Violence that once seemed unthinkable has become central to Trump's understanding of how American society now defines itself.
Language in the service of violence has a long history in the United States, and in this current historical moment, we now have the violence of organized forgetting.
Violence as a source of pleasureAs memory recedes, violence as a toxin morphs into entertainment, policy and world views.
What's different about Trump is that he revels in the use of violence and war-mongering brutality to inflict humiliation and pain on people. He pulls the curtains away from a systemic culture of cruelty and a racially inflected mass- incarceration state. He publicly celebrates his own sadistic investment in violence as a source of pleasure.
At the moment, it may seem impossible to offer any resistance to this emerging authoritarianism without talking about violence, how it works, who benefits from it, whom it affects and why it's become so normalized.
But this doesn't have to be the case once we understand that the scourge of American violence is as much an educational issue as it is a political concern.
The challenge is to address how to educate people about violence through rigorous and accessible historical, social, relational analyses and narratives that provide a comprehensive understanding of how the different registers of violence are connected to new forms of American authoritarianism.
This means making power and its connection to violence visible through the exposure of larger structural and systemic economic forces such as the toxic influence of the National Rifle Association, U.S. arms exports, and lax gun laws.
"Dead zones" of imaginationIt means illustrating with great care and detail how violence is reproduced and legitimized through mass illiteracy and the dead zones of the imagination.
It means moving away from analyzing violence as an abstraction by showing how it actually manifests itself in everyday life to inflict massive human suffering and despair.
The American public needs a new understanding of how civic institutions collapse under the force of state violence, how language coarsens in the service of carnage, how a culture hardens in a market society so as to foster contempt for compassion while exalting a culture of cruelty.
How does neoliberal capitalism work to spread the celebration of violence through its commanding cultural apparatuses and social media?
How does war culture come to dominate civic life and become the most honoured ideal in American society?
Unless Americans can begin to address these issues as part of a broader discourse committed to resisting the growing authoritarianism in the United States, the plague of mass violence will continue -- and the once-shining promise of American democracy will become nothing more than a relic of history.
A version of this analysis was originally published on Moyers & Company.
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