Giroux Henry A. - America at War with Itself

PRAISE FOR HENRY A. GIROUX AND
AMERICA AT WAR WITH ITSELF

This is the book Americans need to read now. No one is better than Henry Giroux at analyzing the truly dangerous threats to our society. He punctures our delusions and offers us a compelling and enlightened vision of a better way. America at War with Itself is the best book of the year.

Bob Herbert, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos and former columnist for the New York Times

In America at War with Itself, Henry Giroux again proves himself one of North Americas most clear-sighted radical philosophers of education, culture and politics: radical because he discards the chaff of liberal critique and cuts to the root of the ills that are withering democracy. Giroux also connects the dots of reckless greed, corporate impunity, poverty, mass incarceration, racism and the co-opting of education to crush critical thinking and promote a culture that denigrates and even criminalizes civil society and the public good. His latest work is the antidote to an alarming tide of toxic authoritarianism that threatens to engulf America. The book could not be more timely.

Olivia Ward, Toronto Star

The current U.S. descent into authoritarianism did not just happen. As Henry Giroux brilliantly shows, it was the result of public pedagogical work in a number of institutions that were part of a long-standing assault on public goods, the social contract, and democracy itself. Giroux powerfully skewers oppressive forces with the hallmark clarity and rigor that has made him one of the most important cultural critics and public intellectuals in North America. His sharp insights provide readers with the intellectual tools to challenge the tangle of fundamentalisms that characterize the political system, economy, and culture in the current conjuncture. America at War with Itself makes the case for real ideological and structural change at a time when the need and stakes could not be greater. Everyone who cares about the survival and revival of democracy needs to read this book.

Kenneth Saltman, author of
The Failure of Corporate School Reform

America at War with Itself

HENRY A. GIROUX

Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley

Open Media Series | City Lights Books

Copyright 2017 by Henry A. Giroux

Foreword copyright 2016 by Robin D. G. Kelley

All Rights Reserved

Open Media Series Editor: Greg Ruggiero

Early versions of appeared in

Social Identities and Monthly Review.

Library of Congress Data
on file

ISBN: 978-0-87286-732-1

eISBN: 978-0-87286-733-8

City Lights books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

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For Susan, Linda, and Dawn

Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism
Albert Camus

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Susan Searls Giroux has provided invaluable advice as I was thinking through various sections of this book. My administrative assistant, Maya Sabados, patiently read every page of this book and offered numerous insights and editorial suggestions. I want to thank Leila Gaind, my research assistant and student, for her initial edit of the manuscript. Colleagues are rare these days, but I do want to thank David Clark and Brad Evans for their reading of some of these chapters. Finally, I would like to thank Greg Ruggiero for accepting the manuscript and doing a terrific and meticulous job in editing the book. He has been invaluable to me as an editor and for the many conversations we have had about the book. He is a rarity among editors.

FOREWORD

WE HOLD THE FUTURE

I love the poorly educated.
Donald J. Trump

Once again, Henry A. Giroux slices through the thick fog of spectacle, mindless punditry, mountains of polling data, the smokescreen of corporate mediaall the bullshitand cuts to the point. These are indeed dark times, but they are dark not merely because we are living in an era of vast inequality, mass incarceration, and crass materialism, or that we face an increasingly precarious future. They are dark because most Americans are living under a cloak of ignorance, a cultivated and imposed state of civic illiteracy that has opened the gates for what Giroux correctly sees as an authoritarian turn in the United States. These are dark times because the very fate of democracy is at stakea democracy fragile from its birth, always battered on the shoals of racism, patriarchy, and class rule. The rise of Donald J. Trump is a sign of the times.

Before you start nodding your head, Giroux does not argue that Trump is the cancer and his removal from the body politic is the answer. Trump is merely the symptom; he is the barometer of our current political, cultural, and social climate. He defies the analyses of the so-called liberal pundits who either sound the alarm, insisting that Trump is dangerous and needs to be stopped, or dismiss him as the latest clown in the two-ring circus we call American politics. What we are facing is not a crisis of Republican implosion or political deform; this is not your MSNBC smug defense of the Democratic Partys sanity in the face of Republican insanity. Giroux harbors no such illusions: The spirit of authoritarianism cuts across both political parties. But as Giroux also notes, these same pundits sounding the alarm to Stop Trump do not insist that racism has to stop, foreign and domestic wars have to stop, the crimes of finance capital have to stop, policies that render most Americansespecially those of darker hueprecarious or disposable, have to stop.

Giroux is not interested in Trump the clown, Trump the narcissist, Trump the racist, or even Trump the con artist. Instead, he turns his critical sights on the society that produced and legitimized him. From his rabid and rapidly growing right-wing following to the channel surfers seeking a good chuckle to the liberal elite quick to dismiss The Donald with smug indifference, our country and its democracy is in steep decline. After all, this is the same society that holds 2.5 million in cages, most of whom are black and brown and poor; whose military budget is larger than that of China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the U.K., India, and Japan combined; where the killing of unarmed Black people by police, security guards, or vigilantes has become almost a daily occurrence; where the toxic mix of privatization, free-market ideology, and a punitive state has turned our schools into high-stakes testing grounds and human warehouses in which the administration of discipline has shifted from teachers and principals to the criminal justice system; where the War on Drugs, with zero tolerance policing, turns some neighborhoods into open-air prisons, strips vulnerable residents of equal protection, habeas corpus, freedom of movement, even protection from torture; and where, in states such as Michigan, local governance has been replaced by so-called Emergency Financial Managers whose primary objective is to privatize public resources and basic needs (e.g., water). And the band plays on... or, as Giroux so aptly puts it, we move from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting.

America at War With Itself demolishes the pedestrian (and dangerous) argument that Trump appeals to legitimate working-class populism driven by class anger. The claim that Trump followers are simply working-class whites expressing class resentment ignores both the historical link between whiteness, citizenship, and humanity, and also the American dream of wealth accumulation built on private property. Trumps people are not Levelers! (Nor are they universally working-classtheir annual median income clocks in at about $72,000.) They strongly believe in private property and the right to bear arms to protect that property. They dont just ignore Trumps wealth; they are enamored with it. They embrace the dream that if only America can be restored to its mythic greatnesswhich is to say, to return to its status as a white MANs country (as if it is not now)they, too, can become a Trump. But their racism, reinforced by civic illiteracy, has convinced them that it is the descendants of unfree labor or the colonized, or those who are currently unfree, who are blocking their ascent to the world of Trump and the billionare Koch brothers.