By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout — The right is seeking to steal elections and deputizing vigilantes to constrain our rights. U.S. democracy is in peril.
ibw21.org
"Alarming echoes of the past have long been evident in a Republican Party that supports Trump’s description of undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border as “animals, “rapists” and “vermin.” They were silent (if not overtly supportive) when he disparaged Black athletes, claimed that all Haitians have AIDS, and repeatedly used the
language of white nationalism and white supremacy as a badge of identity and as a tool to mobilize his supporters. It is worth remembering that in a different historical context, Adolf Hitler spoke of Jews, LGBTQ people and political opponents in the same terms. In both historical and contemporary cases, demagogues created a cultural politics and discourse that allowed people to think the unthinkable. In the current era of militarized hate, bigotry and white nationalism, the conditions that have produced fascism in the past are with us once again, proving, as
Primo Levi noted, that, “Every age has its own fascism.” Again, Gilroy gets it right in
stating that there is a need to understand “Fascism as a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon.”
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In the face of the Republican Party’s attack on electoral integrity, judicial independence, critical education and voter rights, coupled with its unabashed defense of corruption, white nationalism and support for oligarchs such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the U.S. has become more closely aligned with the nightmare of fascism. As language is stripped of any substantive meaning, and reason is undermined by conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation produced by the right’s disimagination machine, the ideological and institutional guardrails designed to protect democracy begin to collapse.
Fascism today once again wears boldly and shamelessly the trappings of white supremacy. As neoliberalism disconnects itself from any democratic values and resorts to blaming the victim, it easily bonds with the poison of white supremacy in order to divert attention from its own economic and political failures. Instead of appealing to a free-market utopia which has lost its legitimacy due to its ruthless policies of austerity, deregulation, destruction of the welfare state, galloping immiseration and scorn for any vestige of government responsibility, neoliberalism now joins hands with a fascist politics. In this discourse, it blames all social problems, including the
absurd claim that white people are victims of racism, on people of color, anti-racist discourse, progressive social movements and almost any source capable of holding power accountable."
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