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October 29, 2007
In Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics after Abu Ghraib Henry Giroux argues that under the Presidency of George W. Bush, the United States is approaching a proto-fascist state; the second that a critical education is a vital strategy for resisting such developments. The new authoritarianism is not arriving in swastika emblazoned brown shirts; instead, it uses the discourse of democracy, even when it undermines it.
In his review of this text Benjamin Franks says that Giroux draws out eight central elements of the new authoritarianism:
....first, reactionary modernism, in which an alliance of free-marketeers, extremist evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives build a sustained social order based upon, and perpetuating, class, gender and ethnic hierarchies (pp. 37-38). The second feature is the corporatization of civil society, in which the democratic social spaces where people create their own social relationships are instead placed into service for the business sector and the administrative arm of the state.....The third feature of proto-fascism is the developing discourse of patriotism and nationalism and the culture of fear that supports it. A continual battery of jingoism on the news media, which includes the fluttering flags of the media idents, the label badges of the TV newsreaders, and the marginalisation or silencing of governmental critics as ‘unpatriotic’, are indicative of the strong current of nationalism used to bolster domestic and foreign policy (pp. 40-42).
This indicates that Giroux is not referring to previous historical examples of fascist regimes signified by swastika emblazoned brown shirts. He is describing the present on its own terms. He adds:
This incessant promotion of a militarised, chauvinistic discourse goes alongside a fourth characteristic: that of control of mass media through a combination of oligarchical corporate ownership and significant state regulation..... Giroux accuses G. W. Bush’s executive of going further than any previous government in intertwining his administration with the mass media and manipulating the Fourth Estate.This deterioration in journalism has an impact on the fifth element – the rise of an Orwellian version of Newspeak.The sixth element of US proto-fascism is the collapse of the separation of church and state. Rather than the tenets of democracy justifying governmental decisions, appeals are made to unknowable deities and their institutional supporters....The final two features are the ones Giroux spends greater time on discussing – Militarization at home and abroad and the replacement of democratic institutions by neo-liberal ones.
What we are presented with is a set of apparatuses of domination illustrated by the photos of American soldiers and private contractors torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Franks points out that Giroux identifiication of neo-liberalism as not only being compatible with fascism, but a necessary
feature of the new authoritarianism is highly controversial, as the orthodoxy of conservative and liberal opinion, propagated by influential theorists like Kirkpatrick, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Roger Scruton, is
that the determining feature of totalitarianism was state intervention in the economy.
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