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Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism by Henry A. Giroux
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. -Martin Luther King Jr.
The American public is suffering from an education deficit. By this I
mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question
authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned
arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage the
mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader
public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not
merely a problem of the individual, one that points to simple ignorance.
It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the
increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public
institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange and
a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of
individual and social agency. One of the major consequences of the
current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that
sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie - which
propagates the myth that the free-market system is the only mechanism to
ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy.
The education deficit, along with declining levels of civic literacy, is
also part of the American public's collective refusal to know - a
focused resistance on the part of many members of society to deal with
knowledge that challenges common sense, or to think reflectively about
facts and truths that are unsettling in terms of how they disturb some
of our most cherished beliefs, especially those that denounce the sins
of big government, legitimize existing levels of economic insecurity,
social inequality and reduced or minimal government intervention in the
field of welfare legislation."
(1)
The decline of civility and civic literacy in American society is a
political dilemma, the social production of which is traceable to a
broader constellation of forces deeply rooted in the shifting nature of
education and the varied cultural apparatuses that produce it, extending
from the new digital technologies and online journals to the mainstream
media of newspapers, magazines and television. Politics is now held
hostage to what the late Raymond Williams called the "force of permanent
education," a kind of public pedagogy spread through a plethora of
teaching machines that are shaping how our most powerful ideas are
formed.
(2) For Williams, the concept of "permanent education" was a central political insight:
What it valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole
social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with
continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the
whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and
profoundly teaches.... [Permanent education also refers to] the field in
which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities,
are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To
work for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any
pressures, a priority. For who can doubt, looking at television or
newspapers, or reading the women's magazines, that here, centrally, is
teaching and teaching financed and distributed in a much larger way than
is formal education.(3)
William's insight about the relationship between education and
politics is more important today than it was in the 1960s when he
developed the idea. The educational force of the wider culture is now
one of the primary, if not most powerful, determinants of what counts as
knowledge, agency, politics and democracy itself. The machinery of
permanent education and the public pedagogical relationships these
create have become the main framing mechanisms in determining what
information gets included, who speaks, what stories are told, what
representations translate into reality and what is considered normal or
subversive. The cultural apparatuses of popular education and public
pedagogy play a powerful role in framing how issues are perceived, what
values and social relations matter and whether any small ruptures will
be allowed to unsettle the circles of certainty that now reign as common
sense. But education is never far from the reach of power and ideology.
As the major cultural apparatuses and technologies of public pedagogy
are concentrated in a few hands, the educational force of the culture
becomes a powerful ideological tool for legitimating market-driven
values and social relations, based on omissions, deceptions, lies,
misrepresentations and falsehoods benefiting the apostles of a range of
economic, educational and religious fundamentalisms.
For the first time in modern history, centralized commercial
institutions that extend from traditional broadcast culture to the new
interactive screen cultures - rather than parents, churches or schools -
tell most of the stories that shape the lives of the American public.
This is no small matter since the stories a society tells about its
history, civic life, social relations, education, children and human
imagination are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of
democracy and its future. Most of the stories now told to the American
public are about the necessity of neoliberal capitalism, permanent war
and the virtues of a never-ending culture of fear. The domestic front
revels in the welcome death of the social state, the necessary
all-embracing reach of the market to determine every aspect of our
lives, the reduction of freedom to the freedom to consume, the pathology
of social relations not under the rule of commodities and finance
capital and the notion that everyone is ultimately responsible for their
own fate in a world that now resembles a shark tank.
Democracies need informed citizens to make them work and they can only
survive amid a formative culture that produces individuals willing to
think critically, imagine otherwise and act responsibly. America seems
to have moved away from that possibility, that willingness to think
through and beyond the systemic production of the given, the pull of
conformity, the comforting assurance of certainty and the painless
retreat into a world of common sense. Hannah Arendt understood the
danger of such a state, which she famously called the banality of evil
and described as a "curiously quite authentic inability to think."
(4)
For Arendt, this was more than mere stupidity, it was a mode of
manufactured thoughtlessness that pointed both to the disappearance of
politics and constituted one of the most serious threats facing
democracy. That threat is no longer merely a despairing element of
philosophical reflection - it has become the new reality in American
life.
The political, economic and social coordinates of
authoritarianism are all around us and through the educational force of
the broader culture they are becoming more normalized and more dangerous.
There is little distance between what I am calling an education deficit
and the reigning market authoritarianism, with its claim to be both
synonymous with democracy and unquestionable in its assumptions and
policies. The education deficit, a hallmark achievement of neoliberal
capitalism,
has produced a version of authoritarianism with a
soft edge, a kind of popular authoritarianism that spreads its values
through gaming, reality TV, celebrity culture, the daily news, talk
radio and a host of other media outlets now aggressively engaged in
producing subjects, desires and dreams that reflect a world order
dominated by corporations and "free markets." This a world that only
values narrow selfish-interests, isolated competitive individuals,
finance capital, the reign of commodities and the alleged "natural" laws
of free-market fundamentalism. This type of turbo capitalism
with its crushing cultural apparatuses of legitimation does more than
destroy the public good; it empties democracy of any substance and
renders authoritarian politics and culture an acceptable state of
affairs. As the boundaries between markets and democratic values
collapse, civil life becomes warlike and the advocates of market
fundamentalism rail against state protections while offering an
unbridled confirmation of the market as a template for all social
relations.
Notwithstanding the appeal to formalistic election rituals, democracy as
a substantive mode of public address and politics is all but dead in
the United States. The forces of authoritarianism are on the march and
they seem at this point only to be gaining power politically,
economically and educationally. Politicians at every level of government
are in collusion with corporate power. Many have been bought by
industry lobbyists. This despicable state of affairs was particularly
evident in the 2010 elections. Commenting on the colonization of
politics by big money in that election, Charles Pierce captures the
power dynamic and ideological relations that were in play at that time
and have intensified since. He writes:
In 2010, in addition to handing the House of Representatives over to
a pack of nihilistic vandals, the Koch brothers and the rest of the
sugar daddies of the Right poured millions into various state campaigns.
This produced a crop of governors and state legislators wholly owned
and operated by those corporate interests and utterly unmoored from the
constituencies they were elected to serve. In turn, these folks enacted
various policies and produced various laws, guaranteed to do nothing
except reinforce the power of the people who put them in office.[5]
More recently,
The New York Times reported that soon after
President Obama took office, "he cut a closed-door deal with the
powerful pharmaceutical lobby [abandoning] his support for the
reimportation of prescription medicines at lower prices."
(6) For the
Times,
this back-door deal signified "to some disillusioned liberal supporters
a loss of innocence, or perhaps even the triumph of cynicism."
(7)
In actuality, it signified a powerful new mode of capitalism that not
only controls the commanding heights of the economy, but has now also
replaced political sovereignty with an aggressive form of corporate
governance. The state and elite market forces, perhaps inseparable
before, have become today both inseparable and powerfully aligned. From
Reagan's assault on the values of the welfare state to Obama's bailout
of the mega banks and the refusal to end the Bush tax cuts, corporate
sovereignty as the pre-eminent mode of US politics is hard to miss. And
the surrender of politics to corporate rule and an amalgam of
antidemocratic forces is not a one party affair. As Bill Moyers and
Michael Winship have argued, "since 1979, 377 members of the Forbes 400
list or richest Americans have given almost half a billion dollars to
candidates of both parties, most of it in the last decade. The median
contribution was $355,100 each."
(8)
As is well known, President Clinton implemented deregulation policies
that led directly to the economic crisis of 2008, while at the same time
enacting welfare reforms that turned a war on poverty into a war on the
poor. In fact, the most radical economic measures that Clinton
undertook "related to further deregulation of the economy [amounting to]
some of the most comprehensive deregulatory reforms of the 20th
century."
(9)
Similarly, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy not only increased the
power of mega corporations and financial services to influence policy
for the benefit of Wall Street titans and the rich more generally, but
also largely punished the middle class and the poor.
The Citizens United Supreme Court
ruling made especially visible the hidden operations behind
contemporary politics: big money translates into political power. The
economist Joseph Stiglitz is correct in insisting that, "We've moved
from a democracy, which is supposed to be based on one person, one vote,
to something much more akin to one dollar, one vote. When you have that
kind of democracy, it's not going to address the real needs of the
99%."
(10)
Stiglitz's point is right in one sense, though the current political
system has nothing substantively to do with democracy and everything to
do with a new form of authoritarianism shaped by the converging
interests of the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, anti-public
intellectuals and corporate political power brokers.
This new mode of authoritarian governance is distinct from the fascism
that emerged in Germany and Italy in the mid part of the twentieth
century. As Sheldon Wolin has pointed out,
big business in this
new mode of authoritarianism is not subordinated to a political regime
and the forces of state sovereignty, but now replaces political
sovereignty with corporate rule. In addition, the new
authoritarianism does not strive "to give the masses a sense of
collective power and strength, [but] promotes a sense of weakness, of
collective futility [through] a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a
corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of
pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that
relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest
health benefits available, especially to the poor."
(11)
According to Wolin, all the elements are in place today for a
contemporary form of authoritarianism, which he calls "inverted
totalitarianism."
Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal
system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which
one part, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon
reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling
class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while
leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political
despair and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling
between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once
the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and
increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with
their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized
in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the
increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law
enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens
and domestic dissidents.[12]
The democratic deficit is not, as many commentators have argued,
reducible to the growing (and unparalleled) inequality gap in the United
States, the pervasiveness of lending fraud, favorable tax treatment for
the wealthy, or the lack of adequate regulation of the financial
sector. These are important issues, but they are more symptomatic than
causal in relation to the democratic decline and rise of an uncivil
culture in America. The democratic deficit is closely related, however,
to an unprecedented deficit in critical education. The power of finance
capital in recent years has not only targeted the realm of official
politics, but also directed its attention toward a range of educational
apparatuses - really, a vast and complex ideological ecosystem that
reproduces itself through nuance, distraction, innuendo, myths, lies and
misrepresentations. This media ecosystem not only changes our sense of
time, space and information; it also redefines the very meaning of the
social and this is far from a democratic process, especially as the
architecture of the Internet and other media platforms are largely in
the hands of private interests.
(13) The
educational pipelines for corporate messages and ideology are
everywhere and have for the last twenty-five years successfully drowned
out any serious criticism and challenge to market fundamentalism.
The current corrupt and dysfunctional state of American politics is
about a growing authoritarianism tied to economic, political and
cultural formations that have hijacked democracy and put structural and
ideological forces in place that constitute a new regime of politics,
not simply a series of bad policies. The solution in this case does not
lie in promoting piecemeal reforms, such as a greater redistribution of
wealth and income, but in dismantling all the institutional, ideological
and social formations that make gratuitous inequality and other
antidemocratic forces possible at all. Even the concept of reform has
been stripped of its democratic possibilities and has become a euphemism
to "cover up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages,
salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increases in
regressive taxes."
(14)
Instead of reversing progressive changes made by workers, women, young
people, and others, the American public needs a new understanding of
what it would mean to advance the ideological and material relations of a
real democracy, while removing American society from the grip of "an
authoritarian political culture."
(15) This
will require new conceptions of politics, social responsibility, power,
civic courage, civil society and democracy itself. If we do not
safeguard the remaining public spaces that provide individuals and
social movements with new ways to think about and participate in
politics, then authoritarianism will solidify its hold on the American
public. In doing so, it will create a culture that criminalizes dissent,
and those who suffer under antidemocratic ideologies and policies will
be both blamed for the current economic crisis and punished by ruling
elites.
What is crucial to grasp at the current historical moment is that the
fate of democracy is inextricably linked to a profound crisis of
contemporary knowledge, characterized by its increasing commodification,
fragmentation, privatization and a turn toward racist and jingoistic
conceits. As knowledge becomes abstracted from the rigors of civic
culture and is reduced to questions of style, ritual and image, it
undermines the political, ethical and governing conditions for
individuals to construct those viable public spheres necessary for
debate, collective action and solving urgent social problems. As public
spheres are privatized, commodified and turned over to the crushing
forces of turbo capitalism, the opportunities for openness,
inclusiveness and dialogue that nurture the very idea and possibility of
a discourse about democracy cease to exist.
The lesson to be learned in this instance is that political agency
involves learning how to deliberate, make judgments and exercise
choices, particularly as the latter are brought to bear on critical
activities that offer the possibility of change. Civic education as it
is experienced and produced throughout an ever-diminishing number of
institutions provides individuals with opportunities to see themselves
as capable of doing more than the existing configurations of power of
any given society would wish to admit. And it is precisely this notion
of civic agency and critical education that has been under aggressive
assault within the new and harsh corporate order of casino capitalism.
Anti-Public Intellectuals and the Conservative Re-Education Machine
The conservative takeover of public pedagogy with its elite codifiers of
neoliberal ideology has a long history extending from the work of the
"Chicago Boys" at the University of Chicago to the various conservative
think tanks that emerged after the publication of the Powell memo in the
early seventies.
(16)
The Republican Party will more than likely win the next election and
take full control over all aspects of policymaking in the United States.
This is especially dangerous given that the Republican Party is now
controlled by extremists. If they win the 2012 election, they will not
only extend the Bush/Obama legacy of militarism abroad, but likely
intensify the war at home as well. Political scientist Frances Fox Piven
rightly argues that, "We've been at war for decades now - not just in
Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it's been a
war [a]gainst the poor [and as] devastating as it has been, the war
against the poor has gone largely unnoticed until now."
(17)
And the war at home now includes more than attacks on the poor, as
campaigns are increasingly waged against the rights of women, students,
workers, people of color and immigrants, especially Latino Americans. As
the social state collapses, the punishing state expands its power and
targets larger portions of the population. The war in Afghanistan is now
mimicked in the war waged on peaceful student protesters at home. It is
evident in the environmental racism that produces massive health
problems for African-Americans. The domestic war is even waged on
elementary school children, who now live in fear of the police
handcuffing them in their classrooms and incarcerating them as if they
were adult criminals.
(18)
It is waged on workers by taking away their pensions, bargaining rights
and dignity. The spirit of militarism is also evident in the war waged
on the welfare state and any form of social protection that benefits the
poor, disabled, sick, elderly, and other groups now considered
disposable, including children.
The soft side of authoritarianism in the United States does not need to
put soldiers in the streets, though it certainly follows that script. As
it expands its control over the commanding institutions of government,
the armed forces and civil society in general, it hires anti-public
intellectuals and academics to provide ideological support for its gated
communities, institutions and modes of education. As Yasha Levine
points out, it puts thousands of dollars in the hands of corporate
shills such as Malcolm Gladwell, who has become a "one man branding and
distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages, constructed on
the public's gullibility in trusting his probity and intellectual
honesty."
(19)
Gladwell (who is certainly not alone) functions as a bought-and-paid
mouthpiece for "Big Tobacco Pharma and defend[s] Enron-style financial
fraud ... earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate
speaker, sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers
as a journalist."
(20)
Corporate power uses these "pay to play" academics, anti-public
intellectuals, the mainstream media, and other educational apparatuses
to discredit the very people that it simultaneously oppresses, while
waging an overarching war on all things public. As Charles Ferguson has
noted, an entire industry has been created that enables the "sale of
academic expertise for the purpose of influencing government policy, the
courts and public opinion [and] is now a multibillion-dollar business."
(21)
It gets worse, in that "Academic, legal, regulatory and policy
consulting in economics, finance and regulation is dominated by a half
dozen consulting firms, several speakers' bureaus and various industry
lobbying groups that maintain large networks of academics for hire
specifically for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy
and regulatory debates."
(22)
Such anti-public intellectuals create what William Black has called a
"criminogenic environment" that spreads disease and fraud in the
interest of bolstering the interests, profits and values of the super
wealthy.
(23)There is more at work here than carpet bombing the culture with lies, deceptions and euphemisms.
Language in this case does more than obfuscate or promote propaganda.
It creates framing mechanisms, cultural ecosystems and cultures of
cruelty, while closing down the spaces for dialogue, critique and
thoughtfulness. At its worst, it engages in the dual processes of
demonization and distraction. The rhetoric of demonization
takes many forms: for example, calling firefighters, teachers, and other
public servants greedy because they want to hold onto their paltry
benefits. It labels students as irresponsible because of the large debts
they are forced to incur as states cut back funding to higher education
(this, too, is part of a broader effort by conservatives to hollow out
the social state). Poor people are insulted and humiliated because they
are forced to live on food stamps, lack decent health care and collect
unemployment benefits because there are no decent jobs available. Poor
minorities are now subject to overt racism in the right-wing media and
outright violence in the larger society.
Anti-public intellectuals rail against public goods and public values;
they undermine collective bonds and view social responsibility as a
pathology, while touting the virtues of a survival-of-the-fittest notion
of individual responsibility. Fox News and its embarrassingly
blowhard pundits tell the American people that Gov. Scott Walker's
victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin recall election was a fatal
blow against unions, while in reality "his win signals less a loss for
the unions than a loss for our democracy in this post-Citizens United
era, when elections can be bought with the help of a few billionaires."
(24)
How else to explain that Tea Party favorite Walker raised over $30.5
million during the election - more than seven times Barrett's reported
$3.9 million - largely from 13 out-of-state billionaires?
(25)
This was corporate money enlisted for use in a pedagogical blitz
designed to carpet bomb voters with the rhetoric of distraction and
incivility.
The same pundits who rail against the country's economic deficit fail to
connect it to the generous tax cuts they espouse for corporations and
the financial institutions and services that take financial risks, which
sometimes generate capital, but more often produce debts and
instability that only serve to deepen the national economic crisis. Nor
do they connect the US recession and global economic crisis to the
criminal activities enabled by an unregulated financial system marked by
massive lending fraud, high risk speculation, a corrupt credit system
and pervasive moral and economic dishonesty. The spokespersons for the
ultrarich publish books arguing that we need even more inequality
because it benefits not only the wealthy, but everyone else.
(26)
This is a form of authoritarian delusion that appears to meet the
clinical threshold for being labeled psychopathic given its proponents'
extreme investment in being "indifferent to others, incapable of guilt,
exclusively devoted to their own interests."
(27)
Nothing is said in this pro-market narrative about the massive human
suffering caused by a growing inequality in which society's resources
are squandered at the top, while salaries for the middle and working
classes stagnate, consumption dries up, social costs are ignored, young
people are locked out of jobs and any possibility of social mobility and
the state reconfigures its power to punish rather than protect the vast
majority of its citizens.
The moral coma that appears characteristic of the elite who inhabit the
new corporate ethic of casino capitalism has attracted the attention of
scientists, whose studies recently reported that "members of the upper
class are more likely to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations,
to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a prize."
(28)
But there is more at stake here than the psychological state of those
who inhabit the boardrooms of Wall Street. We must also consider the
catastrophic effects produced by their values and policies. In fact,
Stiglitz has argued that, "Most Americans today are worse off than they
were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today
then he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding - half a century of
stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter
whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously - when the
majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not
working."
(29) The
economic system may not be working, but the ideological rationales used
to justify its current course appear immensely successful, managing as
they do to portray a casino capitalism that transforms democracy into
its opposite - a form of authoritarianism with a soft edge - as utterly
benign, if not also beneficial, to society at large.
Democratic Decline and the Politics of Distraction
Democracy withers, public spheres disappear and the forces of
authoritarianism grow when a family, such as the Waltons of Walmart
fame, is allowed "to amass a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which
is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of US
society."
(30)
Such enormous amounts of wealth translate into equally vast amounts of
power, as is evident in the current attempts of a few billionaires to
literally buy local, state and federal elections. Moreover, a
concentration of wealth deepens the economic divide among classes,
rendering more and more individuals incapable of the most basic
opportunities to move out of poverty and despair. This is especially
true in light of a recent survey indicating that, "Nearly half of all
Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the federal
poverty threshold but still do hot have enough money to cover housing,
food, healthcare and other basic expenses.... 45 percent of US residents
live in households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to
39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children."
(31)
The consequential impacts on civic engagement are more difficult to
enumerate, but it does not require much imagination to think about how
democracy might flourish if access to health care, education,
employment, and other public benefits was ensured equally throughout a
society and not restricted to the rich and wealthy alone. And yet, as
power and wealth accrue to the upper 1 percent, the American public is
constantly told that the poor, the unions, feminists, critical
intellectuals and public servants are waging class warfare to the
detriment of civility and democracy.
The late Tony Judt stated that he was less concerned about the slide of
American democracy into something like authoritarianism than American
society moving toward something he viewed as even more corrosive: "a
loss of conviction, a loss of faith in the culture of democracy, a sense
of skepticism and withdrawal" that diminishes the capacity of a
democratic formative culture to resist and transform those
antidemocratic ideologies that benefit only the mega corporations, the
ultrawealthy and ideological fundamentalists.
(32) Governance
has turned into a legitimation for enriching the already wealthy elite,
bankers, hedge fund managers, mega corporations and executive members
of the financial service industries. Americans now live in a society in
which only the thinnest conception of democracy frames what it means to
be a citizen - one which equates the obligations of citizenship with
consumerism and democratic rights with alleged consumer freedoms.
Antidemocratic forms of power do not stand alone as a mode of force or
the force of acting on others; they are also deeply aligned with
cultural apparatuses of persuasion, extending their reach through social
and digital media, sophisticated technologies, the rise of corporate
intellectuals and a university system that now produces and sanctions
intellectuals aligned with private interests - all of which, as Randy
Martin points out, can be identified with a form of casino capitalism
that is about "permanent vigilance, activity and intervention."
(33)
Indeed, many institutions that provide formal education in the United
States have become co-conspirators with a savage casino capitalism,
whose strength lies in producing, circulating and legitimating market
values that promote the narrow world of commodity worship, celebrity
culture, bare-knuckle competition, a retreat from social responsibility
and a war-of-all-against-all mentality that destroys any viable notion
of community, the common good and the interrelated notions of political,
social and economic rights. University presidents now make huge
salaries sitting on corporate boards, while faculty sell their knowledge
to the highest corporate bidder and, in doing so, turn universities
into legitimation centers for casino capitalism.
(34)
Of course, such academics also move from the boardrooms of major
corporations to talk shows and op-ed pages of major newspapers, offering
commentary in journals and other modes of print and screen culture.
They are the new traveling intellectuals of casino capitalism, doing
everything they can to make the ruthless workings of power invisible, to
shift the blame for society's failures onto the very people who are its
victims and to expand the institutions and culture of
anti-intellectualism and distraction into every aspect of American life.
Across all levels, politics in the United States now suffers from an
education deficit that enables a pedagogy of distraction to dictate with
little accountability how crucial social problems and issues are named,
discussed and acted upon. The conservative re-education machine appears
shameless in its production of lies that include insane assertions such
as: Obama's health care legislation would create death panels; liberals
are waging a war on Christmas; Obama is a socialist trying to
nationalize industries; the founding fathers tried to end slavery; and
Obama is a Muslim sympathizer and not a US citizen. Other
misrepresentations and distortions include: the denial of global
warming; the government cannot create jobs; cuts in wages and benefits
create jobs; Obama has created massive deficits; Obama wants to raise
the taxes of working- and middle-class people; Obama is constantly
"apologizing" for America; and the assertion that Darwinian evolution is
a myth.
(35)
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continues spinning this
spider web of lies unapologetically, even when members of his own party
point out the inconsistencies in his claims. For instance, he has
claimed that, "Obamacare increases the deficit,"
(36)
argued that Obama has "increased the national debt more than all other
presidents combined" and insisted that Obama has lied about "his record
on gay rights." He has falsely claimed that, "Obama promised
unemployment below eight percent,"
(37)
dodged the truth regarding "his position on climate change" and
blatantly misrepresented the truth in stating that, "he pays a 50% tax
rate."
(38)
Diane Ravitch has recently pointed out that in making a case for
vouchers, Romney has made false claims about the success of the DC
voucher program.
(39)
The politics of distraction should not be reduced merely to a rhetorical
ploy used by the wealthy and influential to promote their own interests
and power. It is a form of market-driven politics in which educational
force of the broader culture is used to create ideologies, policies,
individuals and social agents who lack the knowledge, critical skills
and discriminatory judgments to question the rule of casino capitalism
and the values, social practices and power formations it legitimates.
Politics and education have always mutually informed each other as
pedagogical sites proliferate and circulate throughout the cultural
landscape.
(40)
But today, distraction is the primary element being used to suppress
democratically purposeful education by pushing critical thought to the
margins of society. As a register of power, distraction becomes central
to a pedagogical landscape inhabited by rich conservative foundations,
an army of well-funded anti-public intellectuals from both major
parties, a growing number of amply funded conservative campus
organizations, increasing numbers of academics who hock their services
to corporations and the military-industrial complex, and others who
promote the ideology of casino capitalism and the corporate right's
agenda. Academics who make a claim to producing knowledge and truth in
the public interest are increasingly being replaced by academics for
hire who move effortlessly among industry, government and academia.
Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of
ever-proliferating cultural/educational apparatuses and the anti-public
intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites
who finance such apparatuses. The war at home is made visible in the
show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students,
workers, and others considered disposable or a threat to the new
authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the
intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media
technologies that constitute the sites of public pedagogy, which produce
the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive.
While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either
one's politics or society, it is a crucial precondition for connecting
what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to
act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a
political deficit, serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit
with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made
clear, democracy requires "critical thinkers capable of putting existing
institutions into question.... while simultaneously creating the
conditions for individual and social autonomy."
(41)
Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging
social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of
radical reform and create new public spheres that support the knowledge,
skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic
formative culture.
Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought, civic
engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting
distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians,
media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require
addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable
notion of agency, politics and democracy itself. This is not a matter of
elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as
it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how culture as a
mode of education positions power.
James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights
activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American
identity and politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that
has descended into madness, "especially when one is forced to lie about
one's aspect of anybody's history, [because you then] must lie about it
all."
(42)
He goes on to argue "that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that
precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must
find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to
change society if you think of yourself as an educated person."
(43)
What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger
a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society -
education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for
domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change.
Tragically, in our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a
vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education
deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of
teaching nor the decent into madness by the spokespersons for the new
authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values
and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics.
Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives
using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals
to the everyday needs of ordinary people, but also to jumpstart social
movements by making education central to organized politics and the
quest for a radical democracy.
Footnotes
- Tony Judt, "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century" (New York: Penguin, 2008), p.420
- Raymond Williams, "Preface to Second Edition," Communications" (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 15.
- Ibid.
- Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research 38:3 (all 1970), p. 417.
- Charles Pierce, "Democracy vs. Money in Wisconsin," ReaderSupportedNews (June 2, 2012).
- Peter Baker, "Lobby E-Mails Show Depth of Obama Ties to Drug Industry,"New York Times (June 8, 2012).
- Ibid.
- Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, "Pity the Poor Billionaires," CommonDreams.org (June 1, 2012).
- Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, "Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 60-62.
- Cited in Amy Goodman, "How Citizens United Helped Scott Walker in Wisconsin," The Guardian UK (June 7, 2012).
- Sheldon Wolin, "Inverted Totalitarianism: How the Bush Regime Is Effecting the Transformation to a Fascist-Like State," The Nation (May 19, 2003), p. 14. Wolin develops his theory of inverted totalitarianism is great detail in his Sheldon S. Wolin, "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
- Sheldon Wolin, "Inverted Totalitarianism: How the Bush Regime Is Effecting the Transformation to a Fascist-Like State."
- For an excellent analysis of media in late modernity, see Nick
Couldry, "Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media
Practice" (London: Polity, 2012).v
- James Petras, "The Politics of Language and the Language of Political Regression," Global Research (May 24, 2012).
- Stuart Hall and Les Back, "In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home," Cultural Studies 23:4 (July 2009), p. 679.
- I have taken up this issue in detail in Henry A. Giroux, "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
- Francis Fox Piven, "The War Against the Poor," TomDispatch.com (November 6, 2011).
- See the many examples in S.E. Smith, "Police Handcuffing
7-Year-Olds? The Brutality Unleashed on Kids with Disabilities in Our
School Systems," AlterNet (May 22, 2012).
- Yasha Levine, "Malcolm Gladwell Unmasked: A Look into the Life & Work of America's Most Successful Propagandist," The Exiled (June 6, 2012).
- Ibid.
- Charles Ferguson, "The Sellout of the Ivory Tower and the Crash of 2008," Huffington Post (May 22, 2012).
- Ibid.
- Bill Moyers, "Interview with William K. Black," Bill Moyers Journal (April 23, 2010).v
- Goodman, "How Citizens United Helped Scott Walker in Wisconsin."
- Ibid.
- For a brilliant analysis of the effects of casino capitalism on those marginalized by race and class, see Dorothy Roberts, "Fatal Intervention: How Science, Politics and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century"
(New York: The New Press, 2011). For a sustained and convincing
argument for equality in the service of democracy, see Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett, "The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone" (New York: Penguin, 2010). See also Tony Judt, "Ill Fares the Land" (New York: Penguin, 2010).
- William Deresiewicz, "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths," New York Times (May 12, 2012), p. SR5.
- Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stephane Cote, Mdndoza-Denton and
Dacher Keltern, "Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical
Behavior," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (February 27, 2012). A summary of these reports appears in Thomas B. Edsall, "Other People's Suffering," New York Times (March 4, 2012).
- Joseph Stiglitz, "Politics Is at the Root of the Problem," The European Magazine (April 23, 2012).
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, "The 1 Percent's Problem," Vanity Fair (May 31, 2012).
- Reuters, "Nearly Half of Americans Struggling to Stay Afloat," CommonDreams.org (November 23, 2011).
- Tony Judt, "I Am Not Pessimistic in the Very Long Run," The Independent (March 24, 2010).
- Randy Martin cited in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, "Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death," Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 3.
- See, for example, Laurie Bennett, "Ivy League Presidents Find Time for Corporate Boards," Maced (June 30, 2010); Jack Stripling and Andrea Fuller, "College Presidents Serving on Boards of Trustees' Companies," MAICgregator
(January 16, 2012). Charles Ferguson develops this theme in his Academy
Award-winning film, "Inside Job" and in his book, "Predator Nation," by
focusing on prominent economists such as Larry Summers, Martin
Feldstein and Glenn Hubbard, all of whom appear shameless in their
complicity with corporate power, greed and corruption.
- There are endless list of such lies on the Internet. See, for example, Sandy Screeds, "Short List of GOP Lies," Daily Kos (June 8, 2012). See also Chris Mooney, "Reality Bites Republicans," The Nation (June 4, 2012), pp. 6-8.
- Jess Coleman, "Five Lies from Mitt Romney," Huffington Post (May 24, 2012).
- Ibid.
- All of these positions and their respective sources can be found
at: Jueseppi B, "The Complete 'List Of Lies' by Willard Mitt Romney," TheObamacrat.com (May 8, 2012).
- Diane Ravitch, "The Miseducation of Mitt Romney," The New York Review of Books, (June 5, 2012). Online here.
- See, for example, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Walter Jacobs and Amy Lee, "The Sites of Pedagogy," Symploke 10:1-2 (2002), pp. 7-12; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Provinelli, "Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition," Public Culture 15:3 (2003), pp. 385-397; Lewis Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History," Harper's Magazine (September 2004), pp. 31-41; Henry A. Giroux, "The Politics of Public Pedagogy," in Jeffrey Di Leo, et al. (eds.), "If Classrooms Matter: Place, Pedagogy and Politics" (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 15-36; and Henry A. Giroux, "Neoliberalism as Public Pedagogy," in Jennifer Sandlin, Brian Schultz and Jane Burdick (eds.), Handbook of Public Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 486-99.v
- Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy," Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 102.v
- James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers," The Saturday Review (December 21, 1963). Online here.
- Ibid.
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