What terrifies me the most about the current state of affairs in the United States is not necessarily the fact that corporatist cartels and their billionaires' funders are working diligently to usurp democracy, to kill it all together, and supplant it with a brutally dystopian corporate state hegemony, but what appears to be a willful embrace of ignorance, a weird collective amnesia. And that sadly includes a very large segment of the so-called liberal establishment.
And if it wasn't bad enough, the discourse often veers into the infantile, the absurd, in a kind of sports-like team mentality that fails to address the fundamental problems with the system.
During the last few decades the country has been steadily taking a proto-fascist turn as the result of the levers of governmental power having been captured by billionaires and their corporatist cartels.
As this process has been unfolding throughout the years, those who have tried to sound sound the alarm have been promptly marginalized, their voices muted, overtaken by the best propaganda money can buy.
At some level, I guess one must give regular folks who barely have time to do what it takes to survive in an increasingly brutal, oppressive, regressive, and unjust economic system, a pass on not having the time to sit around the kitchen table to figure out (through critical thinking) how the system if fucking them. But what is truly unpardonable, insidious, is the the treason of the liberal elite, who knowing the true nature of the system, choose to lie and obfuscate, to protect their interests.
This latest manufactured crisis, this drama in the truest sense of the word, regarding the government shutdown and the possible default, once again provides fodder to those who benefit from explaining everything from a political/partisan prism.
And it is a perfect situation since it has all the components of the typical "Shock Doctrine" approach that has been used to move the country towards fascism. There is fear, a sense of crisis, an evil villain (the Tea Party, Ted Cruz, et al), and 24/7 media propaganda.
What has been a steady imposition on the population of painful "austerity" measures, and the defunding and undermining of the public sector by adherents of the Neoliberal economic philosophy, is obscured (camouflaged) by a steady stream of manufactured crises that seem to be pushing the envelope, taking us to the brink of disaster.
In this ongoing (and tiresome) Kabuki Theater (of the absurd), you'll notice that in the aftermath of every "crisis" somehow more power and wealth has been transferred to the ruling class. That our rights continue to be eroded; that the legal framework of oppression continues to take shape as we move towards corporate-led fascism.
Here's how Henry A Giroux, distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University, describes the current state of affairs in the Truthout article titled "The Ghost of Authoritarianism in the Age of the Shutdown:"
The American political, cultural, and economic landscape is inhabited by the renewed return of authoritarianism evident in the ideologies of religious and secular certainty that legitimate the reign of economic Darwinism, the unchecked power of capital, the culture of fear and the expanding national security state. The ghosts of fascism also are evident in what Charles Derber and Yale Magress call elements of "the Weimer Syndrome," which include a severe and seemingly unresolvable economic crisis, liberals and moderate parties too weak to address the intensifying political and economic crises, the rise of far-right populist groups such as the Tea Party and white militia, and the emergence of the Christian Right, with its racist, anti-intellectual and fundamentalist ideology.5 The underpinnings of fascism are also evident in the reign of foreign and domestic terrorism that bears down on the so called enemies of the state (whistleblowers and nonviolent youthful protesters) and on those abroad who challenge America's imperial mission; it is also visible in a growing pervasive surveillance system buttressed by the belief that everyone is a potential enemy of the state and should be rightfully subject to diverse and massive assaults on rights to privacy and assembly. 6
The return to authoritarianism can also be seen in the pervasive and racist war on youths, whether one points to a generation of young people saddled with unspeakable debt, poverty and unemployment, or the ongoing criminalization of behaviors that either represent trivial infractions, such as violating a dress code, or more serious forms of terrorism, such as incarcerating increasing numbers of low-income whites and poor minority youths. Americans live at a time when the history of those who have been cheated, murdered or excluded is being destroyed. Eliminated from this history are the collective narratives of struggle, resistance and rebellion against various forms of authoritarianism. We live in a time in which the politics of the moral coma is alive and well and is most visible in the ways in which the rise of the new extremism in the United States is being ignored. The repudiation of intellectual responsibility confirms what Leo Lowenthal once called the "regression to sheer Darwinism - or perhaps one should say infantilism," along with any sense of moral accountability toward others or the common good.7 The government shutdown offers a clear case of a kind of historical and social amnesia and a rare glimpse of the parameters of the new authoritarianism.
The emphasis is mine
And speaking of infantilism, this rejection of intellectual responsibility renders people incapable of of understanding the true nature of the system as a whole, preferring instead to view things through the prism of narrow-minded partisanship only.
This kind of willful myopia then leads some people to follow the "my-party-and-my-leader-right-or-wrong" dishonest and intellectually-devoid approach, instead of being willing to speak truth to power, to stand up against wrongdoing, embracing the actual principles of democracy.
The hijacking of democracy by extremists in and outside of the government appears completely disassociated from the needs of the American people, and as such the instruments of dominant politics, power and influence appear unaccountable. And unaccountability is the stuff of political tyrants, not simply religious fanatics or market fundamentalists; it has been a long time in the making and has been fed by a relentless culture of fear, warfare, greed, inequality, unbridled power formations, the destruction of civil liberties and a virulent racism that has a long history in the United States and has gone into overdrive since the 1980s, reaching its authoritarian tipping point after the tragedy of 9/11. 22
Obama may not be responsible for the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis, but he can be charged with furthering a climate of lawlessness that feeds the authoritarian culture supportive of a range of political, economic and cultural interests. The American anti-war activist Fred Branfman argues that:
Under Mr. Obama, America is still far from being a classic police-state of course. But no President has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police-state. This infrastructure will clearly pose a serious danger to democratic ideals should there be more 9/11s, and/or increased domestic unrest due to economic decline and growing inequality, and/or massive global disruption due to climate change. 23
Finally, as we continue what seems to be our inexorable march towards fascism, it is this unwillingness to speak truth to power based on what I consider to be intellectually dishonest hyper-partisanship, that contribute the most to what
Mr. Giroux calls a "kind of historical and social amnesia."
As citizens, if we are to uphold the democratic principles we claim to embrace, our first duty must always be to the truth, to justice, to the Constitution, and to the rule of law, and then to the Party.
For if our membership in the Party is not based on the principles for which democracy is supposed to stand, then what are we doing?
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