This is the ultra-nationalistic Big Brother clinging to notions of racial purity and American exceptionalism as a driving force in creating a country that has come to resemble an open air prison for the dispossessed. This is the Big Brother whose split personality portends the dark authoritarian universe of the 1 percent, with their control over the economy and use of paramilitarized police forces on the one hand, and on the other their retreat into gated communities manned by SWAT-like security forces. Fear and isolation constitute an updated version of Big Brother. Fear is now managed and buttressed by normalizing the white supremacist claim that racial purification should be accepted as a general condition of society, disassociated from the politics and moral panics endemic to an authoritarian society, and used to mobilize the individual’s fear of the other. Huxley shared Orwell’s concern about repression as a political tool of the elite, enforced through surveillance and the banning of books, dissent, and critical thought itself. But Huxley believed that social control and the propagation of ignorance would be introduced by those in power through the political tools of pleasure, mass entertainment, and a politics of distraction. Huxley thought that this might take place through the use of drugs and genetic engineering. In the current historical moment, the real drugs and social planning of late modernity are to be found in the pervasiveness of a celebrity culture, entertainment industry, and other cultural apparatuses, which extend from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, news, and the social media. Under the new authoritarian state presided over by the Trump administration, perhaps the gravest threat one faces is not simply being subject to the dictates of what Quentin Skinner calls “arbitrary power,” but failing to respond with outrage when “my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose.” The situation is dire when people no longer seem interested in contesting such power. It is precisely the poisonous spread of a broad culture of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and freedom which lie at the heart of a robust democracy. The democratic imagination has been transformed into a data machine that marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dream worlds of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and initiate individuals into the brave new surveillance/punishing state that merges Orwell’s Big Brother with Huxley’s mind-altering soma. Nothing will change unless people begin to take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United States and what it might require to make such issues meaningful in order to make them critical and transformative. As Charles Derber has explained, knowing “how to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important” if any viable notion of resistance is to take place. The current regime of authoritarianism is reinforced through a new and pervasive sensibility in which people surrender themselves to both casino capitalism and a general belief in its call for security, its support for a punishing notion of law and order, and a range of domestic policies that echo the bigotry, racism, and script of racial purification of earlier fascist regimes.  This updated version of American authoritarianism does not simply repress independent thought, but constitutes new modes of thinking through a diverse set of cultural apparatuses ranging from the schools and media to the Internet. The fundamental question in resisting the transformation of the United States into a 21st century authoritarian society must address the educative nature of politics – that is, what people believe and how their individual and collective dispositions and capacities to be either willing or resistant agents are shaped. What will American society look like under a Trump administration? For Huxley, it may well mimic a nightmarish image of a world in which ignorance is a political weapon and pleasure as a form of control, offering nothing more than the swindle of fulfillment, if not something more self-deluding and defeating. Orwell, more optimistically, might see a more open future and history disinclined to fulfill itself in the image of the dystopian society he so brilliantly imagined. He believed in the power of those living under such oppression to imagine otherwise, to think beyond the dictates of the authoritarian state and to offer up spirited forms of collective resistance willing to reclaim the reigns of political emancipation. For Huxley, there was hope in a pessimism that had exhausted itself; for Orwell optimism had to be tempered by a sense of educated hope. History is open and only time will tell who was right. Yet, one thing is clear. The current onslaught of revenge and destruction produced by the glaringly visible and deeply brutal authoritarianism of the Trump regime points to a dark future in the most immediate sense. But, its arrogant and unchecked presence has also ignited the great collective power of resistance. Hope and sanity are in the air and the relevance of mass action has a renewed urgency. Some mayors are refusing to allow their cities to be Nazified, demonstrations are taking place every day throughout the country, and all over the globe women are marching to protect their rights. This resistance will continue to grow until it becomes a movement whose power will be on the side of justice not injustice, bridges not walls, dignity not disrespect, compassion not hate.  Let’s hope they dispel Orwell and Huxley’s nightmarish vision of the future in our own time. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com. Your support matters…

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#aldous huxley#brave new world#donald trump#henry giroux#trump administration