Yet, there is more at work here than the proliferation of neoliberal policies that breathe new life into white supremacist ideologies, privatize public goods, limit the power of unions, deregulate the public sphere and hollow out the state by shifting massive amounts of capital through regressive tax policies to big corporations and the ultra-rich.
Under neoliberalism, politics is tied to the discourse of exclusion and powerlessness and is viewed along with democracy as the enemy of a market that views itself above the influence of the rule of law, accountability, ethics, governance and the common good. As legal scholar Eva Nanopoulos observes, in the current historical moment, the specific forms of contemporary fascism have to be understood "in the wider context of their relationship to neoliberalism and the neoliberal crisis." What is especially important to grasp is how neoliberalism has reconfigured the state to maximize the disintegration of democratic social bonds and obligations, especially through neoliberal policies that test how far a demagogic administration can push a public into accepting practices that are as cruel as they are unimaginable. This logic is now being carried to extremes under Trump as he is constantly redrawing the lines of what is possible in violating human rights and promoting an ever-widening labyrinth of cruelty, destruction and disposability.
Some of the most distinctive features of neoliberal fascism include the disintegration of the social, the collapse of a culture of compassion and the dissolution of public spheres that make democracy possible. Individual existence is now defined through the circulation of commodities and the elevation of self-interest to a national ideal amounts to what Marx once called "the icy water of egotistical calculation." One consequence is the expansion of an ongoing plague of social atomization, alienation, existential despair and a collective sense of powerlessness. Evidence for the latter can be found in the ongoing opioid crisis, which killed 42,000 people in 2016, the increasing mortality rate for uneducated white men, the growing lack of confidence in American institutions, the desperation experienced by families living on the brink of poverty trying to make ends meet each month, and the heartbreak and despair among the 6.5 million children and their families living in extreme poverty. In addition, the mutually informing forces of despair and powerlessness produce the conditions for the growth of right-wing populism, racism, ultra-nationalism, militarism and fascism.
As the reach of neoliberal ideology spreads throughout society, it works to trivialize democratic values and public concerns, enshrines a militant individualism, celebrates an all-embracing quest for profits, and promotes a form of Social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a "war of all against all" replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. This punishing script constitutes an often unrecognized form of state-sanctioned terrorism that numbs many people just as it wipes out the creative faculties of imagination, memory and critical thought. Under a regime of privatized utopias, hyper-individualism, and ego-centered values, human beings slip into a kind of ethical somnolence, indifferent to the plight and suffering of others. Neoliberalism produces a unique form of modern terrorism. The late Frankfurt School theorist Leo LÃ ¶wenthal refers to it as a form of mass repression and self-preserving numbness that he argues amounts "to the atomization of the individual." He writes:
The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and rigid not only in relation to his neighbor but also in relation to himself; fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population. Human beings live in a state of stupor, in a moral coma.
Implicit in Lowenthal's commentary is the assumption that as democracy becomes a fiction, the moral mechanisms of language and meaning are undermined. In addition, a culture of atomization, precarity, intolerance and brutishness reinforces an ethos of cruel indifference promoted through a relentless barrage of ruthless policies that test how far the most extreme elements in the convergence of neoliberalism and fascism can be promoted by the Trump administration without arousing mass outrage and resistance.
As I mentioned earlier, the disintegration of social bonds, social ties and emancipatory modes of solidarity and collective struggle are intensified through an endless series of political and ethical shocks produced by the Trump administration. Such shocks are designed to weaken the ability of citizens to resist the ongoing barrage of attacks on the moral indexes and democratic values central to a democracy. They are also designed to normalize neoliberal fascist terrorist tactics, dispelling the notion that such practices are ephemeral to the 21st century.
In its willingness to demonstrate such terror, the state mobilizes fear and unchecked displays of power in order to convince people that the president is above the law and that the only viable response to his increasingly cruel policies is individual and collective resignation. This is an exercise of power without a conscience -- a form of violence that revels in the passivity, if not moral infantilism, it wishes to produce in its citizens. Echoes of this view were obvious in Trump's comment, later claimed to be a joke, that he wants "[his] people" to listen to him the way North Koreans listen to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. As the president stated on the Fox News Channel program "Fox & Friends," "He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same." Trump's war against the social and ethical imagination is part of a larger politics designed to destroy those social ties and public spheres that would encourage a sense of responsibility and compassion toward others, especially those considered the most vulnerable. This is a form of terrorism that celebrates self-interest, bare survival, and a regression to a kind of Social Darwinism and political infantilism. Theorist Leo LÃ ¶wenthal gets it right in his comment that this form of terrorism is equivalent to a form of self-annihilation. He writes:
Terrorism wipes out the causal relation between social conduct and survival, and confronts the individual with the naked force of nature--that is, of denatured nature--in the form of the all-powerful terrorist machine. What the terror aims to bring about, and enforces through its tortures, is that people shall come to act in harmony with the law of terror, namely, that their whole calculation shall have but one aim: self-perpetuation. The more people become ruthless seekers after their own survival, the more they become psychological pawns and puppets of a system that knows no other purpose than to keep itself in power.
Surely, this is obvious today as all vestiges of social camaraderie give way to hyper-modes of masculinity and a disdain for those considered weak, dependent, alien or economically unproductive.
Central to developing any viable notion of the social is a rethinking of the critical institutions and shared spaces in which matters of morality, justice and equality become central to a new understanding of politics. There is a need to re-imagine where public spaces, connections and public commitments lie beyond the domain of the private and how they can be constructed as part of a broader effort to create engaged and critical citizens willing to fight for an emergent democratic politics. At stake here is a renewed understanding of education as the crucial site in which the intertwined dynamics of individual agency and democratic politics merge. Politics in this sense is connected to a discourse of critique and possibility in which a plurality of memories, narratives and identities come together in defense of a common good and a comprehensive politics that brings together personal and public meanings, discourses and connections.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt's fear about the extinguishing of the public realm, along with pragmatist John Dewey's apprehension about the loss of a public sphere where visions, power, politics and the ethical imagination can be brought to life, are no longer simply an abstract concern. Such trepidations have become a reality in the age of Trump. Amid the current attack on the foundations of social solidarity and the bonds of social obligation, public values are running the risk of becoming irrelevant. In a society in which it has become commonplace to believe that one has no responsibility for anyone other than oneself, the social is downsized to accommodate a culture of hate, bigotry and cruelty.
Keeping the Struggle for a Radical Democracy AliveThere will be no democracy without a formative culture to construct the questioning agents capable of dissent and collective action. Nor will the struggle for a radical democracy get far without a vision that can replace representative politics with a politics and mode of governing based on a participatory politics. Wendy Brown touches on some of the elements of a visionary politics in which power and governance are shared collectively. She writes:
" a left vision of justice would focus on practices and institutions of popular power; a modestly egalitarian distribution of wealth and access to institutions; an incessant reckoning with all forms of power -- social, economic, political, and even psychic; a long view of the fragility and finitude of nonhuman nature; and the importance of both meaningful activity and hospitable dwellings to human flourishing". The drive to promulgate such a counter rationality -- a different figuration of human beings, citizenship, economic life, and the political -- is critical both to the long labor of fashioning a more just future and to the immediate task of challenging the deadly policies of the imperial American state.
The great philosopher of democracy, Cornelius Castoriadis, adds to this perspective the idea that for democracy to work people have to have a passion for public values and social participation alongside the ability to access public spaces that guarantee the rights of free speech, dissent and critical dialogue. Castoriadis recognized that at the heart of such public spaces is a formative culture that creates citizens who are critical thinkers capable of "putting existing institutions into question so that democracy again becomes [possible] in the full sense of the term." For Castoriadis, people should not be merely given the right to participate in society; they also should be educated in order to participate in it in a meaningful and consequential manner. According to Castoriadis, the protective space of the social becomes crucial when it functions as an educational space whose aim is to create critical agents who can use their knowledge and skills in order to participate in a wider struggle for justice and freedom. At the center of Castoriadis's defense of education is a defense of the public realm where, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, freedom can "find the worldly space to make an appearance." According to Castoriadis, education was not only an essential dimension of justice and politics, but also democracy itself.
One precondition for bringing Trump's neoliberal fascism to a halt is the recognition that democracy cannot exist without informed citizens who have a passion for public affairs, and who believe that critical consciousness is one precondition through which politics must pass in order to render individuals fit for the kind of collective struggles that offer the possibility for change. It is difficult to talk about producing the social bonds necessary in any democracy without viewing civic education, literacy and learning as acts of resistance. Education has to become central to politics in which new narratives can be developed that refuse to equate capitalism with democracy, hope with the fear of losing and surviving, and the separation of political equality from economic equality.
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