10 10 UNDER THE REGIME OF NEOLIBERALISM with its warlike view of competition, its unmitigated celebration of self-interest, and its disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, the notions of unity and solidarity have lost their democratic value. Contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred of the Other now denigrated as an enemy combatant, and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism and the faux safety of gated communities, unity has been transformed into a militarized concept in the service of a neoliberal order. With the merging of militarism, the culture of surveillance, and a neoliberal culture of cruelty, solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display of violence and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space.1
America’s addiction to violence is especially evident in the heroes it chooses to glorify. Within the last few years three important films appeared that offer role models, however flawed, to young people while legitimating particular notions of civic courage, patriotism, and a broader understanding of injustice. I am less concerned in this inquiry with the historical accuracy or artistic merits of the films than with the identifications they mobilize and the narratives they unfold about valor—in Hollywood still a solely masculine trait. Citizenfour is a deeply moving film about the former NSA intelligence analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden and his admirable willingness to sacrifice his freedom and life in order to reveal the dangerous workings of an authoritarian surveillance state. It also points to the role of intrepid journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Julian Assange. These are some of the brave journalists and cultural workers who work in the alternative media, refusing to become embedded within the safe and whitewashed parameters of established powers. These are the journalists who also fiercely challenge the death-dealing war-surveillance machine Snowden reveals both in the film and in later revelations published by the Guardian, Salon, Washington Post, and summed up in Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide.2
At one point in Citizenfour Snowden makes clear that his revelations carry extraordinary political value, particularly when he states that the United States is “building the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind”—this despite the lies and denials of the government and politicians on both sides of the ideological isle. Snowden’s sense of political and moral indignation is captured in his belief that the United States had crossed over into a totalitarian politics that it now shares with the infamous Stasi, the ruthless and feared official state security service of the former German Democratic Republic. According to Snowden, the United States has morphed into a colossal digital update of the Stasi, and has fully retreated from any notion of democratic values and social responsibility. As the surveillance state grows, the United States is increasingly obsessed “by a creepy intoxication with what is now technically possible, combined with politicians’ age-old infatuation with bullying, snooping and creating mountains of bureaucratic prestige for themselves at the expense of the snooped-upon taxpayer.”3
In the documentary, Snowden comes across as a remarkable young man who shines like a bright meteor racing across the darkness. He is calm, unpossessing, articulate, and almost nerdy in his demeanor, appearing utterly reasonable and believable. In many ways, despite some political shortcomings and omissions in the film, Snowden embodies the best of what any viable notion of leadership has to offer given his selflessness, moral integrity, and fierce commitment to both renounce injustice and to do something about it. But the film is not without its flaws. By omission it leaves out the countless additional acts of heroism of other whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake, William Binney, and Kirk Wiebe. Moreover, the film erases the crucial role that WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and Sarah Harrison played in providing the conditions for Snowden’s eventual escape to a safe haven. The film comes close to decontextualizing Snowden’s actions in light of the erasure of the mounting acts of resistance against government surveillance and state violence that have been intensified since the end of the Vietnam War.4 Snowden comes across as a nice guy, a poster boy for the liberal press when in actuality he is a radical in the best sense of the term and is far from interested in simply reforming the empire. Moreover, the film adds to its own depoliticization by focusing exclusively on the whistleblower and not situating Snowden’s behavior within a broader context of struggle. Snowden’s eventual development in the film comes a bit too close to grooming him as a potential celebrity. Indeed, Douglas Valentine goes so far as to argue that Glenn Greenwald is more concerned about Snowden’s potential celebrity status than anything else, writing:
And that’s how the fable of Ed Snowden unfolds in Citizenfour. His handlers at GG Industries Inc. embrace him as cannon fodder for their careers, and happily turn him into a Hollywood star, a celebrity and perpetual money-making myth for the faux gauche, in the mold of Dan Ellsberg. . . . All this focus on celebrities distracts the American public from the real issues, like the fact that they live in a police state that controls every thought they think.5
I think Valentine’s critique might serve as a cautionary tale, but overall it borders on ad hominem and is too harsh. At the same time, as mentioned, there is no reference to the crucial role of Jeremy Scahill, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks in revealing and challenging the various acts of spying, violence, widespread illegal surveillance, and ruthless militarism at the heart of authoritarian regimes, not to mention the corruption and crimes committed by the financial elite in many countries. Nor is there any sense that what Snowden is revealing has less to do with the state’s violation of civil liberties and privacy rights than with the existence of an emerging police state. At the same time, as important as these omissions are, what is compelling for me, despite the film’s shortcomings, is the incredible courage and commitment of a young man who is willing to risk his life in exposing the dark secrets of the deep state. Moral and political courage are in short supply these days and rarely represented in any form in the Hollywood celluloid universe.
Selma focuses on a three-month period in 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others organized and planned to challenge the racist power structure in Alabama by eventually marching from Selma to Montgomery as a nonviolent act of civil defiance in order to secure equal voting rights. The strength of the film lies in its attempts to reveal not only the moral and civic courage of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his fight against poverty and racial oppression but also the courage and deep ethical and political commitments of the incredibly brave men and women unwilling to live in a racist society and willing to put their bodies against the death-dealing machine of militarized state force (eerily anticipating Ferguson) to bring it to a halt. It is this representation, however limited, of civic courage, collective struggle, and the violence at the heart of American history that redeems Selma. The film offers up not only a much needed form of moral witnessing, but also a politics of confrontation that serves as a counterpoint to the weak and compromising model of racial politics offered currently by the Obama administration. It is in this representation of collective courage, popular struggle, and daring resistance against the exercise of visceral racist violence that Selma’s oppositional narrative, however imperfect, offers the possibility for a more complete understanding of valor and heroism in the interest of justice. The film also demonstrates how important education was as part of the civil rights movement and the role it played in highlighting the interrelated elements of nonviolence and vast social movements struggling for radical democratic change. Selma may have buried important historical and political truths, but there is a kernel of visionary politics in the film waiting to be rescued.
Selma represents Hollywood’s attempt to rescue public memory, albeit, as dozens of critics have already revealed, a deeply flawed attempt. While the film provides a historical snapshot of a particular moment in the civil rights movement that offers a horrifyingly visceral portrayal of a vicious and brutalizing racism, it compromises itself by distorting and underplaying the crucial role of SNCC.6 Not only does it downplay the important role of James Foreman in the movement, it also infantilizes his role in the events of Selma by depicting him as a petulant and immature young boy, when at the time he was older than King. As is well known, the film also constructs a self-serving and disparaging image of President Johnson’s relationship with Dr. King, one that is allegedly at odds with the historical record. The film “depicts Johnson authorizing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to smear King and—as King himself suspected—try to drive him to suicide. It is a profoundly ugly moment.”7 This is more than a gross distortion. As Glen Ford makes clear, it was “the Kennedy brothers who were the ones who authorized the bugging of Dr. King’s phones and office and hotel rooms.”8
The liberal retreat into the fog of low-intensity battles, a quick willingness to compromise rather than fight, and the habit of ignoring embarrassing truths are also evident in the way in which Selma whitewashes history not only with regard to the role of SNCC and President Johnson in the civil rights movement, but in the way in which King is portrayed as a kind of compromising liberal, surely a nod to legitimize the politics of President Barack Obama. This might best be viewed as a capitulation to the false purity of liberal political intentions, if not obsessions. Omissions of this sort add up to a kind of liberal amnesia evident in the fact that the actual journey of a more radical Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is undermined by portraying him in the film as a pragmatist intent on compromising with the white power structure in order to get black people the right to vote and ensure them a place in the electoral process. King was not a liberal and that may be why he was assassinated. Near the end of his life, King had developed into a full-fledged democratic socialist who was more than willing to connect the violence of war, militarism, poverty, inequality, and racism with the scourge of a ruthless, punishing, and dehumanizing capitalism.9 I think that the movie critic Steven Rea is partly right in insisting that “Selma may be flawed, even spurious at points. But in its larger portrait of a man of dignity, purpose, and courage” the film succeeds in making visible a courageous movement exhibiting the best of collective resistance and heroism in its quest for racial and economic justice.10
Though Selma makes clear the viciousness of racism during this moment in the civil rights movement, the film echoes the liberal ideology that structures its politics. More specifically, Selma echoes Oprah Winfrey’s stripped-down liberal ideology, which can only focus on individual agency at the expense of larger structural dynamics rooted in the forces of a racist capitalist state. After all, Selma was produced by Oprah Winfrey, who plays, unsurprisingly, the role of one of the most militant characters in the film, which all but guarantees that any hint of a radical politics will constitute a present absence in the film. What most positive commentaries on the film fail to acknowledge is that any viable politics for addressing racism then and now in the United States will not come from Winfrey’s brand of celebrity liberalism or Hollywood’s version of Selma but from the lessons learned from Dr. King’s eventual theoretical and political turn to repudiating a society bounded by militarism and racism on one side, and inequality and financial capital on the other. Selma offers no hint of such a struggle.
The third film to hit American theaters at about the same time as the other two is American Sniper, a war film about a young man who serves as a model for a kind of overconfident, unreflective patriotism and defense of an indefensible war. Chris Kyle, the subject of the film, is a Navy Seal who at the end of four tours of duty in Iraq is heralded a hero for killing more than 160 people there—the deadliest soldier in that military conflict. Out of that experience, he authored an autobiographical book, which bears a problematic relationship to the film. For some critics, Kyle is a decent guy caught up in a war he was not prepared for, a war that strained his marriage and later became representative of a narrative only too familiar for many vets who suffered a great deal of anguish and mental stress as a result of their wartime experiences. This is a made for a CNN narrative that deals in only partial truths. Other critics have labeled the film as a “piece of myth-making and nationalistic war porn.”11 A more convincing assessment and certainly one that has turned the film into a Hollywood blockbuster is that Kyle is portrayed as an unstoppable and unapologetic killing machine, a sniper who was proud of his exploits. Kyle is a product of the American Empire at its worst. This is an empire steeped in extreme violence, willing to trample over any country in the name of the war on terrorism, and leave in its path massive amounts of misery, suffering, dislocation, and hardship. It is also an empire built on the backs of young men and women—though only men are featured—who are relentlessly engaged in buying into the myths of American military masculinity. Chris Kyle was the quintessential “army of one,” able to triumph over all enemies thrown in his way, including a former Olympic rifleman.
Yet it seems that this homage to hyper-masculinity hides a deeper structure of violence in American society, fueled by an omniscient war on terror and culture of fear in which violence and lawlessness become normalized. Within this grim survival-of-the fittest landscape of violence, the only way in which any sense of agency can be activated is to be in a constant state of alertness, narrowly defined by the need to constantly protect oneself. At the same time, a condition of this form of servile agency is to be in awe of a state that claims to offer protection and personal safety but largely produces the violence that saturates everyday life and functions to legitimize the rise of the war machine and punishing state. I think Joseph E. Lowndes is on to something crucial about the film when he writes:
One can see, in Eastwood’s rendering of Chris Kyle, that his desire—his need—to be a killer of almost superhuman proportions makes him not sociopathic, but rather a “sheepdog,” someone operating in a state of anxious alertness at all times against inevitable attack. His violence is justified in advance. . . . It is neither male bravado nor triumphant nationalism that compels viewers to sympathize with Chris Kyle. But nor is it an antiwar film. It is rather an assertion of both the grim inevitability of certain kinds of violence, and of our obligation to those who wage violence for that very reason.12
Of the three films, Citizenfour and Selma, however flawed, invoke the courage of men and women who oppose the violence of the state in the interest of two distinct but intersecting forms of lawlessness, one marked by a brutalizing racism and the other marked by a suffocating practice of surveillance—though we see early histories of the surveillance state in Selma, and racism can hardly be detached from the war in Iraq. American Sniper is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war. In this case the aftermath of war becomes the main narrative, a diversionary tactic and story that erases any attempt to understand the lies, violence, corruption, and misdeeds that caused the war in the first place.
American Sniper hides the fact that behind the celebrated image of the heroic vigilante sniper lie elite killer squads and special operations teams formed, under the George W. Bush administration, as part of a Joint Special Operations Command. The JSOC includes elite troops from a variety of America’s fighting units and has grown “from fewer than 2,000 troops before 9/11 to as many as 25,000 today.”13 In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill describes JSOC as a global killing machine, running covert wars, and allowing its special operations units to function as unaccountable death squads.14 JSOC has a budget of more than $8 billion annually and constitutes the infrastructure that suggests that American Sniper is less about a lone wolf vigilante than it is symptomatic of a much larger and secret killing machine.15
Of course, though it may be redemptive for Hollywood to link targeted assassinations with American heroism, what it erases is that the real global assassination campaign is not the stuff of military valor, of “man-to-man” combat, but is being waged daily in the drone wars that have become the defining feature of the Obama administration. Many critics, including Noam Chomsky, have commented on Chris Kyle’s memoir in which he calls the enemy he has been fighting “savages.” There is more here than a trace of unadulterated racism; there is also an indication of how violence becomes so palatable, if not comforting, to the American public through the widespread ideological and affective spaces of violence produced and circulated in America’s key commanding cultural apparatuses.
This is not surprising since under a regime of neoliberalism, a persistent racism and politics of disposability are matched by a theater of cruelty in which more and more individuals and groups—such as immigrants, low-income whites, poor blacks, the unemployed, and the homeless—are considered throwaways. Within such a politics of disposability, an increasing number of groups are tarred with the label of being less than human and hence all the easier to evict from any sense of social responsibility or compassion. Extreme violence has become an American sport that promotes delight in inflicting suffering on others. But it does more. It also ups the pleasure quotient when the Other is entirely reified and demonized, making it easier for the American public to escape from any sense of ethical responsibility for wars that are as immoral as they are illegal. In the end, American Sniper is both symptomatic of and serves as a legitimation for the savage struggle-for-survival ethic that dominates American life and resonates throughout the film. Moreover, violence becomes a kind of safety valve to protect individuals against the alleged perils of a notion of solidarity based on care rather than fear of the Other. Politics becomes an extension of war. This becomes crystal clear in the dinner table scene when Kyle’s father lectures his kids about how there are three types of people in the world “wolves, sheep and sheepdogs.” In this pernicious worldview, wolves are brutal killers who threaten an innocent public both at home and abroad. Abroad they can be found in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq, or wherever Muslims live. At home, the category is quite fluid and includes groups ranging from drug dealers and urban thugs to dangerous black youth and criminal street gangs. The sheep are a metaphor for God-loving, patriotic, innocent Americans, while the sheepdogs are those patriotic and vigilant Americans whose role is to protect the sheep from the wolves. The sheepdogs include everyone who inhabits the warrior culture and includes a wide range of groups that extend from the paramilitary police forces and vigilante super-patriots along the nation’s borders to the gun- loving soldiers that protect American interests overseas.
The analogy is not just pernicious; it is also a transparent rationale for a hyper-masculine gun and militarized culture that feeds on fear and racist hysteria. It also offers a rationale for killing those dangerous racial others (wolves), who in light of the recent killings of unarmed black men by the police, appear to be fair game for the sheepdogs. I don’t believe this analogy is far-fetched, evident as it is in the discourse of prominent politicians such as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has argued that the white cops in black communities are necessary because of the high numbers of black-on-black crime.16 This is more than a false equivalency since the blacks are not armed by the state and many go to jail for the crimes they commit (or increasingly for not committing any crime at all). But more important, the disproportionate rate at which the police kill blacks rather than whites speaks to a not so hidden order of racial aggression and violence. According to recent data collected by Pro-Publica, “Young black men are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police.”17 What this discourse evokes is one of the central principles of neoliberalism—a survival-of-the-fittest culture in which violence, unchecked self-interest, and a militant individualism merge.
At the same time, American Sniper evokes sympathy not for its millions of victims but for those largely poor youth who have to carry the burden of war for the dishonest politicians who send them into war zones that should never have existed in the first place. Amy Nelson at Slate gets it right in stating that “American Sniper convinces viewers that Chris Kyle is what heroism looks like: a great guy who shoots a lot of people and doesn’t think twice about it.”18 But American Sniper does more than inject the horror of wartime violence into the instrumental logic of efficiency and skill, it also offers young people a form of entertainment that is really a species of right-wing public pedagogy, a kind of “teachable moment.” Its decontextualization of war serves as a recruiting tool for the military and reinforces a sickening rite of passage that suggests that one has to go to war to be a real man. This is a death-dealing myth wrapped in the mantle of American heroism. Moreover, it is a myth that young, vulnerable, poor youth fall prey to, especially when their everyday existence is steeped in despair and precarity and their identities are shaped in an endless number of cultural apparatuses that thrive on the spectacle of violence. There is no context, truth, or history in this film, just the passion for violence and a hint at the anguish that leaves its subjects and objects in a nightmarish world of despair, suffering, and death. In that sense, as Dennis Trainor, Jr., points out, the film is dangerous pedagogically:
History has borne that fact out, and that lack of context makes American Sniper a dangerous film. Dangerous because kids will sign up for the military because of this movie. Dangerous because our leaders have plans for those kids. Some will kill. Some will be killed. Or worse. There is no narrative existing outside the strict confines of American Sniper’s iron sights that allows for the war on terror to be over. It’s like a broken record looping over and over: attack, blow-back and attack. Repeat.19
Citizenfour and Selma made little money, were largely ignored by the public, and all but disappeared except for some paltry acknowledgments by the film industry. American Sniper is the most successful grossing war film of all time. Selma will be mentioned in the history books but will not get the attention it really deserves for the relevance it should have for a new generation of youth confronting new forms of racism and state violence. There will be no mention in the history books regarding the importance of Edward Snowden because his story not only instructs a larger public but indicts the myth of American democracy. Yet American Sniper resembles a familiar narrative of false heroism and state violence for which thousands of pages will be written as part of history texts that will provide the pedagogical context for imposing on young people a mode of hyper-masculinity. Such pedagogies will be built on the false notion that violence is a sacred value and that war is an honorable ideal and the ultimate test of what it means to be a man. This is the stuff of Disney posing as pure Americana while beneath the pretense to innocence, bodies are tortured, children are murdered, villages are bombed into oblivion, and the beat goes on. In an age of short attention spans, an infatuation with speed, and the need for instant gratification it is not surprising that the flight from thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor has also produced a retreat from history and public memory. Hollywood thrives on this loss of historical consciousness while also producing it. The always informative Toronto Star writer Olivia Ward is correct in arguing: “It is not only personality that is digitally altered by films, but history itself. In an era of dwindling attention spans, and where reality shows are more celebrated than real events, few people bother to delve deeper into the historical records behind the biopics they see.”20
The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, its children, the ideals of democracy, and its future. The stories that Hollywood tells represent a particularly powerful form of public pedagogy that is integral to how people imagine themselves, their relations to others, and their relationship to a larger global landscape. In this case, stories and the communal bonds that support them in their differences become integral to how people value life, social relations, and visions of the future. American Sniper tells a troubling story codified as a tragic-heroic truth and normalized through an entertainment industry that thrives on the spectacle of violence, one that is deeply indebted to the militarization of everyday life.
Courage in the morally paralyzing lexicon of American patriotism has become an extension of a gun culture both at home and abroad. This is a war and survival-of-the-fittest culture that trades in indulgent spectacles of violence and a theater of cruelty symptomatic of the mad violence and unchecked misery that is both a by-product of and sustains the fog of historical amnesia, militarism, and the death of democracy itself. Maybe the spectacular success of American Sniper over the other two films should not be surprising to any one in a country in which the new normal for anointing a new generation of heroes goes to billionaires, politicians who sanction state torture, and other leaders of the corrupt institutions and bankrupt celebrity culture that now are driving the world into political, economic, and moral bankruptcy, made visible in the most venal vocabularies of stupidity and cruelty.
Michael Lerner has reminded me that the fog of political and moral illiteracy that many Americans inhabit may have less to do with the power of the cultural apparatuses and the deadening public pedagogies they produce than what I have argued. He suggests that it is not enough to argue that the American public be viewed as “hopelessly bamboozled by the existing entertainments.”21 I think it is crucial to make clear that power never collapses entirely into domination; we observe moments of resistance while trying to chart how powerlessness plays out in ways that damage any viable sense of individual and collective agency. At the same time, Rabbi Lerner is right to suggest that deeper psychological modes of oppression might be at work in oppressing people, given the power of the ideological and affective spaces of a society many people inhabit—spaces fiercely dominated by militarization, consumerism, and finance capital. It is crucial for any politics that matters to understand how subjectivity is inhabited and shaped in oppressive times, especially among those it victimizes. But it is also necessary to understand the way in which the crisis of agency is the by-product of a massive machinery of concentrated power that drives a public pedagogy that incessantly works to define agency in the interests of war, militarism, commercialism, and privatization. War machines, the mainstream corporate-controlled media, and the financial elite now construct the stories that America tells about itself and in this delusional denial of social and moral responsibility monsters are born, paving the way for the new authoritarianism.
At stake here is the need to be mobilized by an awareness of the dark times that beset us. This means not using the present as an excuse to fall into despair, to deny one’s sense of agency and the possibility of individual and collective resistance, but to recognize fully how such a crisis of agency came into being and how it can be challenged, especially at a moment when the relations among cultural institutions, political power, and everyday life have taken on a new intensity and power. This is not merely a political issue, nor is it solved by acknowledging that people are not dupes. It is a deeply pedagogical issue that recognizes that matters of desire, value, identity, and hope are at the heart of any viable politics. If people’s needs are being hijacked, the real issue is not to condemn them for succumbing to the swindle of fulfillment, but to ask ourselves how those needs can be understood and mobilized for emancipatory ends. Raising consciousness matters, but that is often too easily said. At issue here are central questions about how one makes theories, narratives, stories, and the discourse of critique and hope meaningful so as to make them critical and transformative. That may be one of the greatest pedagogical challenges any left movement faces. The educative nature of politics must be embraced by the left and other progressives so the realm of subjectivity can be taken seriously. The thrust of any viable strategy will have to engage what it means to change the way people understand their relationship to the world, see things, and become energized in order to act on their principles in the interest of building a better and more just society and world.
There is a subversive side to popular culture when it is used as a powerful resource to map and critically engage the politics of the everyday, mobilize alternative narratives to capitalism, and activate those needs vital to producing more critical and compassionate modes of subjectivity. Unfortunately, as Stuart Hall lamented, too few progressive thinkers have a “sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.”22 Hall was pointing in part to a failure of the left to take seriously the political unconscious and the need to use alternative media, theater, online journals, news outlets, and other resources. Indeed, film, television, social media, and other instruments of culture can be used to make education central to a politics that is emancipatory and utterly committed to developing a democratic formative culture. There is enormous pedagogical value in bringing attention to the rare oppositional representations offered within the dominant media. At stake is the need for progressives not only to understand popular culture and its cultural apparatuses as modes of dominant ideology, but also to take popular culture seriously as a tool to revive the radical imagination.
To be effective in this struggle, educators and other progressives need a discourse of critique and hope, a discourse that does not simply provide what Naomi Klein calls “a catalogue of disempowerment.”23 What is also needed is a discourse that relates private troubles to larger issues, one that gives meaning in broader terms to people’s problems and links them to the possibility of individual and collective emancipation. Stories help because they make the invisible visible and offer a new form of cultural and political literacy—a new way of reading both the word and the world. Such narratives are dangerous to the status quo and speak to historical and current struggles in which people both talked and pushed back. Howard Zinn and other historians made those narratives available by making visible how history was made from the bottom up. Such histories and struggle were also led by antiwar activists in the 1960s, the brave civil rights workers, and the feminist and gay rights movements.
Chronicling these struggles is not just about offering narratives of hope; it is also about inciting action. These are stories about the force of civic courage and the power of people who are no longer willing to live on their knees. Such struggles not only embrace the radical imagination, they also represent stories of organized courage and collective resistance. In the current historical moment, we see a myriad of battles taking place among “student-debt resisters, fast-food and Walmart workers fighting for a living wage, regional campaigns to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour or the various creative attempts to organize vulnerable immigrant workers.”24 These are the voices of the marginalized, this generation’s authors of dangerous memories whose stories are never likely to appear in the mainstream media.
I conclude by stressing once again that power is never completely on the side of domination; nevertheless, in these times, resistance is not a luxury but a necessity. Those who believe in the democratic promise of the future have to engage issues of economic inequality and overcome social fragmentation, develop an international social formation for radical democracy and the defense of the public good, undertake ways to finance oppositional activities and avoid the corrupting influence of corporate power, take seriously the educative nature of politics and the need to change the way people think, and develop a comprehensive notion of politics and a vision to match. Making good on the promise of democracy, of education as a practice of freedom, and the demands of justice are the core challenges of the twenty-first century. It must be motivated by a faith in the willingness of people to fight together for a future in which dignity, equality, and justice matter, and at the same time recognize the potency of the repressive forces that bear down on such a struggle. What is crucial is that the American public be educated so as to go beyond mere reformism. This means developing a social and political movement that rejects the notion that “there is no alternative,” a movement willing to fight for more than expanding social provisions and the redistribution of wealth. What needs to be dismantled is capitalism itself because it only recognizes markets in its transactions, results in the undoing of every vestige of democratic and participatory politics, and concentrates power in very few hands.