3 3 HOW A SOCIETY TREATS ITS CHILDREN is a powerful moral and political index of its commitment to the institutions, values, and principles that inform the promises of a real democracy. When measured against such a criterion, it is clear that the United States has not only failed, but continues to embrace death-dealing policies that will surely result in democracy’s further demise. According to a report released by the Southern Education Foundation, for the first time in history half of U.S. public schoolchildren live in poverty.1 The U.S. Department of Education reported in 2013 that there were 1.3 million homeless children enrolled in U.S. schools, up 85 percent since 2008; and the organization Feeding America has estimated that 16 million U.S. children, or 21.6 percent, live without food security.2 As Jana Kasperkevic points out:
Those numbers are representative of the growing problem of child poverty in the U.S. Overall, one in five U.S. children live in poverty. It has only recently been dropping, with 14.7 million U.S. children living in poverty in 2013, down from 16.1 million in 2012. In 2012, out of 35 economically developed countries, only Romania had a higher child poverty rate than the U.S.3
Add to these shameful figures the fact that the United States incarcerates more young people than any other country in the world, keeping over 70,000 youth locked up in juvenile detention facilities while trying, sentencing, and incarcerating an estimated 250,000 youth through the adult criminal justice system each year.4 With the social contract all but dead, children no longer count for much in a society that makes virtues out of self-interest and greed, and measures success almost entirely in terms of the accumulation of capital. Under the regime of a ruthless neoliberalism, children and working- and middle-class families have become the new casualties of a system that brazenly disdains the rule of law, compassion, and a concern for others. Systemic inequality has become one of the weapons now used not only to exacerbate and reinforce class divisions, but also to wage a war on young people.
The pernicious effects of neoliberal policies—ranging from an attack on the welfare state and the imposition of cruel austerity measures to the selling of public services to private contractors and the redistribution of wealth upward to the 1 percent—amount to an act of domestic terrorism in light of the suffering such policies and practices impose on children in the United States. Rampant poverty, senseless levels of inequality, lack of adequate health services, racially and economically segregated schools, the rise of the prison state, a crippling minimum wage, police violence directed against poor minority youth, the return of debtors’ prisons, a generation of young people burdened by excessive debt, and the attack on public and higher education only scratch the surface of the effects of what might be called a culture of war aimed at children.5 Surely, it would be irresponsible not to view this horrendous disinvestment in young people and the violence it produces as an act of domestic terrorism, made all the worse by massive levels of inequality that bear down on so many young people.
Paul Buchheit in his article “The Reality Tale of Two Education Systems” maps out how systemic inequality needlessly ruins the lives of millions of children in the public school system.6 He makes clear that public schools succeed when there are fewer children who suffer from the debilitating effects of poverty. He points to the success of schools that are adequately funded and the importance of adequate support for early childhood education and programs such as Head Start, all of which have been defunded by the new extremists and will be further defunded as long as the apostles of free market fundamentalism are in power. As if funding cutbacks are not disadvantaging students enough, underprivileged schools are increasingly required to implement educational policies and classroom practices such as “teaching for the test” that impose on students an authoritarian regimen of repressive discipline and conformity. In fact, a widespread culture of repression that attacks unions, discredits teachers, and punishes children has become the new norm in America, backed up by members of both the Democratic and Republican parties. When it comes to educational policy, the logic of privatization and capital accumulation are the real forces at work in destroying public schools, and done ironically under the name of reform.
Ken Saltman, Diane Ravitch, Joel Westheimer, and many others have written eloquently about how both the Bush and Obama administrations have turned schools into testing and sorting factories that have little to do with learning and a great deal to do with enforcing a pedagogy of repression among students, on the one hand, and redefining schools as a lucrative market for profits on the other. Children and the public spheres they inhabit, along with the federal programs that provide them with crucial social provisions, have become targets in a larger campaign against democracy and the public institutions that support it. Educational reform is just code for an intensive assault now being waged by the financial elite and billionaires to decimate all elements of the public good in order to generate new financial investments and huge profits for private investors; it is also a strategy for producing thoughtless workers who will do what they are told.
The sordid ideological logic informing the government’s educational and economic policies was suggested by a recent example involving the ethically bankrupt leaders of the House and Senate, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, who claimed in a CBS News interview with Scott Pelley on January 22, 2015, that they were against funding Obama’s free Community College Program because it would increase the deficit. The appeal to austerity as a rationale to punish students overburdened by debt, eviscerate the social state, and redistribute wealth upward to rich elites has, by now, become an oft-repeated defense that serves to legitimate economic injustice and a certain transformation to “a world in which political economy has become a criminal economy.”7
Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, asked Pablo Iglesias, the secretary general of Podemos, a left-wing political party in Spain, how he defined austerity and his answer highlights the elements of class warfare waged in its name and the threat it poses to any viable democracy. He states that:
Austerity means that people [are expelled from] their homes. Austerity means that the social services don’t work anymore. Austerity means that public schools have not the elements, the means to develop their activity. Austerity means that the countries have not sovereignty anymore, and we became a colony of the financial powers and a colony of Germany. Austerity probably means the end of democracy. I think if we don’t have democratic control of economy, we don’t have democracy. It’s impossible to separate economy and democracy, in my opinion.8
Guy Standing goes further and argues that austerity constitutes a form of “social cleansing” and “social zoning” in its passing of measures such as the closing of public libraries and public schools, shutting down of affordable housing programs, defunding of public transportation, elimination of arts programs, and elimination of sports programs for working-class kids.9 One disturbing example of how austerity works to punish children is obvious in the recent call by Republican Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas. In order to make up for his crippling tax cuts, he has enacted legislation designed to cut “classroom funding for Kansas schools by $127 million and push[ing teacher] pension fund payments off into the future.”10 Rather than acknowledge that his massive tax cuts are hurting his state’s finances, he implements brutal policies that further undermine the public school system, punishing students and teachers alike. This is a form of financial terrorism in which policies that benefit the rich and big corporations are enacted irrespective of the misery they impose on young people and the most important public spheres in which they are served. What such policies make clear is that the neoliberal support for austerity barely conceals a ruthless logic and oppressive politics that are at the heart of the new authoritarianism. Austerity measures under neoliberalism is an extortion racket “designed to callously extract money from the most vulnerable and funnel it upward to the elites.” 11
Some liberals such as Paul Krugman argue that the current batch of right-wing and Republican extremists are indifferent to reason and evidence and should rightly be viewed as reactionaries “threatened by any expansion of government.”12 This is only partly true. First, the new extremists at various levels of political power—local, state, and federal—have no trouble expanding and using the power of government to benefit the powerful and financially privileged. Nor do they have second thoughts about using state violence to beat back protests, demonstrations, and collective modes of dissent to contain any outbreaks of collective resistance and class struggle. Second, they are not simply dumb or morally vacant, though many of them appear rather thoughtless. Instead, they are pawns of corporate power and have sold themselves out to the highest bidders. Their power is dependent on doing the bidding of the billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson along with their obsequious unfettered support for the interests of oil companies, banks, hedge funds, the defense industry, big corporations, and other financial behemoths. They are not stupid, but they are corrupt. Their politics suggest less a lack of intelligence than the workings of systemic forms of predatory capitalism, which fosters iniquitous class-based relations of power that do great harm to both the American public and democracy itself. The extremists who now control the American government are the new warriors of authoritarianism, proudly implementing the crushing ideologies, values, and policies of a failed state that they have all but handed over to the financial ruling classes.
Painful truths about political corruption, economic injustice, and the rise of the corporate state; the increasing gap between the rich and poor; and the shocking conditions in which children live in the United States are buried within efforts to enforce savage austerity measures. Hence, it is not surprising that there is no mention by politicians such as Boehner, McConnell, and their cronies about how economics and militarism now drive politics. Boehner and McConnell are silent about how the new extremists created the deficit through tax breaks for corporations, deregulation, letting lobbyists write banking bills, the expense of two wasteful wars, pouring money into building more prisons than schools, and maintaining a nuclear arsenal and wasteful military-industrial complex at a huge cost to the American people. Such policies and practices not only impose a precarious and harsh existence on young people, poor minorities, working-class families, and others in the United States, they also pose a direct threat to the planet itself.
American society lives under the lie that free markets and free societies translate into the notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous, in spite of an abundance of evidence to the contrary given the history of free-market regimes such as Turkey, Chile, China, and South Korea. Domestic terrorism thrives on this lie, as it benefits from neoliberalism’s ongoing efforts to make power invisible, remove ethical considerations from the workings of the market, create the conditions that enable finance capital to rule all commanding institutions, and develop modes of schooling and education that function largely to eliminate critical thinking and depoliticize the polity by defining citizenship as merely the act of consuming. The power of neoliberal capital and its commanding economic structures is matched by its ideological machinery and its power to normalize its values, interests, and view of the world. Susan Buck-Morss captures the violence at the heart of neoliberalism and the forces that make it incompatible with democracy and supportive of state violence and authoritarian regimes. She writes that under the regime of neoliberalism
money rules. Finance capitalism integrates a global oligarchy that includes economic actors of every ethnicity and every religion. This system has resulted in grotesque disparities of wealth, both between nations and within them. Capitalist social relations are based on the extraction of value from labor and from nature in order for the system to thrive. The privatization and enclosure of any productive force from which profit can be obtained is encouraged. The social costs of the production process, so-called externalities, are left unpaid. Human misery is discounted. Risks to citizen health are measured in terms of the trade-off between benefits and costs. The trivialization of life for profit is a common occurrence. Deregulation rewards capitalists even when they fail. Banks survive, and citizens—entire national populations—are forced by authorities to pay the price. One does not have to accept Marx’s theory of class warfare to conclude that, given extreme disparities of wealth, democracy as an expression of the general will becomes untenable.13
Under such circumstances, it is not difficult to grasp what will become of the lives and futures of young people, who represent but one way to measure the growing threat of authoritarianism in American society. The violence inflicted by the authoritarian state driven by financial capital also has a range of less perceptible and perhaps farther-reaching effects. Under the existing regime of market fundamentalism, there has been a weakening of social values and a hardening of the culture that makes it easier to live in a world in which demonization replaces compassion, a self-righteous coldness eviscerates the democratic imagination, and the bonds of trust are replaced by bonds of fear. While it is largely recognized that the United States is wedded to mass incarceration and displays an utter disregard for the public good, what is often ignored is the degree to which it has become a class and racially based punishing state. The assault on public education, for example, has particularly devastating effects on low-income and poor minority youth.
Under such circumstances, racism has become not simply more visible, but more violent and repulsive in its attempts to kill young black men, turn back voting rights laws, and in many cities across the country empower the police to become an occupying army, fully aware of the fact that they can act with impunity. Militaristic violence is the new face of racism, the specter that haunts poor minority youth and adults, who are considered disposable in a society in which the flight from responsibility on the part of the financial elite is only matched by the rate in which their wealth increases yearly. As the bonds of sociality and social obligations dissolve, every human relation is measured against the yardstick of profit. Retribution and punishment now replace any vestige of restorative justice, just as low-income and poor minority urban youth are offered jail rather than a quality education and decent jobs.
Racial violence and discrimination explode in a furious display of impunity as local polices forces and right-wing racists from Ferguson, Missouri, and Cleveland to Baltimore to Charleston, South Carolina, shoot unarmed African Americans, some as young as twelve. The alleged age of post-racial society under the presidency of Barack Obama is betrayed by the reality of a legacy of institutional racism with its 350-year legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation that cannot be erased either through the election of an African American or by simply removing the outward symbols of racism such as the Confederate flag.14 Harsh and often violent police tactics in black neighborhoods cannot be separated from the rise of the punishing state, high levels of poverty and unemployment, “the systemic abandonment of black neighborhoods,” and the “failed war on drugs.”15 As Keith Ellison points out:
Cities, starved of funding by austerity-obsessed leaders in Washington and state capitals, write tickets and charge fees for residents already struggling to avoid hunger and eviction. Crimes like loitering, spitting, jay-walking—many of which have been de facto legalized in affluent communities—are frequently used today to harass and imprison people of color.16
Nor can such violence be removed from the increasing criminalization of a range of behaviors that extend from punishing schoolchildren who violate dress codes to entire populations who are brought before the courts for an endless array of administrative violations that include “parking tickets, or tickets for unmowed lawns or improperly placed trash receptacles—[none of which are] criminal matters.”17 On the contrary, they are violations of administrative codes that result in costly fines and sometimes jail sentences on the poor, often to provide revenue for local police administrations. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the Department of Justice revealed a pattern of “policing through profit,” in which “just about every branch of Ferguson government—police, municipal court, city hall—participated in ‘unlawful’ targeting of African-Americans residents” as part of the goal of raising revenue rather than satisfying “public safety needs.”18 In 2015, the DOJ reported that such “fines and fees would account for 23% of the budget or $3.09 million of $13.26 million in general fund expenses.”19 In this case, not only did the police and courts engage in a form of racist-based extortion, but they also arrested people for trivial, trumped-up charges, put them under extreme duress, and put multiple impediments in their lives. (I explore this issue in more detail in chapter 9.) This is the invisible underside of domestic terrorism, one fueled by the connection between state violence and economic impoverishment. The war on poverty under neoliberalism has been transformed into the criminalization of poverty. The notion of war rings true not as an assault on poverty but as a practice that transforms a serious social, economic, and political problem into a police matter. The increasing criminalization of young people, poor minorities of class and color, and other disposable populations also makes clear that there is no discourse of empathy, morality, and justice under the regime of neoliberal authoritarianism. Consequently, older discourses that provided a vision of a better future have been all but rendered useless. As Hannah Arendt once argued, the very nature of the political in the modern period has been dethroned.20
The consolidation of class power by the financial elite has passed into a new historical moment in American history. The unbridled power now on display is indifferent to the problems of long-term unemployment, homelessness, increasing levels of poverty, and the desperate state of American youth. Political concessions to labor and other groups on the part of the financial elite is viewed as a sign of weakness in this hyper-masculine form of social Darwinism. What most of the American public are experiencing under this mode of governance is a level of oppression, violence, poverty, and loss of social provisions that seems unparalleled—especially given the grip that big money has on all the commanding institutions of American life.
To claim that the United States has become an oligarchy, as a recent Princeton University study has done, reveals more subterfuge than insight. Oligarchy sounds tame next to the savage form of free-market capitalism that operates in a field of lawlessness, extreme violence, and wild injustice in which a failed sociality reigns, and social death and individual misery are the norm. Anything that impedes market relations is suspect and deserving of state violence. Moreover, the increasing manifestations of state violence mark a radical shift away from even the slightest vestige of democracy to the more prevalent use of state terrorism. The militarization of American society, the failed war on drugs, the rise of the incarceration state, and the paramilitarization of local police forces coupled with the ongoing killings of unarmed young black men by the police has put on full display only the most obvious registers of the violence of a racist authoritarian state.
The machinery of governance and the commanding institutions of the United States are now controlled by corporate political zombies who savor and reproduce death-dealing institutions that extend from paramilitarized police forces to schools modeled after prisons. These are the same politicians who claim they hate big government but love big corporations, who deride the poor and slash health provisions but claim they are the new face of compassionate politics, and who turn corruption into a virtue and honesty into a political liability. These are the new extremists who support state torture, glorify militarism, and are responsible for the death of millions. Instead of investing in young people and schools, they invest in prisons and support a corrupt corporate state and institutions controlled by the financial elite.21 The new extremists substituted a war on the poor for a war on poverty while at the same time, beginning in the 1990s, did everything possible to underfund and starve programs aimed at reducing poverty and, as Ellison argues, instead “made choices to keep ‘law and order’ in ways that exacerbated the problems facing low-income communities.”22 In a different historical period, they would have fit in well with the likes of Pinochet, apartheid South Africa, the military dictatorships in Greece, and other ruthless authoritarian regimes.
These people are truly the walking dead who inhabit what can only be called a world in which ethical and social responsibilities have been replaced by a moral coma, a culture of fear, and a politics of misery that produces a regime of violence, huge inequities in wealth and power, and a disdain for helping others, including young people. What is new about the emerging authoritarianism is that it takes ideology seriously and is marked by both a rampant and depoliticizing culture of consumerism and celebrity culture and the rise of an expansive punishing and surveillance state. As the language of the market replaces social categories, it hides power relations while isolating people in orbits of privatization and consumption. And it is this increasing culture of atomization, privatization, and reification that further erases the connected forms of experience and belonging needed to produce a new politics and collective struggle in the name of social and economic justice.
The current regime of neoliberalism acts without accountability, despite its ruthlessness, moral blindness, and evident willingness to destroy the planet to preserve its hoarding of power and wealth. The ongoing appeal to fear, insecurity, and uncertainty by the financial elite and its corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses defines the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, and lulls people into accepting a rise in violence and the increasing use of punitive practices in a growing number of public spheres. The war on terror has morphed into a form of domestic terrorism aimed not only at whistleblowers but at all those people, from poor minorities to immigrants, who are now considered disposable. For instance, under the rubric of preventing terrorism, France, England, and Canada have invoked policies that eviscerate personal freedoms and rule-of-law protections. In England, such laws sanction: “Arbitrary house arrest. Electronic tagging, Prohibitions against free association. Travel restrictions.”23 In addition, “postal correspondence can be checked [and] buildings and vehicles can be bugged.”24 In France, “all Internet user data can be monitored and civil liberties have been eliminated with little debate.”25 In the name of antiterrorism, passports can be confiscated, people can be sentenced to jail for up to 10 years for “consulting terrorist websites or receiving terrorist training.”26 In Canada, the state has more power to conduct surveillance, and under bill C-24 “the government has the discretion to strip citizenship of any dual citizen convicted of terrorism, treason, or spying abroad” without due process or trial.27 Dual nationals now “run the risk of being treated as somehow less Canadian.” The violence of the terrorist state now renders entire populations disposable, that is, subject to what Richard Sennett terms the “specter of uselessness that denies gainful employment and self-respect.” Sennett calls this a “new wrinkle in neoliberal capitalism.”28 It is also a new form of terrorism.
Domestic terrorism has become the default response to social problems that increasingly affect all the individuals, groups, and communities that constitute “the 99 percent.” The extremists in power patently refuse to address social problems, regardless of how serious they are. Instead, the behaviors exhibited by people victimized and injured by such problems are criminalized. Debtor prisons have made a comeback in a society in which incarceration has become the default position for dealing with the poor. Students, mostly poor minorities, who violate zero tolerance policies such as using their hand to simulate a gun or bringing a two-inch toy gun to trivial rules such as not wearing school uniform are routinely arrested and escorted away in police cars;29 the strong arm of the punishing state appears to target those who are the most vulnerable, such as the homeless. For instance, Alex Chastain points out that “cities across the United States have been cracking down on homeless people with ordinances and laws that go as far as to prevent the homeless from sleeping with a blanket, or even kicking them out of town. People in 31 cities across America can also be legally punished for feeding the homeless. Instead of preventing veterans or citizens from being forced to live on the streets, cities are punishing them. The homeless are punished for sleeping in parks, and so it goes.”30
Everyone outside of the corporate, financial, and political elite is a potential enemy in America, and this includes not only those populations considered disposable but also those who question authority and refuse to bend to the will of a politically corrupt ruling power. Even as more and more individuals are subject to punitive forms of punishment, financial terrorism, and the suffocating tentacles of the market and surveillance state, they are led to believe that all problems originate from within themselves, and are simply a matter of character. All social problems, according to this logic, are reduced to a matter of lifestyle, and provoke a demand that the impoverished and marginalized get up and make something of themselves.
If one face of the new authoritarianism is the militarization of all aspects of society, the other side is the rabidly individualized and privatized “self-help” culture that extends from Oprah Winfrey to the various screen cultures of the mainstream media. As Mark Fisher has noted, under neoliberalism’s “‘empire of the self’ everyone is trapped in their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations, and unable to escape the tortured conditions of solipsism.”31 This is one of the most distinctive features of the new authoritarianism: how it reproduces its own power and control over the American public not only through the imposition of harsh economic policies and the use of state repression but also through powerful forms of affective management prevalent in the wider culture.
The ideological and affective spaces that support the new authoritarianism do not simply produce powerful myths or function as an ideological drug that legitimates the elimination of broader structural, economic, and political forces. Nor do such spaces function only as a kind of disimagination machine working to make invisible the material relations of race, power, and class. They also work primarily as a powerful educative force that has succeeded extremely well in depoliticizing large numbers of the American public. Neoliberalism relies not only on ideology to legitimate market-based values and produce consent, it also mobilizes needs, desires, and hopes and “in doing so erode(s) the symbolic, affective dimensions of social existence.”32 The authoritarian mindset is central to a consumer culture marked by an endlessly repeating call to celebrate selfishness, waste, and privatization. Such cultural and educative toxins are peddled by the entertainment and advertising industries, celebrity culture, mainstream media, and the anti-public intellectuals who trade on other people’s misery. More than just a popular addiction, consumerism is the new religion in the United States and engages in a swindle of fulfillment through its glitzy promise of a graveyard of rapidly disposable goods as the measure of the good life. Markets now define not only how people live but who they are.
The prison house of consumption succeeds at the expense of any viable notion of critical citizenship, social responsibility, and the skills and resources necessary to be an engaged individual and social agent. This prison house of self-interest and consumption cuts across the ideological spectrum, as is evident by the fact that even union members buy into this logic. No doubt encouraged by their leadership, they have often traded higher wages and other benefits for a class-conscious membership seeking to make work meaningful and production socially useful. Of course, this reshaping of the public is a perfect supplement to state terrorism because it replaces a personalized therapeutic language for a political vocabulary. Left unchecked, a rampant consumer culture will lead to historical and political amnesia; already it gives rise to what appears to be a form of collective insanity as the new extremists, marching forward with their death-dealing policies, seem increasingly to garner support among the American public.
Americans are witnessing a new moment in history in which the symbiosis among cultural institutions, power, and everyday life is shaping the very nature of politics and the broader collective public consciousness with an influence unlike anything we have seen in the past. Economics drives politics, and its legitimating apparatuses have become the great engines of a manufactured ignorance. This suggests the need for the political left and its allies to take seriously how identities, desires, and modes of agency are produced, struggled over, and taken up. The left and other progressive movements need to revisit Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that they have “underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front”—that is, political interventions capable of challenging modes of domination that “lie on the side of the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle.”33 Couple this responsibility to understand and address the educative nature of politics with the need for a more comprehensive vision of change and the organization of broad-based social movements, and it may become possible once again to develop a new political language, new forms of collective struggle, and a politics for radical change rather than cravenly center-right reforms.
As Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and others told us many years ago, there is no democracy without an informed public. This is a lesson the right took very seriously after the democratic uprisings of the 1960s. Acknowledging the failure of public culture in the United States is not a matter of criticizing the public for its partial views, but of trying to understand the role of culture and power as a vital force in politics and how these have been marshalled to support values and policies that enshrine massive inequities in wealth and income. The financial state promotes a form of ideological terrorism, and the key issue is how to expose it and then counter its cultural apparatuses with the use of the social media and other diverse apparatuses of communication, new political formations, and ongoing, collective educational and political struggles. This means asking, first, how to make the ideologies, policies, and structures that play such a powerful role in the expanding forms of indebted citizenship, poverty, and mass incarceration more visible in order to challenge and change them. Such questions must be taken seriously; otherwise, groups such as students, low-income families, immigrants, and poor minorities will continue to be treated as disposable and be increasingly unable to offer any collective resistance given their struggle to suffer and survive under harsh conditions of state repression.
Lies, misinformation, and the spectacle of entertainment frame how issues are presented to the North American public by the vast cultural machinery of education that extends from mainstream news media to conservative think tanks. For instance, in the aftermath of the 2014 election, ABC, CBS, and NBC all claimed that the government will be more sharply divided as a result of the Republican takeover of both houses of Congress. What the mainstream media failed to point out is that both parties have more in common than what divides them. The parties both support the consolidation of power in the hands of the financial and corporate elite. Both parties have passed policies that cut back on social provisions for the needy while providing tax breaks for the wealthy. That is to say, both parties, as Aron Gupta points out, have enacted “policies that increase the wealth and power of those on the top of the economic pyramid.”34 Moreover, at an essential level, both parties need the financial support of the financial elite to get elected in an authoritarian society in which money rules politics and kills any vestige of democracy. Meanwhile, the established press played up Obama’s claim that he is willing to cooperate with the Republican Party—as if this represents a new era of bipartisanship in the United States. What is missed in this rush to judgment is that these parties have been cooperating for years on maintaining the privileges of the ultra-rich, corporations, and bankers, while at the same time punishing the poor, unions, the working class, immigrants, and minorities of color.
The only major difference between the two U.S. political parties is that the Republicans wage naked class warfare without any apologies or political concessions, while the Democrats offer a few painkillers to soften the blow. Yet, in some cases, Democratic leaders such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama outdid their Republican counterparts in consolidating class power and imposing enormous hardships and misery on the poor and middle class. Clinton expanded the punishing state, callously removed millions of poor women and children from the welfare system, expanded the war on drugs, and dissolved the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which helped pave the way for the financial crisis of 2008.35 In several ways, Obama makes George Bush look tame given his unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, use of the sweeping state secrecy doctrine, escalating violations of civil liberties, waging of drone warfare that has often resulted in the indiscriminate death of civilians, and the reckless establishment of an illegal kill list with the power to name U.S. citizens for assassination. To make matters worse, Obama has refused to prosecute corrupt bankers or CIA agents who engaged in torture, and has deported and imprisoned record numbers of immigrants.
In spite of what the established media claim, the 2014 election results contained a hidden order of politics that do not suggest a popular shift to the right, but a failure of both parties, especially the Democratic Party, to address the needs and mood of an ailing electorate. How else to explain that a number of states voted to raise the minimum wage? Joseph Kishore writing on the World Socialist Web Site gets it right in arguing:
The Democratic strategy of appealing to affluent layers of the middle class on the basis of identity politics while working with the Republicans to step up attacks on workers’ jobs, wages and living standards produced an electoral disaster. In a contradictory way, reflecting a system monopolized by two-right parties of big business, the election showed that appeals on the basis of race, gender and sexuality move only a small fraction of the population, while the broad masses of people are driven by more fundamental class issues—issues on which the Democrats have nothing to offer.36
As Paul Buchheit points out, capitalism is spreading like a tumor in American society,37 and the key is to halt its ability to convince people that there are no other alternatives, that the market should govern all of social life including politics itself, and that the government’s only role is to protect the benefits of big business and the interests of the super-rich. Terrorism and the culture of fear have become the malignant tissue holding together a society that relies more on ethical tranquillization and the forces of the punishing state than on any semblance of social justice. Terror is no longer simply a reference to foreign and domestic threats, however real these might be, but has become an alibi for state terrorism, whether it takes the form of a massive state-sponsored spying apparatus, the gutting of social provisions, the criminalization of social problems, the war on women, or the endless police violence used against innocent black youth.
The argument that things will inevitably get worse and push people into action is politically naive because there are never any political guarantees of how people will act in the face of massive repression. They could for all intents and purposes go either left or right. There are no guaranteed opportunities for action in any society. Political outcomes have to be the result of coordinated struggles waged by mass movements using a diversity of tactics extending from boycotts and strikes to sit-ins and direct action. The biggest challenge facing those who believe in social justice is to provide alternative discourses, educational apparatuses, vision, and modes of identification that can convince the American public that a real democracy is worth fighting for—and that such struggles need to begin immediately before ethically bankrupt leaders and the financial interests they serve close down any hope of a future in which matters of justice and equality prevail.
Though it is clear that American society is in a free-fall decline, what is not so clear is why discussions of economic and political crises are rarely matched by discussions about the crisis of ideas and the crisis of subjectivity and agency. As all vestiges of social and economic equality disappear, public provisions evaporate, and the machinery of politics come under the control of the financial elite, what is desperately needed are calls for new modes of subjectivity, a new understanding of power, and the mechanisms for creating new modes of resistance capable of struggling for a radical democracy. The interplay between the propagation of authoritarian values and the production of new modes of identity must be understood within the networks that combine culture, power, and what might be called neoliberal forms of public pedagogy. At stake here is acknowledgment of the educative nature of politics and the centrality of education to any form of resistance. We need to create a critical formative culture in which individuals can reimagine what a radical democracy might look like and how it might be achieved. Politics matters when it changes the way people think, but it must do more. It must not only inform but also energize people to take collective action within deeply committed bonds of solidarity. The crisis of democracy and the slide into authoritarianism point not only to an economic crisis but also to a crisis of agency, subjectivity, and desire. Making education central to politics means developing a culture through which people are inspired to take modes of collective resistance seriously and act as new historical agents of change.
Democracy is quickly withering in the United States. A society is being constructed that no longer believes in the social contract or justice, is addicted to greed and power, and unabashedly displays its savage willingness to use state violence to manage its problems. The strong winds of authoritarianism are wreaking havoc all over the United States; with the new extremists now in power, it is only a matter of time before darkness descends. When this happens, lawlessness not compassion, violence not thoughtfulness, corruption not justice, will define America’s future in a way similar to how the reactionary revolutions of the 1930s defined that horrendous genocidal and militarized period in history. Before then, let’s hope that a thousand movements of resistance will flower and join together in ridding the earth of this neoliberal poison. Jacques Derrida once referred to hope as “an unrelenting fidelity—an entrusted trace, a renewed promise and an endless responsibility before ‘the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.’”38 It is precisely at the intersection of justice, responsibility, and the civic imagination that hope inspires and energizes—not only as a repository of memory and moral witnessing, but as a budding recognition of how one’s self and others are weighed down by forces of oppression and what it would mean to overcome them. In dark times, hope speaks to the need for realistic assessment and actions that extend the horizons of justice both by struggling against the obscene stupidity and reckless use of power that inform neoliberal capitalism and by making education central to imagining a democratic future that is worth fighting for.