The Christian fascists and oligarchs gleefully handing Donald Trump his sharpie and executive orders are not making war on the deep state, the radical left or to protect us from “antisemites.” They are making war on verifiable fact, the rule of law and the transparency and accountability that is only possible with a free press, the right to dissent, a vibrant culture and a separation of powers, including an independent judiciary.
All of these pillars of an open society, as I detail in my book “Death of the Liberal Class,” were degraded long before Trump. The press, including public broadcasting, academia, the Democratic Party, a corporatized and banal culture, a judiciary that serves the billionaire class and a Congress bought by lobbyists, have been disemboweled. They are easily picked off. Few want to rise up to defend them. They sold us out. Let them die.
“The loss of the liberal class creates a power vacuum filled by speculators, war profiteers, gangsters, and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues,” I wrote in “Death of the Liberal Class” in 2010. “It opens the door to totalitarian movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class and the values it claims to champion. The promises of these totalitarian movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.”
Fascism is birthed by a bankrupt liberalism that has surrendered its traditional role in a capitalist democracy. It no longer ameliorates the worst excesses of the ruling class and the empire by instituting incremental and piecemeal reforms. It scolds and moralizes the disenfranchised workers it betrayed.
Media outlets prioritize access to the powerful more than truth. They amplified lies and propaganda to propel us into a war on Iraq. They lionized Wall Street and assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Life savings were gutted. They fed us the lies of Russiagate. They slavishly cater to the Israel lobby, distorting coverage of the genocide and university protests to demonize Palestinians, Muslims and student protestors. They dance to the tune of their corporate advertisers and sponsors. They render whole sections of the population, whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism, invisible.
Universities have transformed into corporations. Senior administrators, who often have a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree, with little or no experience in higher education, along with sports coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated with salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with prized coaches and college presidents earning in the millions.
A little more than 10 percent of faculty positions are now tenure-track. Nearly 45 percent are contingent part-time employees or adjuncts. One in five are full-time, non-tenure-track positions. Universities, by radically reducing tenure-track and adequately paid positions, have become extensions of the gig economy. Adjunct professors and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid, take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa.
A poorly paid faculty that lacks job security does not raise issues that challenge the dominant narrative, whether about social inequality, predatory corporations, the crimes of empire, Israeli genocide or our state of permanent war. If they do, they are dismissed. Senior university administrators, meanwhile, are awarded bonuses for “reducing expenses,” by raising tuition and fees, cutting staff and suppressing wages. This instability assures wealthy donors that the neoliberal ideology that is ravaging the country, along with enabling the genocide in Gaza, will not be questioned by academics fearful of losing their positions. The rich and the powerful are lauded. The working poor, including those employed by the university, are forgotten.
As Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay “This Age of Conformity,” the “idea of the intellectual vocation —the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization — has gradually lost its allure. And it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe writes, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising, and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.”
“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals — the new realists — who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe noted. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.”
The two ruling parties sold the con of neoliberalism to deindustrialize the country, impose punishing austerity, eradicate the freedoms to organize and gut regulations to protect the public from exploitation. They empowered corporations to pillage and consolidate their wealth and power, giving rise to monopoly capitalism and some of the greatest levels of income inequality and wealth inequality in American history. The banks, communications, oil, weapons, agricultural and food industries guarantee profits by fixing prices, skirting or even abolishing financial, health and environmental protections, and abusing their workers. This assault on New Deal regulations, soon to be entirely obliterated under Trump, disenfranchised the working class that in desperation voted in a demagogue to save them.
As funding for the arts dried up, artists, like public broadcasting which was designed to give a voice to those not tethered to corporate interests, were left searching for grants and corporate sponsors. The result was a withering away of artistic and journalistic integrity.
Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans.
Culture in a functioning democracy is radical and transformative. It expresses what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery.
“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
The war on independent intellectual inquiry, art and culture is done to prevent us from looking into the pit, from making the world a more “human dwelling place.” The “burnt people” have been silenced or marginalized. Some 16,000 books were banned in schools and libraries before Trump took office, bans that are accelerating as more books are purged. Culture in authoritarian states celebrates an idealized past that never existed and a present that is self-delusional.
Mass culture feeds the human thirst for illusion, excitement, happiness and hope. It peddles a blind patriotism and the myth of eternal material progress. It urges us to build images of celebrities or ourselves to worship, especially on social media. The result has been a cultural decay whose apotheosis will be Trump’s Garden of Heroes and the lavish Christmas pageant being planned this winter at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Politicians from the two ruling parties are funded by the dark money provided by billionaires and corporations. These politicians, in our system of legalized bribery, do the bidding of their owners in Congress. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this form of government “inverted totalitarianism.” Inverted totalitarianism retains the institutions, symbols, iconography, and language of the old capitalist democracy, but internally corporations have seized all the levers of power to accrue ever greater profits and political control. It uses the international legal system to plunder resources in the developing world, including the overthrow of governments that challenge corporate dominance. It prioritizes profit over justice. It weakens labor laws and eviscerates workers’ protections and rights.
The dynamiting by the Trump administration of these decayed and corrupt institutions will mark the end of the American experiment and the shift from inverted totalitarianism to dictatorship. It will usher in a corporate dystopia, which will resemble, albeit in a much crueler form, China’s totalitarian capitalism with its pervasive state surveillance, draconian censorship, unelected and unaccountable ruling class and the crushing of popular movements including labor unions. We will descend into the world of magical thinking that is the hallmark of all despotisms, one where the language we use to describe ourselves and our society bears no relationship to reality.
It is imperative to the authoritarian project that all independent institutions, no matter how weakened or decayed, be neutered. Trump, Axios reports, has been “lashing out” at “fake polls” showing his sinking approval ratings and calling for the news outlets that publish them to be “investigated for election fraud.” This is the sentiment of all dictators. Ban inconvenient facts. Once these institutions are silenced or captured, the cracks in the old edifice that allowed a muted dissent will be sealed. Fear will be the glue of social cohesion. Tepid criticism will be criminalized. Internal security, immigration enforcement and the military will be lavishly funded, creating Trump’s own version of an unaccountable deep state, while social programs will be defunded or shuttered.
Central to this project will be the great leader cult. The abject servility towards the great leader was on display at Trump’s celebration of his first 100 days with his cabinet, all of whom had navy blue and red baseball caps in front of them bearing the message “Gulf of America.” Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a typical display of sycophancy at the meeting, gushed: “Mr. President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever, ever. [I’ve] never seen anything like it, thank you.”
Trump will get his birthday military parade, his two 100-foot high flag poles on the White House lawns, and perhaps, if the proposed bills in Congress pass, his face carved on Mount Rushmore, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He will see his birthday become a federal holiday, his face on new $250 bills and Washington’s Dulles International Airport renamed Donald J. Trump International Airport. He will build his National Garden of American Heroes. And of course, he will get the overturning of the 22nd Amendment to allow him to serve a third term. President-for-life.
“Children will be taught to love America,” the Svengali-like Stephen Miller intoned. “Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”
Trump’s vipers are snuffing out what is left of our open society, putting the finishing touches on the dirty work begun by billionaires and corporations. This is the end of a process. Not the start. Trump had a lot of help.
There is a word for those who did this to us.
Traitors.