At stake here is the need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle against terrorism must begin with a pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under siege. Once again, the United States has a long history of supporting terrorist groups and upholding authoritarian regimes. Moreover, it has a long history of imposing atrocities and barbarous acts of violence on others - the more recent and well-known being Abu Ghraib, the torture dungeons of CIA-controlled black sites, the Predator and Reaper drone strikes "on at least eight wedding parties," and the brutalizing murders committed by a 12-member "kill team" that hunted Afghans "for sport." (15) Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the discourse of revenge, demonization and extreme violence.
Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of September 11, 2001, within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation and war. Nostalgia is now used to justify and fuel a politics of insecurity, fear, precarity and demonization. The dominant media no longer function in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream media supported George W. Bush's fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq and never apologized for such despicable actions. It has rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling and others. (16) At the same time, mainstream media does little to resist publicly the emergence of a surveillance state and a war on terror that produces a dangerous "culture of shadows and subterfuge" in which there is a holding back of dissent, openness and resistance for fear that such actions could cost one a job, initiate government harassment or worse. (17)
Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state policy. Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply or unleash biochemical agents on the US population. The increased fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize a host of anti-democratic practices at home, including "a concerted attack on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press," (18) and a growing sentiment on the part of the US public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by US foreign policy should not be allowed to teach in public schools or work in the government. (19)
The war on terror is the new normal.This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned the United States' policies in the Middle East and the US government's support of the Israeli government's policies toward Palestinians. Language itself has become militarized, fed by an onslaught of extreme violence that now floods Hollywood films and dominates US television. Hollywood blockbusters such as American Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing views of Islam. (20) Television programs such as "Spartacus," "The Following," "Hannibal," "True Detective," "Justified" and "Top of the Lake" intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic violence appears to provide one of the few outlets for Americans to express what has come to resemble a spiritual release.
Extreme violence, including the sanctioning of state torture, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American people to feel alive, to mark what it means to be close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that deadens every possibility of life. Under such circumstances, the reality of violence is infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce and legitimate a carnival of cruelty. The privatizations of violence do more than maximize the pleasure quotient and heighten macho ebullience; it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence takes on the form of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and neoliberalism "into a criminal system and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered." (21)
The extreme visibility of violence in US culture represents a willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence in US society and to legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of common sense. Moreover, war making and the militarization of public discourse and public space also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hyper-masculinity that operates from the assumption that violence is not only the most important practice for mediating most problems, but that it is also central to identity formation itself. Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any notion of civic values. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in fraternity houses across the United States, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Violence has become the DNA of war making in the United States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of war fever that embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out,
Warmaking can quickly become associated with "war fever," the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one's nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people.... War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroad - and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq. (22)
The war on terror is the new normal. Its adoration and intensification of violence, militarization and state terrorism reach into every aspect of American life. Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy and moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000, New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that, as Tom Engelhardt points out, is "bigger - that the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya," and a number of other countries. (23) At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces all over the United States. Is it any wonder that people of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military budget and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, Black and Brown youth, and women.
Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public space as the "sinister abode of danger, death and infection" and fueled the collective rush to "patriotism on the cheap," but also it has buttressed a "fear economy" and refigured the meaning of politics itself. (24) Defined as "the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown," (25) the fear economy promises big financial gains for both the Defense Department, and the antiterrorist-security sectors, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer good for the hysterical warmongers and their acolytes in the media while making politics an extension of war. Fear is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that functions as "the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor decisions." (26)
But the culture of fear does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent. As Don Hazen points out, it also "breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers' rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD." (27)
The commanding institutions of US life have lost their sense of public mission, just as leadership at all levels of government is being stripped of any viable democratic vision. The United States is now governed by an economic and social orthodoxy informed by the dictates of religious and political extremists. Reform efforts that include the established political parties have resulted in nothing but regression, a form of accommodation that serves to normalize the new authoritarianism and its war on terrorism. Politics has to be thought anew and must be informed by a powerful vision matched by durable organizations that include young people, unions, workers, diverse social movements, artists and others. In part, this means reawakening the radical imagination so as to address the intensifying crisis of history and agency, and engage the ethical grammars of human suffering. To fight the neoliberal counterrevolution, workers, young people, unions, artists, intellectuals and social movements need to create new public spaces along with a new language for enabling the US public to relate the self to public life, social responsibility and the demands of global citizenship.
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 US public be viewed as "hopelessly bamboozled by the existing entertainments." (28) He argues that what is at work in this form of internalized oppression is a form of frustration and feeling of powerlessness that gains relief by projecting pent-up anger on to others whom "society finds convenient to disempower and oppress." (29) I think it is crucial to make clear that power never collapses entirely into domination, excluding any sense of resistance while at the same time trying to chart how powerlessness plays out in ways that indict any viable sense of individual and collective agency. Rabbi Lerner is right to suggest that deeper psychological modes of oppression may 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. While it is crucial for any politics that matters to understand how subjectivity is inhabited and shaped in oppressive times, especially by those it victimizes, what is also necessary is the way in which the crisis of agency is the byproduct 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. At stake here is the need not to deny one's sense of agency and the possibility of individual and collective resistance, but 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, values, 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 people for succumbing to the swindle of fulfillment but asking 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 theory, 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 in that 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.
Educators and other progressives need both a discourse of critique and hope, a discourse that does not simply provide what Naomi Klein calls "a catalogue of disempowerment." (30) 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 hope to the possibility of individual and collective struggles. Stories help because they make the invisible visible and they 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 made by antiwar activists in the 1960s, the brave civil rights workers, and the feminist and gay rights movements.
These struggles are not just about narratives of hope; they are also stories about the force of civic courage, and the power of people who no longer are 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 such struggles taking place among "student-debt resisters, fast-food and Walmart workers fighting for a living wage, regional campaigns to raise the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour or the various creative attempts to organize vulnerable immigrant workers." (31) These are the voices of the marginalized, the pioneers of dangerous memories, whose stories will not appear in the mainstream media.
The left in the United States is too fractured and needs to develop a more comprehensive understanding of politics, oppression and struggles as well as a discourse that arises to the level of ethical assessment and accountability. Against the new authoritarianism, progressives of all stripes need an inspiring and energizing politics that embraces coalition building, rejects the notion that capitalism equals democracy and challenges the stolid vocabulary of embodied incapacity stripped of any sense of risk, hope and possibility. If the struggle against the war on terrorism, militarization and neoliberalization is to have any chance of success, it is crucial for a loyal and dedicated left to embrace a commitment to understanding the educative nature of politics, economic and social justice, and the need to build a sustainable political formation outside of the established parties. (32)
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