[P2P-F] Fwd: Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option

Fri Jan 20 13:03:50 CET 2017

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From: Tikkun <magazine at tikkun.org>
Date: Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 7:02 PM
Subject: Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com

<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=R3%2BDpZrjd8GCAvHcBdeHfUVDjXRfvLQ4>

January 19, 2017

Normalizing Trump’s Authoritarianism is Not an Option

by Henry A. Giroux

The dark times that haunt the current age no longer appear as merely an
impending threat. They have materialized with the election of Donald Trump
to the presidency.  Trump and his administration of extremists epitomize
the dire dangers posed by those who longed to rule American society without
resistance, dominate its major political parties, and secure uncontested
control of its commanding political, cultural, and economic institutions.
The consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the financial elite
along with the savagery and misery that signifies their politics is no
longer the stuff of Hollywood films such as *Wall Street* and *American
Psycho*.  If George W. Bush’s reign of fearmongering, greed, and war on
terror embodied the values of a kind of militarized Gordon Gekko, Trump
represents the metamorphosis of Gekko into the deranged and ethically
neutered, Patrick Bateman. Yet, Trump’s ascent to the highest office in
America is already being normalized by numerous pundits and politicians,
including Barack Obama, who are asking the American public to give Trump a
chance or are suggesting that the power and demands of the presidency will
place some restraints on his unrestrained impetuousness and often
unpredictable behavior.

       As might be expected, a range of supine politicians, media pundits,
and mainstream journalists are already tying themselves in what Tom
Engelhardt calls “apologetic knots” while they “desperately look for signs
that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic, recognizable American president once
he takes the mantle of power.”[1] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn1>  As
comedian John Oliver pointed out on his show, *Last Week Tonight*, Trump is
not ordinary and his politics forebode the storm clouds of an American
version of authoritarianism. Oliver brought his point home by shouting
repeatedly  “This is not normal,” and, of course, he is right! It is even
more surprising that Lesley Stahl’s *60 Minut*e interview with Trump
portrayed him less as a demagogue than as a transformed politician who was
“subdued and serious.”[2] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn2> In addition, NBC’s
Andrea Mitchell “reported approvingly upon the transition as if proposed
White House counselor Steve Bannon and proposed attorney general Jeff
Sessions, two men with racism in their pasts, were ordinary appointments.”
[3] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn3>  High profile celebrity, Oprah Winfrey,
stated without irony, in an interview with *Entertainment Tonight *that “I
just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House, and
it gave me hope.”[4] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn4> This is quite a stretch
given Trump’s history of racist practices, his racist remarks about Blacks,
Muslims, and Mexican immigrants during the primary and the presidential
campaigns, and his appointment of a number of cabinet members who embrace a
white nationalist ideology. *The* *New York Times’ *opinion writer,
Nicholas Kristof, sabotaged his self-proclaimed liberal belief system by
noting, in what appears to be acute lapse of judgment, that Americans
should “Grit [their] teeth and give Trump a chance.”[5]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn5> Bill Gates made clear his own and often
hidden reactionary world view when speaking on CNBC’s *Squawk Box*. The
Microsoft co-founder slipped into fog of self-delusion by stating that
Trump had the potential to emulate JFK by establishing an upbeat and
desirable mode of “leadership through innovation.”[6]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn6>

<#m_8655823248749904935__edn6>

Such actions by the mainstream media and such highly visible pundits point
to not just a retreat from responsible reporting, discourse, and a flight
from any vestige of social responsibility, but also the further collapse of
serious journalism and thoughtful reasoning into the corrupt world of a
corporate controlled media empire and an infantilizing celebrity culture.
Normalizing the Trump regime does more than sabotage the truth, moral
responsibility, and justice; it also cancels out the democratic
institutions necessary for a future of well-being and economic and
political justice. *New York Times* columnist, Charles Blow, observes
insightfully that under a Trump administration:

The nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified,
undignified demagogue [who surrounds] himself with a rogue’s gallery of
white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy
theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate change deniers….This is
not normal [and] I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those
who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through own weariness and
against the corrosive drift of conformity.[7] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn7>

       Blow is right. Any talk of working with a president who has
surrounded himself with militarists, racists, neo-fascists,
anti-intellectuals, and neoliberal fundamentalists should be resisted at
all cost. It is well worth remembering that Trump chose to put Steve
Bannon, a notorious anti-Semite and white supremacist, at  the center of
power in the White House. As Reuters reported, “White supremacists and
neo-Nazis have rarely, if ever, in recent history been so enthusiastic
about a presidential appointment as Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon
to be his chief White House strategist.”[8]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn8> Trump
has also surrounded himself with militarists and corporate ideologues who
fantasize about destroying all vestiges of the welfare state and the
institutions that produce the public values that support the social
contract. Neal Gabler argues that the normalizing of Trump by the
mainstream media is about more than the dereliction of duty my members of
the mainstream media. He writes:

       Far more serious is their normalization not of Trump but of his
voters. The former is        typical cowardice under threat of reactionary
populism. The latter is an endorsement of       reactionary populism that
may have far-reaching consequences for whether the country can ever be
reunited after having been torn asunder.[9] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn9>

       Normalization is code for a retreat from any sense of moral and
political responsibility, and it should be viewed as an act of political
complicity with authoritarianism and condemned outright. What is being
propagated by Trump’s apologists is not only a reactionary popularism and
some fundamental tenets of an American style authoritarianism, but also a
shameless whitewashing of the racism and authoritarianism at the center of
Trump’s politics. In addition, little has been said about how Trump and his
coterie of semi-delusional, if not heartless, advisors embrace a demented
appropriation of Ayn Rand’s view that selfishness, war against all
competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals. In
addition, arguments in defense of such normalization appear to overlook
with facile indifference how the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become
normalized in many parts of the world and that the Trump administration has
clearly demonstrated an affinity with such hateful rhetoric. How else to
explain the support that Trump has received from a number of ruthless
dictators who head reactionary governments such as the Philippines, Turkey,
and Egypt, among others.  Such a danger is all the more ominous given the
current collapse of civic literacy and the general public’s increasing
inability to deal with complex issues, on one hand, and the attempt, on the
other hand, by those who maintain power to ruthlessly promote a
depoliticizing discourse of lies, simplicity, and  manufactured distortions.

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       The United States has entered a new historical conjuncture, which
echoes elements of a totalitarian past. Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and
Robert Paxton, the great theorists of totalitarianism believed that the
fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us and that they would
crystalize in different forms.[10] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn10> Far from
being fixed in a frozen moment of historical terror, these theorists
believed that totalitarianism  not only “heralds as a possible model for
the future”[11] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn11> but that its “protean
origins are still with us.”[12] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn12>  Arendt, in
particular, was keenly aware that a culture of fear, the dismantling of
civil and political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the attack
on labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the
emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and the attempts by
demagogues to undermine education as a foundation for producing critical
citizenry were all at work in American society.  Historical conjunctures
produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred
for democracy, dissent, and human rights.[13]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn13> More recently, Robert Paxton in his seminal
work, *The Anatomy of Fascism*, provides a working definition of fascism
that points to both its anti-democratic moments and those elements that
link it to both the past and the present.  Paxton’s point is not to provide
a precise definition of fascism but to understand the conditions that
enabled fascism to work and make possible its development in the future.
Accordingly, fascism is:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of
unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed
nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with
traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of
internal cleansing and external expansion.[14]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn14>

It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly
categorizes a country as either authoritarian *or* democratic and leaves no
room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.
American politics today suggests a more updated if not different form of
authoritarianism or what might be called the curse of totalitarianism. In
Trump’s America, there are strong echoes of the fascism that developed in
Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s. For instance, there are resemblances to a
fascist script in Trump’s scapegoating of other; his claim that the United
States is in a period of decline;  his call to make America great again;
his blatant appeal to ultra-nationalism;  his portrayal of himself as a
strongman who alone can save the country; his appeal to aggression and
violence aimed at those who disagree with him; his contempt for dissent;
his deep rooted anti-intellectualism or what Arendt called
“thoughtlessness” (i.e., denial that climate change is produced by humans)
coupled with his  elevation of instinct and emotion over reason; his appeal
to xenophobia, national greatness, and support for a politics of
disposability; his courting of anti-Semites, white supremacists, and
flirtation with the discourse of racial purity; his support for a white
Christian public sphere; his use of a kind of verbal waterboarding to
denigrate Muslims, Blacks, illegal immigrants, and women’s reproductive
rights; his contempt for weakness and his support for the dark side of
hyper-masculinity.

       I argue in this essay that the dark period Americans are about to
enter under a Trump regime cannot be understood without an acknowledgement
of the echoes of a totalitarian past. With Trump’s election, the crisis of
politics is accompanied by a crisis of historical conscience, memory,
ethics, and agency exacerbated by an appeal to a notion of common sense in
which facts are regarded with disdain, words reduced to slogans, and
science confused with pseudo-science. Under such circumstances,  language
is emptied of any meaning and constitutes a flight from ethics, justice,
and social responsibility. As language becomes devoid of any meaning, the
American public is inundated with empty slogans such as “post-truth” and
“fake news”—euphemisms for a landscape of manufactured derangements and
distortions that constitute what might be called a culture of post-ethics.
This culture is part of what Todd Gitlin calls “an interlocking ecology of
falsification that has driven the country around the bend.”[15]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn15>  Against the background of an infantilizing
culture of immediacy, spectacle, and sensationalism, Trump will govern as
if he is running a reality TV show, endlessly performing for an
increasingly depoliticized public. But there are more dangers ahead than
the toxic seduction of politics as theater and the transformation of the
mainstream media as adjunct of the entertainment industry or for that
matter a growing distrust of democracy itself.  Under casino capital, the
alleged celebration of the principle of a free press hides more than it
promises. Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, and Robert McChesney, among others,
have observed, mainstream media now work in conjunction with the financial
elite and the military-industrial-academic complex as an echo chamber while
further indulging in the rituals of shock, celebrity culture, and
spectacularized violence in order to increase their ratings. Earlier this
year, Les Moonves, CBS CEO stated that his network’s inordinate and
disastrous coverage of Trump “may not be good for America but it’s damn
good for CBS.”[16] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn16>  Moonves openly gloated
not only because the network was pumping up its ratings but was also
getting rich by inordinately covering Trump’s presidential campaign. As he
put it, [T]he money’s rolling in … [T]his is going to be a very good year
for us….It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead.
Keep going."[17] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn17>  Moonves made it clear
that the power of mainstream media in general has little to do with either
pursuing the truth or holding power accountable. On the contrary, its real
purpose was to normalize corruption, lies, misrepresentation, accumulate
capital, and allow the transformation of the press to become an adjunct of
authoritarian ideologies, policies, interests and commodified values—if
that is what it takes to increase their profit margins.

Normalization is about more than dominating media outlets being complicit
with corrupt power or willfully retreating from any sense of social
responsibility; it is also about aiding and abetting power in order to
increase the bottom line and accumulate other cowardly forms of power and
recognition. This is evident in the fact that some powerful elements of the
mainstream press not only refused to take Trump seriously, they also
concocted embarrassing rationales for not holding him up to any viable
sense of accountability. For instance, Gerard Baker, the
editor-in-chief of *The
Wall Street Journal*, publicly announced that in the future he would not
allow his reporters to use the word lie in their coverage. This is more
than a retreat from journalism’s goal of holding people, institutions, and
power to some measure of justice; it also legitimizes the kind of political
and moral cowardice that undermines the truth, informed resistance, and the
first amendment. While such actions may not rise to the level of book
burning that was characteristic of various fascist and authoritarian
regimes in the past, it does mark a distinctive retreat from historical
memory and civic courage that serves to normalize such actions by making
dissent appear, at best, unreasonable and, at worse, an act of treason.

 Such actions become apparent in efforts by the mainstream press to rage
against the rise of fake news, suggesting that since they are not part of
such attempts their integrity cannot be questioned. Of course, fake news is
a euphemism for deliberately lying and collapsing the line between facts
and fiction, the truth and falsehoods. By that definition, lying is about
more than fake news, it is central to the need to manufacture consent in
the interest of implementing polices, constructing identities, and shoring
up values that serve a wide range of unsavory political and ideological
interests. The slippery nature of the term fake news is on full display
particularly when used by Trump and his merry band of liars to dismiss
anyone or any organization that holds him accountable for his fabrications.
Hence, there were no surprises when Trump at his first president-elect
press conference refused not only to take questions from a CNN reporter
because his network had published material critical of Trump, but he
justified his refusal by labeling CNN as fake news—reducing the term to a
slogan used to silence the press. Clearly, we will see more of this type of
bullying repression and censorship but it will not be aimed just at
mainstream outlets such as CNN but will also eventually be used to smear
all manner of alternative social media such as *Truthout, Tikkun,
Counterpunch, TomDispatch.com, Democracy Now*, and others. Traditional
democratic public spheres such as higher education will also feel the brunt
of such an attack.

 Normalization has many registers and one of the most important is the
control by the financial elite over commanding cultural apparatuses that
produce, legitimize, and distribute highly selective media narratives that
shore up the most reactionary ideologies and financial interests. The
mainstream press says little about how such actions serve as an apology for
the egregiously reactionary nature of Trump’s ideology and policies.
Moreover, they fail to note how distortions of the truth, the endless
production of lies by governments, politicians, and corporations, along
with the media’s flight from civic literacy, serve to bolster authoritarian
societies willing to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing
dissent. Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that Trump’s
authoritarian and hateful discourse, threats of violence, loathing of
dissent, and his racist attitudes towards Muslims, Blacks and Mexican
immigrants are downplayed in the mainstream media. These structured
silences have become more and more apparent given the benign manner in
which the supine press and its legion of enervated anti-public
intellectuals and pundits treat Trump’s endless nighttime Twitter
outpourings and his incessant choreographed public fabrications.

For instance, *The Wall Street Journal’s* refusal to address critically
Trump’s endless lies and insults is matched by the high brow *New Yorker’s*
publishing of a piece on Trump, which largely celebrates uncritically how
he is viewed by conservative intellectuals such as Hillsdale College
president, Larry Arnn. Arnn supports Trump because he shares Arnn’s view
that “the government has become dangerous.”[18]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn18> If he were referring to the rise of the
surveillance and permanent war state, it would be hard to disagree with
Arnn. Instead, he was referring to the government’s enforcement of “runaway
regulations.”[19] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn19>  What Arnn and *The New
Yorker* ignore is the fact that the real danger the government poses is the
result of it being in the hands of demagogues such as Trump who are truly
dangerous and threaten the planet, American society, and the rest of the
world.  While *New Yorker* staff writer Kelefa Sanneh mentions Trump’s
connection to the “alt-right,” he underplays the group’s fascist ideology
and refuses to use the term white supremacy in talking about such groups,
reverting instead to the innocuous term, “white identity politics.”[20]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn20> Trump’s misogyny, racism,
anti-intellectualism, Islamophobia, and hatred of democracy are barely
mentioned.  Sanneh even goes so far as to suggest that since Trump has
disavowed the “alt-right,” his connection to neo-fascist groups is tenuous.
This is more than an apology dressed up in the discourse of ambiguity; such
reporting is a shameful retreat from journalistic integrity, an assault on
the truth, and constitutes an egregious act of normalization. This is only
one example of what is surely to come in the future under Trump’s rule.

        Under Trump’s regime of economic, religious, education, and
political fundamentalism, compassion and respect for the other will be
viewed with contempt while society will increasingly become more
militarized and financial capital will be deregulated in order to be  free
to engage in behaviors that put the American public and planet in danger. A
form of social and historical amnesia will descend over American society
like a poisonous virus. A culture of dumbness and civic illiteracy will be
produced and legitimated along with a culture of fear that will enable a
harsh law and order regime.

Policies will be enacted in which public goods such as schools will be
privatized, and a culture of greed and selfishness will be elevated to new
heights of celebration. There will be a further retreat from civic
literacy, civic courage, and social responsibility, one matched by a
growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance to the common good. Fear
and the threat of state violence will shape how problems are addressed, and
a growing culture of dissent will be ruthlessly suppressed in all of the
public spheres in which it has functioned in the past.  The free-market
mentality that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will
accelerate under the Trump administration and it will continue to drive
politics, destroy many social protections, celebrate a
hyper-competitiveness, and deregulate economic activity.  Under Donald
Trump’s reign, all human activities, practices, and institutions will be
subject to market principles and militarized. The only relations that
matter will be defined in commercial terms just as civil society will be
organized for the production of violence.  It is most likely that the most
dangerous powers of the state will be unleashed under Trump, possibly on
the environment, public and higher education, protesters, poor Blacks,
Muslims, and illegal immigrants. Surely, all the signs are in place given
the coterie of billionaires, generals, warmongers, Islamophobes, neoliberal
cheerleaders, and anti-public demagogues Trump has appointed to
high-ranking government positions. Americans may be on the verge of
witnessing how democracy ends and this is precisely why Trump’s election as
the president of the United States cannot be normalized.

       Trump’s repressive and poisonous attitudes and irresponsible view of
others and the broader society will not change his role as president. If
fact, he will consolidate his power and will be more reckless than he was
during the primaries and presidential campaigns. Trump’s narcissism,
indifference to the truth, and addiction to the spectacle will further
increase his view of himself and his policies as unaccountable, especially
as he institutes a mode of governance that suppresses the opposition and
deals with his audience directly through the social media. Fortunately, a
number of diverse groups, extending from union members and women’s groups
to more left oriented groups such as Refuse Fascism.org, along with
teachers, actors, and artists are organizing to protest Trump’s neo-fascist
ideology and policies. As George Yancy pointed out to me in a personal
correspondence, such actions are unique in that they make the political
more pedagogical by elevating protests, modes of resistance, and criticism
to the level of the cultural rather than allowing such criticism to reside
in the voice and presence of isolated, prophetic intellectuals. Moreover, a
number of opposition magazines and social sites such as *In These Times*, *The
Nation*, *Truthout, and Counterpunch* along with various public
intellectuals such as Anthony DiMaggio, Robin Kelley, and members of the
Black Lives Matter Movement are producing instructive articles on both the
nature of resistance and what forms it might take.[21]
<#m_8655823248749904935__edn21>

At issue here is the urgent necessity to produce a collective effort that
enables a level of critical thinking, civic literacy, and political courage
that will inspire and energize a massive broad-based struggle intent on
producing ongoing forms of non-violent resistance at all levels of society.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is right in insisting that progressives need a new
language of critique and possibility, one that embraces a movement for a
world of love, courage, and justice while being committed to a mode of
nonviolence in which the means are as ethical as the ends sought by such
struggles.[22] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn22>  Such a call is as
historically mindful as it is insightful and it draws upon legacies of
non-violent resistance as diverse as those called for by renowned activists
such as Saul Alinsky, Paulo Freire, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, in
spite of their diverse projects and methods, these modes of non-violent
resistance all shared a commitment to a collective and fearsome struggle in
which non-violence strategies rejected passivity and compromise for
powerful expressions of resistance.  Such struggles to be successful will
have to be coordinated, fearless, and relentless. Single-issue movements
will have to join with others in supporting both a comprehensive politics
and a mass collective movement.  *We live at a time in which totalitarian
forms are with us again. * American society is no longer at the tipping
point of authoritarianism, we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt called
“dark times” and individual and collective resistance is the only hope we
have to move beyond this ominous moment in our history.

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Henry A. Giroux currently is a Contributing Editor for Tikkun Magazine and
the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest
and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most
recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights,
2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge,
2015),   coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of
Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War
with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is www.henryagiroux.com
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.

------------------------------

[1] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref1> Tom Engelhardt, “Tomgram: Rebecca
Gordon, No ‘New Normal,” TomDispatch (November 20, 2016). Online:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212/
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[2] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref2> Neil Gabler, “And So It Begins:
Normalizing the Election,” *Moyers&Company* (November 24, 2016). Online:
http://billmoyers.com/story/media-normalizing-election/
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[3] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref3> Ibid. Gabler, “And So It Begins:
Normalizing the Election.”

[4] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref4> The interview is available at
http://buzz.blog.ajc.com/2016/11/12/oprah-trump/

[5] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref5> Nicholas Kristof, “Gritting Our Teeth
and Giving President Trump a Chance,” New York Times (November 9, 2017).
Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/gritting-our-
teeth-and-giving-president-trump-a-chance.html?_r=0
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[6] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref6> *Irish Central* Staff, “Bill gates
Says Trump Could lead America like JFK,” *IrishCentral.com* (January 6,
2017). Online: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/bill-gates-says-
trump-could-lead-america-like-jfk

[7] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref7> Charles Blow, “Donald Trump, This is
not Normal,” *New York Times* (December 19, 2016). Online:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/donald-trump-
this-is-not-normal.html?_r=0

[8] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref8> Bill Trott, “Donald Trump’s choice of
Steve Bannon as chief strategist sets off critical firestorm,” *Global News
*(November 15, 2017). Online: http://globalnews.ca/news/
3068972/donald-trumps-choice-of-steve-bannon-as-chief-
strategist-sets-of-critical-firestorm/

[9] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref9> Ibid., Gabler, “And So It Begins:
Normalizing the Election.”

[10] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref10> Hannah Arendt, *The Origins of
Totalitarianism*, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York: 2001). Sheldon S.
Wolin, *Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of
Inverted Totalitarianism*, (Princeton University Press, 2008).

[11] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref11> Marie Luise Knott, *Unlearning With
Hannah Arendt*, trans. by David Dollenmayer, (Other Press: New York, NY.
2011, 2013), p 17.

[12] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref12> Bill Dixon, “Totalitarianism and
the Sand Storm,” Hannah Arendt Center (February 3, 2014). Online:
http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=12466
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[13] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref13> The following three paragraphs draw
from previous work in Henry A. Giroux, “Barack Obama and the Resurgent
Specter of Authoritarianism,” *3:4 JAC* (2011), pp. 415-440.

[14] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref14> Robert O. Paxton, *The Anatomy of
Fascism*. (USA, N.Y.: Vintage Books, 2005), p. 208.

[15] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref15> Todd Gitlin, “Welcome to the
Vortex,” *Open Democracy*, [7 January 2017]
Online: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/01/07/welcome-vortex

[16] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref16> Amy Goodman, “"It Might Not Be Good
for America, But It's Good for Us": How the Media Got Rich on Trump's
Rise,” *Democracy Now *(Novemmber 9, 2016). Online:
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/9/it_might_not_be_good_for
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=qGxSaAOPugB848q%2ByBvF90VDjXRfvLQ4>

[17] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref17> Ibid.

[18] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref18> Kelefa Sanneh, “Secret Admirers:
The Conservative Intellectuals Smitten with Trump,” The New Yorker (January
9, 2017). Online: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/
intellectuals-for-trump

<#m_8655823248749904935__ednref19>

[19] Ibid.

[20] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref20> Ibid.

[21] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref21> See for instance, “A Handbook For
Resistance” in the January 2017 issue of *In These Times*; the December 5th
issue of *The Nation* on “How to Fight Back;” Anthony DiMaggio, “The
Anti-Trump Uprising: Forging a Path Forward in Uncertain Times,”
Counterpunch (December 15, 2016). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/
2016/12/15/the-anti-trump-uprising-forging-a-path-
forward-in-uncertain-times/
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZJBE2F%2Bkgko2uQY8rrPY3EVDjXRfvLQ4>;
Robin D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” *Boston Review *(November 15, 2016).
Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-
trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=YmcJm9mDsp%2BwE555p0%2B8VUVDjXRfvLQ4>;
a resistance manual launched by the Movement for Black Lives,  See
https://www.resistancemanual.org/Resistance_Manual_Home

[22] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref22> Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Yearning for
a World of Love and Justice: An introduction to the Ideas of *Tikkun* and
the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP),” *Tikkun *(April 30, 2015).
Online:  http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/yearning-for-a-world-
of-love-and-justice-the-worldview-of-tikkun-and-our-network-of-spiritual-
progressives
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