While the Republican Party is far more extremist than the Democratic Party, it must be remembered that they both participate in, benefit from, and support what Robert Jay Lifton has called a "malignant normality," which he defines in his book Losing Reality as "the imposition of a norm of destructive or violent behavior, so that such behavior is expected or required of people."
At one level, this strikes me as a suitable definition of a rabid form of neoliberalism and finance capital that is now reproduced in different forms by both parties. At another level, it applies to the "murderous arrangements" that define the fascist politics practiced by the Trump administration. Lifton is worth quoting at length. He writes:
Fighting Fascist Politics With Civic Education"With Trump and Trumpism ... we have experienced a national malignant normality: extensive lying and falsification, systemic corruption, ad hominem attacks on critics, dismissal of intelligence institutions and findings, rejection of climate change truths and of scientists who express them, rebukes of our closest international allies and embrace of dictators, and scornful deligitimation of the party of opposition. This constellation of malignant normality has threatened and at times virtually replaced, American democracy."
Historian David Blight has written that Trump's "greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution." Blight is only partly right in that the greatest threat to our society is a collective ignorance that legitimates forms of organized forgetting, modes of social amnesia and the death of civic literacy. The notion that the past is a burden that must be forgotten is a centerpiece of authoritarian regimes. While some critics eschew the comparison of Trump with the Nazi era, it is crucial to recognize the alarming signs in this administration that echo a fascist politics of the past. As Jonathan Freedland points out, "the signs are there, if only we can bear to look." Rejecting the Trump-Nazi comparison makes it easier to believe that we have nothing to learn from history and to take comfort in the assumption that it cannot happen once again. No democracy can survive without an informed and educated citizenry.
The pedagogical lesson the impeachment process offered far exceeded its stated limited aims as a form of civic education. It not only ignored the most serious of Trump's crimes; it also failed to examine a number of political threads that together constitute elements common to a global crisis in democracy. The impeachment process, when viewed as part of a broader crisis of democracy, cannot be analyzed and removed from the connecting ideological, economic and cultural threads that weave through often isolated issues such as white nationalism, the rise of a Republican Party dominated by right-wing extremists, the collapse of the two-party system, and the ascent of a corporate-controlled media that functions as a dis-imagination machine and as a corrosive system of power.
Crucial to any politics of resistance is the necessity to analyze Trump's use of politics as a spectacle and how to address it not in isolation, not just as a form of diversion and political theater, but also as part of a more comprehensive political project in which updated forms of authoritarianism and contemporary versions of fascism are being mobilized and gaining traction both in the United States and across the globe. Federico Mayor Zaragoza, the former director general of UNESCO, once stated, "You cannot expect anything from uneducated citizens except unstable democracy." In the current historical moment and age of Trump, it might be more appropriate to say that in a society in which ignorance is viewed as a virtue and civic literacy and education are viewed as a liability, you cannot expect anything but fascism.
Trump's State of the Union address made clear that he lives in a world of lies, spectacles and a complex machinery of manipulation that shreds any viable notion of civic culture and the institutions that are fundamental to a robust democracy.
The deceitful rhetoric and lies that Trump produced in the State of the Union speech need to be countered with the power of a civic literacy. In the struggle against manufactured falsehoods and the ecosystem of hate, civic literacy is a fundamental resource. Living within the truth, as Va'clav Havel once put it, demands modes of civic education within a variety of sites that use the "power of culture to energize and articulate political issues." In this instance, civic education demands not only a struggle over ideas but also a struggle over the public institutions and critical spheres that produce, legitimate and sustain such ideas.
Any attempt to defeat Trump must expose the type of lies central to his relentless rallies, tweets, and speeches, while simultaneously building a politics wedded to questioning and holding power accountable. Civic education and a civically minded culture must become central to politics, following the assumption that democracy cannot exist without a democratic formative culture whose task is enacting democratic modes of governing and producing critical thinkers who can call existing institutions and dominant relations of power into question. Under such circumstances, as social critic Cornelius Castoriadis writes, civic literacy provides the cultural workstation in which "the question of justice" becomes central to "the question of politics."
Civic literacy and civic education are an antidote to Trump's culture of lying and manipulation and offer the first line of defense against Trump's dis-imagination machines, which include the right-wing press and talk shows as well as reactionary protofascist digital media platforms. Depoliticization is a form of domination in which agency is rendered toxic and unreflective, while critical thinking is disparaged, and real hope is either trivialized or degenerates into cynicism.
Trump's use of apocalyptic and exaggerated rhetoric in his State of the Union address maligned language, the truth, historical memory and the public good. His speech thus served as a reminder that fascism begins with language. What needs to be also remembered is that civic literacy also begins with language, not as a tool of violence, but as a means for developing collective modes of resistance wedded to real structural changes and planning.
Trump's State of the Union address was simply another example of the descent into the constitutional and political abyss in which lawlessness and cruelty have become normalized and buttressed by grandiose claims that abandon any pretense to truth in the service of power. Shifts in language have now made it difficult to imagine the promise of a robust democracy. Let us not forget that civic literacy doesn't chip away at reality, the truth or democracy; instead, it offers the building blocks for a civic formative culture in which the fascist world of manufactured drama and its underlying straitjacket of common sense can be challenged by individuals who can speak, write and act from a position of agency and empowerment.
Civic literacy is about the possibility of interpretation as an act of intervention that can bridge private troubles to broader systemic forces. Trump's State of the Union was an ode to capitalism on steroids, a future controlled by the 1 percent, and a politics that substitutes a fascist politics for democratic narratives and struggles for emancipation and social equality. If Trump and his neoliberal counter-revolution are to be defeated, the first step is to expand and develop the formative cultures, critical institutions, modes of identification and forms of civic literacy capable of challenging the violent rhetoric and affective energies of fascism. Only then can we begin to build a popular movement willing to engage in forms of resistance that can overcome the proto-fascistic and racist neoliberal forces that produced Trump.
Note: This article has been updated to reflect the Senate's vote Wednesday afternoon to acquit Trump.
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