Read This: Against the New Authoritarianism
Non-fiction by Henry Giroux (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)
REVIEW BY Charles Demers
The latest book from Henry Giroux—the intellectual refugee who recently traded Penn State for McMaster in a bid to escape the “fear, insecurity and repression” engendered by America’s “religious, political, and free-market fundamentalists” is less one cohesive study than it is two complementary essays and an interview, each focused on rather different manifestations of contemporary American politics. The title and subtitle of the book are variations on the titles of its two major component pieces, with “politics” acting as a book-selling stand-in for the more specialized “What Might Education Mean After Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno’s Politics of Education.”
Giroux’s lacklustre introduction treads the familiarly depressing grounds of President George W. Bush’s grocery list of far-flung and domestic atrocities before the author lands his belated thesis statement like a punch on the neck, 30 pages in: “The United States is not simply a centre-right government supported by the majority of its populace; it is a country moving rapidly towards a form of authoritarianism that undermines any claim to a practising liberal democracy.” If that idea sounds shrill or hyperbolic at first, it certainly doesn’t 66 lucidly argued pages—and 157 footnotes—later. For the most part, Giroux argues calmly and very persuasively that the climate of neo-liberalism, hyper-nationalism, militarization and hysterical obsession with private profits and national security prevalent under the Bush-Cheney regime has effectively undercut democracy and opened the door to the mass incarceration, imperialism, alienation and torture that constitute “proto-fascism.”
While Giroux’s bleak view of the disastrous policies of the Bush administration is totally reasonable, it’s still a stretch to paint those policies as the taking-off point for a qualitatively new authoritarianism, rather than being the logical culmination of a decades-long bipartisan trend in Washington towards deregulation, imprisonment, unilateralism and privatization. Much of the groundwork for the policies and ideology of the current administration, as well as the grassroots anti-democratic movements of American Evangelism and fascism, took shape under Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush and—American liberals must be reminded—gained momentum under President Clinton. In this respect, an excellent companion piece to Giroux’s essay is Chip Berlet’s and Matthew N. Lyons’s Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, published in 2000 by the Guilford Press.
Giroux’s second essay is weaker, more mired in baffling and infuriating post-modern jargon—“The pictures at Abu Ghraib prison gain their status as a form of public pedagogy by virtue of the spaces they create between the sites in which they become public and the forms of pedagogical address that both frame and mediate their meaning”—and internal contradiction. For instance, after rightfully going after the right-wing apologia that held popular culture and pornography responsible for warping the minds of the Abu Ghraib soldiers, Giroux goes on to cite Donald Trump’s obnoxious “You’re fired!” catchphrase as part of a contributing “celebration of both violence and hardness.” Having lucidly argued his first thesis through a helpful and accessible blend of theory and empirical evidence, Giroux then wanders into the realm of abstract, oblique prose and sometimes baffling formulations in arguing his second.
Nevertheless, Giroux’s interest in revisiting Theodor Adorno’s post-Auschwitz theories of developing a pedagogy that would prevent citizens from going along with state-sponsored horrors by engendering a culture of compassion and democracy is an admirable one. It’s worth wading through a little post-modernist wackiness (or “wackiness”) to engage with a scholarship that is so humane, sincere and interested in building a better world beyond the campus.
