We Must Overcome Our Atomization to Beat Back Neoliberal Fascism

Leo Lowenthal, writing in Commentary in January 1, 1946, writes about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear that approximates a kind of updated fascist terror, one that echoes strongly with the present historical era. Hannah Arendt went further and argued that, "What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century." She elaborates her view of loneliness as the precondition for fascist terror when she writes:

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.

What both understand, writing in the aftermath of the ravaging destruction produced by fascism and World War II, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational, political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible. Moreover, atomized, rootless and uninformed individuals are not only prone to the forces of depoliticization, but also to the false swindle and spirit of populist demagogues, and the discourses of hate and the demonization of others.

We live in an age of death-dealing loneliness, isolation and militarized atomization. If you believe the popular press, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions in advanced industrial societies. The usual suspect is the Internet, which isolates people in the warm glow of the computer screen while reinforcing their own isolation and sense of loneliness. The notion of friends and likes become disembodied categories in which human beings disappear into the black hole of abstractions and empty signifiers.

Many blame the internet for this development, but the rootlessness and loneliness on display in many internet-facilitated interactions actually predate the internet. In neoliberal societies, even before the invention of the internet, dependence, compassion, mutuality, care for the other and sociality were already undermined by a market-driven ethic in which self-interest becomes the organizing principle of one's life, and a survival-of-the-fittest mode of competition breeds a culture that promotes an indifference to the plight of others, a disdain for the less fortunate, and a widespread culture of cruelty aimed at those considered poor, "disposable" and excess.

Isolated individuals do not make up a healthy democratic society. A more theoretical language produced by Marx talked about alienation as a separation from the fruits of one's labor, and while that is certainly more true than ever, the separation and isolation now is more extensive and governs the entirety of social life in a consumer-based society run by the demands of commerce and the financialization of everything. Isolation, privatization and the cold logic of instrumental rationality have created a new kind of social formation and social order in which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections, a sense of intimacy and long-term commitments.

Neoliberalism has created a society where pain and suffering are viewed as entertainment, warfare a permanent state of existence and militarism as the most powerful force shaping masculinity. Politics has taken an exit from ethics, and thus the issue of social costs is divorced from any form of intervention in the world. This is the ideological metrics of political zombies and the currency of neoliberal fascism. The key word here is atomization, and it is a curse imposed by both neoliberal and authoritarian societies while also posing a dire threat to any viable form of democracy.

As we are witnessing in Chile, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Brazil, the heart of any type of politics wishing to challenge this flight into authoritarianism is not merely the recognition of economic structures of domination, but something more profound - which points to the construction of particular identities, values, social relations, or more broadly, agency itself. Central to such a recognition is the fact that politics cannot exist without people investing something of themselves in the discourses, images and representations that come at them daily.

Rather than suffering alone, lured into the frenzy of hateful emotion, individuals need to be able to identify - see themselves and their daily lives - within progressive critiques of existing forms of domination and how they might address such issues not individually, but collectively. This is a particularly difficult challenge today because the scourge of atomization is reinforced daily not only by a coordinated neoliberal assault against any viable notion of the social, but also by an authoritarian and finance-based culture that couples a rigid notion of privatization with a flight from any sense of social and moral responsibility. Moreover, under the dynamics of a fascist political machine, power is concentrated in the hands of a small financial elite that promote divisiveness and hatred through appeals to white nationalism, a deep contempt for liberalism, a propensity for violence and a suppression of dissent.

The atomization of individuals in fascist and neoliberal societies finds its counterpart in the often fatal political fragmentation that is often seen on the left with its proliferation of different groups articulating and addressing often single-issue forms of oppression, whether they are rooted in some version of identity politics or specific instances of domination such as issues associated with climate change. This is not to suggest such struggles are not important politically. On the contrary, what is crucial and equally important is the strategic imperative to unite them around a politics of solidarity that can get them to work together through narratives that, as Nancy Fraser and Houssam Hamade argue, unite struggles for emancipation and social equality.

Feminist scholar Zillah Eisenstein captures insightfully and with great lyrical power the necessity for coalition building as part of a politics of solidarity. She writes:

Coalitions are part of building solidarity with and between the differences. They are demanded by the complexity of our presences. We must move with and beyond the categories that push us apart like center and margin; we must move beyond binaries that separate and divide, and instead find a way towards connectedness that denies unity, or oneness, and instead images solidarity and its tensions. This is a moment for cross-movement and intersecting actions that will create new alliances that we might not know or imagine yet. This means supporting autonomous actions that become cross movement through the intersections that exist within each.

A politics of solidarity could incorporate calls for health care, higher wages, decent pensions, access to quality education, a clean environment, and social goods that improve the dignity and quality of life for everyone. What is needed in this case is a politics that awakens new modes of identification, desire and self-reflection. Stuart Hall was right when he argued in the journal Cultural Studies that, "There's no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition, and without that moment of recognition." Politics also has a drift, so politics will go on, but you won't have a political movement without that moment of identification."

The cultural apparatuses controlled by the 1 percent are the most powerful educational forces in many authoritarian societies, and they have been transformed into disimagination machines - apparatuses of misrecognition, ignorance and cruelty. Collective agency is now atomized, devoid of any viable embrace of the social. Too many people on the left and progressives have defaulted on this enormous responsibility for recognizing the educative nature for politics and for challenging this form of domination, working to change consciousness, and make education central to politics itself. Democracies are only as strong as the people who inhabit society. Put differently, the relationship between culture and politics becomes clear in the understanding that democracy's survival depends on a set of habits, dispositions and sensibilities of a formative culture that sustains them.

Trump plays to and manipulates the media because he understands how politics and theater merge in an environment in which the spectacle becomes the only politics left. He does not want to change consciousness, but to freeze it within a flood of shocks, sensations and simplisms that demand no thinking while erasing memory, thoughtfulness and critical dialogue.

For authoritarians like Trump and Bolsonaro, miseducation is the key to maintaining power. In addition, they use the media, schools and other cultural institutions to kill the social imagination, collapse the distinction between the truth and falsehoods, and abolish the line between civic literacy and lies. Education in the broadest sense has become a powerful weapon not merely of propaganda, but a tool of power in the shaping of desires, identities and one's view of the future. The central political issue here is not about the emergence of an existing reign of civic illiteracy, but about the crisis of agency, the forces that produce it, and the failure of progressives and the left to take such a crisis seriously by working hard to address the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle - all of which is necessary in order to get people to be able to translate private troubles into wider social issues. The latter may be the biggest political and educational challenge facing those who believe that the current political challenge is not between simply Trump and progressives who rail against the financial elite and big corporations, but over those who believe in democracy and those who do not.

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