With the rise of Donald Trump to the pinnacle of U.S. political and military power, America has descended, as never before, into a drama styled after theater of the absurd. Unbridled anti-intellectualism, deception, and “vindictive chaos” have created the conditions for repeating elements of a morally reprehensible past in the guise of “Making America Great Again.” Advancing an alarmist agenda bolstered by “alternative facts,” the Trump presidency has unleashed a type of anti-politics that unburdens people of any responsibility to challenge—let alone change—the fundamental precepts of a society torn asunder by open bigotry, blatant misogyny, massive inequality, and violence against immigrants, Muslims, the economically disadvantaged, and communities of color.1 Immersed in crisis, America now mimics a failing state as the credibility of its democratic institutions and the trustworthiness of its leadership openly depreciate on the global stage.2
Despite all his fabrications and posturing, Trump’s contempt for democratic processes has been exceeded only by his commitment to nepotistically favoring his family and fellow members of the country-club elite. Trump’s ascendancy has revealed the degree to which acute political illiteracy, corruption, and contempt for reason have become defining features of present-day U.S. culture. His rise has involved using threats of violence and intimidation to shock and incite everyday people, and is preceded by a serious decline of American public life. Taken with relentless lying and targeted attacks on dissent, the result is a political climate that recalls those of past pre-fascist societies. Trump is not simply unfit to be president, he is a “political weapon of mass self-destruction for American democracy,” says Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at Brookings.3 Seen in this light, Trumpism is symptomatic of the decline of the United States into a new, commercially integrated, American-style fascism. While sectors of Trumpist fascism may re-use imagery from European symbols of the 1930s, its actual roots extend directly from the absolute white supremacy of the settler-colonial origins of the United States and its subsequent racialized economic history of destroying and erasing Native American civilizations and enslaving, breeding, and subordinating Africans and people of color for generations. It will take great struggle for the American public to come to terms with the voices and narratives of this history, and even greater struggle to overcome the ways Trumpism is giving new social legitimacy and political form to these racist legacies today.
The danger signs are not just in the United States. Movements in North America and across Europe are exhibiting growing support for right-wing extremist politicians and political movements, though there was one respite with the 2017 presidential election in France with centrist Emmanuel Macron’s victory over far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Unemployment, wage stagnation, vision-less futures, a growing sense of precarity and insecurity for working and lower middle classes, and an increasing sense of atomization and alienation—all of it fueled by austerity measures, a growing worldwide culture of fear, and a permanent war culture—are undermining not only the foundations of democracy, but a belief in the value of democracy itself.4 Many people now find themselves living in societies in which they experience a kind of social homelessness, detached from and invisible to the policies and language of those in power.
As Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Erich Fromm, among others, have reminded us, rootlessness creates the conditions for an escape from freedom and social responsibility, and finds meaning in the foundations of totalitarianism. After reviewing a number of Harvard University reports analyzing historical and current attitudes on the part of millennials in North America and Europe, Gwynn Guilford concludes that young people have grown weary of democracy. Not only have many millennials lost their faith in democracy, but many are less willing to oppose military coups and no longer view civil rights as absolutely essential; more than a quarter dismiss the importance of free elections to democracy.5 Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk argue that support for authoritarianism is increasingly apparent. They write:
Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated.6
The growing protest movements against fascism in general, and against the Trump regime in particular, offer hope against this dismal prediction. But the fight against the politics of hate operates in a difficult historical moment, one in which many people feel abandoned by both the ruling elite and the political left. The language of intolerance now seriously threatens the survival of the institutions that make a critical formative culture possible. Marsha Gessen describes how “Donald Trump has an instinct for doing . . . violence to language:”
He is particularly adept at taking words and phrases that deal with power relationships and turning them into their opposite. This was, for example, how he used the phrase “safe space” when talking about vice-president-elect Mike Pence’s visit to the musical Hamilton. Pence, if you recall, was booed and then passionately—and respectfully—addressed by the cast of the show. Trump was tweeting that this should not have happened. Now, the phrase “safe space” was coined to describe a place where people who usually feel unsafe and powerless would feel exceptionally safe. Claiming that the second most powerful man in the world should be granted a “safe space” in public turns the concept precisely on its head. Trump performed the exact same trick on the phrase “witch hunt,” which he claimed was being carried out by Democrats to avenge their electoral loss. Witch hunts cannot actually be carried out by losers, big or small: the agent of a witch hunt must have power. And, of course, he has seized and flipped the term “fake news” in much the same way.7
The world is now witnessing how the conditions that have been undermining U.S. democracy over the last forty years have brought us to a place where resurgent forms of nativism, racism, and misogyny, have consolidated and aligned as a social base for an authoritarian, corporate, political-economic order. Trump’s emergence signals the successful merger of white ultra-nationalism with the forces of unfettered corporate power. And it is this lethal combination that poses, as the Washington Post observed, a “unique threat to democracy.”8
While U.S. courts initially blocked Trump’s various versions of an immigration ban, he has unleashed and emboldened a rising culture of hate and violence that has led to attacks on immigrants, Blacks, Jews, transgender people, and institutions and individuals deemed anti-American. Synagogues have been bombed, white supremacist slogans have been painted on schools, students have shamelessly shouted racial slurs at classmates, and militant right-wing groups have attacked those attending anti-Trump rallies. A particularly violent display of racism took place on May 26, 2017, in Portland, on a light-rail train. Three men were stabbed by Jeremy Joseph Christian, a white supremacist, as they attempted to intervene after Christian hurled religious slurs at two females, one of whom was wearing a hijab. Two of the men were killed. While appearing at his first court date, flanked by two deputies in the courtroom, Christian unapologetically yelled, “Get out if you don’t like free speech. . . . You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.” He followed up with “Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom.”9
For those who defend equality, justice, and democracy as fundamental principles and essential elements of American society, the time for equivocation and half measures is over. Trump is more than an opportunistic clown who leveraged his reality-show celebrity for political gain; he has been a vehicle for right-wing populism by rousing uneducated white fear and committing it to a pro-corporate economic agenda.10 As Gessen has demonstrated, this is a populism that relies on the blunt hammer of ignorance, a “rejection of the complexity of modern politics,” and a disdain for expertise.11
Trump is wedded to both the spectacle and use of power—a position made all the more dangerous given that, unlike his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, Trump is a “poorly educated, under-informed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world.”12 He is also a racist, a demagogue, and a neoliberal fundamentalist who is contemptuous of dissent, truth, and the basic norms of political life. As is evident in the rise of numerous modes of fascism since the 1920s, authoritarianism takes many forms, and aligns itself with the worse dimensions of the historical contexts in which it gains political and ideological currency. Trump is the endpoint of a social order that values self-interest over compassion, profit over basic human needs, and corruption over justice. Trump is not simply a liar. He has no regard for the truth, empathy, or reality itself. Trump’s world is the underside of a fascistic movement that feeds on fantasies, paranoia, alternative realities, conspiracy theories, and self-aggrandizement. Trump’s authoritarianism is on display on many levels: in the menacing tone of his populist rallies, in his public humiliation of his own staff, in his open threat of Republican rivals, in his relentless falsehoods and fabrications, in his alignment with bigots and nationalists, and in his embrace of violence, coercion, and militarism. Paraphrasing former White House advisor Steve Bannon, Trump unabashedly presents himself to his base as the blunt instrument of a populist authoritarian movement. As David Goldberg has pointed out, what is most disturbing today—and Trump personifies this position—“is the license to say and act in blatantly racist ways with little restraint, magnified by a deafening lack of condemnation and constraint by those in a position to delimit the expression.”13
What Trump makes clear is the dystopian side of an ideology that enshrines existing relations of power as a matter of common sense while endorsing ignorance as a virtue. Coupled with a systemic culture of fear, ignorance sustains itself by looking everywhere for enemies while occupying the high ground of political purity and an empty moralism. I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know, it is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by powerful disimagination machines, and its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it, but also to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift. This is a culture of social abandonment and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable, along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the ideology of ignorance while employing it to fill government positions and produce death-dealing policies. Trump is a master at putting into play pedagogies of repression that reproduce what I have called dead zones of the imagination, zones endemic to a society addicted to consumerism, war, militarism, economic exploitation, and self-promotion.14 Trump is not the stranger in the night banging menacingly on our front door. Far from an abnormality, he is the overt and unapologetic symbol of a feral capitalism that has been decades in the making. He is the theatrical postmodern self-absorbed Frankenstein monster that embodies and makes clear a history of savagery, greed, and predatory cruelty that has reached its endpoint—a poisonous form of American authoritarianism. As John Steppling writes, “he is the sunlamped face of capital.”15
Dystopia is no longer the stuff of fiction; it has become the new reality. But underlying Trumpism’s dark and poisonous assaults on the imagination is a truth worth remembering. At the center of resistance, politics, and hope is the power of educating people to a more promising reality, one that unmasks the falsehood and fear upon which fascism depends. Authoritarians live in fear of criticism, dissent, community, solidarity, and the social imagination. Brad Evans captures it well in his comment on the importance of language and books:
If you don’t provide people with the intellectual tools to empower critically minded subjects, you end up with incarcerated minds. A world without books is a world foreclosed. Every great tyranny begins by declaring a war upon the imagination and the appropriation or imprisonment of those deemed to be its most creative. The question is why? Imagining other worlds runs counter to the fascistic impulse to impose a forced unity upon a people. Tyrants always try to suffocate and replace the richness of the human condition with dogmatic images of thought.16
And it is precisely in the recognition and struggle against the imagination, the war on truth, and the attack on democratic public spheres that the power and horror of authoritarian rule becomes visible and therefore vulnerable. Albert Camus understood this threat well. He warned us about how the plague of authoritarianism can reappear in updated forms. For Camus, the disease of fascism could best be initially fought with the antibody of consciousness, one that embraced the past as a way of protecting the future. The words that form the concluding paragraph of The Plague are as relevant today as they were when they were written more than half a century ago. Camus writes:
[As] he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.17
One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. As both reason and truth come under attack, it is essential to advance democracies in exile—or what has been called the project of a parallel polis—oppositional political and pedagogical social formations that spread within authoritarian societies to preserve and advance social justice, egalitarianism, political tolerance, cultural diversity, and vibrant democracy-centered community.
A Politics of the Indefensible
In the age of Trump, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that any appeal to reason, critical thought, and informed judgment would be at odds with the Republican-dominated political culture, if not the 91 percent of his political base who support his performance regardless of what he says or does.18 Many Americans seem to display a growing fondness for misinformation, an attitude that reinforces the disintegration of the civic culture and even the communicative function of language, which Trumpists strongly reinforce. As Lucy Marcus has observed, “Nowadays, facts and truth are becoming [more] difficult to uphold in politics (and in business and even sports).”19 Indeed, falsehood and deception no longer appear marginal to political debate; they now seem to shape much of what is spoken in the public sphere, even by U.S. presidential candidates. This includes the former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose email scandal is surely symptomatic of a deeper level of dishonesty than her apparent penchant for serial lying.20 Matters of corporate power, economic injustice, state violence, widespread poverty, institutional racism, a broken criminal justice system, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the existence of the mass incarceration state, among other important matters, rarely entered her discourse during the 2016 presidential campaign, and yet these are major issues negatively affecting the lives of millions of children and adults in the United States.
The politics of deceit has reached alarming new heights with Trump, whose campaign and presidency have been the source of endless falsehoods. When Trump is caught in a falsehood, he simply ignores the facts and just keeps on lying or switches the topic. Matthew Yglesias in Vox has argued that Trump’s misrepresentations are not lies in the sense of trying to mislead his audience. On the contrary, Yglesias argues, “Trump provides the public with a steady diet of bullshit [with the intent] of both endlessly reinscribing polarization in American politics . . . corroding America’s governing institutions, [and] poisoning civic life.”21 Yglesias claims that Trump has no interest in accuracy or persuasion, and that his endless stream of fictions are part of his attempt to create a separate language meant to distinguish his fan base from his enemies, to enforce what he calls “trust and loyalty in his followers.”22 Yglesias is only partly right.
Trump persistently tests his subordinates by seeing who “around him will debase themselves to repeat” his lies.23 But Trump’s violence to language is used to do more than test the fealty of officials and underlings. He also uses language and lies to both persuade and distract people from reality, to “create enough confusion about basic facts” in order to normalize his preferred policies as sensible so that he can legitimate his right-wing policies and corrupt politics.24 Trump’s lies are part of the spectacle of distraction fueled by a long history in which large sectors of corporate media have been all too willing to surrender their pursuit of the truth for pursuit of commercial enrichment.25
Trumpists seem to care little about whether their public servants, particularly the president, deceive them or not. Nationwide support for militant right-wing politicians resonates strongly with Trump’s attacks on trade policies that produced massive unemployment, deindustrialization, despair, and little hope for them or their families for the future. Trump’s critique of companies moving their facilities abroad, his call for competitive bidding in the drug industry and military-industrial complex, fuel their disdain for the ruling elite, outlandish CEO salaries, and a two-party system that bailed out the banks but left American towns to rot in despair and misery. Principles of equality, egalitarianism, and meritocracy, however frail, are no longer espoused by the major political parties. Many of Trump’s supporters respond to his criticism of crumbling infrastructures that affect their towns, neighborhoods, and cities, and recognize that such neglect was more often than not the result of government indifference to the needs of low-income areas and the common good. The despair that has ravaged the towns and cities of many Trump supporters is real. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown in their studies, the mortality rates from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, which they call “deaths of despair,” have reached alarming heights among working-class whites with no more than a high school diploma. They also observe that this pattern has spread across the country, and there is no end in sight. In addition, they observe that deteriorating economic conditions are a powerful force, but that they are only part of the story.
Many commentators have suggested that poor mortality outcomes can be attributed to contemporaneous levels of resources, particularly to slowly growing, stagnant, and even declining incomes; we evaluate this possibility, but find that it cannot provide a comprehensive explanation. . . . We propose a preliminary but plausible story in which cumulative disadvantage from one birth cohort to the next, in the labor market, in marriage and child outcomes, and in health, is triggered by progressively worsening labor market opportunities at the time of entry for whites with low levels of education. This account, which fits much of the data, has the profoundly negative implication that policies, even ones that successfully improve earnings and jobs, or redistribute income, will take many years to reverse the mortality and morbidity increase, and that those in midlife now are likely to do much worse in old age than those currently older than 65.26
Decades of big business rigging the political economy have taken a terrible toll on the lives of American workers. Trumpism deviously taps the resulting insecurity of white workers and weaponizes it into a sense of contempt for liberals, immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, climate change, affordable health care, and the left in general. White Americans support Trumpist narratives because they validate anger and blame, and openly reconnect with the officially sanctioned Jacksonian national security vision—white supremacy. This is an important issue that many analysts often overlook.
Trump and Bannon, prior to their split following the publication of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s explosive exposé of Trump’s mindset, more often than not used fighting words in place of ideas as pathways toward political solutions. Trumpism, as a form of nascent fascism, is being built around aggression, hatred, and violence, while coding white supremacy as an acceptable form of historical national heritage. At the same time, through his tweets and mass rallies, Trump has offered his mostly white audiences a consistent narrative that gives them a sense of visibility and symbolic community. Unfortunately, Trump’s style often appeals to his supporters’ juvenile fantasies. Many commentators have argued that Trump’s followers are ignorant to continue to support him in light of his perpetual lies and fabrications. Roger Berkowitz argues that most Trump supporters don’t care about his lies or that his economic moves are designed to make the rich even richer. What they prefer is a consistent narrative of a reality in which they are a part. He writes:
The reason fact-checking is ineffective today—at least in convincing those who are members of movements—is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. When Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall to protect our borders, he is not making a factual statement that an actual wall will actually protect our borders; he is signaling a politically incorrect willingness to put America first. When he says that there was massive voter fraud or boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, he is not speaking about actual facts, but is insisting that his election was legitimate. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” Leaders of these mass totalitarian movements do not need to believe in the truth of their lies and ideological clichés. The point of their fabrications is not to establish facts, but to create a coherent fictional reality. What a movement demands of its leaders is the articulation of a consistent narrative combined with the ability to abolish the capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.27
Every day that Donald Trump remains employed as a public servant is a day he takes us closer to fascism. While Clinton hardly critiqued the imperialist role played by the United States around the globe, Trump’s bellicose posturing, particularly toward countries such as nuclear-armed North Korea, puts the entire world at risk.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, it became clear that Trump and Bannon wanted to intensify a domestic war, though not just against the political establishment, but against people of color, the economically disadvantaged, transgender people, and undocumented immigrants. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has reversed the prison reforms of the last decade and is instructing prosecutors to reinstate maximum sentencing laws, three-strikes-you’re-out legislation, and other regressive and racist legislations that re-establish the worst dimensions of the police state. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general from 2009 to 2015, has stated that Sessions’ policies are draconian and condemned them as an “absurd” hold-over of “failed 20th-century ideology . . . unwise and ill-informed,” quipping that his “tough on crime” stance, in reality “is dumb on crime.”28 In actuality, it is much more, and serves as a disturbing reminder of the ongoing war on economically disadvantaged youth and communities of color.
The whole world is watching the Donald operate the nation’s affairs like a TV game show, hyping himself and belittling rivals with the relish of a fifth grader. How have we arrived here? For one, the U.S. political establishment’s foreign policy approach, which has for decades involved calls for regime change and war, has now become the dominant framework governing American society—and has been fortified by its recent alliance with state-sanctioned torture, armed ignorance, and a deep hatred of democracy. With Trump’s presidency, the crisis of politics has been accelerated by a crisis of historical conscience, memory, ethics, and agency. In the process, legitimacy has been extended to a populist notion of “common sense” in which facts are dismissed and “alternative facts” dominate. In a culture of immediacy, spectacle, and sensationalism, Trump behaves as if he is still starring in his own TV show. But more dangers lie ahead than our collective immersion in the shallow appeal of politics as theater.
Under the economic, religious, and political extremists Trump has been installing in positions of power, intolerance and militarization will intensify. Financial capital will be deregulated in order to be free to engage in behavior that puts most of the American public and the planet in danger. Institutions that embody the common good, such as public schools, will be defunded or privatized, and as a culture of greed and selfishness reaches new heights, there will be a further retreat from civic literacy and a growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance to the public interest. The free-market mentality that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will advance under Trump and will continue to drive politics, destroy many social protections, further privilege the wealthy, and deregulate economic activity. How else to explain Trump’s tax reform bill, which offers a $1.5 trillion tax cut that largely favors the ultra-rich and major corporations and would eventually leave 83 million middle-class and poor families paying more in taxes? Moreover, the increase in the deficit caused by these tax cuts enables the Republicans to wage and justify a major assault on the welfare state and its chief social provisions, such as social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And what other rationale is there for Trump’s war on the environment, evident not only in his withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement but also in his opening up billions of acres of land on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts for oil drilling? This is beyond shameful. It constitutes an act of war on the planet and the health of millions of adults and children.
Trump’s reign will continue to usher in an extreme version of pro-corporate capitalism in which all human activities, practices, and institutions will be subject to market principles and commercialization. Under the Trump regime, the powers of the state will be unleashed against new targets as well as old: political rivals, Blacks, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, transgendered people, women’s reproductive rights, “porous” borders, the environment, protest, the press, the U.S. Justice system. Americans are witnessing the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism and fascism that are challenging the very ability for society to function as a civilian democracy. This is precisely why Trumpism cannot be further normalized.
It is crucial to acknowledge that the path we are currently on will lead to more misery and conflict. It will bring more violence to our doorsteps, unleashing and trapping many people in reactionary spirals of escalation and retaliation. Such violence is seen in increasingly frequent mass shootings, the killing of unarmed civilians by the police, and the senselessness of daily violence in all its forms. If you are Black, this means living each day with the possibility of being either harassed, incarcerated, or shot by the police.29 Violence, or the threat of violence, seems to be increasingly the default response of the state to every domestic and foreign problem. Trump has even publicly ridiculed his secretary of state for attempting to de-escalate nuclear confrontation with North Korea. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State,” said Trump in a tweet, “that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” Another says, “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”30
Unsurprisingly, it has been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (since fired) once called Trump a “fucking moron.” Ignorance and power form a foundation for fascism. Commenting on his book Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff stated that he “interviewed more than 200 people in Trump’s inner and outer orbit and they reached a joint conclusion. They all say, ‘He is like a child,’ and what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification,” the author told NBC.31 In short, most of the people interviewed considered Trump to be stupid and incompetent. What they left out is that he is also dangerous, particularly at a time when violence runs through U.S. politics and culture like an electric current. Violence is at the heart of every fascist society. To paraphrase the historian Richard J. Evans, what we are witnessing under Trump is the emergence of a society that is plunging into “a new, militarized, and brutalized world where violence in the service of politics [becomes] the norm.”32
Wolff’s gossipy tale may be revealing, if not entertaining, in exposing Trump’s character and mode of (non) governance, but it also is a distraction that feeds the mainstream media’s obsession with his mental health rather than a much-needed focus on the slew of dangerous policies he promotes that inflict violence and misery upon immigrants, the poor and vulnerable, and those marginalized by class, race, sexual orientation, and gender. Of course, the more serious issue ignored by the mainstream media should be a focus on what kind of political and economic system produces demagogues like Trump, the people who support him, and a gangster capitalism with its organized culture of violence. Reference here to Nazi Germany may be overblown, but under Trump there are echoes and warnings resembling a fascist past that “shut down the country’s democratic institutions, destroyed the freedom of its press and media, and created a one-party state in which opposition was punishable by imprisonment, banishment, or even death.”33 As Richard Evans, the renowned historian of modern Germany, observes, democracies die in different ways, but what they often have in common as they fall is the shift of violence to the center of civic and political life. Trump may not be Hitler, but the Nazis and the legacy of fascism offer a “warning from history” that cannot be dismissed.34 While the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism, and militarism, are at the center of power in Trump’s United States.
Violence increasingly finds its way onto the screens of Americans’ phones and devices. War culture, alive and well on U.S. soil, becomes commercialized via constant news programming of extreme violence captured in videos of a lone gunman indiscriminately shooting scores people at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas or at a church in a small community in Texas. Such mass shootings now occur daily in the United States, and have for years. A pervasive culture of violence means that “seventy-eight children under 5 died by guns in 2015—thirty more than the forty-eight law enforcement officers killed by guns in the line of duty.”35 It also means that in the United States, mass shootings occur, on average, more than once per day.36 In Chicago alone, in the first eight months of 2016, twelve people were shot daily. According to a Carnegie-Knight News21 investigation, the effects on youth are devastating:
For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America. More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten. Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car. Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. A News21 investigation of child and youth deaths in America between 2002 and 2012 found that at least 28,000 children and teens 19 years old and younger were killed with guns. Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America.37
Gary Younge observes that every day in the United States “seven kids and teens are shot dead,” which adds up to 2,500 dead children a year. It’s clear that neither mainstream political party has what is needed: “a thoroughgoing plan for dealing with America’s gun culture that goes well beyond background checks.”38 While such a plan would be an improvement, it would not be enough. The level of gun deaths and violence exhibited in the United States has deep roots in systemic structures of racism, inequality, and poverty that bear down particularly hard on young people. Not only is the United States “the only country in the world that continues to sentence children to life in prison without parole,” but the criminal justice system functions to make it more difficult for young people to escape the reach of a punishing and racist legal system.39 According to a 2016 report published by the Juvenile Law Center, there are close to a million children who appear in juvenile court each year and are subjected to a legal system rife with racial disparities and injustices, which are further entrenched by the extraction of fees for court-related services. This report, titled “Debtor’s Prison for Kids? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System,” states:
Approximately one million youth appear in juvenile court each year. In every state, youth and families face juvenile justice costs, fees, fines, or restitution. Youth who can’t afford to pay for their freedom often face serious consequences, including incarceration, extended probation, or denial of treatment—they are unfairly penalized for being poor and pulled deeper into the justice system. Many families either go into debt trying to pay these costs or must choose between paying for basic necessities, like groceries, and paying court costs and fees. Research shows that costs and fees actually increase recidivism and exacerbate economic and racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.40
An updated form of the debtors’ prison, one of the hallmark horrors of the nineteenth century, has materialized in the United States with young people as its target. This is a justice system operating as a legalized extortion racket, and an appalling illustration of how our society has come to accept the neoliberal priority of profit over people.
It is clear we now live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering, and to protect young people and other vulnerable groups from the excesses of the police state and the market, have been either weakened, defunded, or abolished. The consequences can also be seen in the ongoing and ruthless assault on public education in the United States, with the transformation of schools into “microcosms of the American police state.”41 Schools have become, in many cases, surveillance zones that increasingly subject students to pedagogies of control, discipline, and detention. Designed to provide profits for the security industries, they impose violence and repression on young people, with the direst effects impacting students from low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. At the same time, what students learn—and the pedagogies through which they are taught—have been emptied of critical content, and now impose on students mind-numbing curricula and the primacy of the test. The dismantling of schools as sites for creativity, critical thinking, and learning constitutes both a war on the imagination and the establishment of a set of disciplinary practices meant to criminalize the behavior of children who do not submit to overbearing control. No longer considered democratic public spheres intended to create critically informed and engaged citizens, many schools now function as intermediary sites that move between the roles of warehousing students in low-income communities and creating pathways that will lead them into the machinery of the criminal justice system and eventually prison. Under such circumstances, public schooling is unmoored from the culture of education and bound instead with a culture of punishment and militarization.
Children matter in any discussion of politics because they remind us of the need not only to create a more democratic future, but also to take seriously the collective struggle and modes of resistance that can make it happen. Likewise, the degree to which a nation turns its back on its young people, selling out their futures and allowing the social fabric to be torn to shreds, is a bellwether of that country’s deepening descent into an abyss of political self-annihilation. Rather than being viewed as a social investment, economically disadvantaged youth, particularly youth of color, are now seen as excess in the United States—threatening, suspect, and undeserving of either a society in which they are protected or a future in which they are treated with respect. Instead of educating them, the United States spends large sums of money to imprison them; instead of building schools, we invest more and more in prisons; instead of providing quality health care, jobs, and housing for them, we consign them to dilapidated schools, push them into the underground economy, and criminalize their behaviors. There are few safe spaces left for economically disadvantaged youth, especially youth of color, only the likelihood of increased encounters with police and jail. This suggests not only a politics that has turned into a pathology, but a dystopian logic that is as cruel as it is morally indifferent.
If children matter, as many politicians are quick to insist, then it is crucial to recognize that such concerns are highly disingenuous when they are not backed up by efforts to halt the sacrificing of youth to the most brutal elements of an unbridled capitalism. This means regulating big business in the public interest, not the other way around. It means fighting for a sovereign social order that is able to hold a system of governance accountable to serve the interests of the common good, not those of a small financial elite. It means investing resources in a diverse and open society that addresses the needs of young people of all colors and economic levels. Accomplishing this not a matter of reform, it is a matter of justice—economic, political, environmental, racial, and social justice—at all levels.
The current state of electoral politics in the United States makes it abundantly clear that an allegedly more progressive Democratic Party seems incapable of addressing the underlying conditions that have brought us to this calamitous moment in American history. The Republican Party took a different approach than the Democrats did, successfully deploying the slogan “Make America Great Again” while unleashing big business in full force, undermining whatever social and environmental protections are left, relentlessly attacking affordable health care, and waging nothing less than an informational, financial, and political war against the average American family. As the Trumpists embark on their mission to eradicate the welfare state, it also builds on Obama’s efforts to expand the surveillance state, but with a new and deadly twist. This is evident, for example, in the Congressional Republicans’ successful efforts to pass a bill that overturned privacy protections for internet users, thereby allowing corporations to monitor, sell, and use everything that people put on the internet, including their browsing history, app usage, and financial and medical information. Early on, we already see emerging the Orwellian side of Trump’s administration as it not only strives to make it easier for the surveillance state to access information, but also sells out the American public to corporate strategists who view everything in terms of money, no matter what the consequences for other people, the nation, or the environment.
Meanwhile, state-backed and corporate-sponsored ignorance produced primarily through the disimagination machines of both social and legacy media now function chiefly to accommodate the public to its own atomization and commodification, suppress selected elements of history, express disdain for critical thought, reduce dissent to a species of fake news, and undermine the social imagination. Manufactured ignorance erases histories of repression, exploitation, and revolt. What is left is a space of fabricated absences that makes it easy, if not convenient, to forget that Donald Trump is not just some impulsive rich guy who marketed his way into politics through empty Kardashian-type celebrity and consumer culture. Trump, Bannon, and their so-called alt-right sphere of influence represent a genuine threat to democracy, the public interest, and ethical culture. The isolated analyses of Trump’s tweets and comments simply work to distract people’s attention away from seeing the whole pattern now emerging, an orchestrated proto-fascist campaign to consolidate power and dismantle democracy by tearing it to pieces one joint and one limb at a time.
What this context makes clear, and what I argue throughout this book, is that resisting the whitewashing of history is a core issue. History unexpurgated provides us with a vital resource that helps inform the ethical ground for resistance, an antidote to Trump’s politics of disinformation, division, diversion, and fragmentation. Moreover, history reminds us that in the face of emerging forms of authoritarianism, solidarity is essential. People need to network and organize in public spheres and institutional structures that allow their actions to be organized collectively and magnified outward. As historian Timothy Snyder observes:
And the reason why institutions are so important is that they’re what prevent us from being those atomized individuals who are alone against the overpowering state. That’s a very romantic image, but the isolated individual is always going to lose. We need the constitutional institutions as much as we can get them going. It’s a real problem now, especially with the legislature. We also need the professions, whether it’s law or medicine or civil servants, to act according to rules that are not the same thing as just following orders. And we need to be able to form ourselves up into nongovernmental organizations, because it’s not just that we have freedom of association. It’s that freedom itself requires association. We need association to have our own ideas confirmed, to have our confidence raised, to be in a position to actually act as individuals.42
Currently, historical knowledge is under attack. How else to explain the recent Arkansas legislator who is pushing legislation to ban the works of Howard Zinn? How else to explain the aggressive attempts by extremists in both political parties to undermine public and higher education? Authoritarian policies and practices once again feed a war culture, while moral paralysis paves the way for further gains by the forces of intolerance. These are moves that will not be stopped through half measures. If there is one thing that the important lessons of history and the radical imagination of writers such as George Orwell have taught us, it is that we must refuse to be complicit in the mockery of truth now put on display by Trumpists and commercial far-right operations such as Infowars and Breitbart News that profit from propagating it. The nightmare we had thought might one day arrive is here. The challenge is to develop nationwide solidarity and resistance networks required to overcome it with non-violence, imagination, and community.
Rethinking Resistance as the Rise of Democracies in Exile
Within weeks of assuming the powers of civilian president and military commander-in-chief, Trump issued an executive order banning all Syrians and people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. At the end of his first year in office, Trump reversed an immigration policy that allowed 200,000 people from El Salvador to “live and work legally in the United States since a pair of devastating earthquakes struck their country in 2001.”43 Coupled with Trump’s rescinding protections for 800,000 Dreamers—children who have grown up in the United States but were born in other countries—it is difficult not to view such acts as both racist and as acts one associates with fascist regimes. Such policies put Trump’s embrace of white supremacy on full display, making visible his authoritarian intentions, while also setting in place an additional series of repressive practices for the creation of a police state. This is a grim reality, indicating that the United States has conclusively entered a period of what Alex Honneth terms “failed sociality”44—a failure in the power of civic imagination, political will, and a functioning democracy.
Given its design and rhetoric of exclusion, not only does Trump’s immigration order further threaten the security of the United States, it also legitimates a form of state-sponsored racial and religious cleansing. Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, hardly a radical, was accurate in stating that the design and implementation of the initial order banning Muslims and Syrians from the United States was “rushed, chaotic, cruel, and oblivious” to the demands and actualities of national security, and that it had “ushered in a dark moment in U.S. history.”45 Dark indeed, because the order surely signals not only a governing authority that has stopped questioning itself, but one that openly assaults religious and racial communities.
Trumpism offers fascist purification rituals motivated by social intolerance and the attempt to re-create a system of white privilege that extends from and perpetuates founding narratives of Anglo settler-colonialism. Trumpist glorification of President Andrew Jackson and a “Jacksonian national security”46 vision signals the advance of the same historical white supremacy that codified the Second Amendment to decentralize and individualize white people’s armed enforcement of Black enslavement and the extermination of Native Americans. Understanding this, many Americans accurately interpret the Trumpist slogan “Make America Great Again” as “Make America White Again.” The celebrated writer Ta-Nehisi Coates further exposes Trump’s fascist intolerance. He writes:
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” . . . The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.47
Trumpism openly legitimizes armed white supremacy and social intolerance. Those considered flawed and disposable due to race, residency status, political affiliation, gender, sexual preference, and religious practice are subjected to increased suspicion, surveillance, exclusion, and increased vulnerability to hate crimes. Intolerance to diversity of all kinds feeds violence as a method for maintaining dominance and militancy on all levels. While Ta-Nehisi Coates makes clear that “not every Trump voter is a white supremacist,” he qualifies that statement with the insightful comment that “every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”48 That is both the defining ideology of the Republican Party under Trump and the residual fungus of authoritarianism mushrooming in the United States today. Unfortunately, Coates does not mark the history of collective struggles waged by people of color against the legacy of white supremacy. His condemnation runs the risk of cynicism and omits, as Cornel West points out, “the centrality of Wall Street power, U.S. military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in Black America.”49 Coates’s analysis of white supremacy needs further development in regard to how white privilege operates with other forms of domination.50
American citizens are not exempt, either, from the cruelty and misery of massive exploitation dispensed by a society in the thrall of wealth and neoliberal capitalism, which now merges the spectacle of exclusion with a politics of disposability reminiscent of the fascist regimes of the 1930s.51 This is nowhere more evident than in Trump’s modes of racial and religious cleansing based on generalized notions of identity that strongly echo the principles of historical policies of extermination seen in the past. This is not to suggest that Trump’s immigration policies have risen to that standard of violence as much as to identify that they contain within them the impetus and elements of a past authoritarianism that herald it as a possible model for the future.52 This form of radical exclusion suggests previous elements of fascism are crystallizing into new forms.
In response to Trump’s executive order targeting Muslims and Syrian refugees escaping the devastation of war, carnage, and state violence, thousands of people across the country initially mobilized with great speed and energy to reject not just an unconstitutional ban, but also what this and other regressive policies portend for the days ahead. Many writers have focused on the massive disruption this shoot-from-the hip piece of legislation will produce for students, visa holders, and those entering the United States after finishing a long vetting process. As an editorial in the Washington Post pointed out, Trump’s immigration order is “breathtaking in scope and inflammatory in tone.”53 Moreover, it lacks logic and speaks to “the president’s callousness and indifference to history, to America’s deepest lessons about its own values.”54 The fact that it was issued on Holocaust Remembrance Day further points to Trump’s moral incapacity; it may also point to the machinations of former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, who played a key role in drafting it. Trump’s ongoing reversal of a number of immigration policies put in place by the Obama administration has been opposed by the United States Chamber of Commerce, members of Congress, and numerous immigrant advocacy groups. Such opposition falls on deaf ears in an administration filled with racist animus and an allegiance to the legacy and principles of white supremacy.
Now is the moment to challenge one of the most destructive governments ever to emerge in the United States. Now is the time to talk back, occupy the streets, organize, and resist. Today it might be immigrants and Muslims who are under attack—maybe a neighbor, a librarian, a journalist, a teacher—but tomorrow it could be any of us. The need to engage in massive forms of resistance and civil disobedience is urgent. If we expect the planet to survive, and hope to offer the next generation something better than life in a state of permanent war, we must act.
The metaphor of an American nightmare provides us with a rhetorical space where a kind of double consciousness, based in both resistance and hope, can emerge. This is a consciousness that identifies and rejects structures of domination and repression. It is an expression of what Vaclav Havel once called “the power of the powerless,” but it also gestures beyond this, to what the poet Claudia Rankine calls a new understanding of community, politics, and engaged collective resistance in which a radical notion of the social contract is revived. This is a critical consciousness in which individuals and groups allow themselves to embrace the condition of exile—with its underlying message of being flawed—in solidarity with their brothers and sisters who are targeted because of their politics, gender, religion, residency status, race, sexual preference, and country of origin. She writes of exile as an opportunity to address the resentment and retribution that have historically underlain denials of our common humanity. For Rankine, being “flawed differently” offers a metaphor for embracing our differences. It offers diversity as a strength in our collective resistance against the pre-fascist “America First” script in which whiteness is sustained as the dominating feature of a violent society that has descended directly from genocidal settler-colonialism.
Democracies in exile embrace being flawed differently as a way to insist that “You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you’re constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you’re a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. . . . There’s a letting go that comes with it. I don’t know about forgiving, but it’s an ‘I’m still here.’ And it’s not just because I have nowhere else to go. It’s because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let’s make other kinds of mistakes; let’s be flawed differently.”55
To be “flawed differently” provides a rhetorical signifier to understand and work against the poisonous legacies and totalitarian strictures of racial purity that are still with us, and rejects the toxic reach of a government dominated by morally repulsive authoritarians with their hired legions of lawyers, think tanks, pundits, and intellectual thugs.
Being “flawed differently” means we bleed into each other, flawed in our rejection of certainty and our condemnation of the false ideals of racial and religious purity. Flawed differently, we revel in our diversity, united by a never-ending search for a just society. Our “flaws” increase rather than diminish our humanity, as we celebrate our differences mediated by a respect for the common good. But we also share in our resistance to a demagogue and his coterie of reactionaries who harbor a rapacious desire for obliterating differences, for concentrating power in the hands of a financial elite, and the economic, political, and religious fundamentalists who slavishly beg for recognition and crumbs of power.
Being “flawed differently” means mobilizing against the suffocating circles of certainty that define the ideologies, worldviews, and policies that are driving the new authoritarianism, expressed so clearly by a Trump administration official who, with an echo of fascist Brownshirt bravado, told the press to shut up and be quiet.56
Being “flawed differently” provides a rhetorical signpost for being in collective exile, working to create new democratic public spheres, noisy conversations, and alternative spaces informed by compassion and a respect for the other. It is not a retreat. On the contrary, it echoes Naomi Klein’s insistence that in moments of crisis and peril, we broaden the spaces of resistance that provide a collective voice to the struggle against authoritarianism.57
Trump’s constant use of lies, fear, belittlement, and humiliation wages war on the ideals, values, and practices of a viable democracy. Under such circumstances, a fierce, courageous, and broad-based nonviolent resistance is the only option—a necessity forged within and by an unshakable commitment to economic, political, and social justice. As I argue throughout this book, this must be a form of collective resistance that is not episodic but systemic, ongoing, loud, noisy, educative, and disruptive. Under the reign of Trump, the words of Frederick Douglass ring especially true: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”58
There is no choice but to stop the authoritarian machinery of political death from consolidating further. It has to be brought to an end in every space, landscape, and institution in which it tries to shunt and obstruct the pathways to justice and democracy. Reason and thoughtfulness have to awake from the narcoticizing effects induced by a culture of spectacles, consumerism, militarism, populist ignorance, and the narrow preoccupations of unchecked self-interest. The body of democracy is fragile, and the wounds now being inflicted upon it are alarming.
Under the current circumstances, it is crucial to confront the nightmare with insurgency. Such confrontation can be waged and won through our capacity for solidarity, cooperation, kindness, and community. Such capacity inspires us to organize and take action in our local communities, and to imagine a more just and democratic future, one that can only emerge through a powerful and uncompromising collective struggle. As Hannah Arendt once predicted, totalitarianism’s curse is upon us once again, and it has emerged in forms unique to the tyranny of the times in which we live. Trump has brought the terrors of the past into full view, feeding off the fears, uncertainties, and narratives that make diversity seem threatening. In response, we must create a new language for politics, resistance, and hope. This must be a language that exposes and counters the drift toward fascism that Trumpism clearly accelerates.
In the conclusion I return to the issue of creating spaces of resistance defined through the metaphor of democracy in exile. Developing such spaces serves to energize efforts in which increasingly totalitarian practices are revealed, analyzed, challenged, and undone. It is worth noting that my previous book, America at War with Itself, tracked the rise of authoritarianism in the United States. American Nightmare continues the analysis while providing a detailed exploration of the numerous instances of the ideals and practices of multicultural democracy being denounced, subverted, or directly attacked by a unique form of U.S. authoritarianism.
The United States now occupies a historical moment in which there will likely be an intensification of violence, oppression, impunity, and corruption. These are serious forces that must be confronted if a radical democratic future is not to be foreclosed. Roger Ballen’s image, “The Stare,” on the cover of this book is eerie and prophetic, signifying the deep sense of alienation, loneliness, and anxiety that haunts the United States at the present moment. At the same time, the eyes look out from a space of danger, watching and witnessing the emergence of a menacing political environment that must be confronted, resisted, and destroyed. “The Stare” brings to light a democracy in the shadows, a haunting phenomenon, unwilling to look away and determined to prevent a further darkening of social justice and ethical culture. Hopefully, the image will also bring home for the reader the need not only to acknowledge current conditions, but also to confront and counter their potential to further the allure of fascism.