Hannah Arendt rightly declared that we are living in ‘dark times’ when there is a need to emphasise the value of education to the world that we engineer for future generations. “Education,” she said, “is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
It is in this context that Henry Giroux’s recent book America at War with Itself can be seen as a diatribe against the decline in cultural values in the U.S. and particularly the demise of revolutionary pedagogies that might give impetus to radicalism endangering the status quo. The sharp shift in American culture is apparently more towards abusive forms of power visible in predatory capitalism, citizen surveillance, domestic violence, gun-massacres by school children, and a deeply post-truth scenario of true lies and misrepresentation.
Timely critique
Giroux stands up against this toxic social environment with its all-pervasive authoritarianism, bellicose nationalism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism that has engulfed America.
The survival of American democracy, therefore, depends on the understanding and critique of the political and cultural dynamics of a state and the structural formations that have fashioned a public responsible for bringing an ultra-nationalist, a morbid misogynist and a rabid racist to the White House. The book couldn’t be more timely especially in the prevailing volatile environment of hate-mongering.
Out of this development arises the will to change with the emphasis that revolutions have always been the sine qua non of historical transformation. Change is the sustenance of a society which does not allow the spark of revolution to be extinguished. Giroux, the public intellectual, is optimist enough to give a legitimacy to debate and free speech, something that the education system in the country is bent upon destroying.
There is a deep sense of fear that haunts American society which seems to have lost its historical or mythical consciousness. And probably, that is the reason it finds itself in the quagmire of Trumpism, an upheaval that will gradually throw up enough opposition to the right-wing world of authoritarianism. Periods in history undoubtedly bring us to such dark junctures when the world accepts the post-truth scenario that prevails upon the public to accept the discourse of the elites with its subterranean agendas of power and profit.
It is at such moments that the dialectics of history counter the unilateral right-wing ideology, spurring socialists like Bernie Sanders to retard the American war against itself.
Though it seems that the possibility of a democratic state does not exist under the present circumstances, Giroux does lay out his plan for a more justifiable future of cohesion, freedom and social welfare to fight off the right-wing movement that is more emboldened and brazen than ever before.
He comes to grips with the impending threat to American society, spelling out a strategy to counter the decline and fall of the most powerful nation in the world.
Seeking solutions
A broad and emphatic answer to this threat is possible only if America reinvents its democratic institutions investing them with the necessary features of civil rights, common good of all and hope in the resistance to the authoritarian corporate mindset of self-serving politics.
The renovation of its education system could be another means of infusing a sense of legitimacy to the critique of the existing electoral politics that we have been witness to. To control education is to ensure the end of ideology.
The withering of democracy, the criminalisation of civil society, the corporate impunity and the passion for incarceration are some of the issues that he censures. And more than directing his anger at the ‘dark times’ that the nation is passing through, he denounces the ignorant masses swept by delusion and deception at the hands of a very ‘toxic’ dominant system: “The call for gun rights conveniently side steps and ignores criticising a popular culture and corporate controlled media which uses violence to attract viewers, increase television ratings, produce Hollywood blockbusters, and sell video games that celebrate first-person shooters.... Such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalise violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues.”
The book is a provocative challenge to the existing fundamentalisms that define the fascist politics and culture of the contemporary nightmare of history when the rise of Trump becomes a sign of the dismal fate of democracy where racism, patriarchy and class become the hallmarks of a dark age. “Trump is merely the symptom. He is the barometer of our current political, cultural and social climate.” To stand against this culture, Giroux suggests ‘insurrectional democracy’, found in social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the Occupy insurgency, community building, civic education and historical memory.
His agenda is indeed a robust and insightful response to the ongoing onslaught on democratic public spheres as experienced in the ‘violent cult of strong-arm masculinity’, a manifestation of a society at war with itself.
Shelley Walia is Former Professor at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, and presently, Fellow at Panjab University, Chandigarh.
