Trump has emboldened and legitimated the dire anti-democratic threats that have been expanding under an economic system stripped of any political, social, and ethical responsibility. This is a form of neoliberal fascism that has redrawn and expanded the parameters of the genocidal practices and hate-filled politics of the 1930s and 40s in Europe in which it was once thought impossible to happen again. The threat has returned and is now on our doorsteps, and it needs to be named, exposed, and overcome by those who believe that the stakes are much too high to look away and not engage in organized political and pedagogical struggles against a fascist state and an omniscient fascist politics. We live in an age when the horrors of the past are providing the language and politics of illiberal democracies all over the globe. This is a world where dystopian versions of a catastrophic, misery producing neoliberalism merge with unapologetic death dealing visions of a fascist politics. We live in an era that testifies to the horrors of a past struggling to reinvent itself in the present, and which should place more than a sense of ethical and political responsibility on those of us bearing witness to it. As my friend, Brad Evans, notes under such circumstances, we live in a time "that asks us all to continually question our own shameful compromises with power," and to act with others to overcome our differences in order to dismantle this assault on human rights, human dignity, economic justice, equality, and democracy itself.[20]
Notes.
[1] Terry Eagleton, "The ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas-it is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present," Red Pepper(October 13, 2013). Online: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/death-of-the-intellectual/
[2] Brad Evans, "A World Without Books," Atrocity Exhibition: Life in the Age of Total Violence,(Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019). P. 177
[3] Robin D.G. Kelley, "Sorry, Not Sorry," Boston Review,[September 13, 2018] Online: http://bostonreview.net/race-literature-culture/robin-d-g-kelley-sorry-not-sorry
[4] Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street have addressed this issue in a number of brilliant books and articles.
[5] Teju Cole, "Resist, Refuse," The New York Times,[September 8, 2018] Online: click here
[6] Michael Hayden, "The End of Intelligence," New York Times (April 28, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-intelligence.html
[7] Anonymous, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," New York Times (September 5, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html?module=inline
[8] Ibid. Anonymous.
[9] Christopher R. Browning, "The Suffocation of Democracy", The New York Review, (October 25, 2018 | Vol. 65, No 16). Online at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/
Cass R. Sunstein, "It Can Happen Here," The New York Books Review, [June 28, 2018] Online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/
[10] See, for instance, Jason Hirthler, "The Pieties of the Liberal Class," Counterpunch (October 19, 2018). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/19/the-pieties-of-the-liberal-class/
[11] Michelle Alexander, "We Are Not the Resistance," The New York Times,[September 21, 2018]. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/sunday/resistance-kavanaugh-trump-protest.html
[12] Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012), p. 36.
[13] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. X.
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