deeper malady that demand a new understanding of theory, politics, and oppression.
There is certainly something to be learned from older, proven tactics including using education to create a revolution in consciousness and values, and using broad-based alliances to create the conditions for mass disruptions such as a general strike.8 These tactics combine theory, consciousness, and practice as part of a strategy to dismantle the complex workings of the death-dealing machinery of casino capitalism and its recent intensification under the Trump administration. Certainly, one of the most powerful tools of oppression is convincing people that the oppressive conditions they experience are normal and cannot be changed. The ideology of normalization functions to prevent any understanding of the larger systemic forces of oppression by insisting that all problems are individually based and ultimately a matter of individual character and responsibility. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the message spread through a range of cultural apparatuses extending from the schools to the mainstream media continues to be that there are no structures of domination, only flawed individuals, and the system of capitalism as a whole is organized for our own good. The 1960s produced a range of critical thinkers who already recognized and challenged this oppressive neoliberal narrative as it emerged, including Herbert Marcuse, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Robin Morgan, Stanley Aronowitz, Mary Daly, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and many others. For them, structures of domination were rooted in subjectivity itself, as well as in larger economic apparatuses. Learning from this past resistance means remembering what was at stake for society then, and considering what is at stake for all of us now. Memory can be a powerful force for change, because it provides us with a critical perspective and a much fuller understanding of the times in which we live, and in doing so inspires us to take risks to ensure a better future, one that does not merely repeat history but struggles to transform it.
Restoring Historical Memory
The great Spanish novelist Javier Marías captures in a 2016 interview why memory matters, especially as a resource for understanding the present through the lens of history. He writes:
I do not know what I might say to an American young person after Trump’s election. Probably that, according to my experience with a dictatorship—I was 24 when Franco died—you can always survive bad times more than you think you can when they start. . . . Though the predictions are terrible, I suppose we must all wait and see what Trump does, once he is in office. It looks ominous, indeed. And [Vice President Mike] Pence does not seem better, perhaps even worse. It is hard to understand that voters in the United States have gone against their own interests and have decided to believe unbelievable things. One of the most ludicrous interpretations of Trump’s victory is that he represents the poor, the oppressed, the people “left behind.” A multimillionaire, and a very ostentatious one to boot? A man who surrounds himself with gilded stuff? A guy whose favorite sentence is, “You’re fired!”? A bloke who has scorned blacks, Mexicans, women, and of course, Muslims in general? He is the elite that he is supposed to fight. Indeed, it is a big problem that nowadays too many people (not only Americans, I’m afraid) don’t know anything about history, and therefore cannot recognize dangers that are obvious for the elder ones (those with some knowledge of history, of course, be it first- or second-hand).9
As Marías suggests, historical legacies of racist oppression and dangerous memories can be troublesome for the authoritarians now governing American society. This was made clear in the backlash to Ben Carson’s claim that slaves were immigrants; Trump’s insistence that all Black communities are crime-ridden, impoverished hellholes; and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s assertion that historically Black colleges and universities were “pioneers of school choice.”10 Memories become dangerous when exposing this type of ideological ignorance aimed at rewriting history so as to eliminate its oppressive and poisonous legacies. This is particularly true of the genocidal brutality waged against Native Americans and Black slaves in the United States and its connection to the atrocity of Nazi genocide in Europe and the disappearance of critics of fascism in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s.
Dangerous memories are eliminated by today’s political reactionaries in order to erase the ugliness of the past and to legitimate America’s shopworn legacy of exceptionalism with its deadening ideology of “habitual optimism,” one that substitutes a cheery, empty, Disney-like dreamscape for any viable notion of utopian possibility.11 The Disney dreamscape evacuates hope of any substantive meaning. It attempts to undercut a radical utopian element in the conceptual apparatus of hope that speaks to the possibility of a democratic future very different from the authoritarian past or present. Jelani Cobb is right in insisting that “the habitual tendency to excise the most tragic elements of history creates a void in our collective understanding of what has happened in the past and, therefore, our understanding of the potential for tragedy in the present.”12 The revival of historical memory as a central political strategy is crucial today, given that Trump’s white supremacist policies not only echo elements of a fascist past but also 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.”13 What historical memory discloses is that subjectivity and agency are the material of politics and offer the possibility of creating spaces in which “the domestic machinery of inscriptions and invisibility” can be challenged.14 Catherine Clément argues correctly that “somewhere every culture has an imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone we must try to remember today.”15 The historical and dangerous memories relegated to that zone in the contemporary social order must be recovered. Historical memory is crucial to keeping the American public attuned to what elements in the national landscape signal the emergence of updated elements of fascism. Memory in this sense functions as a critical guidepost that help us to recognize and analyze “where and how totalitarian practices might emerge.” For instance, Trump’s insistence that there is “no truth” in politics or that the critical media is a form of “fake news” provides a clear signal from the past of how fascism works.16
While it would be irresponsible to underestimate Trump’s skulking proximity to neo-fascist ideology and policies, he is not solely answerable for the long legacy of authoritarianism that became a frontal assault with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the emergence of the Tea Party, and the rise of Sarah Palin as a national voice for the new extremism. This neoliberal attack was later embraced in the Third Way politics of the Democratic Party, expanded through the growth of a mass incarceration state, and solidified under the anti-democratic “war on terror” and permanent war policies of the Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations. During this period, democracy was sold to the bankers and big corporations. Whistleblowers were sent to prison. The financial elite and CIA torturers were given the green light by the Obama administration to commit the gravest of crimes with impunity. This surge of repression was made possible mostly through the emergence of a savage neoliberalism, a ruthless concentration of power by the ruling classes, 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 education struggles of the 1960s.
As mentioned previously, Trump’s unapologetic authoritarianism has prompted Democratic Party members and the liberal elite to position themselves as the only model of organized resistance. It is difficult not to see their alleged moral outrage and faux resistance as both comedic and hypocritical in light of the role these centrist liberals have played in the last forty years—subverting democracy and throwing the working class and people of color under the bus. As Jeffrey St. Clair observes, “Trump’s nominal opponents,” the Democrats, are “encased in the fatal amber of their neoliberalism.”17 They are part of the problem and not the solution. Rather than face up to a sordid history of ignoring the needs of workers, young people, and minorities of class and color, the Democratic Party acts as if its embrace of a variety of neoliberal political and economic policies along with its support of a perpetual war machine had nothing to do with paving the way for Donald Trump’s election. Focusing only on how Trump represents the transformation of politics into a reality TV show misses the point. Underlying Trump’s rise is the ruling-class conviction that U.S. Presidential candidates should be judged in terms of how much value they generate as an advertisement for casino capitalism.18
Dangerous memories and critical knowledge, and the genuinely democratic formative cultures they enable, must be at the forefront of resisting the armed ignorance of the Trump disimagination machine. While a critical consciousness is the precondition of struggle, it is only the starting point for effective resistance. What is also needed is a bold strategy and a social movement capable of shutting down the authoritarian political machine at all levels of government through general strikes, constant occupation of the political spaces and public spheres controlled by the new authoritarians, and the creation of an endless groundswell of educational strategies and demonstrations that make clear and hold accountable the different ideological, material, psychological, and economic registers of authoritarianism at work in U.S. society. This is a time to study, engage in critical dialogues, develop new educational sites, support and expand the alternative media, and counter force with reason and a resurgence of the collective will. It will not be easy to turn the tide, but it can happen, and there are historical precedents.
Shutting Down American-style Authoritarianism
Effective strategies to support social change and political agency have to focus, in part, on the young and those most vulnerable to the advancing wave of authoritarianism. Young people, workers, and those now considered disposable, especially, are the driving force of the future, and we have to learn from them, support them, contribute where possible, and join in their struggles. At the same time, as Robin D.G. Kelley argues:
We cannot build a sustainable movement without a paradigm shift. Stopgap, utilitarian alliances to stop Trump aren’t enough. . . . So where do we go from here? If we really care about the world, our country, and our future, we have no choice but to resist.19
This would also suggest building up unions again and putting their control in the hands of workers, fostering the conditions for the creation of a massive student movement, and working to build sanctuary cities and institutions that will protect those considered the enemies of white supremacy—immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, and others considered disposable. Democratic politics must be revived at the local and state levels, especially given the control of 56 percent of state legislatures by right-wing Republicans.20 Education must be made central to the formation and expansion of study groups throughout the country, and a public pedagogy of justice and democracy must be furthered through the alternative media and when possible in the mainstream media. Central to the latter task is expanding the range of dialogues regarding how oppression works to focus not merely on economic structures but also on the way it functions ideologically, psychologically (as Wilhelm Reich once argued), and spiritually, as Michael Lerner has pointed out.21 It is not enough for progressives to examine the objective forces and conditions that have pushed so many people to give up on politics, have undercut acts of solidarity, and have dismantled any viable notion of hope in the future. It is also crucial to understand the devastating emotional forces and psychological narratives that harm them from the inside out.22
A successful resistance struggle must be comprehensive, and at the same time embrace a vision that is unified, democratic, and equitable. While talking about youth in the age of precarity, Jennifer Silva makes an important point about the need for this comprehensive vision of politics. She writes, “I find that without a broad, shared vision of economic justice, race, class and gender become sites of resentment and division rather than a coalition among the working class.”23 Instead of simply reacting to the horrors and misery produced by capitalism, it is crucial to call for its end, while supporting the formation of a democratic socialism that gives voice to and unifies the needs and actions of those who have been left out of the discourse of democracy under the financial elite. The need here is for a language of both critique and possibility, a rigorous analysis of the diverse forces of oppression and a discourse of educated hope.
Such a task is both political and pedagogical. Not only must existing relations of power be called into question and their authority to govern society be denied, but notions of neoliberal “common-sense” learning must be disconnected from democratic forms of political agency and civic literacy. As Michael Lerner insightfully observes, rather than engage 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.24 As I have stressed throughout this book, this is not just a political but a pedagogical challenge in which education becomes central to any viable mode of resistance. Making education central to politics means the left will have to remove itself from the discourse of meritocracy that is often used to dismiss and write off those who hold conservative, if not reactionary, views. Not doing so only results in a discourse of blaming others and a self-indulgent congratulatory stance on the part of those who occupy progressive political positions. The hard political and pedagogical work of changing consciousness, producing new kinds of identity, desires, and values conducive to a democracy, doesn’t stop with the moral high ground often taken by liberals and other progressives.
The right wing knows how to address matters of self-reproach and anger head on, often through a racism-inflected diversion, whereas the left and progressives continue to shy away from the pedagogical challenges posed by those vulnerable groups caught in the magical thinking of reactionary ideologies.25 So while it is crucial to address the dramatic shifts economically and politically that have produced growing poverty and unemployment along with enormous anger and frustration in American society, it is also important to address the accompanying existential crisis that has destroyed the self-esteem, identity, and hopes of those considered disposable, and those whom Hillary Clinton shamelessly called a “basket of deplorables.” The ideological mix of untrammeled self-interest, unchecked individualism, unrestrained self-reliance, a culture of fear, and a war-against-all ethic has produced a profound sense of precarity and hopelessness, not only among immigrants and poor people of color, but among working-class whites who feel crushed by the economy, threatened by those deemed other, and demeaned by so-called elites.
Resistance on each of these several fronts will not be easy, but it has to happen, and it has to happen in a way that connects these multiple fronts through a shared politics and pedagogy. It must at the same time open the public’s eyes to an understanding of how a new class of financial scavengers operates in the free flow of a global space with no national allegiances, no respect for the social contract, and a degree of power unparalleled in its ability to exploit people, produce massive inequality, destroy the planet, and accelerate human suffering across and within national boundaries. Clearly, a broad social movement must create a shared common agenda that rejects the notion that capitalism is synonymous with democracy. Such a movement must grow out of shared spaces, alternative public spheres, and what I call democracies in exile. There must be a space for dialogue, for educational work aimed at developing a comprehensive understanding of oppression and not just a critique of Wall Street. Most important, there is a need to create a radical vision of what a democratic socialism would look like, how such a vision can be conveyed to the American public, and what sort of educational spheres and institutions would be vital to such a task. Such a vision may be impossible without a new language for theorizing politics, culture, power, and collective resistance.
Trump’s speech has a history that must be acknowledged, made known for the suffering it imposes, and challenged with an alternative critical and hope-producing narrative. No form of oppression, however hideous, can be overlooked. And along with that critical gaze there must emerge a critical language, a new narrative and a different story about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States.
At the same time, there is a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres as sites of critical learning. There is also a need to encourage artists, intellectuals, academics and other cultural workers to talk, educate, and challenge the normalizing discourses of casino capitalism, white supremacy, and fascism. There is no room here for a language shaped by political purity or limited to a politics of outrage. A truly democratic vision has a more capacious overview of the project of struggle and transformation.
Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, 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, the first step is to acknowledge that fascism begins with words, and in response there is a need to develop a language of critique and possibility that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. A critical language can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging today in new forms. The use of such a language can also reinforce and accelerate the creation of alternative public spaces in which critical dialogue, exchange, and a new understanding of politics can emerge. Focusing on language as a strategic element of political struggle is not only about meaning, critique, and the search for the truth. It is also about power: understanding how it works and using it as part of ongoing struggles that merge the language of critique and possibility, theory and action.
Without a faith in intelligence, critical education, and the power to transform, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that fascism poses to the world. All forms of fascism aim at destroying standards of truth, openness, accountability, empathy, informed reason, and the institutions that make them possible. The current struggle against a nascent fascism in the United States 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.
Progressives need to formulate a new language, alternative cultural spheres, and fresh narratives about community, collective welfare, social justice, environmental sustainability, empathy, solidarity, and the promise of a real socialist democracy. We need a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism and democracy, normalize greed and excessive competition, and accept self-interest as the highest form of motivation. We need a language, vision, and understanding of power to enable the conditions in which education is linked to social change and the capacity to promote human agency through the registers of cooperation, compassion, care, love, equality, and respect for difference.
Resistance is no longer an option: it is now a matter of life or death. The lights are going out on democracy across the globe, and the time to wake up from this nightmare is now. There are no guarantees in politics, but this is not a cause for retreat. No politics that matters is without hope—a hope forged in an educated awareness of history and the possibilities for real intervention and social change. This is not simply a call for a third political party. Progressives need to create a new politics and new social and political formations. The time for mounting resistance through a range of single-issue movements is over. Nothing is more important now than to bring such movements together as part of a broad-based political formation.
Those who believe in a radical democracy must find a way to make this nation ungovernable by the powers that currently claim governing authority. Small-scale defiance and local actions are important, but there is a more urgent need to educate and mobilize through a comprehensive vision and politics that is capable of generating massive teach-ins all over the United States so as to enable a collective struggle aimed at producing powerful events such as a nationwide boycott, sit-ins, and a general strike in order to bring the country to a halt. The promise of such resistance must be rooted in the creation of a new political movement of democratic socialists, one whose power is grounded in the organization of novel political formations, unions, educators, workers, young people, religious groups, and others who constitute a popular progressive base. There will be no resistance without a vision of a new society and new mechanisms of resistance. In this instance, effective resistance involves cutting off power to the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, and neoconservative warmongers. In doing so, it gives birth to a social wakefulness and a politics of ungovernability. Hopefully, in that wakefulness, a resurgent act of witnessing and moral outrage will grow and provide the basis for a new kind of politics, a fierce wind of resistance, and a struggle too powerful to be defeated: democracy in exile.