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Sam welcomes back onto the show Anthony DiMaggio and Henry Giroux to discuss their latest book Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy. Dr. Henry A. Giroux is a renowned educator and author of multiple books on fascism and pedagogy. He holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Follow Dr. Giroux on Twitter at @HenryGiroux and visit his website at henryagiroux.com.Dr. Anthony R. DiMaggio is a Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University, USA. He is the author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here. Read his writings at Counterpunch and Salon.
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Episode 196 Fascism on Trial with Anthony DiMaggio
& Henry Giroux
Sun, Mar 31, 2024 11:08AM • 43:53
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
fascism, people, trump, fascist, threat, henry, denialism, country, tony, book, case, talking, election, refuse, fascist movement, call, liberals, violence, democracy, notion
SPEAKERS
Anthony DiMaggio, Sam Goldman, Henry Giroux
Henry Giroux 00:00
This is a fascism that expands the logic of disposability. We’re not just talking about a specific group, now we’re talking about anybody who doesn’t fit into this white Christian nationalist notion. So what’s at stake here is a shrinking of the public sphere and a shrinking of the notion of who counts as a citizen, and who doesn’t count as a citizen isn’t just as excluded, but now are the objects of potential violence, if not elimination.
Anthony DiMaggio 00:24
People don’t recognize what fascism actually is to the point where they may be embracing many elements of it in a sort of dressed up form with more diplomatic language. You need to build a movement, so where does that start? It starts with average people. It starts with people who are willing to do these things in alternative media, people in higher ed who are willing to sort of stick their neck out. There’s really no excuse in these situations for people not to be taking these things seriously because we’re the people who are going to have to build this movement.
Sam Goldman 01:07
Welcome to Episode 196, of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of this show. As you can hear, I have a bit of a sinus infection, and I apologize for the sound of my voice. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. As we’ll get into more in this episode, but I want to say up front, fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies, it is not the worst of all insults we can sling, it is a qualitative change in how society is governed. What is crucial to understand is that once in power, fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. I want to extend a warm welcome to new listeners and a thanks to everyone who shares this show to help reach more people during the year when I think we can all agree refusing fascism is needed more than ever. After you listen to the show, be sure to share it with others — click the Share button in your app to send this episode to a friend or ten. or let the world know why you listen by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. Today, we’re sharing a conversation I had with Anthony DiMaggio and Henry Giroux, esteemed academics, friends of the show, and authors of the new book, ‘Fascism on Trial: Education and the possibility of democracy.’ I want to also add that long before many were recognizing the fascist threat, Henry was an initiator of Refuse Fascism, adding his name to the call to action to stop Trump and Pence before they come to power — in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America — which called for a month of massive resistance, and this was issued in December of 2016. Tony and Henry were signers of the pledge to all the people of the world — in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America, the Trump pence regime must go — that was written by Andy Zee and Coco Das, members of the refuse fascism editorial board, in November of 2020.
Sam Goldman 03:34
I want to share a few thoughts from this past week as they relate to the accelerating Republi-fascist threat. First, it’s worth noting that in addition to his golden sneakers, Trump is now hawking a Trump branded Bible. Let’s be frank, yes, it’s a money making scheme, yes, as many have pointed out, Trump has often seemed entirely ignorant of the contents of the Bible, but those facts have too often covered over the point that what Trump is aiming to do is consolidate a fascist theocracy, and any hypocrisy or ignorance of Scripture on his part is incidental at best to his ability to lead that process. It’s extremely dangerous to laugh this off. Like many theocrats before him, religion is fundamentally a means to an end — violent, patriarchal, reactionary, and most importantly in this regard, unobstructed power. We’ve seen this and more on display just this week, as reports came out that the RNC is interrogating staffers and new hires on their views on the 2020 election as a litmus test for loyalty to Trump, unencumbered by evidence or any loyalty to nominally fair elections. Relatedly, the threats against election workers, which began at Trump’s direction in 2020, have escalated to the point that states are beginning to consider changing voting protocols in order to insulate the process and the people from MAGA violence. Mulling the increased use of ballot drop boxes and firearm bans at polling places, the Department of Justice has been investigating these threats, and at this time, at least 20 individuals have been charged for crossing the line from vague threats to criminal actions. And speaking of threats, in this week’s edition of Trump’s openly threatening his political rivals, he used his Truth Social account to share an image of Biden hogtied on the back of a maggot pickup truck. As the media continues to hem and haw about whether these threats crossed the line of decency, we’re running out of novel ways to scream from the rooftops that these threats aren’t rhetorical, that the fascist movement is actively developing the legal means and methods to literally carry out these threats, along with gassing up their loyal foot soldiers to do so.
Sam Goldman 05:53
Lastly, we have to talk once more about mifepristone, one of the two drugs used together in well over half of abortions in this country, and the case against it the Supreme Court entertained this past week. We’ve covered this extensively as the focus of previous episodes, and commented on it even more frequently as the case worked its way through the courts. But now the court has given us quite clear insight into where they stand and what might happen next. If Alito and Thomas were to have their way, this case could be used to revive the Comstock Act, a broad Victorian era obscenity law that could ban, mifprestone, all abortions, and even then some forms of contraception. Thankfully, at this stage, it seems that those two are alone in their interpretation. So we can all breathe a big sigh of relief, right? No. Because it’s clear that even if this case seems destined to be decided against the plaintiffs on the basis of standing, with the court, keeping with a pistol and safe from this challenge, we are not even close to safe. It’s a good thing, that the majority seemed to imply that this case should never have been brought, because no harm has been done to the fascist complainants, and probably never will be. But as this Court has signaled their actions like overturning Biden’s debt forgiveness, they refuse to combine the reactionary agenda by only serving those the standing. And as Mayra Dunnigan points out, in what has become something of a tradition for this court, “If the opinion is written by a conservative, it will likely operate as something of an instruction manual, describing the kind of case that the conservative legal movement could bring that would successfully overturn the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone. Meanwhile, even without action by the court, if Trump or anyone like him does regain power, they could technically just start prosecuting people left and right using the Comstock Act, as the Court has never officially overturned it. And even if the plaintiffs lose, one person who seems to be coming out on top is the author of the opinion which brought the case to the Supreme Court, the fascist federal appeals court Judge James Hall, a Clarence Thomas accolyte, seemingly being groomed to join him on the highest court. We’ll have more to say about this case and about the ongoing war on women’s lives and an abortion rights in future episodes, and we’ll cover it when the opinion is delivered in June. There are other high stakes cases before the court in the interim, and stay tuned for more discussion of those. With that, here’s my conversation with Tony and Henry.
Sam Goldman 08:42
Today, I am so glad to welcome back onto the show Henry Giroux and Anthony DiMaggio to discuss their latest book: ‘Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy.’ Henry holds the chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada, and Anthony is a professor of political science at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Welcome back.
Henry Giroux 09:12
Thank you.
Sam Goldman 09:13
Thanks for coming on.
Anthony DiMaggio 09:13
Thanks for having us.
Sam Goldman 09:14
So, here we are, eight years into the horror show that is the Trump-ocene, and we still have people denying the fascism, despite the coup attempt the Big Lie, the Muslim ban, the rounding up of immigrants, the family separation, all that was Trump’s term in office. A debate still rages as this movement rises — right back, potentially, into the White House. Folks will call it authoritarianism when he speaks of being a dictator, day one. They’ll call it grift when Trump sells his Bible. They’ll call it performance, not promise, when he says that there will be a bloodbath, should he not win. First, I thought it would be helpful to set the parameters of what Fascism is, and is not. It’s at the heart of your book, and I think is really worth coming back to. Who wants to start with that?
Henry Giroux 10:11
I’ll say something. I want to begin with the Big Lie. The Big Lie is that it’s impossible to imagine fascism in the United States. What that suggests is that we’re trying to really talk about fascism, we’re not just talking about Trump, we’re talking about the long standing conditions that basically allowed it to move from the margins of society to the service of society. So in a sense, fascism involves a series of mobilizing passions. I think that Tony and I have focused on a few that are quite serious, and I’ll just mention a couple. Central, I think, to our argument, is that there’s one element of fascism that nobody wants to talk about, and that is, white supremacy, and the logic of disposability, and how it works. If you look at fascist movements from the beginning of the KKK, to what we see in Hungary today, with the claim that mixed races is the last thing we want in a democracy, you sort of begin to get a sense that we’re really talking about a politics of racial cleansing. It’s not just about anti intellectualism, it’s not just about elevating instinct over reason. It’s not just about disdain for the past. It’s about a politics of elimination, and that element of elimination has many factors in many forces. I think that all too often, people don’t focus on this enough, because the legacy of racial capitalism and the legacy of fascism is not something they want to argue for, particularly liberals, in light of this false myth of American exceptionalism.
Anthony DiMaggio 11:36
The way we’re talking about in the book, and the way that a lot of scholars have talked about it historically, is there’s like these basic dimensions. Henry mentioned white supremacy, but we’re also talking in the book about the glorification of violence — whether it’s vigilante violence of the Kyle Rittenhouse variety — or of the January 6th variety. Trump has really sort of fully lionized these people now, he’s not even trying to hide it. It has to do with the cult of personality and people basically worshipping at the altar of a leader that more than about two thirds of Trump supporters said there’s no thing you could ever do that would make them not support him. Obviously, that’s a cultish level of devotion. The extreme misogyny, where you can have a president and then a presidential candidate now, who not only openly brags about sexually assaulting women and grabbing them by their privates, but also has been convicted in civil courts of sexual assault and rape. Christian nationalism too, whether Trump himself sees himself as a legitimate Christian nationalist or not, or whatever ,he clearly has played that card to perfection here, in terms of appealing to the evangelical, born again right — in terms of his Supreme Court nominees in terms of the rhetoric he uses terms of tying this idea of the cult of personality to religion. He used to refer to himself as the “chosen one,” infamously. So you’ve got all these things coming together, especially, not just the white nationalism and the heterosexism, but the glorification of violence is what makes this particularly dangerous with regards to trying to overthrow and overturn elections, which however imperfect and flawed, they are, clearly, there is at least a rule of law there that isn’t supposed to be susceptible to people who just aren’t happy with the result, and then they want to use violence to get what they want. These are sort of the main dimensions that we’re talking about in the book that are key to understanding the contemporary fascist moment.
Henry Giroux 13:14
The other thing was, you got into the question of American exceptionalism, is the argument seems to be that America is incapable of moving towards fascism because, after all, it’s it has a long standing embrace of democracy, however flawed, which is often lost in historical and political analysis. But I also think there’s something else, I think that, if I may, Brexit is something that we tend to not remember, and that is, if you want to talk about fascism, you better start talking about capitalism. It seems to me that one of the things that we’ve explored in this book that I think that is new, is that just exactly how does fascism emerge in a different form? And under what conditions? And how different are those conditions? Well, you have the collapse of capitalism. Its promises no longer matter, they don’t care. So they need a new kind of form of legitimation, to sort of, in some way, justify neoliberal capitalism. That justification now takes the form of violence, a kind of endorsement of lawlessness, and language in the in the service of violence. It also takes the form, in some ways, of attempting to convince people that the real enemy, because the enemy/friend distinction is central to fascism, the real enemies are Black people, the real enemies are brown people, the real enemy are immigrants, the real enemy, are those — and this is crucial to the book — this is a fascism that expands the logic of disposability. We’re not just talking about a specific group, Jews, as in the past. Now, we’re talking about anybody who doesn’t fit into what Tony knows better than I do: this white Christian nationalist notion. So what’s at stake here is a shrinking of the public sphere, and a shrinking of the notion of who counts as a citizen, and who doesn’t count as a citizen isn’t just as excluded, but now are the objects of potential violence if not elimination. That’s an alarming signpost, to say the least, that far exceeds essentially anything that we’ve seen in the past, if it’s fully implemented.
Sam Goldman 15:09
I really appreciate what you both were getting at there and what ran through your book as the centrality of this being a form of rule that is overt brute force. I think that overtness is often lost amongst those on the left who think about the continuity of powers that have been integral to the American experience, who don’t want to see the shift or the leap, if you will. In addition to that, you were talking about where this comes from, I think, is a very puzzling and challenging question for many people on how did we get here? It opens up a lot of questions that, as you talk about in your book, have to do with how people see this country. If we can bring ourselves to the idea that this could happen here, and that elements of this did happen here, then what does that say about this country? What does that say about us, as a society where everything comes back to “me”? Then there’s that reflection of challenging the most common, dear held beliefs about oneself and one’s nation and the world that we’ve accepted.
Henry Giroux 16:27
I want to make an intervention here: Education is central to our book. It’s not just about brute violence. It’s about the potential for brute violence, and the adoration of brute violence. But the fact of the matter is, you have a shift in mass consciousness in this country, because you have a collapse of civic culture, you have a collapse of educational institutions, you have a collapse of the notion of literacy. All of a sudden, you have the merging of power, the new media, and it seems to me, everyday life, in a way that constitutes what I would call a paradigm shift in the United States, if not globally. You can’t change consciousness, forget it. There isn’t going to be a global resistance movement. It’s not gonna be resistance based simply on the threat of violence, it’s going to be on the recognition that this doesn’t work, it’s dreadful, it has to be overthrown, and it’s a threat to any viable notion of democracy.
Anthony DiMaggio 17:11
I would follow up on that. As Henry knows better than anybody, there’s been a real hollowing out of education, K through 12 and collegiate level because of neoliberalism, and the idea that with what’s called professionalization, I think inaccurately, there’s this idea that academics are objective and neutral, they don’t get involved in controversies. All that ends up happening there is that you end up siding with oppressors because, as Howard Zinn used to say, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. These things are happening, right, so you’re either part of challenging them, or you’re part of sweeping them under the rug by not talking about them. It’s nominal objectivity in the sense that people don’t talk about these issues like fascism, but in reality, you’re fueling them by being denialists, implicitly. This is something that filters down to many people who see themselves as liberal or left. In some of the survey work that I’ve done that made it into the book looks like these different metrics, where you post in very sort of diplomatic ways, words that are really compatible with white nationalism, like talking about how we have to really prioritize white European culture or something. Well, that’s white nationalism. Just because you say it diplomatically doesn’t mean it’s not white nationalism. A lot of liberals, contrary to what people might want to admit, people who identify as liberal, you know, they oftentimes go along with this stuff. It might only be one in five, one in four, one in three, depending on the survey question, but you have a lot of racism among liberal Americans and even other people who purport to be radical left in the sense that, you know, they oftentimes don’t want to talk about things like BLM, or Me Too — they see them as distractions from the larger real battle, which is capitalism, and they’re not really seeing the ways in which sexism and racism and capitalism work together to oppress people. That willful blind spot among people who claim to be left is something that I’ve been dealing with for a long time. I know Henry has too. It’s not just on the right, it’s not just people in the middle ignoring it, it’s people on the left doing it, too, as Henry said.
Henry Giroux 18:54
Sam, you mentioned this a minute ago, and it’s really crucial, you said: Well, people are so self interested. You’re talking about neoliberalism. You’re talking about a philosophy that makes the template for everything. You’re talking about the elevation of self interest over social needs. You’re talking about, in many ways, the way in which money drives politics. But you’re also talking about liberals who seem to believe that individuals alone are responsible for their problems. I think that one of the crucial factors in the rise of fascism in the United States is the inability to translate private issues into larger systemic considerations. That notion of literacy, which depends on the notion, being able to translate, to recognize where one fits into a system, and to understand that the totality of that system means that it gets fragmented, it gets disjointed, that people can’t understand the connection, and if they can’t blame themselves, and feel utterly alienated and lonely, social atomization being a point that we’re talking about here, then they end up in false communities, seduced by what I call the swindle of fulfillment. Okay, there’s a community here, let’s hate Blacks — it’s called white supremacy. But I think that liberals, particularly, are really in some way, so complicitous with this, because they really believe there’s nothing beyond the market. They really believe there’s nothing beyond individualism. They really believe the social contract is a drag. They really believe that the notion of the social is not a place where you can fight against the possibility of fascism, and they don’t believe that education matters. You have people in this country banning books, you have people in this country, criminalizing the behavior of educators. You have people in this country attacking trans people. There’s a lesson to be learned here, as Tony and I have said repeatedly, and it’s not a lesson just simply about fascism, it’s a lesson about the conditions that produce it, and what it means to learn from history in order to recognize it.
Sam Goldman 20:39
One of the things that, I think Henry, you had mentioned earlier in your remarks was the notion of this expanding target, where community after community is dehumanized, as you both get into in your book; the perpetual othering. One of the things that I’ve struggled with people over, who are kind of hamstrung in this idea of feeling only safe with calling it authoritarianism, what we face or what we confront in Trump, is that it it loses this definite content of dehumanization — that there is a program and an ideology that is driving this. Yes, it is the evisceration of civil or democratic rights, but it’s doing that, relying on and fomenting upon the vicious hatred of Black folks, of LGBT folks, of immigrant communities, of people of Jewish ancestry — the targets go on and on and on. Oftentimes that gets lost from the conversation, and is something that, especially in a lot of academic conversations, is completely lost, is the lives that this already effects and could affect. I just wanted to underscore that as a appreciation for what’s explored in in your book. It was alluded to in things that both of you have said so far, but I think one of the biggest questions that I think is profoundly important for confronting and opposing this threat is what is propelling this fascism, and why, if folks voted Trump out, did the fascist movement not go away?
Henry Giroux 22:22
You have to be older to recognize that there’s a counterrevolution going on in this country. It begins with the onslaught of the 60s, the endless democratization called for the democratization of the universities, the rise of the social welfare state in a more pronounced way, and then: bam, 1980, and all of a sudden, the Powell memo starts to become operative. The right says: Look, we are going to fight the left, which means anybody who’s not white and a nationalist, or Christian nationalist, that doesn’t believe in racism, then we’ve gotta get into the field of ideas, we’ve got to take the question of ideological struggle seriously. So what do you have? You have the emergence of foundations. You have the emergence of policy centers. You have the emergence of what I call, and Tony and I call, anti-public intellectuals. You begin to have a cultural politics emerging, unlike anything we have ever seen, coupled with the new media, that basically is an insurrectional culture. That’s what it is. It wants to kill democracy, and wants to make sure that nobody outside of what Tony has described, that privilege group of white people, has any power, and its counter revolution takes many forms. Coupl that with the collapse of education, and the attack on education, as an absolutely crucial critical element in the fight against fascism.
Sam Goldman 23:38
I think that there’s this push in the mainstream media about the narratives of Democrats and Republicans battling for the votes of some abstract center. I’d love to hear you speak more, you spoke some, about this ideology that’s driving this American fascism. Your book speaks to fascism is fundamental passions, and what you call the fascist organizing passions. This base isn’t simply rational people who are gonna lean one way or the other, and I think that that’s essential to understand. If there’s anything else that you want to say, either of you, about what’s driving the members of this fascist movement to their beliefs.
Anthony DiMaggio 24:18
The real problem is when we talk about this is the denialism. If you ask people: Are you a fascist? You could find like, maybe one in 1200 people who would say: Yeah, I’m a fascist. If you ask people if they’re white nationalists, nobody’s gonna say that explicitly. They’re not gonna say they’re a white supremacist, even the white supremacists who are openly white supremacist in terms of like their language, alt-right types, they talk about white genocide or something, right — they turn it around. If you look at the polls, very few people want to identify as any of these things because they are savvy enough to know that it’ll come with a stigmatization because Americans have, by and large, convinced themselves to a large extent at least, that America has gotten beyond issues like racism and sexism. It’s a huge number of Americans who believe these things. You have to change the wording for a lot of these questions. In the polling work that we’ve done and the polling work that other people have done, they look at these things like: Are you concerned that white majority in America is beginning become a minority; you’re going to be replaced, and that there’s some sort of active effort on the part of the Democratic Party to replace white voters with immigrants? Do you want to privilege and prioritize white European history? What about the blood of the nation? This is a recent Trump one, where he says the blood of the country is being poisoned by immigrants. What he’s done is he’s sort of shifted what’s considered mainstream in the Republican Party, and what people still might think is conservative, to what is realistically a fascist rhetoric, and he’s made it okay for people to agree with these kinds of sentiments that they don’t in their minds associate with fascism, because they see fascism as something, like historians overwhelmingly argue, it’s something that happened between the 19-teens and 1945 in countries called Italy, in Germany, and by people named Hitler and Mussolini — and that’s it, end of the story, case closed. When you have a country that’s been that hollowed out in terms of their understanding of the history of fascism, people don’t recognize what fascism actually is to the point where they may be embracing many elements of it in a sort of dressed up form with more diplomatic language, but it’s fully compatible with that stuff. It’s beyond black comedy when I see people like Samuel Moyn, or this recent piece in The New Yorker, where people are still arguing about whether it’s fascism or not, when you have a president who’s using language verbatim from Nazi Germany and from Hitler about the blood of the nation. This is beyond black comedy, it’s just dangerous at this point. It’s a dangerous complicity.
Henry Giroux 26:31
James Baldwin has a great quote, he’s talking about fascism when he was in Paris, in the, maybe, 40s and 50s there, and he says: Liberals are interesting, they don’t talk about fascism until one day, they get a knock on the door. In many ways, Tony has really captured it well. What we’re talking about here is a legitimation crisis among the ruling elite. The planet is in shambles, inequality is staggering, racism is no longer on the margins, it’s at the surface, violence has become an organizing principle of everyday life, and we have to ask ourselves first, as Tony said, and Tony is absolutely right: How do you name the problem? If you can’t name it, you can’t do anything about it. But I think the question that not many people are asking is: Who benefits from this? It’s not just who’s being mobilized, but who benefits? Well, it seems to me, you have an economic and financial elite that’s consolidating their power in ways in which… they’re a bit concerned about the Civil Rights Movement and where it’s going, they’re a bit concerned about gay rights, they’re a bit concerned about women arguing for reproductive right, they’re concerned about a variety of movements that haven’t unified, but a signaling that there is a possibility for a genuine insurrection in this country. And as far as they’re concerned, it’s gotta be stopped, and it can be stopped with people like Trump — who basically is simply a showcase for their own fascist views. When we say that neoliberalism can no longer justify itself, it can’t make a claim to social mobility, it can’t make a claim to equality, it can’t make a claim to political and social rights without making a claim to economic rights. It can’t do that. So now it has to go somewhere else, and we know where it is going, it’s going towards fascism, that’s where it’s going.
Sam Goldman 28:10
One of the things that I’ve been reflecting on a lot, in conversations with people is — I think, Tony, you might have spoken to this earlier, maybe both of you — the reticence to go there, to look at the feted soil from which, of this system — and when I’m saying “this system,” for listeners, I’m talking about the system of capitalism/imperialism — of which this fascism is an extreme expression of, and it can only exist within. I think that there’s two sides to that: One is confronting the reality, and you both spoke to this in a really clarifying way. There are crises that this system is facing — that fascism is the solution to the horrific unspeakable ecosystem collapse that we are facing produced by this system. This is a solution that they think is the way to solve, for them, not for the interests of humanity, but a situation where people’s lives are ripped apart, destroyed by the system and flung all over the globe, because of wars for empires, because of climate change, because of gangs propped up by the United States, and all sorts of other reasons that have propelled this migrant crisis. This is their solution. I have found in my conversations with people over these past few years that those who have the best understanding of the fascist threat of Trump and the whole GOP still struggle with seeing the role that the Democrats have played, and play, because of this concessions piece, that, Henry, you brought up: The rights that people won, and not wanting people to get too out of bounds, to get to beyond their control. That’s something that I find myself continuing to work with people on.
Anthony DiMaggio 30:03
What we’re really talking about is just not having the institutional framework necessary because you have corporate media outlets and mainstream academia what’s called mainstream political parties, but as Henry has pointed out, are fueling fascism one way or another, more lightly or more explicitly. So without having these major institutions with power that would challenge this, because they’re either tolerating it or actively promoting it, you need to build a movement. Where does that start? It starts with average people, it starts with people who are willing to do these things and alternative media, whether it’s Truthout, or Counterpunch, or other venues, people in higher ed, who are willing to sort of stick their neck out, people have the protection of tenure. There’s really no excuse in these situations for people not to be taking these things seriously, because we’re the people who are going to have to build this movement. So people like Henry and I are trying to do this, but obviously, we can’t do it alone. We need things like Refuse Fascism, the podcast, to reach out to a larger audience of people to really put this on their radar, because these mainstream institutions, or what’s called mainstream, are just really not up to the task, or they’re perpetuating it.
Sam Goldman 31:02
I wanted to go there in terms of this education piece. This show exists to help provide — we’re not going to do it alone, and the weight of denialism is still heavy, despite all the evidence. We were talking before the show started about the New Yorker article, and this Moyn quote that’s in there just strikes me time and time again, as something that is really paralyzing, I think, for a lot of people, where he writes: “abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes,” as if that means that it can’t be both, as it’s the either/or not the both/and. Yes, exactly, and therefore. I’m wondering, for myself, and for listeners, what strategies should we be employing to help people dispel the persistent denialism that continues to pervade the decent folk?
Anthony DiMaggio 32:00
People just need to force themselves to talk about these things and make for unpleasant conversations, because it’s an inherently unpleasant topic. Whatever setting people are working in, whether it’s in a private workplace, or in the academy, or in family conversations, Thanksgiving dinners, this is where this stuff needs to start. When I teach about social movements, the women’s rights movement, civil rights movement, gay and lesbian LGBTQ plus rights, the idea of consciousness raising is the first step of any sort of real movements. Without people being willing to have these conversations with people, even if it becomes unpleasant, you can’t get to the part of organizing. That part is absolutely essential, and we just don’t have enough people who are talking about the fascism question to the point where intellectuals like myself, Paul Street, and others have said, this is like the new ‘F’ word, ‘fascism’. You don’t use this word in polite conversation, because it’s seen as like, paranoid or something, or crazy or deluded. We have to really sort of challenge that sort of denialism anywhere we can at this point. Without that consciousness raising, you’re not going to get that mass movement.
Sam Goldman 32:59
One question that came up earlier, but I regularly like to ask people is, transitioning to the 2024 election, repeatedly, many are told right now that this election is the mechanism through which we defeat fascism. In fact, those who long kept people passive with: the trials, the justice, the courts — have now predictably pivoted to the: If he is defeated, it will be at the ballot box. How do you go about responding to this almost incantation that people deliver?
Anthony DiMaggio 33:31
We had 2020 already. If an election by itself was going to defeat fascism, then that would have happened, wouldn’t it? What happened was people convinced themselves after that election that it had been defeated, and they didn’t want to talk about politics at all, let alone fascism. And it just sort of regrouped and reorganized, and Trump has been spending the last four years doing that. I’m not gonna trash talk elections as a short term mechanism for avoiding worst possible outcomes, but it’s not any sort of ideal mechanism or substantive mechanism for the kind of proactive democracy that Henry and I are talking about related to socialized values and revolution in the way people think. These are, at best, short term stock gaps to stop the worst possible outcomes. They can do something for that, as they did in 2020, but even then, we almost didn’t have that outcome, because Trump had his insurrection politics, where it came down to one guy, his vice president not being willing to refuse to certify that election results, and you would have had complete chaos. It’s a very precarious thing to sort of put your hope into that basket, because increasingly, people don’t seem to have a lot of faith in elections, to a large extent because of Trump. He’s undermined confidence in elections, so I don’t know how you say that. That’s going to be your sort of saving grace here, when most of the Republican Party doesn’t even believe in these elections when they don’t win. That’s a crisis.
Henry Giroux 34:44
It’s very interesting, these elections driven by money and power. Why would you presuppose that elections, in some way, are a way to fight fascism in this country? The other issue, of course, is that fascism is not about one person. It’s not about defeating Trump. It’s about basically defeating a history that suggests something about how fascism is, as Primo Levi said, “every age has its own fascism,” right, and how it’s ingrained in the history of this country. So what we’re really dealing with is not the matter of defeating Trump, what we’re really dealing with is a legacy that has emerged over the last 200 years. And we’ve got to confront. We’ve got to understand how it gets reproduced, how it emerges in new forms, and who benefits from this, and what it means for the future, if that’s the way that people want to go.
Sam Goldman 35:24
I found both of your answers very helpful and meaningful, and I’m sure our listeners will as well. One of the things that has come up in conversations, when I’ve been reflecting on my answers, has been adding in the degree that it was a stopgap then — 0we’ve passed that now. It is now clear that they will not accept any election that they lose. They will not accept it, and they are creating a situation where it’s very possible where they don’t even have to do that — where they could just walk right back into power lawfully. Now they have lessons learned that they didn’t have before. In case, listeners, you don’t know, take a look at Project 2025 — it outlines it pretty clear — the mistakes that they made, they’re not going to make again. That doesn’t mean that there’s no solution, but it does mean that we passed that stop gap moment. Again, this is just my opinion.
Henry Giroux 36:18
My brilliant co author, Tony, has hit this on the head a hundred times, and that is, if you can’t feel the weight of fascism today, especially with Project 2025 — if the media can’t recognize, if academics and intellectuals don’t see the alarming signals here, laid out unobtrusively, with no attempt to cover up the end of democracy… I mean, look, the leading political pundits and political figures in this country align themselves with Viktor Orban. You’ve got a guy who claims he wants to be a dictator. You’ve got white supremacy now driving the police, collectively. The forefront of white supremacy, may be in America’s police forces. You’ve got the endless militarization of everyday life, and you’ve got an ethic that drives this country now that says that all that matters is consumption, self interest, and hating the other. It’s all pretty clear, I think. But the real problem is why is it invisible to most people? as Tony has suggested.
Sam Goldman 36:23
I wanted to end with a section of your book, and just any new thoughts that you have off of it. You wrote in this section, Politics of Disposability: “One source of hope comes from the words of James Baldwin, which were written in another time of crisis, he writes: ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ The urgency of the times demands that we remove the blinders before it is too late and face the impending fascist threat. The urgent question of what kind of world we want to live in is no longer rhetorical, it is a vital call to action. Collective resistance is no longer an option waiting to unfold, it is a necessity, with no time to spare.” It was deeply moving to me it was deeply inspiring to me, and folks that are listening should get the book, should read and sit with it and come to their own conclusions on what it means for them. But just in in the time that’s passed since you first wrote those words, I was wondering whether you had any more reflections on it.
Sam Goldman 37:18
We live in a time of danger and urgency, and it seems to me that we can either act or we can become complacent. But these are dangerous times. Under such circumstances, it isn’t should we resist, it’s that we have no option but resistance. I think we see a number of movements doing that, and I’m just hoping that they can come together and be more successful than they have been. Because what’s at stake is not just simply the question of whether we’re going to be fascist or not. What’s at stake is the future itself.
Anthony DiMaggio 38:46
To add to that point, an environmental crisis, right, unfolding in front of us. So this is urgent stuff, and when you have both political parties that have really dropped the ball on climate change, and one that has led the way in denialism, there’s no potential to address these defining issues of our time, like the climate crisis, when you have a fascist, neoliberal, capitalist sort of party ascending, and a system that has fueled that between both parties. It’s really about human survival at this point. We’re not gonna have this corrupt, broken status quo and be able to deal with these pressing issues of our time as long as people are letting the politics of white nationalism, heterosexism, classism, and neoliberal capitalism drive us. If nothing else, these things are all interconnected, so we need to wake up.
Sam Goldman 39:27
We do need to wake up. I wanted to let people know that in the shownotes, there will be a link for you to get Tony and Henry’s book, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy.’ For people who want to read more than that book or connect with you in other ways, where should they go? Tony, you want to hit that one first?
Anthony DiMaggio 39:51
Outside of the book — obviously, that can be found at Bloomsbury’s website, Henry and I write for a number of venues like Truthout, Counterpunch, Salon.com, and the nice thing about these venues is that it’s free information to everybody, you don’t have to pay for subscriptions, so, we’re trying to do our part in terms of democratizing access to information. I think that these are invaluable resources for people to help them fight back and educate themselves.
Sam Goldman 39:51
Absolutely. And Henry.
Anthony DiMaggio 39:53
Tony is absolutely right. We’ve gotta find those alternative spaces that basically are engaged with courage and commitment and passion to really provide information and dialogue for people in which they can both understand the threat that we face and what it might mean to do something about it. Common Dreams, Rise Up Times, AlterNet. There’s a whole range of options out there — Refuse Fascism. We’ve got to do more to be able to publicize these sites so people realize there’s something beyond the New York Times, and it’s certainly something beyond Fox News.
Sam Goldman 40:47
Absolutely. I want to thank you both for coming back on, for sharing your expertise, your perspective, and your commitment to refusing fascism.
Anthony DiMaggio 40:57
Thanks so much for having us.
Henry Giroux 40:59
Thanks.
Sam Goldman 40:59
Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Got thoughts or questions off this episode? We want to hear ’em. Ideas for topics or guests? Yes please, send them to us. Have a skill you think could help? We want to know all about it. Connect with us on social media, @RefuseFascism. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, @RefuseFascism. Find us over on the YouTubes if that’s your jam, we have all the episodes up there too, you can find us at Refuse_Fascism, and be sure to subscribe. Or leave a voicemail — see the show notes for the voicemail button. If you want to reach me personally — love to hear from you — find me over on Twitter @SamBGoldman, drop me a line at [email protected], or on TikTok, @SamGoldmanRF. If you appreciate the show and want to help us reach more listeners to understand and to stop the fascist threat, please become a patron. Whether you can give $2 or $20 a month, it all makes a difference in producing and promoting this independent, all volunteer weekly show. And if you needed extra incentive to join, we’ll be having our next feature and only virtual event Sunday, April 28, at 5pm Eastern Time on the Zoom. Our patrons voted on having a book discussion, and based on polling we will be discussing Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, so you have time to read it and chat with us about it if you haven’t read it already. Sign up today at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. And for those who are already patrons of the show, thank you, thank you — you can find a link to register to join us for that zoom on our Patreon page. If you’re not in the position to give monthly but still want to support this show, visit RefuseFascism.org and hit the donate button to make a one time gift. Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman. Thanks so much for helping make this episode happen, given my illness, for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. Until next time: In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!