[Graphic: Trump Troops by Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune, UT (Reprinted with Permission)]

By: Henry A. Giroux
Source: Counterpunch

Henry A. Giroux

The election of Trump is more than a political event; it is an attempt to legitimize a brutal evolution of fascism in America. His rise is not accidental but symptomatic, emerging from the depths of collective fear, dread, and anxiety stoked by a savage form of gangster capitalism—neoliberalism—that thrives on division and despair. This climate, steeped in a culture of hate, misogyny, and racism, has given life to Trump’s authoritarian appeal, drowning out the warning signs of past and present tyranny.

While it’s clear that American society changed dramatically with Reagan’s election and the corrupt rise of the billionaire elite, we must also recognize how liberals and the Democratic Party, instead of resisting, aligned with Wall Street power brokers like Goldman Sachs. In doing so, they adopted elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class, intensified the class and racial divide, accelerated staggering levels of inequality, and intensified the long lacy of nativism,  all of which fed into the conditions for Trump’s appeal. Clinton’s racially charged criminalizing policies, Obama’s centrist neoliberalism and unyielding support for the financial elite, and Biden’s death-driven support for genocide in Gaza have contributed to a culture ripe for authoritarianism. In short, this groundwork didn’t just make Trump possible; it made him inevitable.

But perhaps one of the most overlooked failures of liberalism and Third Way democrats, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, about forgetting that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion. Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of civic education. Historical amnesia has always provided a cover for America’s long-standing racism, nativism, and disavowal of women’s rights. Capitalizing on far-right propaganda machines, Trump managed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, to convince millions of Americans that they “simply could not accept the idea of a non-White and female president.” Nor could they insert themselves in a history of collective struggle, resistance, and the fight for a better world. He also convinced the majority of Americans that it is okay to elect a white supremacist to be the President of the University.

Bernie Sanders rightly observes on X that “It comes as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Of course, the Democratic Party shares with mainstream media stenographers the fact that they have refused to forcefully acknowledge, as Sherrilyn Ifill points out, that not only the MAGA crowd but also “a majority of white Americans in fact have chosen to embrace white supremacy rather than the promise of a multi-racial democracy.”   Sanders’ comments only scratch the surface. The issue of abandonment and moral collapse also extends to the pedagogical realm: for decades, the right has wielded the educational force of culture to persuade white, Latino, and Black workers to turn their backs on their own interests, binding them to an authoritarian cult and white supremacist ideology that exploits their alienation and sabotages any sense of critical agency. Since the 1970s, galvanized by the Powell Memo, reactionary conservatives have grasped, far more than the left, the transformative power of ideas. They have weaponized culture to dismantle institutions that once nurtured critical thought, education, and resistance. Recognizing that reshaping public consciousness was essential to their agenda, they systematically eroded critical literacy, attacked public spaces, and transformed public and higher education from forces of liberation —turning them into either sites of repression and training or more disdainfully, full scale sites of indoctrination. This was no accident; it was a core part of their long-term strategy—to strip society of its capacity for dissent, molding a populace more easily controlled, more willingly complicit in its own subjugation.

Trump is the grim culmination of this cultural war against reason, truth, and critical thinking. Mass ignorance and civic illiteracy have become not mere byproducts but the very engines of a strategy to blind working people and those considered expendable to the economic injustices ravaging their lives. Rather than addressing these economic onslaughts, they are instead lured into a communal theater of hate and bigotry. This spectacle of manufactured ignorance and call for cult-like loyalty does more than cloud the mind; it becomes a political weapon, rendering the dispossessed both docile and divided. Neoliberal ideology intensifies this dynamic, imprisoning people in suffocating bubbles of self-interest and hyper-individualism. It wages a calculated assault on collective solidarity, designed to transform the public into isolated consumers, unable to envision a politics beyond their private lives or recognize that their true power lies in unity and critical consciousness. At the same time, it takes advantage of the anxiety and loneliness experience by the disposed to lure them into a false community of hatred and lawlessness. The need for solidary falls prey under Trump into the lure of what Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope called the swindle of fulfillment.

With no viable movement for meaningful social change in sight, Trump and his modern-day Brownshirts exploited the void left by a crisis of consciousness. Into this gap, they injected a corporate-controlled culture that shaped daily life with a culture steeped in hatred, fear, anxiety, and the force of endless fascist like spectacles. It is worth noting that such spectacles are chillingly reminiscent of Nuremberg in the 1930s, designed to stoke division and obedience, distracting the public from any path toward collective resistance or liberation. This carnival of divisiveness and dehumanizing rhetoric did more than destroy the nation’s civic and educational fabric, it produced a poisonous populist culture that changed the way most Americans view the past, present, and future.

If we are to confront this fascistic momentum, we must urgently return to the tools necessary to rebuild a mass consciousness as a precondition for a mass movement–one that can use the mobilization of mass consciousness, strikes and other forms of direct action to prevent this new fascist regime from governing. We need to stop this machinery of death from enacting the enormous suffering, misery,  violence, and power that gives it both a sense of pleasure and reason for enduring.

With Trump’s rise to power, American citizens have empowered a fascist agenda—one bent on enriching the ultra-wealthy, gutting the welfare state, deporting millions, and dismantling the very institutions that uphold accountability, critical thought, and democracy itself. These structures are not just formalities; they are the lifeblood of a radical, inclusive democracy and the safeguard for an informed citizenry. In this perilous moment, Seyla Benhabib, drawing on Adorno and Arendt, confronts us with a question of profound urgency: “What does it mean to go on thinking?” Her call to “learn to think anew” resounds with particular force as we grapple with the stark reality of Trump’s election.

We are now compelled to rethink the very foundations of culture, politics, power, struggle, and education. The stakes are clear. In mere weeks, as Will Bunch notes, a man who attempted to overturn an election—who espouses overt racism, embraces white supremacy, and boasts about his rancid misogyny, has pledged mass deportations, and threatens military force against political opponents—will once again assume power. This is a historical crossroads that demands a radical reevaluation of our democratic commitments and strategies for real social and economic change.

Chris Hedges aptly warns that “the American dream has become an American nightmare [and that] Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump embodies the cumulative effects of decades of moral and social corrosion. His presidency signals not a departure but an intensification of a deep-seated national crisis.

In this historical moment, we face an urgent challenge to confront and dismantle the forces entrenching fascist politics and authoritarian governance. Now is the moment to radically transform our approach to theory, education, and the liberatory power of learning—tools we must wield to build a robust, multi-racial working-class movement that is unapologetically anti-capitalist and unwaveringly democratic. We must relinquish the myth of American  exceptionalism and the dangerous illusion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The cost of inaction is dire: a future where democracy is not merely eroded but supplanted by a violent police state,—a betrayal soaked in blood, extinguishing the dream of a society committed to the promise and ideals of justice and equality.

The stakes could not be higher. We must confront this moment with uncompromising purpose, a blueprint for bold action, and an unyielding commitment to a radical democracy that defies fascist cruelty, bigotry, and the stranglehold of the financial elite at every step. Our future demands it, as does the vision of a society where justice, solidarity, and human dignity are not just ideals but realities—part of a future that defies the rising shadow of fascism threatening to consume us. We either fight to reclaim this promise, or we surrender to a darkness from which there is no return.

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, 2^nd 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