The Violence of Organized Forgetting. Henry A. Giroux
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resulted in a Republican Party that is now considered the righteous party of anti-science.7 Similarly, right-wing politicians, media, talk show hosts, and other pundits loudly and widely spread the message that a culture of questioning is antithetical to the American way of life. Moreover, this message is also promoted by conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, which “hit the ground running in 2013, pushing ‘model bills’ mandating the teaching of climate-change denial in public school systems.”8 Efforts to discredit climate change science are also promoted by powerful conservative groups such as the Heartland Institute. Ignorance is never too far from repression, as was demonstrated in Arizona when Representative Bob Thorpe, a Republican freshman Tea Party member, introduced a new bill requiring students to take a patriotic loyalty oath in order to receive a graduation diploma.9
The “disimagination machine”—though not entirely new to American culture—is more powerful than ever. Conservative think tanks provide ample funds for training and promoting anti-public pseudo-intellectuals and religious fundamentalists, while simultaneously offering policy statements and talking points to conservative media such as Fox News, Christian news networks, right-wing talk radio, and partisan social media and blogs. This ever-growing information-illiteracy bubble has become a powerful form of public pedagogy in the larger culture and is responsible not only for normalizing the war on science, reason, and critical thought, but also the war on women’s reproductive rights, communities of color, low-income families, immigrants, unions, public schools, and any other group or institution that challenges the anti-intellectual, antidemocratic world views of the new extremists. Liberal democrats, of course, contribute to this “disimagination machine” through educational policies that substitute forms of critical thinking and education for paralyzing pedagogies of memorization and rote learning tied to high-stakes testing in the service of creating a dumbed down and compliant work force. As the U.S. government retreats from its responsibility to foster the common good, it joins with corporate power to transform public schools into sites of containment and repression, while universities are “coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by the modern economy.”10 The hidden order of politics in this instance is that the United States has become an increasingly corporate space dominated not only by the script of cost-benefit analysis but also one in which creative powers of citizenship are being redefined as a narrow set of consumer choices.
What further keeps the American public in a state of intellectual servitude and fuels the hysteria of Judeo-Christian nationalism is the perception of being constantly under threat—a thinly veiled justification for ramping up state and corporate surveillance while extending the tentacles of the national security state.11 Through political messages filtered and spectacularized by the mass media, Americans have been increasingly encircled by a culture of fear and what Brad Evans has called “insecurity by design.”12 Americans are urged to adjust to survival mode, be resilient, and bear the weight of the times by themselves—all of which is code for a process of depoliticization.13 The catastrophes and social problems produced by the financial elite and mega-corporations now become the fodder of an individualized politics, a space of risk in which one can exhibit fortitude and a show of hypermasculine toughness. Or vulnerability is touted as a matter of common sense so as to mask the social, political, and economic forces that produce it, thus transforming it into an ideology whose purpose is to conceal power and encourage individuals to flee from any sense of social and political engagement. As Robin D. G. Kelley argues, “focusing on the personal obscures what is really at stake: ideas, ideology, the nature of change, the evisceration of our critical faculties under an appeal to neoliberal commonsense.”14
In this instance, the call to revel in risk and vulnerability as a site of identity formation and ontological condition makes invisible the oppressive workings of power. But it does more—it undermines any viable faith in the future and reduces progress to a script that furthers the neoliberal goals of austerity, privatization, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the ruling and corporate elite. Meaningful social solidarities are torn apart and deterred, furthering a retreat into orbits of the private and undermining those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, public values, critical exchange, and civic literacy. The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but also through a climate of fear and the ominous presence of a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.15
The stalwart enemies of manufactured fear and militant punitiveness are critical thought and the willingness to question authority—as is abundantly evident, for example, in the case of Edward Snowden and those who champion him. What many commentators have missed in regard to Snowden is that his actions have gone beyond revealing merely how intrusive the U.S. government has become and have demonstrated how willing the state is to engage in vast crimes against the American public in the service of repressing dissent and a culture of questioning. Snowden’s real “crime” was that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower the population to think and act as critically engaged communities fully capable of holding their government accountable. Snowden’s exposure of the massive reach of the surveillance state with its biosensors, scanners, face-recognition technologies, miniature drones, high-speed computers, massive data-mining capabilities, and other stealth technologies made visible “the stark realities of disappearing privacy and diminishing liberties.”16 Making the workings of oppressive power visible has its costs, and Snowden has become a flashpoint revealing the willingness of the state to repress dissent regardless of how egregious such a practice might be.
Since the late 1970s, there has been an intensification in the United States, Canada, and Europe of neoliberal modes of governance, ideology, and policies—a historical period in which the foundations for democratic public spheres have been dismantled.17 Schools, libraries, the airwaves, public parks and plazas, and other manifestations of the public sphere have been under siege, viewed as disadvantageous to a market-driven society that considers noncommercial imagination, critical thought, dialogue, and civic engagement a threat to its hierarchy of authoritarian operating systems, ideologies, and structures of power, domination, and control. The 1970s marked the beginning of a historical era in which the discourses of democracy, public values, and the common good came crashing to the ground. First Margaret Thatcher in Britain and then Ronald Reagan in the United States—both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism—announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the function of culture to counter oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.18 Large social movements fragmented into isolated pockets of resistance mostly organized around a form of identity politics that largely ignored a much-needed conversation about the attack on the social and the broader issues affecting society, such as increasingly harmful disparities in wealth, power, and income. Tony Judt argues this point persuasively in his insistence that politics
devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. “Identity” began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. . . . However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasizing these carries an unavoidable cost: the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.19
As forms of state sovereignty gave way to market-centered private modes of political control, the United States morphed into an increasingly authoritarian space in which young people became the most visible symbol of the collateral damage that resulted