Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age
In an age where everything is for sale, ethical accountability is a liability and empathy viewed as weakness, the quest for instant gratification is more important than supporting the public good and embracing an obligation to care for others.
Donald Trump against a backdrop of supporters in Phoenix. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
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At the same time, it is important to recognize that Trump represents the more immediate threat, especially for people of color. As the apotheosis of a brutal, racist, fascist expression of neoliberalism, Trump would eliminate 21 million from the ranks of those insured under Obamacare, would deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and would stack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues who would implement reactionary polices for the next few decades.
At stake here is a different type of conflict between those who believe in democracy and those who don’t. The upcoming election will not address the ensuing crisis, which is really a fight for the soul of democracy. One consequence will be that millions one way or another will once again bear the burden of a society that hates democracy and punishes all but the financial elite. Both candidates and the economic and political forces they represent are part of the problem and offer up different forms of domination. What is crucial for progressives to recognize is that it is imperative to make clear that neoliberal economic structures register only one part of the logic of repression. The other side is the colonization of consciousness, the production of modes of agency complicit with their own oppression.
This dual register of politics, which has been highlighted by theorists extending from Hannah Arendt and Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams and C. Wright Mills, has a long history but has been pushed to the margins under neoliberal regimes of oppression. Once again, any viable notion of collective resistance must take matters of consciousness, identity, desire and persuasion seriously, so as to speak to the underlying conditions of atomization that depoliticize and paralyze people within orbits of self-interest, greed, resentment, misdirected anger and spiralling violence.
Addressing the affective and ideological dimensions not only of neoliberalism but also of the radical imagination is crucial to waking us all up to our ability to work together, recognize the larger social and systemic structures that dominate our lives, and provide each other with the tools to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues. The power of the social does not only come together in social movements; it is also central to the educative force of a politics that embraces democratic social relations as the foundation for collective action.
Overcoming the atomization inherent in neoliberal regimes means making clear how they destroy every vestige of solidarity in the interest of amassing huge amounts of wealth and power while successfully paralyzing vast numbers of people in the depoliticizing orbits of privatization and self-interest. Of course, we see examples of movements that embrace solidarity as an act of collective resistance — most visibly, the Movement for Black Lives. This is model that needs to take on a more general political significance in which the violence of apparatuses of oppression can be connected to a politics of atomization that must be addressed as both an educational and political issue. Neoliberal precarity, austerity and the militarization of society inflict violence not just on the body but on the psyche as well. This means that the crisis of economic structures must be understood as part of the crisis of memory, thinking, hope and agency itself.
Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015) and coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
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