Giroux on American fascism

By  Henry Giroux

 "As the United States tips over into the abyss of fascism, state violence must be interrogated within the historical conditions that have both legitimated and normalized it over time. It must be viewed with a long durée of neoliberalism and racist violence that has become normalized in almost every aspect of daily life. The militarization of American society is now readily embraced and revealed in its turn toward a fascist politics. As long as we allow neoliberal capitalism to disconnect the fascist past from the present, the violence will continue as a matter of common sense.

"The histories of repressed others must be made visible, along with the struggles and resistance they have waged against such repression. In this instance, the apocalypse of violence must be addressed not through limited reforms but through a call for eliminating a capitalist society whose history only leads to mass suffering, staggering inequality, endless injustice and fascism itself. Labor historian Michael Yates is right in stating that 'The long rule of capital has created profoundly alienated conditions for nearly all of humanity [and we] cannot afford to settle for incremental changes….The radical upending of the social order is now hard headed realism, the only path forward.' The struggle for revolutionary socialism is no longer a utopian longing. It is an urgent necessity."

~  Henry Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.