The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux

allows the members of that group to be dehumanized. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.146

      What is often labeled as an economic crisis in American society is also a crisis of morality, of sociality, and of community. Since the 1970s, increasingly unregulated capitalism has hardened into a form of market fundamentalism that has accelerated the hollowing out of democracy through its capacity to reshape the commanding institutions of American society, making it vulnerable to the fascist solutions proposed by Trump. As an integrated system of structures, ideologies, and values, neoliberalism economizes every aspect of life, separates economic activity from social costs, and depoliticizes the public through corporate-controlled disimagination machines that trade in post-truth narratives, enshrine the spectacle of violence, debase language, and distort history. Neoliberalism now wages a battle against any viable notion of the social, solidarity, the collective imagination, the public good, and the institutions that support them. Wendy Brown rightly insists that democracy comes in many forms and does not offer any political guarantees, but without it, there is no acceptable future. She writes:

      Without it, however, we lose the language and frame by which we are accountable to the present and entitled to make our own future, the language and frame with which we might contest the forces otherwise claiming that future.147

      The Crisis of Reason and Fantasies of Freedom

      As more and more power is concentrated in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, freedom is defined exclusively in market terms; inequality is cast as a virtue, and the logic of privatization heaps contempt upon civic compassion and the welfare state. The fatal after-

      effect is that neoliberalism has emerged as the new face of fascism.148 With the 50 year advance of neoliberalism, freedom has become its opposite, a parody of its true meaning. Moreover, democracy — once the arc of civic freedom — now becomes its enemy since democratic governance no longer takes priority over the unchecked workings of the market. Neoliberalism undermines both social ties and the public good and, in doing so, weakens the idea of shared responsibilities and moral obligations. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, “ethical tranquillization” is now normalized under the assumption that freedom is limited to the right to only advance one’s own interests and the interests of the markets.149 Freedom in the neoliberal playbook disavows any notion of responsibility outside of the responsibility to oneself.

      As Wendy Brown makes clear, democracy is now viewed as the enemy of markets and “politics is cast as the enemy to freedom, to order, and to progress.”150 Politics now becomes a mix of regressive notions of freedom and authority whose purpose is to protect market-driven principles and practices. What disappears in this all-encompassing reach of capital is the notion of civic freedom, which is replaced by securitization organized to protect the lawless workings of the profit motive and the savagery of neoliberal austerity policies. Moreover, as freedom becomes privatized, it feeds a lack of interest in politics and breeds moral indifference. Democratic passions are directed towards private pleasures, the demands of citizenship are undermined, and the public sphere withers as self-interest becomes one of the primary organizing principle of society. Under neoliberalism, the spheres of intimacy and interpersonal relations begin to disappear and are replaced by an ideological and economic system that constructs individuals as objects of capital within a system of harsh competitive relations and commercial exchange. As it becomes more difficult for people to think critically, the market provides them with a consumerist model that both infantilizes and depoliticizes people. As the terrain of politics, agency, and social relations loses its moral bearings, the passions of a fascist past are unleashed and society increasingly begins to resemble a war culture, blood sport and form of cage fighting.

      In this instance, the oppressed are not only cheated out of history, they are led to believe that under neoliberal fascism there are no alternatives and that the future can only imitate the present. Not only does this position suppress any sense of responsibility and resistance, it produces what Timothy Snyder calls “a kind of sleepwalking, and has to end with a crash.”151 The latter is reinforced by a government that believes that the truth is dangerous and that reality begins with a tweet that signals both the legitimation of endless lies and forms of power that infantilize and depoliticize because they leave no room for standards of language capable of holding power accountable. Even worse, Trump’s war on language and truth does more than limit freedom to competing fictions, it also erases the distinction between moral depravity and justice, good and evil. As I have said elsewhere, “Trump’s Ministry of Fake News works incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable, claiming that reason, evidence, consistency, and logic no longer serve the truth because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. ‘Thought crimes’ are now labeled as ‘fake news.’”152

      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 spectacle.”153 More startling is the assumption that in an age of deep divisions, exploitation, and precarity what matters is not only whether something is true or false but also the willingness of people to identify with the seductive lure of a consistent fascist narrative in which people willingly suspend “their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.”154 Hannah Arendt rightly argued that “what was new and dangerous to the American republic was not lying, but a situation in which lies had become indistinguishable from the truth.”155 Needless to say, there is more at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified as the theatricalization of politics, there is also the threat to democracy itself.