Youth in Authoritarian Times: Challenging Neoliberalism's Politics of Disposability

Youth in Authoritarian Times: Challenging Neoliberalism's Politics of Disposability

Wednesday, 21 October 2015 10:00
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis






Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States. (1) Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative. (2)

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life.

The citizen is now urged to become a consumer, politicians are now mouthpieces for money and power (3) and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of compassion, the commons and democracy itself. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but as a private right, and critical thinking is no longer valued as a fundamental necessity for creating engaged and socially responsible citizens. Neoliberalism's contempt for the social is now matched by an utter disdain for the common good. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange have been replaced by corporate entities whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins and producing a vast commercial culture "that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters." (4)

One outcome of this tangle of forces is that we live at a time in which institutions that were designed to limit human suffering and indignity and protect the public from the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist markets have been either been weakened or abolished. (5) Free market policies, values and practices, with their now unrestrained emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the denigration of social protections and the deregulation of economic activity, influence practically every commanding political and economic institution in North America. Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains. ................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33312-youth-in-authoritarian-times-challenging-neoliberalism-s-politics-of-disposability