Neoliberal Fascism

Henry Giroux:

Timothy Snyder is right in arguing that “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is a spectacle.” The post-truth society is a state-sponsored diversion and spectacle. Its purpose is to camouflage a moral and political crisis that has put into play a set of brutal neoliberal arrangements.

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Rather than disappear into the memory hole of history, fascism has reappeared in a different form in the United States echoing Theodor Adorno’s warning “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.” Theorists, novelists, historians, and writers that include such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, Sinclair Lewis, Bertram Gross, Umberto Eco, Robert O’Paxton, Timothy Snyder, Susan Sontag, and Sheldon Wolin have argued convincingly that fascism remains an ongoing danger and can become relevant under new conditions. In the aftermath of the fall of Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarianism was far from a thing of the past because the conditions of extreme precarity and uncertainty that produce it were likely to crystallize into new forms.

What Arendt thought was crucial for each generation to recognize was that presence of the Nazi camps and the policy of extermination should be understood not only as the logical outcome of a totalitarian society or merely a return of the past but also for what their histories suggest about forecasting a “possible model for the future.”

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What is under siege in the present moment is the critical need to keep watch over the repressed narratives of memory work. The fight against a fascist erasure of history must begin with an acute understanding that memory always makes a demand upon the present, refusing to accept ignorance as innocence.

… monstrous deeds are committed under the increasing normalization of civic and historical modes of illiteracy. One consequence is that comparisons to the Nazi past can whither in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books. In an age marked by a war on terror, a culture of fear, and the normalization of uncertainty, social amnesia has become a powerful tool for dismantling democracy. Indeed, in this age of forgetfulness, American society appears to revel in what it should be ashamed of and alarmed over.