Normalizing Violence In the Age of Authoritarian Politics
[Graphic: Confirmation Bias, Bennett via José Luis Ferreira]
By: Henry A. Giroux
Source: The Spectator
Further, we are not at the end of where those pushing this agenda plan (or want) to go. Trump, his advisers, and the GOP in general are still pushing the theory of the unitary executive as a valid, legal model of the presidency. I wrote daily extensively on this in 2006, and republished it in 2018. Here is a brief quote from that article:
This theory argues that the executive branch of government, held in the hands of the President, has the sole right to ignore all law (including the Constitution and international agreements), and without oversight by Congress, or checks by the Supreme Court. In short, the President is above the law and has all the authority of government, and the right to order without challenge all branches of government. This includes the ordering of the U.S. military into war without authorization by Congress. In short, the “unitary executive,” as vested in the person of the President, is a king, an emperor, or a dictator. It represents one individual with total control of the full resources of the United States to take any action Bush sees fit.
Too many people are accepting violence as an acceptable part of our political process, and language plays an important, multi-layered role in that acceptance. Trump, and those around him, are very good at playing into symbols, especially harkening to symbols of hate from earlier times. This is then married to religious symbology which helps reify the process. It has become okay to not edit our speech and to act out verbally and physically. Sometimes that acting out is at specific targets, and at other times it is at anyone who happens to be in the way. A short trip across town, whether driving or by bus, will most likely allow us to observe or experience at least one person acting out violently. The violence has become personalized and is considered personally and politically acceptable. This is dangerous for us normalization may well lead to institutionalization. One current example is Trump’s (and now his Lawyers’) verbal attacks on the court and court staff. Any other person would be in jail at this time, but Trump has been cautioned multiple times and had to pay a couple of (for him) chump change fines. Meanwhile, it makes it seem that threatening and intimidating even people whom we’ve been taught to treat with decorum, is acceptable. In this case, it also calls into question the authority of law in general.
Henry A. Giroux
Violence has become the midwife of political power in U.S. politics and a valued currency of social change.
Trump and his followers now inundate American culture with false claims about a stolen presidential election and flood society with a rhetoric of fear, intimidation and violence. As novelist and civil rights activist Toni Morrison pointed out in her Nobel Prize-winning speech, the rhetoric of violence is a dead language, though it often results in lethal consequences. It is a language that “actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential … it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.” This is a discourse that emerges from living corpses whose mouths are filled with blood.
We have seen this language grow in intensity. It is the language of nativism, bigotry and hatred. Within the last few years, the rhetoric of violence has intensified and is no longer hidden. It is now boldly displayed on social media, in protests against transgender people and attacks against people of colour. In Canada, the rhetoric of violence, bigotry and toxic self-interest was recently displayed in the “freedom convoy” movement and in the rise of neo-fascist groups. As Fae Johnstone observes, it has surfaced in “protests targeting drag events, rhetoric equating trans people to pedophiles, and so on. From 2020 to 2021, we saw a 64 percent increase in hate-motivated violence targeting queer communities.”
The language of violence is on full display in the United States. For instance, with four indictments hanging over his head, Trump has called for the shooting of shoplifters, suggested migrants crossing the southern border should be shot, and stated that Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves to be executed. His language turned particularly violent when recently in the National Post he stated “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.” This same language was used by Hitler and the words “poison” and “blood” were used to spread the toxic rhetoric of racial purity that legitimized the extermination of Jews and the concentration camps.
Trump’s embrace of lies and violence has produced an unrelenting series of shocks to the body politic and its democratic ideals. Violence that was once considered inconceivable and relegated to the margins of society now passes for normal. As Trump’s violent rhetoric accelerates, physical acts of violence permeate into everyday life, affecting everyone from journalists and school board officials to election workers and librarians.
While the culture of violence in Canada does not match its full-blown normalization in the United States, such rhetoric does more than pour fuel on the fire of extremism; it also wages war on democracy — an issue Canadians must take seriously. As the language of democracy is hollowed out by the cult of authoritarianism, we are witnessing the inexorable force of a history ripe with mass anxiety and unimagined catastrophe, produced by an authoritarian politics governed by lies, the appeal to violence and a perpetual fear and crisis machine. If Canadians cannot grasp that such a history is with us once again, the struggle to resist will wither and the seeds of authoritarianism will bury existing democracies, including our own, with ashes.
Those with mouths full of blood will usher in a history filled with the smell of genocidal violence, suffering and death. Under such circumstances, it is crucial for Canadians to be attentive to the need for a language that rejects an era of foreclosed hope and condemns the rhetoric of fear and violence that contains the present in the nightmarish shadow of an authoritarian past. The times in which we live are too dangerous for us to give up on civic courage, critical education, compassion, social responsibility and a vision of a society that is never just enough.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury 2023). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com