In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination.
A resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the present crisis, particularly the long tradition of racism, white supremacy, exceptionalism, war mongering, and the extended wars on youth, women, and immigrants.
Identifying Trump as a fascist is accurate, but not enough. What is necessary are analyses in which the seeds of totalitarianism are made visible in Trump’s discourse and policy measures.
A new thoughtlessness drapes the U.S. public in the abyss of ignorance, infantilism, consumerism, militarism, and environmental stupidity. Against this, there is a need to create those pedagogical spaces in which shared faith in justice replaces the shared fears of precarity, hatred of the other, and a fear of the demands of justice.
Against the savage brutalism of the new totalitarianism, there is a need to develop new discourses, vocabularies, values, desires, and a sense of spirituality that brings people together around a need for critique, passion for justice, and a desire for new modes of collective resistance and struggle.
We may be in the midst of “dark times” but the light of hope is never far off and while it offers no guarantees, it posits the possibility of a future that will not mimic the horrors of the past and present.
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