Chris Hedges's Blog, page 476

North Korea Stresses Economy, Not Nukes, on 70th Anniversary

PYONGYANG, North Korea—North Korea held a major military parade and revived its iconic mass games to celebrate its 70th anniversary on Sunday, but in keeping with leader Kim Jong Un’s new policies the emphasis was firmly on building up the economy, not on nuclear weapons.

The North rolled out some of its latest tanks and marched its best-trained goose-stepping units in the parade but held back its most advanced missiles and devoted nearly half of the event to civilian efforts to build the domestic economy.

It also brought the mass games back after a five-year hiatus. The games are a grand spectacle that features nearly 20,000 people flipping placards in unison to create huge mosaics as thousands more perform gymnastics or dance in formation on the competition area of Pyongyang’s 150,000-seat May Day Stadium.

The strong emphasis on the economy underscores the strategy Kim has pursued since January of putting economic development front and center.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans waving brightly colored plastic bouquets filled Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square as the parade began. Residents of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, trained for months for the anniversary and held up the bouquets to spell out words and slogans that can be seen from the VIP viewing area.

Kim attended the morning parade but did not address the assembled crowd, which included the head of the Chinese parliament and high-level delegations from countries that have friendly ties with the North.

At the end of the two-hour event he strolled to the edge of the balcony with the Chinese special envoy, Li Zhanshu, the third-ranking member in China’s ruling Communist Party. The two held up their joined hands to symbolize the countries’ traditionally close ties, though the absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping could indicate Beijing still has some reservations about Kim’s initiatives.

Senior statesman Kim Yong Nam, the head of North Korea’s parliament, set the relatively softer tone for the parade with an opening speech that emphasized the economic goals of the regime, not its nuclear might. He called on the military to be ready to work to help build the economy.

After a truncated parade featuring tanks and some of North Korea’s biggest artillery, fewer than the usual number of missiles and lots of goose-stepping units from all branches of the military, the focus switched to civilian groups ranging from nurses to students to construction workers, many with colorful floats beside them.

The combining of military and civilian sections is a familiar North Korean parade format.

The past two big anniversaries of North Korea’s founding, in 2008 and 2013, did not feature the Korean People’s Army, only the civil defense units, which are officially called “Worker Peasant Red Guards.”

Although North Korea stages military parades almost every year, and held one just before the Olympics began in South Korea in February this year, Sunday’s parade came at a particularly sensitive time.

Kim’s effort to ease tensions with President Donald Trump has stalled since their June summit in Singapore. Both sides are now insisting on a different starting point. Washington wants Kim to commit to denuclearization first, but Pyongyang wants its security guaranteed and a peace agreement formally ending the Korean War.

With tensions once again on the rise, a parade featuring the very missiles that so unnerved Trump last year, and led to a dangerous volley of insults from both leaders, could have been seen as a deliberate provocation. The North also refrained from immediately televising the event, though North Korean media were out in force to film it, deploying booms and — for possibly the first time — drones with cameras.

“This is a big and very positive statement from North Korea,” Trump tweeted. “Thank you To Chairman Kim. We will both prove everyone wrong! There is nothing like good dialogue from two people that like each other! Much better than before I took office.”

The North did show off a battery of big artillery pieces known as self-propelled guns that could be used to threaten Seoul, South Korea’s capital. But the only types of missiles displayed were short-range surface-to-surface missiles, a surface-to-air missile and an anti-ship cruise missile.

That’s a big departure from February’s parade, when it displayed its Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, believed capable of reaching the U.S., and a number of other formidable missiles and the erector-launchers used to fire them off from remote locations.

Pyongyang residents unable to attend at the square on Sunday lined the streets around town to cheer and applaud convoys carrying the troops after they completed the parade duties.

Soon after the anniversary celebrations end, Kim will meet in Pyongyang with South Korean President Moon Jae-in to discuss ways to break the impasse over his nuclear weapons.

The “new line” of putting economic development first has been Kim’s top priority this year. He claims to have perfected his nuclear arsenal enough to deter U.S. aggression and devote his resources to raising his nation’s standard of living.

The economic theme was also prominent in the new mass games routine, which was markedly lighter in tone and more entertaining than in previous years, when it tended to be more dramatic and overtly political.

The mass games, dubbed “Shining Fatherland,” featured everything from a display of drones flying in formation to fireworks, lasers, circus-style performances and at one point hundreds of martial artists doing taekwondo. A running commentary throughout the show pointed out the importance of following Kim’s economic and development strategy, while significantly playing down the role of the military and not once mentioning North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

The mass games performances are expected to continue for the next month or so, with tickets for foreigners starting at just over $100 and going up to more than $800 per seat.

2 NFL Players Kneel for Anthem, Kaepernick Tweets His Thanks

DENVER—No longer welcome on an NFL sideline, Colin Kaepernick turned to social media to make his point on the NFL’s opening Sunday.

In a tweet, Kaepernick gave a shout-out to “my brothers,” Miami Dolphins teammates Kenny Stills and Albert Watson, who were the only two players in the league to take a knee during the national anthem during Sunday’s early games.

“They have not backed down, even when attacked and intimidated,” Kaepernick said in the tweet, which was accompanied by a picture of the Dolphins kneeling before their game. “Love is at the root of our resistance.”

It was Kaepernick, then with the 49ers, who sparked the anthem controversy by kneeling during the pregame ritual in 2016—his way of protesting policy brutality and social injustice in America.

Since opting out of his contract after that season, Kaepernick has been unable to land a contract on an NFL team and is suing the league for collusion.

But his voice is still being heard. Last week, Nike introduced an ad featuring the quarterback and his message: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” One fan in Cleveland for the Steelers-Browns games was spotted in the stands wearing a Kaepernick jersey.

While Stills and Watson were kneeling during the anthem, teammate Robert Quinn raised his fist. Niners receiver Marquise Goodwin did the same at San Francisco’s game at Minnesota. Jalen Ramsey and linebacker Telvin Smith Jr. of the Jaguars stayed in the locker room while the anthem was played.

Hours before Kaepernick’s tweet, President Donald Trump took to twitter to dig at the NFL, linking low ratings for Thursday night’s opener between Atlanta and Philadelphia (lowest for an opener since 2008) to players who refuse to stand for the anthem.

“If the players stood proudly for our Flag and Anthem, and it is all shown on broadcast, maybe ratings could come back? Otherwise worse!” he tweeted.

CBS and Fox, which carried Sunday afternoon’s games, have said they did not plan on televising the anthem.

However, NBC did show the anthem on Thursday night, and no players kneeled or protested in other ways.

That included Malcolm Jenkins, who raised his fist during the anthem last season but did not for the opener. During pregame warmups, he wore a shirt that read “Ca$h bail = poverty trap.”

Jenkins said he would like to move the focus away from the anthem.

“I think there’s a huge need for us to turn the attention to not only the issues, but what players are actually doing in their communities to promote change,” he said. “We’re trying to move past the rhetoric of what’s right or what’s wrong in terms of the anthem, and really focus on the systematic issues that are plaguing our communities.”

Pulling Drinking Water Out of Thin Air

A new technology, harvesting airborne potable water from the air using salts and sunlight, is set to offer new hope to many communities desperate for water to drink and to grow their crops.

An existing technology, which collects water from mist and clouds in mountain or coastal regions, is now established as a useful source of water in many countries. But where there is no fog it can achieve little. The new technology, harvesting water vapour from the air with the use of abundant salts and virtually unlimited sunlight, has now become a possibility, meaning even places without fog are not condemned to continued thirst.

Using sheets of various materials that harvest vapour from fog and allow the water to drip into collectors for later use already sustains many dry region communities, and a Canadian charity, Fogquest, works to help people in countries able to benefit. Countries using these established fog collectors include Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Namibia, Eritrea, Oman and Nepal.

In California, where coastal fog is normal even in the driest seasons because of the closeness of the sea to the dry coast, much of the vegetation could not survive without harvesting fog. A large number of water-collecting devices is being tried in a quest to improve efficiency.

“These salts not only work when the sunlight is strongest, at noon or early afternoon, but also … during other times of the day. …”

But in some desert regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, there is no fog, so the existing technology is no help. What there is, though, even in the driest regions, is water vapour in the atmosphere. And that offers hope.

Until now extracting water from this vapour so people and animals could make use of it has defeated human ingenuity. But Renyuan Li, a Ph.D student from KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, has shown that using commonly available salts which absorb water from the atmosphere at night makes it possible to obtain fresh water during the day – by exposing the salts to sunlight.

With his tutor Peng Wang he experimented with a range of common salts and came up with three that readily absorb water from the atmosphere and release it again in drinkable form when daylight arrives.

Nothing but water

The three salts are copper chloride, copper sulphate and magnesium sulphate. They are effective in capturing water from the air with relative humidity as low as 15%. Still better, when exposed to even weakened sunlight, they release all the water they hold: just fresh, clean water.

“We found that these salts not only work when the sunlight is strongest, at noon or early afternoon, but that they also perform well during other times of the day, such as morning and late afternoon,” Li says. “This is important, because the extended operating hours could broaden the range of conditions in which the process can be used.”

With the problem of water shortages growing ever more acute in parts of Africa badly affected by climate change, many human settlements face extinction if they cannot find a reliable water source. The discovery at KAUST could provide a solution, because even in the most arid regions there is plenty of water in the atmosphere. It has been calculated that at any given moment the atmosphere contains as much as six times the water in all the rivers on Earth..

Professor Wang says their work could be useful in many poor, dry regions. “We are now working on salt-based composite materials with significantly enhanced water-uptake capacity, which we consider to be the second generation of our atmospheric water generator,” he said.

Leading Cancer Researcher Fails to Disclose Corporate Payments

ProPublica produced this article in partnership with The New York Times.

One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet.

The researcher, Dr. José Baselga, a towering figure in the cancer world, is the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has held board memberships or advisory roles with Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb, among other corporations; has had a stake in start-ups testing cancer therapies; and played a key role in the development of breakthrough drugs that have revolutionized treatments for breast cancer.

According to an analysis by ProPublica and The New York Times, Baselga did not follow financial disclosure rules set by the American Association for Cancer Research when he was president of the group. He also left out payments he received from companies connected to cancer research in his articles published in the group’s journal, Cancer Discovery. At the same time, he has been one of the journal’s two editors in chief.

At a conference this year and before analysts in 2017, he put a positive spin on the results of two Roche-sponsored clinical trials that many others considered disappointments, without disclosing his relationship to the company. Since 2014, he has received more than $3 million from Roche in consulting fees and for his stake in a company it acquired.

Baselga did not dispute his relationships with at least a dozen companies. In an interview, he said the disclosure lapses were unintentional.

He stressed that much of his industry work was publicly known although he declined to provide payment figures from his involvement with some biotech startups. “I acknowledge that there have been inconsistencies, but that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s not that I do not appreciate the importance.”

Baselga’s extensive corporate relationships — and his frequent failure to disclose them — illustrate how permeable the boundaries remain between academic research and industry, and how weakly reporting requirements are enforced by the medical journals and professional societies charged with policing them.

A decade ago, a series of scandals involving the secret influence of the pharmaceutical industry on drug research prompted the medical community to beef up its conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements. Ethicists worry that outside entanglements can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Disclosing those connections allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts.

“If leaders don’t follow the rules, then we don’t really have rules,” said Dr. Walid Gellad, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and director of its Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing. “It says that the rules don’t matter.”

The penalties for such ethical lapses are not severe. The cancer research group, the AACR, warns authors who fill out disclosure forms for its journals that they face a three-year ban on publishing if they are found to have financial relationships that they did not disclose. But the ban is not includedin the conflict-of-interest policy posted on its website, and the group said no author had ever been barred.

Many journals and professional societies do not check conflicts and simply require authors to correct the record.

Officials at the AACR, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and The New England Journal of Medicine said they were looking into Baselga’s omissions after inquiries from The Times and ProPublica. The Lancet declined to say whether it would look into the matter.

Christine Hickey, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan Kettering, said that Baselga had properly informed the hospital of his outside industry work and that it was Baselga’s responsibility to disclose such relationships to entities like medical journals. The cancer center, she said, “has a rigorous and comprehensive compliance program in place to promote honesty and objectivity in scientific research.”

Asked if he planned to correct his disclosures, Baselga asked reporters what they would recommend. In a statement several days later, he said he would correct his conflict-of-interest reporting for 17 articles, including in The New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and the publication he edits, Cancer Discovery. He said that he did not believe disclosure was required for dozens of other articles detailing early stages of research.

“I have spent my career caring for cancer patients and bringing new therapies to the clinic with the goal of extending and saving lives,” Baselga said in the statement. “While I have been inconsistent with disclosures and acknowledge that fact, that is a far cry from compromising my responsibilities as a physician, as a scientist and as a clinical leader.”

The Corporate Imprint on Cancer Research

Baselga, 59, supervises clinical operations at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation’s top cancer centers, and wields influence over the lives of patients and companies wishing to conduct trials there. He was paid more than $1.5 million in compensation by the cancer center in 2016, according to the hospital’s latest available tax disclosures, but that does not include his consulting or board fees from outside companies.

Many top medical researchers have ties to the for-profit health care industry, and some overlap is seen as a good thing — after all, these are the companies charged with developing the drugs, medical devices and diagnostic tests of the future.

Baselga’s relationship to industry is extensive. In addition to sitting on the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb, he is a director of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation equipment and for whom Memorial Sloan Kettering is a client.

In all, Baselga has served on the boards of at least six companies since 2013, positions that have required him to assume a fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of those companies, even as he oversees the cancer center’s medical operations.

The hospital and Baselga said steps had been taken to prevent him from having a say in any business between the cancer center and the companies on whose boards he sits.

The chief executive of Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, settled lawsuits several years ago that were filed by the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliated research center. They contended that he hid research conducted while he was at Penn to start a new company, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and did not share the earnings. Thompson disputed the allegations. He now sits on the board of Merck, which manufactures Keytruda, a blockbuster cancer therapy.

Hickey said the cancer center cannot fulfill its charitable mission without working with industry. “We encourage collaboration and are proud that our work has led to the approval of novel, life-saving cancer treatments for patients around the world,” she said.

Some Disclosures Are Required; Others Aren’t

After the scandals a decade ago over lack of disclosure, the federal government began requiring drug and device manufacturers to publicly disclose payments to doctors in 2013.

From August 2013 through 2017, Baselga received nearly $3.5 million from nine companies, according to the federal Open Payments database, which compiles disclosures filed by drug and device companies.

Baselga has disclosed in other forums investments and advisory roles in biotech start-ups, but he declined to provide a tally of financial interests in those firms. Companies that have not received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for their products — projects still in the testing phases — do not have to report payments they make to doctors.

Serving on boards can be lucrative. In 2017, Baselga received $260,000 in cash and stock awards to sit on Varian’s board of directors, according to the company’s corporate filings.

ProPublica and The Times analyzed Baselga’s publications in medical journals since 2013, the year he joined Memorial Sloan Kettering. He failed to disclose any industry relationships in more than 100, or about 60 percent of the time, a figure that has increased with each passing year. Last year, he did not list any potential conflicts in 87 percent of the articles that he wrote or co-wrote.

Baselga compiled a color-coded list of his articles and offered a different interpretation. Sixty-two of the papers for which he did not disclose any potential conflict represented “conceptual, basic laboratory or translational work,” and did not require one, he said. Questions could be raised about others, he said, but he added that most “had no clinical nor financial implications.” That left the 17 papers he plans to correct.

Early-stage research often carries financial weight because it helps companies decide whether to move ahead with a product. In about two-thirds of Balsega’s articles that lacked details of his industry ties, one or more of his co-authors listed theirs.

In 2015, Baselga published an article in the New England Journal about a Roche-sponsored trial of one of the company’s drugs, Zelboraf. Despite his financial ties to Roche, he declared that he had “nothing to disclose.” Fourteen of his co-authors reported ties to Roche.

Baselga defended the articles, saying that “these are high-quality manuscripts reporting on important clinical trials that led to a better understanding of cancer treatments.”

The guidelines enacted by most major medical journals and professional societies ask authors and presenters to list recent financial relationships that could pose a conflict.

But much of this reporting still relies on the honor system. A study in August in the journal JAMA Oncology found that one-third of authors in a sample of cancer trials did not report all payments from the studies’ sponsors.

“We don’t routinely check because we don’t have those kind of resources,” said Dr. Rita F. Redberg, the editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, who has been critical of the influence of industry on medical practice. “We rely on trust and integrity. It’s kind of an assumed part of the professional relationship.”

Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for The New England Journal of Medicine, said in an email that it had now asked Baselga to amend his disclosures. She said the journal planned to overhaul its tracking of industry relationships.

The American Association for Cancer Research said it had begun an “extensive review” of the disclosure forms submitted by Baselga.

It said that it had never barred an author from publishing, and that “such an action would be necessary only in cases of egregious, consistent violations of the rules.”

Among the most prominent relationships that Baselga has often failed to disclose is with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche and its United States subsidiary Genentech.

In June 2017, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, Baselga spoke at a Roche-sponsored investor event about study results that the company had been counting on to persuade oncologists to move patients from Herceptin — which was facing competition from cheaper alternatives — to a combination treatment involving Herceptin and a newer, more expensive drug, Perjeta.

The results were so underwhelming that Roche’s stock fell 5 percent on the news. One analyst described the results as a “lead balloon,” and an editorial in The New England Journal called it a “disappointment.”

Baselga, however, told analysts that critiques were “weird” and “strange.”

This June, at the same cancer conference, Baselga struck an upbeat note about the results of a Roche trial of the drug taselisib, saying in a blog post published on the cancer center website that the results were “incredibly exciting” while conceding the side effects from the drug were high.

That same day, Roche announced it was scrapping plans to develop the drug. The news was another disappointment involving the class of drugs called PI3K inhibitors, which is a major focus of Baselga’s current research.

In neither case did Baselga reveal that his ties to Roche and Genentech went beyond serving as a trial investigator. In 2014, Roche acquired Seragon, a cancer research company in which Baselga had an ownership stake, for $725 million. Baselga received more than $3 million in 2014 and 2015 for his stake in the company, according to the federal Open Payments database.

From 2013 to 2017, Roche also paid Baselga more than $50,000 in consulting fees, according to the database.

These details were not included in the conflict-of-interest statements that are required of all presenters at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, although he did disclose ownership interests and consulting relationships with several other companies in the prior two years.

ASCO said it would conduct an internal review of Baselga’s disclosures and would refer the findings to a panel.

Baselga said that he played no role in the Seragon acquisition, and that he had cut ties with Roche since joining the board of a competitor, Bristol-Myers, in March. As for his presentations at the ASCO meetings in the last two years, he said he had also noted shortcomings in the studies.

The combination of Perjeta with Herceptin was later approved by the FDA for certain high-risk patients. As for taselisib, Baselga stands by his belief that the PI3K class of drugs will be an important target for fighting cancer.

Florence Becomes a Hurricane, Targets Southeastern U.S.

ATLANTA—Tropical Storm Florence turned into a hurricane Sunday morning and swirled toward the U.S. for what forecasters said could be a direct hit on the Southeast toward the end of the week.

The storm’s sustained winds reached 75 mph (121 kph), just over the threshold for a hurricane, as it made its way across the Atlantic, about 750 miles (1,210 kilometers) southeast of Bermuda, the National Hurricane Center said. It was moving west at 6 mph.

The Miami-based center said that it was still too early to predict the hurricane’s exact path but that a huge coastal area from South Carolina to the mid-Atlantic region should prepare for a major strike late in the week.

“All indications are that Florence will be an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane while it moves over the western Atlantic toward the southeastern United States,” the hurricane center said.

The storm brings with it an increasing risk of two life-threatening impacts: storm surge along the coast and freshwater flooding from prolonged rains, the hurricane center said.

It is forecast to approach the southeastern U.S. coast on Thursday.

The governors of North and South Carolina and Virginia declared states of emergency to give them time to prepare, and the Navy said ships in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area would leave port for their own safety.

Dangerous swells generated by Florence affected Bermuda and have begun to reach parts of the Eastern Seaboard. The National Weather Center in Melbourne, Florida, warned of dangerous rip currents along the state’s east-central coast, including Brevard County.

Sweden Goes to the Polls Amid Heated Debate on Immigration

STOCKHOLM — Sweden went to the polls Sunday in a general election that is expected to be one of the most unpredictable and thrilling races in the Scandinavian country for decades amid heated debate on immigration.

The election will be Sweden’s first since the government in 2015 allowed 163,000 migrants into the country of 10 million. While far less than what Germany took in that year, it was the most per capita of any European nation.

“This election is a referendum about our welfare,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said. “It’s also about decency, about a decent democracy … and not letting the Sweden Democrats, an extremist party, a racist party, get any influence in the government.”

About 7.5 million registered voters choose from almost 6,300 candidates for a four-year term in the 349-seat Riksdag, or parliament. It’s highly unlikely that any single party will get a majority, or 175 seats.

The latest opinion poll conducted by pollster Novus for public broadcaster SVT suggested Friday that Lofven’s ruling Social Democrats would substantially lose seats, but still emerge as the party with the most votes with an estimated 24.9 percent of the ballots.

If realized, it would be a historical low for the traditional left-wing party, which has dominated Swedish politics in the post-World War II era.

The poll showed that the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats — led by Jimmie Akesson — would get 19.1 percent of the votes in what would be a major increase compared to the 13-percent support received in 2014.

The center-right Moderate Party is set to take to take third place with 17.7 percent.

With a steady rise in popularity of the Sweden Democrats, immigration has become the hot topic of the election.

The party, rooted in a neo-Nazi movement has worked to soften its image, has played a role in breaking down longstanding taboos on what Swedes could say openly about immigration and integration without being shunned as racists.

During a heated debate Friday evening of party leaders, Akesson caused a stir by blaming migrants for the difficulties they often have in finding employment and not adjusting to Sweden.

The broadcaster that aired the televised debate, SVT, afterward called his remarks degrading and against the democratic mandate of public broadcasting.

Akesson responded that state television shouldn’t take sides, and later announced that he wouldn’t take part in any of SVT’s election programs Sunday.

At the party’s rally on Saturday, he strongly criticized Lofven’s government for “prioritizing” the cause of asylum-seekers.

“This government we have had now . they have prioritised, during these four years, asylum-seekers,” Akesson said, giving an exhaustive list of things he says the government has failed to do for Swedish society because of migrants.

“Sweden needs breathing space, we need tight responsible immigration policies.”

Akesson’s strong rhetoric has shocked many Swedes since the country has a long tradition of helping those in need.

“Terrible! I just wanna cry when I think about it,” said Veronica Lundqvist, referring to the Sweden Democrats after she left a voting booth in central Stockholm.

“They say awful things. I mean of course we have a lot of refugees here, but we need to take care of them. They come from a terrible place, terrible wars. We can’t just throw them out.”

But others say the Sweden Democrats are trying to fix a historical problem.

“It’s an integration issue,” Karl Ljung said at the same voting station. “It’s not just about what happened two years ago when we had a lot of refugees. It’s more that we have had an integration issue for maybe 20 years. So we really have to solve it now.”

Mohamed Nuur, a 26-year-old Social Democratic candidate of Somali descent, told The Associated Press that he sees Akesson taking Sweden back to the past.

“For me, the Sweden that he (Jimmie Akesson) wants to see … that is not our future,” Nuur said. “That is to go back in history. For me, when he is saying that immigrants are not welcome to Sweden …he is trying to spread hate between the people. Actually, it’s the immigrants who built up this country.

Sabina Macri, voting in central Stockholm, said the current political situation has left her questioning her future in Sweden.

“We used to be very safe. We used to be a very calm nation,” she said. “And today I feel a bit insecure about the future, especially for my children.”

___

Jari Tanner reported from Helsinki. Jeff Schaeffer and Philipp Jenne in Stockholm contributed to this report.

What Will Donald Trump Be Remembered For?

I know you won’t believe me. Not now, not when everything Donald Trump does — any tweet, any insult at any rally — is the news of the day, any day.  But he won’t be remembered for any of the things now in our headlines. No human being, it’s true, has ever been covered the way he has, so what an overwhelming record there should be. News about him and his associates fills front pages daily in a way that only something like a presidential assassination once did and he has the talking heads of cable TV yakking about him as no one has ever talked about anyone. And don’t even get me started on social media and The Donald.

In a sense, like it or not, we are all now his apprentices and his transformational powers are little short of magical. Simply by revoking the security clearance of John Brennan — who even knew that America’s deep-staters could keep such clearances long after they left government — he managed to make the former Obama counterterrorism czar and CIA head, a once-upon-a-time “enhanced interrogation techniques” advocate and drone-meister, into a liberal hero; by attacking former FBI head James Comey, he turned the first national security state official ever to intervene in and alter an American presidential election (and not in Hillary Clinton’s favor either) into a bestselling, well-reviewed, much-lauded author; by his dismissive taunts and enmity in life and death, he helped ensure that Senator John McCain would have a New York Times obituary of such laudatory length that, in the past, it might only have been appropriate for someone who had actually won the presidency; with his charges and passing insults, he even proved capable — miracle of all miracles — of turning Attorney General Jeff Sessions into a warrior for justice.

Donald Trump is, in the most bizarre sense possible, a transformational figure, not to speak of the man who makes the “fake news” fake, or at least grotesquely overblown and over-focused. He has the uncanny ability to draw every camera in the house, all attention, blocking out everything but himself. Still, omnipresent as he is — or He is — take my word for it, he won’t be remembered for any of this. It will all go down the media drain with him one of these days. Don’t be fooled by newspapers or the Internet. They are not history. They are anything but what will someday be remembered.

Still, don’t for a second imagine that Donald Trump won’t be remembered. He will — into the distant future in a way that no other American president is likely to be.

A Forgettable Presidency

Let me tell you first, though, what he won’t be remembered for.

He won’t be remembered for entering the presidential race on an escalator to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”; or for those “Mexican rapists” he denounced; or for that “big, fat, beautiful” wall he was promoting; or for how he dealt with “lyin’ Ted,” “low-energy Jeb,” and Carly (“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”) Fiorina, or the “highly overrated” Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle (“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”). He won’t be remembered for that pussy-grabbing video that didn’t determine the 2016 election; or for the size of his hands; or even for those chants, still in vogue, of “lock her up.” He won’t be remembered for his bromance with Vladimir Putin; or his bitter complaints about a rigged election, rigged debates, a rigged moderator, and a rigged microphone (before, of course, he won). He won’t be remembered for his “stormy” relationship with a porn star; or even the hush money he paid her and another woman he had an affair with to keep their mouths shut during election season and thereafter, or his three wives; or the book of Hitler’s speeches once by his bedside; or the five casinos that, as a great “businessman,” he took into bankruptcy; or the undocumented workers he hired at next to no pay; or all the people he stiffed; or the students he took to the cleaners at Trump “University”; or the private airplane with 24-carat gold-plated bathroom fixtures he flew in; or those giant gold letters he’s branded onto property after property globally; or the way he promoted his own children and in-laws and their businesses in the White House; or the hotel that he built in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue and, once he entered the Oval Office, turned into a hub of corruption.

He won’t be remembered for the record crew of people who took positions in his administration only to find themselves, within a year or so (or even days), fleeing the premises or out on their noses, including Anthony Scaramucci (6 days), Michael Flynn (25 days), Mike Dubke (74 days), Sean Spicer (183 days), Reince Priebus (190 days), Sebastian Gorka (208 days), Steve Bannon (211 days), Tom Price (232 days), Dina Powell (358 days), Omarosa Manigault Newman (365 days), Rob Porter (384 days), Hope Hicks (405 days), Rex Tillerson (406 days), David Shulkin (408 days), Gary Cohn (411 days), H.R. McMaster (413 days), John McEntee (417 days), and Scott Pruitt (504 days). And White House Counsel Don McGahn was only recently tweeted out of office, too, with others to follow.

He won’t be remembered for the way more of his associates and hangers-on found themselves in the grips of the legal system in less time than any other president in history, including Paul Manafort (convicted of tax fraud), Michael Cohen (pled guilty to tax evasion), Rick Gates (pled guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators), Alex van der Zwaan (pled guilty to lying to investigators), Michael Flynn (pled guilty to lying to the FBI), and George Papadopoulos (ditto). With plenty more, it seems, to come. Nor will he be remembered for the number of close associates who turned on him — from his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who once swore to take a bullet for him, only to testify against him; to the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, who had long buried salacious material about him, only to accept an immunity deal from federal prosecutors to blab about him; to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who did the same. Nor will The Don(ald) be remembered for his mafia-style language and focus (“RAT,” “loyalty,” and “flipping”), his familiar references to a mob boss, the way he clings to his personal version of omertà, the Mafia code of silence, or for being “a president at war with the law.”

He won’t be remembered for campaigning against the Washington “swamp” and, on arrival in the White House, creating an administration that would prove to be an instant swamp of personal corruption — from EPA head Scott Pruitt’s $43,000 soundproof office phone booth, the millions of taxpayer dollars he racked up for a 20-person, full-time security detail, and the more than $105,000 he spent on first-class air travel (and $58,000 more on charter and military planes) in his first year in office; to the near-million dollars of taxpayer money Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price poured into flights on private charter planes and military jets; to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s $12,000 charter plane ride on an oil executive’s private plane, his nifty $53,000 worth of helicopter rides on the public dole, and his $139,000 office “door”; to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 office dining set. And that’s just to start down such a list (without even including the president and his family).

Nor will he be remembered for the sinkhole and stink hole of environmental pollution he and his crew are creating for the rest of us, nor for the estimated up to 1,400 extra premature deaths annually and “up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days,” thanks to his administration’s easing of federal pollution regulations on coal-burning power plants. Nor for “greatly increased levels of air pollutants like mercury, benzene and nitrogen oxides,” thanks to its push to relax air pollution rules of many sorts. Nor for the suppression of news about pollution science. Nor for drastic cuts to the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, lest it protect us against anything at all that corporate America wants to do. Nor for the opening of America’s waterways to far greater dumping of waste and pollutants, including mining waste. And that, again, is just to start down a list.

By the time he’s done, the swampiness of Washington and the nation will undoubtedly be beyond calculation, but that is not what history will remember him for. Nor, in the country that may already have outpaced the inequality levels of the Gilded Age, will it remember him for the way in which he and his Republican colleagues, thanks to their tax “reform” bill, have ensured that inequality will only soar in a country in which just three men — Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos — already have as much wealth as the bottom half of American society (160 million people). Nor will it remember the way Donald Trump reinforced racism and a growing tide of white supremacy (just the prerequisites needed for establishing a “populist” version of authoritarianism in the U.S.), including the “birtherism” by which he rose as a politician, his “evenhanded” remarks after Charlottesville (“very fine people, on both sides”), his implicit racial slurs, his obsession with black football players who take a knee in protest, his tweeting of a white supremacist conspiracy theory about South Africa — for which former Klan leader David Duke tweeted his thanks — and the rest of a now familiar litany.

Nor will the man who claimed in campaign 2016 that he could “win” better than the U.S. military high command (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do…”) when it came to America’s wars or get us out of them be remembered for having done neither. Nor for his urge to pour yet more tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and the national security state (even as he regularly blasts its officials).

And keep in mind that this is just to graze the surface of the Trump presidency — and while all of it matters (or at least obsesses us now) and some of it will matter greatly for a long time to come, it’s not what history will remember Donald Trump for.

A Crime Against Humanity

On that score, the record is clear, in part because we are already beginning to live the very future that will remember Donald Trump in only one way. It’s a future that, at its core, has animated his presidency from its first days. Whatever else he thinks, says, tweets, or does, President Trump and his administration have been remarkably focused not just on denying that humanity faces a potential future of environmental ruin — as in the term “climate-change denial” so regularly attached to a startling list of people in his administration — but on aiding and abetting the disaster to come.

As everyone knows, Donald Trump is taking the world’s historic number one (and presently number two) emitter of greenhouse gases out of the Paris climate agreement. He is also, not to put the matter too subtly, a fossil-fuel nut, nostalgic perhaps for the polluted but energized American world of his 1950s childhood. From his first moments in office, he was prepared to turn his administration’s future energy policy into what Michael Klare has called, “a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies.” He has been obsessed with ensuring that the U.S. dominate the global oil market (think: Saudi America), saving the dying coal-mining business in this country, building yet more pipelines, rolling back Obama-era fossil fuel economy standards for autos and other vehicles, and letting the big energy companies drill just about anywhere from previously out-of-bounds waters off America’s coasts to Alaska’s protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In other words, every act of his related to energy reveals the leader of the planet’s “last superpower” as a climate-change enabler of a sort that once would only have been the fantasy of some energy company CEO.

This makes him and his administration criminals of a historic sort. After all, he and his cronies are aiming at what can only be thought of as terracide, the destruction of the environment of the planet that has sustained us for thousands of years. That would be a literal crime against humanity so vast that it has, until this moment, gone unnamed and, until relatively recently, almost unimagined.

In the wake of this summer, climate-change denial, however ascendant in Washington, is an obvious joke. You no longer have to be a scientist studying the subject or even particularly well informed to grasp that. As New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta put it recently, in covering the heat waves that have engulfed the planet, “For many scientists, this is the year they started living climate change rather than just studying it.” The rest of us are now living it as well.

The math is no longer even complicated. As Sengupta points out, 2018 is shaping up to be the fourth warmest year on record. The other three? 2015, 2016, and 2017. In fact, of the 18 warmest years on record, 17 took place in guess which century? For the lower 48 states, this was, May to July, the hottest summer ever; Japan had an “unprecedented” heat wave; Europe broiled; Sweden’s tallest mountain ceased to be so as its glacial peak melted; numerous fires broke out within the European part of the Arctic Circle; scientists were spooked by the fact that the oldest, strongest ice in Arctic waters started to break up; California, along with much of western North America burned amid air so polluted that warnings were regularly issued in a fire season that threatened never to end. The temperature set records at over 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 straight days in Oslo, Norway; over 91 degrees for 16 straight days in Hong Kong; 122 degrees in Nawabsha, Pakistan; and 124 degrees in Ouargla, Algeria. Ocean waters were experiencing record warmth, too.

And again, that’s just to start down a far longer list and but a taste of what the future, according to The Don(ald), has in store for us. Imagine, for instance, what the intensification of all this means: a California that never stops burning; coastal cities swamped by rising seas; significant parts of the North China plain (where millions of people live) made potentially uninhabitable thanks to devastating heat waves; tens of millions of human beings turned into the very people Donald Trump hates most: migrants and refugees. This is the world that our president is preparing for our grandchildren and their children and grandchildren.

So tell me that he won’t be remembered for his absolute, if ignorant, dedication to the taking down of civilization.

In other words, the one thing Donald Trump will be remembered for — and what a thing it will be! — is his desire to put us all on an escalator to hell; to, that is, a future of fire and fury. It could make him and the executives of the largest energy companies the greatest criminals in history. If the emissions of greenhouse gases aren’t significantly cut back and then halted in a reasonable period of time, the crime he is now aiding and abetting with such enthusiasm is the only one, other than a nuclear war, that could end history as we know it, which might mean that Donald Trump won’t be remembered at all. And if that isn’t big league, what is?

 

Pompeo’s Five Hours in Islamabad

He came, he talked briefly and he left. All in one afternoon. That sums up U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s fleeting visit to Islamabad on Sept 5. Since expectations were not high, both sides opted to be discreet about disclosing what they had discussed. No doubt they were courteous and conciliatory. That would have helped to create the atmosphere needed to “reset” relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, the main purpose of this exercise in diplomacy.

“The ice has been thawed,” remarked Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. Secretary Pompeo reciprocated the positivity, saying he was hopeful that the foundation had been laid for “continued success.”

It is too early to say what direction this resetting will take. Given the confrontational tone that marked ties between the two countries on the eve of Pompeo’s visit, there was widespread relief that the outcome was free of acrimony—especially on social media, in keeping with the U.S. president’s new style of conducting foreign policy, which pre-empts quiet negotiations.

Various incidents in the last week or so were seen as warnings of things to come. It would have been a wonder had Pompeo managed to produce a turnaround.

A few days after Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, Imran Khan, was sworn in, Pompeo made a goodwill call. During their conversation, he let Khan know that the issue of terrorism would also be on the agenda when he arrived for talks in Pakistan. This was a red flag to Pakistan, which has constantly denied giving safe haven to the Taliban, who have been trying to topple the government in Afghanistan. After a spat over the content of that phone conversation as recorded in the readout issued by the State Department, Islamabad chose to let the matter die.

Soon thereafter came the announcement from Washington of the “reallocation” of military aid of $300 million originally earmarked to Pakistan for the Coalition Support Fund. Pompeo explained it away as a predictable move, since Pakistan was not keeping up its side of the deal by producing the expected results.

Although U.S.-Pakistan relations have gone through rough patches in the past, they have never sunk quite this low. The onset of the Trump presidency marked the beginning of this slide. Washington’s stance hardened visibly in August 2017, when Trump announced a new South Asia policy that spelled out a shift toward India while demanding that Pakistan do more. The last straw came with Trump’s New Year’s  tweet in January, accusing Pakistan of “deceit and lies.”

A few revealing remarks by Pompeo in Islamabad, however, give an idea of the overall message he conveyed during this visit. “We made it clear to them—and they agreed—it is time for us to begin to deliver on our joint commitments.” Some main points of agreement, as they emerged from the press statements of the two sides, were:

● Agreements previously made were not actually executed;

● The need is to act to deliver outcomes to build trust and confidence between the two countries;

● Military relations would be leveraged to support the agreement between the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State, and boost President Trump’s South Asia strategy;

● Military ties would be one of the props to take the rapprochement forward.

Both sides conceded that challenges continue to exist, but these were not spelled out.

It is clear that the U.S. continues to look at Pakistan through the Afghan prism. Washington is seeking to pull out of Afghanistan at the earliest time, but only after a stable pro-U.S. government is firmly in place in Kabul. Can the use of military power achieve this goal? Pakistan is suspected of protecting the Taliban, which don’t wish to see President Ashraf Ghani at the helm.

It is widely known that Pakistan’s army created the Taliban as its “strategic asset.” But what is not known is if the patron still controls the protégé. Like Frankenstein’s monster, are Taliban officials no longer taking orders from their progenitors?

For Pakistan these are not easy times. Decades of dependence on foreign assistance has robbed it of its self-reliance. The nation’s foreign debt has escalated to unbelievable levels. Pakistan is now on the brink of defaulting on its debt-service and needs a bailout. The International Monetary Fund can help, but the U.S. has threatened to block it; Washington is adamant that it cannot allow the IMF to make payments that will be channeled into repaying Chinese loans. And China is anathema to the U.S.

Pompeo stated clearly that he wanted to meet with Pakistan’s new leadership at the start of its tenure. It is true that Khan’s administration doesn’t carry the baggage of the history of U.S.-Pakistan relations, although the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader adopted an anti-American stance in his election campaign.

However, the military has always played a key role in Pakistan’s politics and foreign policy, and is believed to have facilitated the ascendancy of the PTI in politics.

Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, participated in the talks with Pompeo, and according to Foreign Minister Qureshi, the civilian and military leaders were on the same page.

The challenges Qureshi and Pompeo face include Pakistan’s ties with China and India. Pakistan’s friendship with Beijing—described as being as high as the Himalayas and as deep as the Indian Ocean—has made it an integral part of China’s global ambition in the One Road-One Belt project. Underpinned by a massive $55 billion Chinese loan, this venture has brought immediate gains to Pakistan, but there is skepticism about the economic trap it is expected to lay for Pakistan in the long term. And the United States’ reservations about China are well-known.

The challenge stemming from Pakistan’s ties with India is no less serious. For the last decade, relations between the two countries have been deadlocked. The on-again-off-again dialogue that was launched in the 1990s stands suspended. Trump now wants India to be a key partner in South Asia. How acceptable would that be for Islamabad?

Ever since Pakistan became a “special ally” of the U.S. in the 1950s, all American administrations have tried to be even-handed in dealings with the two South Asian neighbors. Since 1998, when the two countries became nuclear powers, the U.S. had an added reason to treat its ties with the two countries with discretion.

Trump has flouted this self-made guiding principle of the U.S.’ South Asian policy. As a reminder of this “challenge,” Qureshi said in a press conference that the U.S. has been asked to play its role in the improvement of India-Pakistan relations—especially the situation on the Line of Control in Kashmir, so that the focus on the western border with Afghanistan could be intensified. And Kashmir is India’s Achilles heel.

Q&A: With Severe Storms Approaching the U.S., What to Expect

Emergency officials are urging residents to prepare for severe storms that are forecast to hit the East Coast and Hawaii over the next week at what is the peak of this year’s hurricane season.

Coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, Tropical Storm Florence is expected to make landfall Thursday as a level 3 hurricane or greater, steered by winds that could guide it as far south as Florida or as far north as New England.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Olivia is forecast to hit the Hawaiian Islands as a tropical storm on Wednesday, bringing heavy rains just two weeks after Hurricane Lane caused major flooding.

A look at what forecasters are predicting for those storms and the rest of the season:

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WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE STORMS RIGHT NOW?

Tropical Storm Florence was gathering strength Saturday, with the National Hurricane Center expecting it to become a hurricane overnight. Five days out from expected landfall, there’s still wide uncertainty about where it will hit and at what intensity, but the latest models show that it’s most likely to make landfall in the southeast U.S., between northern Florida and North Carolina.

Still, there’s a chance it could be pushed farther north and strike along the mid-Atlantic or New England coast, threatening to make landfall between Virginia and Massachusetts. No matter where it lands, there’s a chance it could stall out and pummel the coasts for days.

The latest models on Saturday show that it’s becoming less likely the storm will veer north and miss the mainland U.S. entirely. At minimum, residents along the East Coast are being told to expect heavy rainfall and storm surges, with the possibility of heavy winds.

Forecasters are also keeping an eye on two storms gathering behind Florence. Tropical Storm Helene was expected to reach the Cabo Verde islands on Saturday but is predicted to miss the mainland U.S. A tropical depression that was upgraded to Tropical Storm Isaac on Saturday is headed toward the Caribbean and brings a greater chance of curving north toward Puerto Rico and the mainland, potentially as a hurricane.

It’s still uncertain whether Hurricane Olivia will make landfall in the Hawaiian Islands, but at minimum meteorologists believe it will come very close and deliver a new round of rainfall.

The National Weather Service has also issued a typhoon watch in the U.S. territory of Guam, where Tropical Storm Mangkhut is approaching from the east and is expected to bring damaging winds by Monday evening.

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WHEN WILL WE HAVE A BETTER IDEA OF WHETHER THEY POSE A THREAT?

Each day brings a clearer picture of the risks posed by the storms. Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground service, says airplanes gathering weather information began flying into Florence on Saturday, which should provide data that will lead to a major boost in the reliability of models on Sunday.

Isaac’s route is still wildly uncertain and will be for days. Forecasters are more confident that Olivia will affect Hawaii, with its path and intensity sharpening in the next few days.

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WHAT FACTORS GIVE FLORENCE A CHANCE OF BEING A PARTICULARLY STRONG HURRICANE?

By the time it reaches the East Coast, Florence could strengthen into a major hurricane. Winds higher up in Florence have been weakening, giving it time to gather itself and gain strength over the ocean, experts say. And it’s also approaching water where the temperature is slightly warmer than average, providing heat that the storm can convert into stronger winds.

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HOW SHOULD PEOPLE IN AREAS VULNERABLE TO HURRICANES STAY PREPARED?

Residents in evacuation zones are urged to have a plan to flee if the order comes. Others should have at least a week’s supply of food, water and medication for their families and their pets.

Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s school of marine and atmospheric science, says residents who stick it out should have gas cans to fuel their cars and power generators, and should take out some cash in case electronic payment systems are down after the storms pass.

To avoid a headache down the line, residents are also encouraged to keep insurance documents in a safe place ahead of time.

North Carolina’s governor already issued a state of emergency on Friday as the storm advanced, while officials in other coastal states say they’re monitoring forecasts.

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WHAT EXPECTATIONS DO FORECASTERS HAVE FOR THE REST OF THE HURRICANE SEASON?

The second week of September is the peak of hurricane season, so the flurry of activity is no surprise to forecasters. After the current round of storms, though, long-range models suggest a lull for several weeks.

Masters said there’s a chance for another active period by mid-October, which would mark the end of the busiest stretch of the season.

“I don’t think we’re quite done yet,” he said, “but certainly as far as September goes, this is the big week.”

Neoliberal Fascism and the Twilight of the Social

This article was first published on Truthout.

Donald Trump’s increasingly dangerous, incendiary attacks on the media, his willingness to separate children from their parents at the southern border, his efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens and deport U.S. citizens on the groundless claim that they have fraudulent birth certificates, and his relentless attempts to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others to obstruct the rule of law all amount to a lawless grab for power that is pushing the U.S. further into the abyss of fascism.

The terrors of 20th century fascism have risen once again in the United States but less as a warning about repeating past mistakes than as a measure of the degree to which the lessons of history become irrelevant. Politics now moves between what philosopher Susan Sontag once labeled as “unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” The “unremitting banality” is evident in Trump’s daily barrage of reckless tweets in which language becomes a weapon to vilify, humiliate and demonize government officials, journalists and critical media outlets. An evil banality is also present in his branding of undocumented immigrants as “murderers and thieves,” “rapists” and criminals who want to “infest our country.”

There is more at work here than the use of coarse language or an unprecedented display of incivility by a sitting president; there is also a flirtation with violence, the rhetoric of white supremacy, and the language of expulsion and elimination. Trump’s embrace of unthinkable terror takes on an even more onerous tone as the language of dehumanization and cruelty materializes into policies that work to expel people from any sense of community, if not humanity itself.

Such policies are evident in Trump’s systemic “zero tolerance” policy, now rescinded, that forcibly separated migrant children from their parents and incarcerated them in prison-like cages where many of them were physically and sexually abused. These attacks have not been limited to children. Aida Chavez reports in The Intercept that both physical and sexual assaults on immigrants in detention centers have become commonplace and are documented in a number of reliable sources. For instance, The Intercept has obtained public records that reveal that more than 1,000 complaints have been made about sexual abuse in immigration detention facilities. The systemic nature and scope of violence and sexual abuse also extends to the reign of terror inflicted on immigrants at the hands of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents. The Office of the Inspector General has received over 33,000 horrifying complaints by immigrants made against ICE, revealing the underpinnings and wanton lawlessness of a fascist police state. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has called ICE a “deportation force” and along with a number of prominent politicians, such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, has argued that it should be abolished. Cynthia Nixon, the progressive actor who has entered the gubernatorial race in New York, has called ICE “a terrorist organization” and has insisted on its abolition.

Trump’s penchant for cruelty is also on full display in his removal of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of refugees from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti as well as his rescinding of protections “for 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers.” It gets worse: the Trump administration has advocated depriving undocumented immigrants with due process and threatened to deport them immediately when they cross the border “without a trial or an appearance before a judge.”

The degree and transparency of Trump’s racism are even more well-defined in his plan to punish legal immigrants for accepting public benefits to which they are entitled, such as food stamps and public housing. Moreover, his rule would authorize federal officials to revoke legal resident status from immigrants who accept such assistance. The guiding force behind this anti-immigrant movement in the Trump administration is hard-liner and white supremacist sympathizer, Stephen Miller, who takes delight in proposing legislation that makes “it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare.”

Legislation that denies immigrants citizenship because they receive public assistance reveals a level of state violence, if not a form of domestic terrorism, that increasingly characterizes the onslaught of Trump’s policies. More recently, he has suggested the death penalty for drug dealers, a plan that takes its cues from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, which has resulted in deaths of over 20,000 alleged drug users and dealers since 2016, many of whom live in poor communities.

Meanwhile, as part of his broader attack on human life and the conditions that make it possible, Trump has rolled back many of the Obama-era polices designed to curb climate change; he has reversed environmental protections, such as the banning of pesticides in wildlife refuges, and he has dismantled federal rules regulating American coal plants, which are “designed to curtail coal emissions of carbon dioxide and methane that contribute to climate change.”

In a case that highlights Trump’s war on youth and his ongoing attempts to destroy the social bonds that sustain a democracy, the United States government attempted to scrap a research-based United Nations-World Health Organization resolution that encouraged breast-feeding. Supporting the interests of infant formula manufacturers, American officials first sought to use language that would water down the resolution. When that failed, they threatened smaller countries such as Ecuador that supported it. Patti Rundall, a policy director supporting the resolution, observed that the actions by the Trump administration were “tantamount to blackmail.” Rundall’s criticism becomes even more alarming given a 2016 study in The Lancet that documented how “universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk.”

Slow Violence, Fast Violence

Trump’s discourse and policies represent a profound attack on the collective values crucial to a democracy and present a constant assault not just on economic and political institutions but also on the formative culture, public foundations and educational apparatuses necessary to nurture critically active and engaged citizens. Trump’s assault on social obligations, social responsibility, and the social fabric is a fundamental element of his espousal of neoliberal fascism. This new political arrangement operates in its most lethal form as a form of “slow violence,” which in Princeton University scholar Rob Nixon’s terms is a “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”

“Slow violence” destroys the formative cultures that make human suffering visible, covers over authoritarian impulses behind the calls for national greatness, and exposes the danger of surrendering freedom for security. At the core of this violence, which has intensified under neoliberal fascism, is an attack on those social forces that defend the welfare state and engage in an ongoing struggle to make concrete the possibilities of democratic socialism. Under neoliberal fascism, chauvinism and militarism work hand in hand with a hardening of the culture, the unleashing of the forces of brutal self-interest, and a growing illiteracy that undermines both public values and a collective struggle against what sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “a politics of organized irresponsibility.” “Slow violence” is difficult to gauge because it is often concealed beneath policies that promote what can be called fast violence.

Fast violence comes with an immediate body blow, exhibits the spectacularized drama of Trump’s imperious and insulting tweets, and produces high-profile assaults on democratic institutions, such as the courts, media and rule of law. Such violence embraces the theatrical, feeds off the spectacle and aims at high shock value. One recent example of the fast violence of cultural politics was the almost unthinkable announcement by the Trump administration that Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, was planning—at a time when underprivileged schools lack the most basic resources and support services—to use federal funds, designed to benefit programs aimed at underserved students, to train and arm teachers, in spite of an established federal policy that prohibits using such funds to arm educators. Of course, this hidden agenda legitimated in this proposed policy is that schools attended largely by poor students are sites defined in the image of war, should be modeled after prisons, and necessitate being governed through zero-tolerance policies that often feed the school-to-prison pipeline. The endpoint of such policies moves between pushing poor Black and Brown youth into the criminal justice system and either abolishing these public institutions or turning them into cash cows by privatizing them. The larger goal is to destroy education as a democratic public sphere whose mission is to create an educated citizenry necessary for the workings of a vibrant democracy. The state-sponsored violence at work here imperils the rule of law and works to unravel the alleged democratic institutions, such as the courts and media that some believe provide an impregnable firewall against Trump’s authoritarianism. Taken together “slow” and fast violence under the Trump regime share a cultural politics that erodes memory, substitutes emotion for reason, embraces anti-intellectualism, increases the harshness of rugged individualism and thrives in the glow of what economist Paul Krugman terms a “white nationalism run wild.”

State violence has become the organizing principle shaping all aspects of American society. At the heart of such violence is a full-fledged attack on notions of the social and public space that makes critical thought, dialogue, and the individual and collective pursuit of the common good possible. Under such circumstances, pressing social problems are removed from the inventory of public concerns and ethical considerations. The end point is the replacement of the welfare state and social investments with the punishing state and what Jonathan Simon has called “governing through crime.” This is all too evident in the Trump administration’s mode of governance founded on a harsh, racially charged regime of law and order that is as repressive as it is corrupt. Locked into an “abyss of failed sociality,” the American public finds it increasingly difficult to challenge the assumption that markets and the rule of the strong man are all that is needed to solve all individual and social problems. When public values are invoked, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, they appear less for their recognizability and relevance for the present than a symbol for what has been irrevocably lost.

Public values and the public good have been reduced to nostalgic reminders of another era—associated, for example, with the New Deal or the Great Society—in which the social contract was seen as crucial to meeting the needs of postwar Americans and fundamental to a substantive democratic order. Rather than viewed as a legacy that needs to be reclaimed, reimagined and renewed, visions of the public good are consigned to the distant past, a passing curiosity like a museum piece perhaps worth viewing, but not worth struggling to revive as either an ideal or a reality. What is “new” about the long decline of public values in U.S. society is not that they are again under attack but that they have become weakened to the point of no longer provoking a massive oppositional social movement in the face of more daring and destructive attacks by the Trump administration. When such values are attacked, the targets are groups who for decades have been largely immune to such attacks because they embody the most cherished ideals associated with democratic public service—immigrants, public school teachers, public servants, poor youth of color and labor unions. This suggests that the precondition for any viable sense of individual and collective resistance must reclaim the social as part of a democratic imaginary that makes education and learning not only central to social change, but also to the struggle to democratize the very character of American politics, institutional power and public discourse.

Neoliberalism’s Attack on Social Bonds

In the aftermath of the horrors of WWII, critical theorist Theodor Adorno remarked that while it becomes difficult to live in the shadow of a history in which there seemed to be no end to terror, it is impossible to evade the past because it “lingers on” after both its own alleged death and because a “willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.” Adorno, in this case, was referring to the survival of fascist elements within democracies consoled by the false belief that history could not repeat itself. With the rise of “illiberal democracy,” and a resurgent embrace of an unapologetic authoritarian across the globe, it is clear that not only has the struggle over democratic laws, rules and rights become more urgent than ever, but the formative culture that creates the social fabric and critical agents, habits and dispositions necessary to sustain and strengthen such a democracy is in peril. The crisis of democracy has taken a lethal turn in the United States.

Over the last 40 years, neoliberalism has produced the more extreme elements of casino capitalism, emphasizing austerity policies designed to accumulate wealth and profits for the financial and corporate elite regardless of social costs and the enormous price paid in human suffering and misery. At the same time, neoliberalism has unleashed and legitimized the mobilizing paroxysms of neo-fascist discourse. Neoliberalism merges a cruel form of contemporary capitalism with elements of white supremacy, ultra-nationalism and elimination policies that echo the horrors of a fascist past. Neoliberalism’s attack on social justice and the common good, coupled with its production of economic conditions that trample on human needs and produce massive inequality in wealth and power, mobilizes the violent energies of a right-wing populism and white supremacist anxieties “about loss of status and social dominance.”

In the neoliberal narrative, people are reduced to merchandise and expected to imitate rather than challenge corporate values. In this view, culture becomes a pedagogical weapon whose aim is to convince people that imagining an alternative future is impossible. In this fascist version of the script, people are largely considered either extensions of capital or disposable, and ultimately subject to racial cleansing, terminal exclusion or worse. Within this convergence of neoliberal rationality and alarming echoes of a fascist history, Trump has emboldened the discourse of borders, walls, racial purging and militarism along with nonstop attacks on people of color, workers, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists and more.

As Trump’s war against democracy intensifies, the speed and onslaught of policies that carry the ghosts of a monstrous past become more difficult to grasp given the endless shocks to the body politic and a plethora of spectacularized earthquakes that follow each succeeding blow to the values, social relations and institutions that make a democracy possible. While the horrors of a fascist past are easy to recall, it is much more difficult at the current moment to learn from history how to resist a culture tied to extreme forms of nationalism, white supremacy, systemic racism, militarism, police violence, the politics of disposability and an expanding culture of cruelty. Equally difficult is understanding how the mechanisms of neoliberal fascism work to undermine modes of social solidarity, the social contract, social obligations and social relations, while sustaining in the public mind “conditions that are hostile to any kind of democratic liberties.”

How does a culture whose mission is to keep democracy alive give way to political, economic and pedagogical arrangements that normalize a hatred of democracy? What role does neoliberal culture play as an educational force to construct policies that undermine human rights and pose a threat to the dignity of politics? How does neoliberalism use corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses to destroy the communal cohesion necessary to nurture support for the common good, public goods and a compassion for others? How do the ideological workstations of neoliberal fascism work to configure all of social life in economic terms? How does neoliberalism’s regressive embrace of individual responsibility work to reduce all social problems to personal failings and in doing so, empty politics of any substance while undermining a grammar of ethics and the moral bearings needed to distinguish good from evil?

These questions point to the terror of the unforeseen that is at the heart of neoliberal formation which has emerged under the Trump administration as a new and frightening political development. As the political sphere is corrupted by ever-greater concentrations of wealth and power, the institutions, cultures, values and ethical principles that make a democracy possible begin to disappear. Political theorist Wendy Brown is insightful on the breakdown of democracy in the troubled present and points to forces that threaten democracy from within by hollowing out its most crucial public institutions. She writes:

Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, and aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it. … Democracy in an era of enormously complex global constellations and powers requires a people who are educated, thoughtful, and democratic in sensibility. This means a people modestly knowing about these constellations and powers; a people with capacities of discernment and judgment in relation to what it reads, watches, or hears about a range of developments in its world; and a people oriented toward common concerns and governing itself.

Neoliberal ideology and its attack on social bonds, critical thinking and democratic values has a long legacy and has accelerated in intensity since the late 1970s. Education in the wider culture is dominated by corporate interests and has become a weapon and disimagination machine. As a form of pedagogical oppression, neoliberalism instrumentalizes learning, reduces education to training, and produces subjects defined by the social relations and values of the market place. Substituting market values for democratic values, it has economized and commercialized all social relations and subordinated human needs to the imperatives of profit making. In an age when self-interest and unchecked individualism are heralded as the essence of agency; democratic relations and ideals, if not human nature, have become difficult to both imagine and recognize. As the longings for wealth, status and power were elevated to the status of national ideals, the mood in America turned dark in a climate marked by despair, a culture of fear aimed at scapegoated populations, skyrocketing inequalities in wealth and power, and a vision that morphed into cynicism, anger and resentment. The American dream gave way to a cruel illusion as the hopes of social mobility, a better future and economic prosperity for all disappeared in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.

As social bonds deteriorate under obscene notions of privatization, business deregulations and an expansion of the precariat, there is a growing moral panic engineered by white nationalists and those who substitute traditional forms of economic nationalism for what might be called cultural sovereignty. In this instance, community is now defined through a “mix of neoliberalism, cultural chauvin­ism, anti-immigrant anger and majoritarian rage as the major model” of governance. An attack on cultural differences has become the driving force of a toxic form of neoliberal fascism that mixes the cruelty of a market-driven system with an embrace of racial purity and social cleansing.

This demagogic pursuit of power driven by a hatred of democracy is reinforced by defunding public goods, tax policies that produce massive inequalities, the expansion of military power, voter suppression polices and the destruction between the balance of freedom and security, and also through a neoliberal formative culture that has redefined the very nature of subjectivity, desire and agency in reductive market terms. This becomes evident in the educational force of a neoliberal culture that defines the citizen as the consumer of commodities, uses economic calculations to measure the worth of the good life, rewards entrepreneurship as the driving force of human agency, and reduces politics to the empty spectacle of voting in election cycles. Under neoliberal fascism, we are citizens with alleged individual and political rights, but without economic and social rights.

As neoliberalism is normalized, self-secure in its proclaimed motto and self-fulfilling prophecy that there is no alternative, it becomes difficult to imagine a society, social relations and a self that is not defined through the rationality, logic and values of the market. In this conception, capitalism and the market are synonymous, and human beings can only be conceived as human capital. Rather than be called to think critically, share power, exercise one’s imagination and hold power accountable, human beings are reduced to pawns to be manipulated by financial markets. Literary critic and political analyst Anis Shivani rightly observes that neoliberalism argues that everything is to be imagined and constructed through the lens of the market and the wishes of the financial elite. He writes:

One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything—everything—is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange—which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.

Cynicism now replaces hope as matters of responsibility are reduced exclusively to matters of individual choice, if not character, nurtured by regressive notions of self-enrichment while any notion of the social, dependency or care for the other is viewed as both a weakness and object of contempt. A mix of social amnesia, punitive justice and a theater of cruelty now drive policy decisions increasingly accepted by segments of the public that either refuse or are incapable of connecting private troubles and worries with broader systemic forces. According to late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, what is broken under such circumstances is

the link between public agenda and private worries, the very hub of the democratic process … with each of the two spheres rotating by now in mutually isolated spaces, set in motion by mutually unconnected and un-communicating (though certainly not independent!) factors and mechanisms. To put it simply, it is a situation in which people who have been hit don’t know what has hit them – and have little chance of ever finding out.

Under neoliberal fascism, the plague of privatization weakens democratic culture and promotes a flight from any sense of political and social responsibility. As the high priest of a neoliberalism on steroids, Trump embodies the ideology of self-interest and supports corporate interests, for whom the public good is viewed as a site to be colonized and democracy as the enemy of private interests and market liberties.

Neoliberalism Fuels the Trump Administration’s Neo-Fascist Agenda

Policies conducive to the most extreme elements of casino capitalism have become the testing ground for seeing how far, for instance, the Trump administration can advance its neo-fascist agenda. Solutions that echo the extreme cruelty of a sordid past have pushed the United States closer to a full-fledged American fascism that makes clear its hatred of immigrants, the poor, Black people, Indigenous people, Muslims and others who do not fit into the racist logic at work in Trump’s call for “America First.”

Yet, there is more at work here than the proliferation of neoliberal policies that breathe new life into white supremacist ideologies, privatize public goods, limit the power of unions, deregulate the public sphere and hollow out the state by shifting massive amounts of capital through regressive tax policies to big corporations and the ultra-rich.

Under neoliberalism, politics is tied to the discourse of exclusion and powerlessness and is viewed along with democracy as the enemy of a market that views itself above the influence of the rule of law, accountability, ethics, governance and the common good. As legal scholar Eva Nanopoulos observes, in the current historical moment, the specific forms of contemporary fascism have to be understood “in the wider context of their relationship to neoliberalism and the neoliberal crisis.” What is especially important to grasp is how neoliberalism has reconfigured the state to maximize the disintegration of democratic social bonds and obligations, especially through neoliberal policies that test how far a demagogic administration can push a public into accepting practices that are as cruel as they are unimaginable. This logic is now being carried to extremes under Trump as he is constantly redrawing the lines of what is possible in violating human rights and promoting an ever-widening labyrinth of cruelty, destruction and disposability.

Some of the most distinctive features of neoliberal fascism include the disintegration of the social, the collapse of a culture of compassion and the dissolution of public spheres that make democracy possible. Individual existence is now defined through the circulation of commodities and the elevation of self-interest to a national ideal amounts to what Marx once called “the icy water of egotistical calculation.” One consequence is the expansion of an ongoing plague of social atomization, alienation, existential despair and a collective sense of powerlessness. Evidence for the latter can be found in the ongoing opioid crisis, which killed 42,000 people in 2016, the increasing mortality rate for uneducated white men, the growing lack of confidence in American institutions, the desperation experienced by families living on the brink of poverty trying to make ends meet each month, and the heartbreak and despair among the 6.5 million children and their families living in extreme poverty. In addition, the mutually informing forces of despair and powerlessness produce the conditions for the growth of right-wing populism, racism, ultra-nationalism, militarism and fascism.

As the reach of neoliberal ideology spreads throughout society, it works to trivialize democratic values and public concerns, enshrines a militant individualism, celebrates an all-embracing quest for profits, and promotes a form of Social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. This punishing script constitutes an often unrecognized form of state-sanctioned terrorism that numbs many people just as it wipes out the creative faculties of imagination, memory and critical thought. Under a regime of privatized utopias, hyper-individualism, and ego-centered values, human beings slip into a kind of ethical somnolence, indifferent to the plight and suffering of others. Neoliberalism produces a unique form of modern terrorism. The late Frankfurt School theorist Leo Löwenthal refers to it as a form of mass repression and self-preserving numbness that he argues amounts “to the atomization of the individual.” He writes:

The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and rigid not only in relation to his neighbor but also in relation to himself; fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population. Human beings live in a state of stupor, in a moral coma.

Implicit in Lowenthal’s commentary is the assumption that as democracy becomes a fiction, the moral mechanisms of language and meaning are undermined. In addition, a culture of atomization, precarity, intolerance and brutishness reinforces an ethos of cruel indifference promoted through a relentless barrage of ruthless policies that test how far the most extreme elements in the convergence of neoliberalism and fascism can be promoted by the Trump administration without arousing mass outrage and resistance.

As I mentioned earlier, the disintegration of social bonds, social ties and emancipatory modes of solidarity and collective struggle are intensified through an endless series of political and ethical shocks produced by the Trump administration. Such shocks are designed to weaken the ability of citizens to resist the ongoing barrage of attacks on the moral indexes and democratic values central to a democracy. They are also designed to normalize neoliberal fascist terrorist tactics, dispelling the notion that such practices are ephemeral to the 20th century.

In its willingness to demonstrate such terror, the state mobilizes fear and unchecked displays of power in order to convince people that the president is above the law and that the only viable response to his increasingly cruel policies is individual and collective resignation. This is an exercise of power without a conscience — a form of violence that revels in the passivity, if not moral infantilism, it wishes to produce in its citizens. Echoes of this view were obvious in Trump’s comment, later claimed to be a joke, that he wants “[his] people” to listen to him the way North Koreans listen to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. As the president stated on the Fox News Channel program “Fox & Friends,” “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” Trump’s war against the social and ethical imagination is part of a larger politics designed to destroy those social ties and public spheres that would encourage a sense of responsibility and compassion toward others, especially those considered the most vulnerable. This is a form of terrorism that celebrates self-interest, bare survival, and a regression to a kind of Social Darwinism and political infantilism. Löwenthal gets it right in his comment that this form of terrorism is equivalent to a form of self-annihilation. He writes:

Terrorism wipes out the causal relation between social conduct and survival, and confronts the individual with the naked force of nature—that is, of denatured nature—in the form of the all-powerful terrorist machine. What the terror aims to bring about, and enforces through its tortures, is that people shall come to act in harmony with the law of terror, namely, that their whole calculation shall have but one aim: self-perpetuation. The more people become ruthless seekers after their own survival, the more they become psychological pawns and puppets of a system that knows no other purpose than to keep itself in power.

Surely, this is obvious today as all vestiges of social camaraderie give way to hyper-modes of masculinity and a disdain for those considered weak, dependent, alien or economically unproductive.

Central to developing any viable notion of the social is a rethinking of the critical institutions and shared spaces in which matters of morality, justice and equality become central to a new understanding of politics. There is a need to re-imagine where public spaces, connections and public commitments lie beyond the domain of the private and how they can be constructed as part of a broader effort to create engaged and critical citizens willing to fight for an emergent democratic politics. At stake here is a renewed understanding of education as the crucial site in which the intertwined dynamics of individual agency and democratic politics merge. Politics in this sense is connected to a discourse of critique and possibility in which a plurality of memories, narratives and identities come together in defense of a common good and a comprehensive politics that brings together personal and public meanings, discourses and connections.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s fear about the extinguishing of the public realm, along with pragmatist John Dewey’s apprehension about the loss of a public sphere where visions, power, politics and the ethical imagination can be brought to life, are no longer simply an abstract concern. Such trepidations have become a reality in the age of Trump. Amid the current attack on the foundations of social solidarity and the bonds of social obligation, public values are running the risk of becoming irrelevant. In a society in which it has become commonplace to believe that one has no responsibility for anyone other than oneself, the social is downsized to accommodate a culture of hate, bigotry and cruelty.

Keeping the Struggle for a Radical Democracy Alive

There will be no democracy without a formative culture to construct the questioning agents capable of dissent and collective action. Nor will the struggle for a radical democracy get far without a vision that can replace representative politics with a politics and mode of governing based on a participatory politics. Wendy Brown touches on some of the elements of a visionary politics in which power and governance are shared collectively. She writes:

… a left vision of justice would focus on practices and institutions of popular power; a modestly egalitarian distribution of wealth and access to institutions; an incessant reckoning with all forms of power — social, economic, political, and even psychic; a long view of the fragility and finitude of nonhuman nature; and the importance of both meaningful activity and hospitable dwellings to human flourishing…. The drive to promulgate such a counter rationality – a different figuration of human beings, citizenship, economic life, and the political – is critical both to the long labor of fashioning a more just future and to the immediate task of challenging the deadly policies of the imperial American state.

The great philosopher of democracy, Cornelius Castoriadis, adds to this perspective the idea that for democracy to work people have to have a passion for public values and social participation alongside the ability to access public spaces that guarantee the rights of free speech, dissent and critical dialogue. Castoriadis recognized that at the heart of such public spaces is a formative culture that creates citizens who are critical thinkers capable of “putting existing institutions into question so that democracy again becomes [possible] in the full sense of the term.” For Castoriadis, people should not be merely given the right to participate in society; they also should be educated in order to participate in it in a meaningful and consequential manner. According to Castoriadis, the protective space of the social becomes crucial when it functions as an educational space whose aim is to create critical agents who can use their knowledge and skills in order to participate in a wider struggle for justice and freedom. At the center of Castoriadis’s defense of education is a defense of the public realm where, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, freedom can “find the worldly space to make an appearance.” According to Castoriadis, education was not only an essential dimension of justice and politics, but also democracy itself.

One precondition for bringing Trump’s neoliberal fascism to a halt is the recognition that democracy cannot exist without informed citizens who have a passion for public affairs, and who believe that critical consciousness is one precondition through which politics must pass in order to render individuals fit for the kind of collective struggles that offer the possibility for change. It is difficult to talk about producing the social bonds necessary in any democracy without viewing civic education, literacy and learning as acts of resistance. Education has to become central to politics in which new narratives can be developed that refuse to equate capitalism with democracy, hope with the fear of losing and surviving, and the separation of political equality from economic equality.

In doing so, education has to be turned into an “instrument of political power,” a way of reading against the conditions that produced a fascist past and are with us once again. In the current historical moment, a society of gated communities, walls and prisons has torn asunder any sense of shared community, making it more and more difficult to imagine a sense of collective identity rooted in compassion, empathy, justice and shared obligations to each other. Against this tattering of public space, it is crucial to cultivate a lofty vision that refuses to give up on the radical imagination and the willingness to fight for a world in which an emancipatory kind of struggle and politics is possible.

Such a politics must do more than exhibit outrage toward the regime of neoliberal fascism emerging in the United States and across the globe as a model for the future. It must also take seriously the notion that there is no democracy without a critical formative culture that can enable the critical power and modes of collective support necessary to sustain it. That is, it must develop a relationship between civic education and political agency, one in which the liberating capacities of language and politics are inextricably linked to the civic beliefs, public spaces and values that mark a democratic embrace of the social. This is especially urgent at a time when civic culture is being eradicated and commanding visions of an alternative future are disappearing. Politics must once again become educative and education must become central to politics.

As vehicle for social change, education registers the political, economic and cultural elements that can be used to reclaim a critical and democratic notion of community and the social relations and values that make such communities possible. The challenge to create a new and revitalized language of politics, the social and the common good can move from the abstract to the practical through the power of a mass social movement that recognizes the tactical importance of what Pierre Bourdieu describes in “Acts of Resistance” as “the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle” and resistance.

I am not suggesting that education or public pedagogy in the broadest sense is going to offer political guarantees in creating individuals and movements who can fight against the current attacks on democracy, but there will be no resistance without making education central to any political struggle. In his essay “On Politics” in “The Sociological Imagination,” the late sociologist C. Wright Mills captures the spirit of this sentiment in his comment on the value of the social sciences:

I do not believe that social science will ‘save the world’ although I see nothing at all wrong with ‘trying to save the world’—a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the re-arrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. Such knowledge as I have leads me to embrace rather pessimistic estimates of the chances. But even if that is where we now stand, still we must ask: if there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them?… It is on the level of human awareness that virtually all solutions to the great problems must now lie.

If progressives are going to redeem a democratic notion of the social, we need to build on activism that rethinks what it means to take on the challenge of changing how people relate to others and to the conditions that bear down on their lives. Such efforts speak to a notion of educational hope and the possibilities for nurturing modes of civic literacy and critical modes of learning and agency. It also points, as the late historian Tony Judt observed, to the need to forge a “language of justice and popular rights [and] a new rhetoric of public action.” Revitalizing a progressive agenda can be addressed as part of a broader social movement capable of re-imagining a radical democracy in which public values matter, the ethical imagination flourishes, and justice is viewed as an ongoing struggle. In a time of dystopian nightmares, an alternative future is only possible if we can imagine the unimaginable and think otherwise in order to act otherwise. This is no longer an abstract hope but a radical necessity.