The Violence of Organized Forgetting. Henry A. Giroux

argument that both parties are to blame for the current deadlock lies a Republican Party strategy to make the federal government look as dysfunctional as possible so as to convince the wider American public that the government should be dismantled and its services turned over to for-profit private interests. In fact, a number of recent critics now believe that the extremist nature of the current Republican Party represents one of the most difficult obstacles to any viable form of governance. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, two prominent conservative commentators, have recently argued that not only have moderates been pushed out of the Republican Party, but they are for all intents and purposes “virtually extinct.” Mann and Ornstein go even further by stating:

      In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.⁹

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has further emphasized the dire effects of extremist politics on democracy, describing the Republican Party’s “corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous.” He states that Americans are “now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy; noxious, thieving and tyrannical.” With the most corporate-friendly Supreme Court since the Gilded Age having passed the Citizens United decision, “those who have the money now have the loudest voices in our democracy while poor Americans are mute.”¹⁰

      In addition, a tradition of progressive intellectuals has long alerted the public to the decades-long transformation of the United States from a weak democracy to a spirited authoritarian state. Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Chris Hedges, Angela Davis, Sheldon Wolin, Stanley Aronowitz, Robert Scheer, Robin D. G. Kelley, Matt Taibbi, Susan George, and David Theo Goldberg, among others, have challenged the permanent war economy, the erosion of civil liberties, the moral bankruptcy of the liberal intelligentsia, the corporate control of the media, the criminal wars of repression abroad, the rise of the torture state, and the increasing militarization of everyday life.