Terror of the unforeseen
https://truthout.org/articles/henry...ns&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=mashshare
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What we need to understand is that neoliberalism does a couple of things that set the groundwork for a fascist politics. But behind all of that, there is a comment that Horkheimer mentioned once, and which always sticks in my mind. He said that if you can’t talk about capitalism, you can’t talk about fascism. I think that we have to keep that in the background.
But what neoliberalism has done since the 1970s is it has created such economic misery, it has so accentuated levels of inequality, it has created such suffering, it has dismantled entire towns, it has concentrated wealth in the hands of the financial elite, and it has legitimated an enormous culture of cruelty. And it operates off the assumption that the market can solve all problems — not simply in the economy, but in all of social life — so it becomes a template and a model for all social relations. In doing so, it is at odds with any notion of the welfare state, any notion of labor unions, any notion of workers’ rights, and any notion of economic rights. It privatizes, deregulates, and commodifies everything. It sets up a series of competitive attitudes that degrades collaboration. It highlights self-interest at the expense of modes of solidarity. It so accentuates matters of inequitable relations in wealth and power that you have an enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the financial elite, and this is enacted by all kinds of policies that undermine the foundations of a democracy — all of its basic institutions, from the press, to public goods such as schools and media, to politics itself.
Money drives politics. We all know that now. But the other side of this is that it’s not just an economic system, it’s also an ideological system. As an ideological system, what it generally does is three things that are pernicious and which set the groundwork for a kind of right-wing populism and a fascist politics. First, it operates off the assumption that all social problems are individual problems. Therefore whatever problems people face, the blame for those problems rests with themselves — whether we’re talking about ecological disasters, about poverty, about homelessness, about ignorance and illiteracy, and so forth and so on. Secondly, in doing so it tends to depoliticize people, and by depoliticizing them it becomes very difficult for people — operating under that notion of self-interest, a brutal form of competition, and this heightened notion of rugged individualism — to translate private troubles into larger systemic issues. Hence they find it very hard to understand the conditions in which they find themselves. Thirdly, it creates an enormous culture of ignorance. You have these cultural apparatuses like Fox News, conservative talk radio, and digital online platforms, that constantly pump out conspiracy theories, lies, and attacks on the truth as ‘fake news’.
This creates a level of ignorance in which ignorance is not innocent; ignorance actually becomes a form of depoliticization. People become very susceptible to simplistic answers, and they become very susceptible in their anger and their frustration to turning over their sense of agency to the strongman. They get wooed by appeals to ultra cultural sovereignty — shorthand for racism and nativism — and ultra cultural nationalism. They fall into the trap of believing in the friend/enemy divide.
And in the United States, now under Trump and prior to Trump, with the rise of fascist politics that’s been going on for a long time, the friend/enemy divide translates into a racial divide. It’s a divide that basically supports xenophobia and a politics of racial cleansing. It says that people at the border are the enemy, it says that blacks are the enemy, it says that women cannot have certain reproductive rights. And so with the anger coupled with the misery, you have a perfect storm between that and the appropriation of what I want to call white supremacy, white nationalism, and this despicable notion of racial cleansing.”
https://truthout.org/articles/henry...ns&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=mashshare
“
What we need to understand is that neoliberalism does a couple of things that set the groundwork for a fascist politics. But behind all of that, there is a comment that Horkheimer mentioned once, and which always sticks in my mind. He said that if you can’t talk about capitalism, you can’t talk about fascism. I think that we have to keep that in the background.
But what neoliberalism has done since the 1970s is it has created such economic misery, it has so accentuated levels of inequality, it has created such suffering, it has dismantled entire towns, it has concentrated wealth in the hands of the financial elite, and it has legitimated an enormous culture of cruelty. And it operates off the assumption that the market can solve all problems — not simply in the economy, but in all of social life — so it becomes a template and a model for all social relations. In doing so, it is at odds with any notion of the welfare state, any notion of labor unions, any notion of workers’ rights, and any notion of economic rights. It privatizes, deregulates, and commodifies everything. It sets up a series of competitive attitudes that degrades collaboration. It highlights self-interest at the expense of modes of solidarity. It so accentuates matters of inequitable relations in wealth and power that you have an enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the financial elite, and this is enacted by all kinds of policies that undermine the foundations of a democracy — all of its basic institutions, from the press, to public goods such as schools and media, to politics itself.
Money drives politics. We all know that now. But the other side of this is that it’s not just an economic system, it’s also an ideological system. As an ideological system, what it generally does is three things that are pernicious and which set the groundwork for a kind of right-wing populism and a fascist politics. First, it operates off the assumption that all social problems are individual problems. Therefore whatever problems people face, the blame for those problems rests with themselves — whether we’re talking about ecological disasters, about poverty, about homelessness, about ignorance and illiteracy, and so forth and so on. Secondly, in doing so it tends to depoliticize people, and by depoliticizing them it becomes very difficult for people — operating under that notion of self-interest, a brutal form of competition, and this heightened notion of rugged individualism — to translate private troubles into larger systemic issues. Hence they find it very hard to understand the conditions in which they find themselves. Thirdly, it creates an enormous culture of ignorance. You have these cultural apparatuses like Fox News, conservative talk radio, and digital online platforms, that constantly pump out conspiracy theories, lies, and attacks on the truth as ‘fake news’.
This creates a level of ignorance in which ignorance is not innocent; ignorance actually becomes a form of depoliticization. People become very susceptible to simplistic answers, and they become very susceptible in their anger and their frustration to turning over their sense of agency to the strongman. They get wooed by appeals to ultra cultural sovereignty — shorthand for racism and nativism — and ultra cultural nationalism. They fall into the trap of believing in the friend/enemy divide.
And in the United States, now under Trump and prior to Trump, with the rise of fascist politics that’s been going on for a long time, the friend/enemy divide translates into a racial divide. It’s a divide that basically supports xenophobia and a politics of racial cleansing. It says that people at the border are the enemy, it says that blacks are the enemy, it says that women cannot have certain reproductive rights. And so with the anger coupled with the misery, you have a perfect storm between that and the appropriation of what I want to call white supremacy, white nationalism, and this despicable notion of racial cleansing.”
