This is the small change of militarism. Think, for example, of the ATM receipts that post a "Support the Troops" message under the customer's bank balance. We encounter such messages when checkout clerks at gas stations and supermarkets ask for donations to "support our troops." Such messages function as military recruiting advertisements on the side of buses, cabs and billboards. Higher education institutions sponsor ads for graduate programs with pop-up images on their websites, such as "Advance Your Military Career with an MBA." As Schwalbe argues, inherent in all of these messages is the idea that freedom and democracy are dependent upon the use of military force, state violence, and military service, the essence of which is "obedience, not courageous independence."
These "small cultural spaces" -- when combined with various sites of militarism, ranging from public schools and sports events to popular cultural and policy-making institutions -- normalize war and violence. In this way, they make it more difficult for the American public to question the merging of war and politics and the pathologizing of politics by a culture of violence. One consequence is that democratic idealism is replaced by the ethos of militarism, and violence becomes the axiom by which everyday problems are both defined and mediated. Accordingly, the dominance of war-like values "expands from the margins of society to become a powerful process by which civil society ... organizes itself," and coincides with what Catherine Lutz describes as "the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality."
Trump's rhetoric in support of violence and discrimination threatens to further the transformation of the police into SWAT teams and the endless practice of arresting students for trivial behaviors in schools, subjecting Black people to fines for breaking rules that are petty and punitive and criminalizing Black people through policies of racial profiling that constitute practices of state harassment and violence. Aggressive policing is the underside of white supremacy because it is largely used in the service of whites against Blacks who have committed no crimes. And with racists, such as Jeff Sessions and Stephen Bannon holding top positions in the Trump administration, fantasies of America being transformed into a white public sphere will be at the center of politics.
War culture is legitimated ideologically by collapsing public issues into private concerns. This is a powerful pedagogical tool that functions to depoliticize people by decoupling social problems from the violence inherent in the structural, affective and pedagogical dimensions of neoliberalism. Capitalism is about both winning at all costs and privileging what Zygmunt Bauman calls a "society of individual performance and a culture of sink-or-swim individualism."
This mode of individualized politics functions as a weapon of fear that trades off conditions of precarity in order to amplify the personal anxieties, uncertainties and misery produced through life-draining austerity measures and the destruction of the bonds of sociality and solidarity. Abandoned to their own resources, individuals turn to what Jennifer Silva describes in her book Coming Up Short as a "mood economy" in which they "turn to emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation."
At the same time, it redefines the pathologies of poverty, patriarchy, structural racism, police violence, homophobia and massive inequities in income and power as personal pathologies and shortcomings to be overcome by support groups, safe spaces and other reforms that sometimes ignore the need to fight for what Robin D. G. Kelley calls "models of social and economic justice."
Toward a Comprehensive Politics
Any attempt to resist and restructure the intensification of a war culture with its white supremacist, ultra-nationalist underside in the US necessitates a new language for politics. Such a discourse must be historical, relational and as comprehensive as it is radical. Historically, the call for a comprehensive view of oppression, violence and politics can be found in the connections that Martin Luther King, Jr. drew near the end of his life, particularly in his speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." King made it clear that the United States uses "massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted," and that such violence could not be clearly addressed if limited to an analysis of single issues, such as the Vietnam War. On the contrary, he argued that the war at home was an inextricable part of the war abroad and that matters of militarism, racism, poverty and materialism mutually informed each other and cut across a variety of sites. For instance, he understood that poverty at home could not be abstracted from the money allotted to wars abroad and a death-dealing militarism. Nor could the racism at home be removed from those "others" the United States demonized and objectified abroad, revealing in their mutual connection a racism that drove both domestic and foreign policy. For King, "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" had to be resisted both through a revolution of values and a broad-based nonviolent movement at home aimed at a radical restructuring of American society. One ethical referent for King's notion of a radical restructuring was his moral and political abhorrence of the killing of millions of children -- at home and abroad -- by a war culture and its ruthless machineries of militarism and violence.
Michelle Alexander has also argued that one thing we can learn from King is the need to connect the dots among diverse forms of oppression. A broader view of oppression allows us to see the underlying ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work in the US. For instance, Alexander raises questions about the connection between "drones abroad and the War on Drugs at home." In addition, she argues for modes of political inquiry that connect a variety of oppressive practices enacted in order to accumulate capital -- such as the workings of a corrupt financial industry and Wall Street bankers, on the one hand, and the moving of jobs overseas, the foreclosing of homes, the increase in private prisons and the caging of immigrants, on the other.
Similarly, Alexander calls for "connecting the dots between the NSA spying on millions of Americans, the labeling of mosques as 'terrorist organizations,' and the spy programs of the 1960s and 70s -- specifically the FBI and COINTELPRO programs that placed civil rights advocates under constant surveillance, infiltrated civil rights organizations and assassinated racial justice leaders." More recently, we have seen the call for such connections emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement and a range of other grassroots movements whose politics go far beyond an agenda limited to single issues, such as the curbing of anti-Black violence. This type of comprehensive politics is exemplified in the policy document, "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice," created by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over 60 organizations.
Angela Davis has for years been calling for progressives to build links to other struggles and has talked about how what has happened in Ferguson must be related to what is happening in Palestine. This type of connective politics might raise questions about what the US immigration policies and the racist discourses that inform them have in common with what is going on in authoritarian countries, such as Hungary.
Another example is illustrated when Davis asks what happens to communities when the police who are supposed to serve and protect them are treated like soldiers who are trained to shoot and kill? How might such analyses bring various struggles for social and economic justice together across national boundaries? In her book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Davis argues that such connections have to "be made in the context of struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against police racism you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world [including] structural connections." Davis embraces what she calls the larger context, and this is clearly exemplified in her commentary about prisons. She writes:
We can't only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger framework. That means asking: Why is there such a disproportionate number of Black people and people of color in prison? So we have to talk about racism. Abolishing the prison is about attempting to abolish racism. Why is there so much illiteracy? Why are so many prisoners illiterate? That means we have to attend to the educational system. Why is it that the three largest psychiatric institutions in the country are jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Rikers Island, Cook County Jail, and L.A. County Jail? That means we need to think about health care issues, and especially mental health care issues. We have to figure out how to abolish homelessness.
We need a new political vocabulary for capturing the scope and interconnections that comprise the matrix of permanent war and violence that shape a variety of experiences and spheres in American society, all of which will expand under the Trump presidency. While the current focus on police killings, gun violence, mass shootings and acts of individual bloodshed are important to analyze, it is crucial not to treat these events as isolated categories. By doing so we lose a broader understanding of the ways in which American society is being held hostage to often invisible but formative modes of intolerable violence that are distributed across a range of sites on a daily basis. This is especially true as Americans enter into a historical moment in which the highest reaches of government will be run by a group of officials who support a president who has condoned torture, wants to increase the numbers of and power of the police, views Black neighborhoods as manifestations of a criminal culture, staffs his cabinet with racists, militarists and misogynists, and views violence as a legitimate tool for dealing with dissent. Noam Chomsky is right in calling Trump, his generals, and the Republican Party "the most dangerous organization in the world."
Intolerable violence is most visible when it attracts the attention of mainstream media and conforms to the production of what Brad Evans and I have discussed as the spectacle of violence, that is, violence that is put on public display in order to shock and entertain rather than inform. However, such violence is just the tip of the iceberg and is dependent upon a foundation of lawlessness that takes place through a range of experiences, representations and spaces that make up daily life across a variety of sites and public spaces. Those spaces of lawlessness are on the rise, and the ominous shadow of authoritarianism is at our doorstep. Nevertheless, such forces cannot be allowed to cancel out the future and promises of a radical democracy.
Militant Hope and the Politics of Resistance
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