The Age of Gangster Capitalism

And then I grab 'em by the...

American public intellectual and McMaster prof, Henry Giroux, writes of how Trump is dismembering American democracy to clear the way for a fascist, gangster state.


Just one year into the Donald Trump presidency, not only have the failures of American democracy become clear, but many of the darkest elements of its history have been catapulted to the center of power. A dystopian ideology, a kind of nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian relations of power, now shapes and legitimates a mode of governance that generates obscene levels of inequality, expands the ranks of corrupt legislators, places white supremacists and zealous ideologues in positions of power, threatens to jail its opponents, and sanctions an expanding network of state violence both at home and abroad.

Trump has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people. He uses the power of the presidency to peddle misinformation, erode any sense of shared citizenship, ridicule critical media and celebrate right-wing “disimagination machines” such as Fox News and Breitbart News. Under his “brand of reality TV politics,” lying has become normalized, truthfulness is viewed as a liability, ignorance is propagated at the highest levels of government and the corporate controlled media, and fear-soaked cyclones of distraction and destruction immunize the American public to the cost of human suffering and misery.

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As Hannah Arendt argues in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the erasure of truth, facts and standards of reference furthers the collapse of democratic institutions because it is “easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which have become pious banalities. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it the worst … and [is] easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life.”

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Trump’s authoritarianism cuts deeply into the fabric of both government and everyday politics in the United States. For example, despicable and morally reprehensible acts of collaboration with an emergent authoritarianism have created a Republican Party that echoes an eerie resemblance to similar flights of moral and political corruption that characterized the cowardly politicians in power in Vichy France during World War II.

Former conservative talk-show host Charles Sykes is right to argue that members of the current Republican Party are “collaborators and enablers” and as such are Vichy Republicans who are willingly engaged in a Faustian bargain with an incipient authoritarianism. Corrupted by power and willing to turn a blind eye to corruption, stupidity, barbarism and the growing savagery of the Trump administration, Republicans have surrendered to Trump’s authoritarian ideology, economic fundamentalism, support for religious orthodoxy and increasingly cruel and mean-spirited policies, which “meant accepting the unacceptable [all the while reasoning] it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare.”

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Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that enables him to delight in taunting black athletes, defending neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Reichian psycho-politics, with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive against a culture of rancid racism, “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.”

In an age of almost unparalleled extremism, violence and cruelty, authoritarianism is gaining ground, rapidly creating a society in which shared fears and unchecked hatred have become the organizing forces for community. Under the Trump regime, dissent is disparaged as a pathology or dismissed as fake news, while even the slightest compassion for others becomes an object of disdain and subject to policies that increase the immiseration, suffering and misery of the most vulnerable.

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In the past, racist Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to cover over any naked expressions of their racism. This is no longer the case. Under Trump, both racist discourse and the underlying principles of white supremacy are both encouraged and emboldened. In the midst of the collapse of civil society and the public spheres that make a democracy possible, every line of decency is crossed, every principle of civility is violated, and more and more elements of justice are transformed into an injustice. Trump has become the blunt instrument and Twitter preacher for displaying a contempt for the truth, a critical citizenry, and democracy itself. He has anointed himself as the apostle of unchecked greed, unbridled narcissism and limitless militarism.

Wedded to both creating a culture of civic illiteracy and the plundering of the planet for both his own personal gain and that of his corporate cronies, Trump has done more than assault standards of truth, verification and evidence. He has opened the door to the dark cave of moral depravity, political corruption and a dangerous right-wing nationalist populism that, as Frank Rich observes, threatens to have “remarkable staying power” long after Trump is gone.

Gangster capitalism under Trump has reached a new stage, in that it is unabashedly aggressive in mounting a war against every institution capable of providing a vision, a semblance of critical agency or a formative culture capable of creating agents who might be willing to hold power accountable. The American public is witnessing a crisis not merely of politics but of history, vision and agency, or what Andrew O’Hehir more pointedly called the acts of a domestic terrorist. This is a politics of domesticated fear, manufactured illusions and atomizing effects. Trump is the product of a culture long in the making, one fueled by the triumph of finance capital, the legitimation of a rancid individualism and a crippling notion of freedom. In this age of precarity, infantilizing publicity machines and uncertainty, a sense of collective impotency and fear provides the breeding ground for isolation, the corporate state and the discourses of inscription, demonization and false communities.

God bless save America.