Fascist politics and the dread of white supremacy in the age of disconnections

Abstract

With the rise of authoritarian politics across the globe, echoes of a fascist past are with us once again signaling a looming and dangerous threat to education and democracy. This essay argues that is it crucial to engage fascism both as a language of white supremacy and a politics of disconnection. If fascism is to be addressed both politically and educationally, it is crucial to address its underlying political, educational, and economic elements comprehensively as part of a broad politics. Any viable mode of resistance to fascism in its upgraded forms must not only make education central to politics but also analyze the problems it produces and its root causes in their interconnections and as part of a wider totality of power and exclusion. Fascism is normalized in a capitalist order when its diverse economic, political and social problems appear fragmented, disconnected, and are treated in isolation. This essay argues against this form of normalization and critiques the relationship between fascism and capitalism and its politics of diversion by examining how a number of crucial issues are often wrongly dealt with in isolation. It concludes by demonstrating how a politics that is comprehensive and interrelated provides a language to rethink how fascism can be made visible and resisted.

Keywords:

• Disconnections
• white supremacy
• memory
• racial cleansing
• moral witnessing
• education
• indoctrination
• fascism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux is a Faculty of Humanities, Chaired Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at the McMaster University.