Activism in the Anthropocene

SUBHEAD: To withstand the coming waves, winds and wars, we need to be addressing our own incoherence.

By Sam Allen on 15 December 2017 for Transition Network -
(https://transitionnetwork.org/news-and-blog/activism-in-the-anthropocene/)


Image above: The Pacific Climate warriors prepare for their journey to the Vatican, carrying traditional mats that weave together stories from the low-lying islands of the Pacific. Photo by Fenton Lutunatabua. From original article.

This is the first in a series of blogs from Kevin Buckland, a Barcelona-based artivist, storyteller, facilitator and organizer who engages art as a tool for enabling change.

Look out the window, see the air between your eyes and the horizon.

This is the Anthropocene – a new geological age characterized by the critical impacts of human activities on the Earth’s systems. Every word you will ever speak will be articulated using this changed air.

The Anthropocene can be understood not as an issue but a context: it is the world we do and will, from now on, inhabit – the rest of our lives will be defined increasingly by an accelerating political and ecological destabilization of unimaginable scale.

Sit with that feeling, hold it – it is not going away, internalizing this knowledge will allow us as individuals and as movements to build structural resilience that prepares us for coming destabilization.

But if climate change is inevitable, global and profoundly altering human culture – then so too can our movements react on scale with the crisis.

The word “crisis” first appeared in English (from the greek origin krinein “decide”) to mean “the turning point of a disease”. Global warming is Gaias’s fever, a symptom of an unsustainable relationship to the physical world.

But as this fever rises, global movements are swarming like antibodies to the underlying causes of the disease. The global climate crisis presents a great challenge, but also a great opportunity. Climate change means that our human civilization has to change.

Yet, the direction this now inevitable cultural shift takes is still left to be decided. As the ecological security of our vital life systems degrade there is a grave danger for the neoliberal logic of scarcity to accumulate more power, and already the rise of the far-right is hailing a response to this crisis with enhanced borders, racism, centralization and militarism.

For movements to thrive and survive in the anthropocene, we need to look beyond the “activism-as-usual” that has shaped the past century, and gaze deeper into long-term cultural change that can withstand in the coming centuries of accelerating entropy.

If the left is to provide a more effective proposal to this collective crisis than the world that capitalism proposes, it requires the deep work of targeting not only the symptom of the illness, but also its causes.

This means addressing the long history of white-supremacy, racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, imperialism and colonialism that have shaped both our world and our atmosphere.

This is hard work, that many environmental movements have shied away from due to the urgency of the crisis, but this also reframes the vast majority of the world who have been victim of structural injustice as our allies.

But to create a movement wide enough for everyone, history demands the left provides not only an alternative politic to neoliberalism, but an alternative process.

If this process is a truly bottom-up democratic process, then each coming disaster provides the opportunity for it to spread, allowing movements for justice to flourish inside the oncoming chaos, rather than be derailed by it.

This series of articles and interviews digs into the space where resistance becomes resilience; where people are experimenting with alternative organizing cultures inside their place of struggle.

These articles will investigate how movements are working together, rather than just what we are working on; and examining the socio-cultural shift underway inside those on the edges who are nudging the mainstream into new directions.

Our movements’ desires to foment alternative futures – encouraging democratic, prefigurative and decentralized solutions – may actually have less to do with solar panels and community gardens than with nurturing scalable and democratic organizing cultures that can be shared with allies, volunteers and partners in ways that improve access to autonomy as we move together into an exponentially tumultuous future.

We will examine organizing that is intentional about its cultural legacy, and focus on process for participation rather than as a product of participation. It is, perhaps, these organizing cultures that are already incubating the next chapter of human history.

This series of articles will examine a diversity of spaces from across the global movement for climate justice.

1. In our first article, we will look at how eco-feminist principles are reshaping cultures of mass direct action though Ende Gelande.
2. Our second article will focus on the “Pacific Warriors”, indigenous activists from the low-lying islands of the Pacific and the people most vulnerable to sea level rise.
3. Our third article will look at Cooperation Jackson, that combines black-led eco-social cooperativism with local municipal politics to provide an alternative future for the “deep south” of the United States.
4. Finally, we will look to Imider, a small community on the edge of the Sahara who are transforming their indigenous political cultures as they protect their communities’ water from an expanding silver mine.

It is my intention that by looking at Emergent movement organizing structures on a diversity of scales and contexts, there is potential to look at how other groups are developing and enacting political processes that are coherent with their shared values and ambitions.

While the climate crisis cannot be avoided; disaster can be. The main question regarding the severity of the Anthropocene will be how human beings organize in this unpredictable and hostile terrain and what processes have the structural integrity to survive constant destabilization.

If our “movement of movements” is to withstand the coming waves, winds and wars, we need to be addressing our own incoherencies, lest they open fissures in our structures at every weak point.

Across the world, bottom up processes are gaining force as the global climate justice movement begins to inhabit its politics, tilting from being diverse protest movements towards being a truly revolutionary force that can rise faster than the oceans.

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Abrupt Climate Justice

SUBHEAD: Resistance gives ultimate meaning to life in the Anthropocene.  Let’s embrace it, and each other. 

By John Foran on 16 November 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-11-16/abrupt-climate-justice/)


Image above: Photograph of dawn as Somali woman walks through a camp of people displaced from their homes by the drought in Qardho, Somalia, March 9, 2017. From (https://www.voanews.com/a/dire-food-insecurity-five-east-african-countries-facing-drought/3944455.html).

Three of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded just ripped through Puerto Rico and the southern US – within weeks of each other! Ash rained from the sky in Seattle and Portland for weeks. Record monsoons swept through Asia. Parts of Sierra Leone and Niger are underwater. San Francisco recorded its hottest day ever and Europe endured a triple-digit heat wave they called “Diablo.”

The fucking devil is here man, and its name is climate change. – Wendy & Jesse & Hayley & Teresa, “Face Down Climate Change,” Slingshot issue 125 (Autumn 2017)

I recently attended a talk by Guy McPherson, generally acknowledged as the doyen –some consider him the “superhero” – of the abrupt climate change [ACC] thesis [note to readers:  I understand that Guy McPherson can be a “polarizing” figure for some in the Resilience community; I ask only that you read my essay with the usual care, and stay focused on the nuances of my argument!).

I only came across this debate because I met – to my great good fortune – Shanelle LeFage, a millennial expert on it, and have subsequently followed her leads into the literature, discussed below.  As I learned more, I began to realize something that I had always intimated:  the science is grimmer than any of us know…

This has important implications for how those of us in the global climate justice movement approach our work, that it’s high time we tease out and engage with.

The Science of Abrupt Climate Change
The science is new, not widely known, and even less widely accepted.  In shorthand form, it connects these dots:

• We are on the verge of an “ice-free” Arctic, or a so-called “blue ocean event,” meaning that, at the end of the summer months in the northern hemisphere, ocean waters have warmed to the point where there is nearly no ice left in the Arctic Ocean except in secluded enclaves.
  
  
• This leads to even more warming because of the loss of the reflectivity of the ice, the so-called albedo effect.
  
  
• Now we have the first of many positive feedback loops – less ice, warmer air, warmer water, less ice.
  
  
• As the northern ocean warms further, the risk increases of the release into the atmosphere of both methane clathrates (methane deposits that have been kept on the ocean floor because they have till now been “frozen” in the slush) and of methane on northern lands as permafrost warms and melts.
  
  
• And, of course, this all comes with the attendant feedback loops: more extreme weather events and all the rest – rising seas, changing ocean currents, warmer weather and oceans, ad infinitum, literally and unfortunately.

As Dahr Jamail, one of the few climate journalists reporting on the ACC thesis, noted back in 2013:

Moving beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates – often described as methane gas surrounded by ice – exist, a March 2010 report in Science indicated that these cumulatively contain the equivalent of 1,000-10,000 gigatons of carbon. Compare this total to the 240 gigatons of carbon humanity has emitted into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began.

A study published in the prestigious journal Nature this July suggested that a 50-gigaton “burp” of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is “highly possible at any time.” That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Even the relatively staid IPCC has warned of such a scenario: “The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from the terrestrial biosphere and oceans.”

Dahr Jamail’s book, The End of Ice, is promised for 2018.

Robert Hunziker, another excellent climate journalist who is covering the story, quotes Oxford University researcher Peter Wadhams, author of the recently released A Farewell to Ice:

Leading researchers, like Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge for years have repeatedly warned, over and over again, the day will come when the Arctic will be ice-free.

That’s when bright red flashing lights and sirens start going off, as the water will be absorbing all but 6% of sunlight. Whereas with its icy cover, the Arctic reflects up to 90% of sunlight back to space, no harm, no foul.

When Dr. Wadhams was asked in an interview if “civilization could withstand a 50-gigaton release of methane,” he answered: “No, I don’t think it can.”

From here, all bets would be off.  How much methane could be released is the subject of at best a SWAG – “scientific wild-assed guess” – according to methane specialist Ira Leifer, whom Shanelle and I spoke with in Santa Barbara in September.

The scientists in the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, the Russian team of Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semilitev of the University of Alaska-based International Arctic Research Center, along with Leifer and others, are extremely concerned that the amounts could be significant.  And remember, methane’s warming potential as a greenhouse gas is many times greater than carbon dioxide, its better known cousin.

While it’s true that methane’s warming effect wears off in a matter of decades, as opposed to centuries for CO₂, the last thing that humanity needs at this point in the twenty-first century – at the very dawn of the Anthropocene and the halting first steps by the international community to come to terms with the climate crisis, however ineffectually – the last thing that humanity needs now is a single to several degree spike in average temperatures, which would accelerate ocean acidification, glacier and ice melt, rising oceans, and the “extreme” (now proven to be a polite word) weather that has started to beset us with alarming regularity.  Oh, wait, that’s already happening, so this would all be intensified.

As Robert Hunziker notes, it may be that:

“The only question going forward is whether climate change rapidly accelerates as an out of control defiant monster or evolves little by little, in which case the gradualists will be correct, meaning future generations can fight the demons of ecosystem collapse.”

The Stakes when We Connect the Dots
We should therefore be asking some “what if” questions.  What if a sudden burst of methane led to a collapse or serious disruption of industrial society?  Apocalypse then?  Dystopia in our lifetimes, anyone?

Since we can’t answer this question, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Repeat:  the stakes could not be higher.  No one tells the disheartening story of the implications of abrupt climate change better than Guy McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who walked away from his life as a tenured teacher when colleagues and administrators found his message (and his anarchist pedagogy) too disturbing for the undergraduates he so openly and creatively tried to explore this with.

McPherson then spent seven years in the arid landscape of New Mexico, learning the difficult arts of homesteading, self-sufficiency, and community-building with an assortment of like-minded spirits before packing that in and moving to Belize (a rather hot spot for a climate “doomist,” as he is often accused of being), where he now runs workshops for people whose lives have been shattered by their reading of the crisis as a terminal, near-term one for civilization.

As Dahr Jamail, the leading investigative journalist of abrupt climate change puts it:

Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for instance, has often been labeled “Guy McStinction” – to which he responds, “I’m just reporting the results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are published in established, esteemed literature.

I don’t think anybody is taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  [Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], for example. I’m not making this information up, I’m just connecting a couple of dots, and it’s something many people have difficulty with.”

McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, he believes, “because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue.”

And it is true that McPherson has met with fierce criticism from many well-placed climate scientists, as for example, this broad-ranging dismissal by Scott Johnson at Fractal Planet.

I have no firm position in this debate, other than to take seriously the general line of argument that follows from the ice-free Arctic to the possibility of a severe and sudden disruption of our climate system’s ongoing dysfunction.

  

Abrupt Climate Justice
Our first responsibility remains, as always, to tell the truth.  The debate that exploded in climate circles this summer over the widely-read essay, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” by David Wallace-Wells in New York magazine, touched a nerve, and it was fascinating to see such eminent climate scientists as Michael Mann react to its harsh thesis, while activists such as Margaret Klein Salamon of the Climate Mobilization and journalists such as Dave Roberts at Vox generally found it worth taking on board.

All Wallace-Wells did was report what leading scientists think will happen in the worst-case scenario of continued business as usual (BAU).

We need to take a similar hard look at the situation now, in light of the possibility of abrupt climate change – however remote, and remember it’s anyone’s SWAG as to the precise likelihood, possibility, or probability, and even more of a SWAG to suggest when (or if) and how much of a temperature spike might hit us.

So please don’t misread my views as anything more than acknowledging the possibility of yet another worst-case (actually a worse case) scenario.  It just turns out that Wallace-Wells may have erred on the optimistic side.  Yikes!

Speaking now as a social scientist and scholar-activist, here are some of the things (I think) we know.
In the global climate justice movement, we know that BAU neoliberal global capitalism is already a slow-fuse death sentence for humanity.  The best science, such as that of Kevin Anderson, established this almost ten years ago.

We know that our only hope is the global climate justice movement.  I can hear friends like Shanelle over my shoulder saying “But there is no hope!”

But with other heroes of mine, from Bill McKibben (in all of his work, including a new novel, Radio Free Vermont) to Naomi Klein (in This Changes Everything and No Is Not Enough) to Rebecca Solnit (in Hope in the Dark and countless exquisite essays), I remain a deeply serious and (fun-) loving “hopist.”

And aren’t referring (or at least I’m not) to a kind of false hope that we can really contain the climate crisis from taking humanity into extremely dangerous climate change.

What we mean is real(istic) hope for deep, radical social transformation as the crisis unfolds.  This is what we are fighting for, and if you don’t think that overthrowing capitalism and the one percent is worth fighting for … then don’t join us.  Except, I suspect that increasing numbers of readers could be on board for this.

We already knew that time is short:  Carbon Brief’s meticulous carbon budgets tell us that we have perhaps four years of current-level GHG emissions left before we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

Geoengineering – risky, untested, capitalist wishful thinking – is about to be (or is already being) foisted on us for effectively allowing two degrees to become a fait accompli, thus dictating that we somehow develop the capacity to remove already released greenhouse gases from the air.

So now, the existential urgency of our politics has just been accelerated by the possibility of abrupt climate change, or at the very least, the knowledge that tipping points, positive feedback loops, and so much more that is not in the IPCC’s climate models and future scenarios is on the cards.

We have to be clear about this:  we probably can’t prevent the climate from deteriorating toward a nearly uninhabitable Earth.

Does this mean have to do things differently? Well, since we aren’t winning at present, that would probably be a good idea. We need new ideas, fresh voices, radical imaginations, and loving hearts, still and always.

To address abrupt climate change as a possibility and extremely dangerous climate change as a certainty, we might want to adjust and re-imagine our work as abrupt climate justice. This is not just for me to do, but here are a few starters that I have been thinking about recently…

• Emergent Strategy – the title of adrienne maree brown’s 2017 book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds – is a useful new approach to building stronger movements by attending to process, cultivating relationships, maximizing our diversity, and staying open to learning and deciding in unfolding situations, which are skills much in demand by the many strands of the social movements that need to link up today.
  
  
• Following on directly from this, the breakthroughs of Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock in the practice of intersectionality need to be studied and deepened as we proceed together, for many of us for the first time. Let’s resolve to learn more about the possibilities, pitfalls, and possible new options they open up for doing this work.
  
  
• One idea for us to play with is what I am calling the New Kind of Party (NKoP).

What if we saw the path forward now as some excitingly new and original kind of party that in each country or area comes out of the social movements that would bring it to power and can then be held strictly accountable by them as it turns this ship of fools we’re on around?

Such a “party” (and the name is apt for the convivial connotations it holds) will be the patient, challenging, loving product of the actions of many people, and it will embrace the multiple, richly diverse threads of the new political cultures of opposition and creation that are bubbling up from the recesses of our wildest imaginations.

What if we could harness the people power, radical imagination, and boundless energy of all of these new actors in the present and the future, starting to facilitate discussions among the new social movements, brainstorming how to fashion some new kind of party to take power where that is possible while beginning or continuing to support and enable all the emerging transition initiatives to co-create radical social transformation on every level, from the always available local to the much needed national, not to mention our global arenas of struggle?

What have we got to lose?  We aren’t winning at present.  We need to try something different, something, really, that we haven’t tried before.

As Nathan Thanki, a young Irish climate justice radical has said in his trenchant response to the Wallace-Wells controversy, “Fuck Your Apocalypse”:

[W]hat good is our analysis, what is the point of our writing, if we can’t offer anything else? If we can’t contribute to transforming the world? It speaks to a poverty of the imagination if we cannot even see past our nihilism to ideas about how we might possibly fight and win.

“Ordinary” people are fighting for life all around the world. They always have and they always will. Some have sacrificed everything for this struggle, their deaths like their agency going unnoticed in the annals of any New York publication.

Deniers, you can keep your opinions to yourselves. Doomsayers, you can keep your apocalypse. I’ll keep my belief that another world is possible and worth fighting for.

Yes, I think now, that existence means resistance.  Or we simply won’t exist.  I’m not ready just yet to accept that.  And no one has to.

Resistance gives ultimate meaning to life in the Anthropocene.  Let’s embrace it, and each other.  And let’s move forward now, with urgency, with or without hope!

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The so-called "Resistance"

SUBHEAD: What would a real resistance to the complex systemic corruption of America look like? 

By James Kunstler on 29 May 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-so-called-resistance/)


Image above: Left-wing protesters attended an April 29 rally in a "clown bloc," wearing masks to mock their adversaries as Alt-Left  and Alt-Right battle in the streets of Portland. From (http://www.wweek.com/news/2017/05/23/white-supremacists-are-brawling-with-masked-leftists-in-the-portland-streets-homeland-security-is-watching/).

Entropy never sleeps. It works remorselessly to transform things of value into useless, dissipated waste and heat. Complexity stokes it especially as the law of diminishing returns multiplies the wheels of futility spinning down to zero. Hence, the intellectual decay of American life in which spin is everything, anything goes, and nothing matters.

The latest manifestation of this dynamic is the curious movement that styles itself The Resistance, lately adopted by the grotesque handmaiden of the Deep State that the Democratic Party became in the regency of Hillary Clinton.

Its mission is to undo the results of the last national election by claiming that Russia undid it. It pretends to seek the restoration of something — but what? Of dissipated power relations within the Deep State itself?

President Trump is actually taking care of that by turning government management over to his generals and the minions of Goldman Sachs.

The generals are reinvesting in the strategic black hole of our military adventures overseas.

The Goldman Sachs appointees are making Wall Street safe for the continued asset-stripping of the USA. The last time I checked, Hillary’s gang did not oppose either of these endeavors.

The Resistance employs cadres of useful idiots — Black Lives Matter, “undocumented” visitors, “Antifa,” the LGBTQ “community” — to pretend that it stands for social justice, but these are just straw persons fronting a gang devoted only to regaining the levers of “privilege” — which they also pretend to be against.

The Resistance takes its name from the movement in World War Two France that fought the Nazi occupation, thus self-valorizing itself. But the pre-owned styling is just another victory of spin in the public relations nightmare that American political life has become.

It also begs the question: what would a real resistance look like?

First, it would oppose the aforementioned asset-stripping that the US economy has become, the transfer of capital in all its forms — monetary, political, cultural, social — from the dis-employed former middle classes to the tiny, select beneficiaries of financial manipulation.

Note that the things being manipulated — markets, currencies, securities, and interest rates — are increasingly phantom entities that appear to maintain their value only because the high priests of financial authority say that they do.

The shelf-life of that flim-flam approaches its endgame as it self-evidently immiserates the masses and their sheer faith in its recondite promises dwindles away to nothing. A genuine resistance would begin to deconstruct this clerisy and its institutions, namely Too Big To Fail banks and the Federal Reserve.

The best opportunity to accomplish that would have been the early months of Mr. Obama’s turn in the White House, the dark time of the previous financial crash when the damage was fresh and obvious.

But the former president blew that under the influence of high priests Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. And the lower order clerics were allowed run their hoodoo machine flat out in the following eight years.

 Just look at the long chart of the Standard & Poors index. Tragically, this ever-upward arc is now taken to be the normal state of things, and when it fails the implosion will be orders of magnitude more violent than the last time.

One would think that a genuine resistance would also oppose the growing consolidation of power in the now-colossal spying apparatus of the nation — the often averred to “seventeen intel agencies” that show signs of being actively at war against other parts of the government and against citizens themselves.

Hence, the non-stop murmur of allegation about “Russian interference in the election,” going back to the summer of 2016 without either any real evidence, or any clarification of what is actually alleged to have happened.

Another tragic turn is that this fifth column of rogue intel agencies has recruited the major organs of the news to incessantly repeat its allegations until the public accepts the story as established fact rather than just the manufactured story it so far appears to be.

Well, the lives of persons and societies founder on versions of the “reality” they fabricate for their own purposes.

A genuine resistance would show foremost some fidelity to a reality beyond the spin-factories of self-delusion. And it would lead in the hard work of shedding this over-burden of self-multiplying despotisms.

Maybe this Memorial Day is a good moment to question the claims of the so-called resistance, and perhaps patriotically meditate on what the nature of an authentic resistance would be to the ongoing decay of this nation while it is still possible.

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Disengage from the Spectacle

SUBHEAD: Many real heroes and heroines may choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

By Richard Heinberg on 15 March 2017 for Post Carbon Institute -
(http://www.postcarbon.org/disengage-from-the-spectacle/)


Image above: The media grabbing pictures of Trump. From original article.

Behold today’s edition of Empire’s End—the biggest, best-ever 24/7 reality TV show! It’s been decades in preparation, with a budget in the trillions, a cast of billions! Its hero-villain is far more colorful and pathetic than Tony Soprano or Walter White.

One day he and his team of oddball supporting characters appear to be winning bigly; the next, they’re crashing and burning.

We’re all on the edges of our seats, alternately enraged, horrified, thrilled, or brought to tears in uncontrollable laughter. Who could bear to miss a minute of it?

Still, maybe at least some of us are better off severely limiting our consumption of American national news just now. It’s not that events in Washington won’t affect us. They most assuredly will. Rather, I’d argue that there are even more important things to attend to, over which we have far greater agency.

I’ve invested as much attention in the outrage-of-the-day distraction machine as anyone, spending scores of hours reading news reports and analyses, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen essays about our current tweeter-in-chief. And I’m here to tell you that full immersion in the news cycle is just not healthy.

Some readers may find this conclusion too cynical. I propose it only after a great deal of thought, and on the basis of two premises.

First Premise:
We are at the end of the period of general economic growth that characterized the post-WWII era.

I’ve written extensively about this, and there’s no need to repeat myself at length here. Suffice it to say that we humans have harvested the world’s cheap and easy-to-exploit energy resources, and the energy that’s left will not, much longer, support the kind of consumer economy we’ve built.

Further, in order to keep the party roaring, we’ve built up consumer and government debt levels to unsustainable extremes. We’ve also pumped hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and oceans, putting the entire biosphere at risk.

Yet our current economic and political systems require further, endless growth in order to avert collapse. Almost no one wants to discuss this situation—neither politicians nor economists. Therefore the general public is left mostly in the dark.

Still, everyone senses a change in the air: despite jiggered statistics, workers know that their wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and members of the younger generation generally expect to earn less that their parents. This generates a persistent low-level sense of fear and dissatisfaction, guaranteeing a significant political shift such as we are seeing.

Second Premise:
The new and current U.S. regime is adopting an essentially fascist character. When empires decline, people often turn to leaders perceived as strong, and who promise to return the nation to its former glory.

In extreme instances, such leaders can be characterized as fascist—using the word in a generic sense to refer to authoritarian nationalism distinguished by one-party rule, the demonization of internal and external enemies (usually tinged with some form of racism or anti-Semitism), controls on press freedoms, and social conservatism.

Here’s the thing: Once a nation turns decisively toward fascism, there’s rarely a turning back. Fascist regimes ruthlessly hobble and destroy all opposition. Typically, it takes a foreign invasion or a complete economic-political-social collapse to reset a national government that has gone fascist.

Now, put these two premises together.

Those who get the second premise but miss the first tend to conclude that, at least until the new regime neutralizes significant opposition within the government, there is still something we can do to make everything turn out okay—in the sense that life would return to “normal.”

Just defeat the fascists, no matter what the cost. But the end of growth ensures that, beyond a certain point, there will be no more “normal.” We’re headed into new territory no matter what.

Taking both premises into account, what are the likely outcomes?

It’s possible that the Trumpist insurgency will succeed in rooting out or suppressing opposition not just in Congress and the media, but also in Executive-branch departments including the CIA and FBI.

In that case we may see at least a few years of authoritarian national governance punctuated by worsening financial and environmental crises, all against the backdrop of accelerating national decline.

It’s just a guess, but the regime may have only two more months to somehow overcome resistance within the intelligence community; if it can do so, then the task of undercutting the judiciary and the media can be pursued at a more leisurely pace over the next year or two.

But thanks to Premise One, short-term success probably will not lead to a regime that is stable over the long term.

Eventually, no matter how vigorously it suppresses real or perceived enemies, the U.S. federal government will collapse as a result of war, economic crisis, or the simple ongoing erosion of biophysical support systems.

At that point a possible trajectory for the nation would be to break apart into smaller geographically defined political entities.

However, the short-term success of the current regime is not yet guaranteed.

It is still entirely possible that establishmentarian Democratic and Republican members of Congress, working with with renegade CIA and FBI mid-level officials and mainstream media outlets, could mire the new leadership in a scandal that is too deep to survive. Or, if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2018, articles of impeachment could be brought against Trump.

This would not, however, guarantee a return to status quo politics in Washington. Not only does Premise One guarantee that the old status quo is no longer tenable, but also on its own terms the political system is now too broken and the nation too divided.

In this scenario, pro-regime and anti-regime elites might just continue to escalate their attacks on one another until the whole system crashes—as I explained in a previous essay, citing the conclusions of ecologist Peter Turchin, which he based on his comparative study of over a dozen ancient and modern societies in analogous circumstances.

It’s just a guess: if the regime is successful in the short term, we might get a slower crash; if it fails, we might get a faster one.

In any case, there’s no national team to root for that is capable of restoring the status quo ante Trump, at least not for long, if that is even desirable. Under either scenario, competent local governance might provide significantly better living conditions than the national average (more on that below), but the overall picture is pretty grim.

A few years from now I expect that we’ll be in very different territory socially, politically, and economically. This is not a conclusion that I relish, but it’s one seemingly demanded by history and logic.



Image above: The Empire from Star Wars in defeat. From original article.

Nevertheless, what we do in the meantime could make a big positive difference to people and planet, both over the short term and also over the long term. Here are some specific things you can do:

1. Disengage from the spectacle. Learn what you need to know in order to assess immediate threats and general trends, but otherwise avoid spending long periods of time ingesting online, print, radio, or televised media. It’s bad for your mental health and takes time away from other items on this list.
2. If you haven’t already done so, make a personal and family resilience plan in case of a temporary breakdown in the basic functions of government (everyone should do this anyway in view of our vulnerability to earthquakes or weather disasters). Where should you be living? Are you growing any of your own food? Do you have some food and water in storage? Have you reduced your energy usage to a minimum, and installed solar PV (with short-term battery backup) and hot water solar panels? Do you have some cash set aside?
3. Work to build community resilience. If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference for you and your family. Biophysical resilience relates to local food, water, and energy systems. A socially resilient community is one in which people are talking to one another, institutions for resolving disputes are trusted, and people look out for one another. Identify organizations that are building both kinds of resilience in your community and engage with them. These could be churches, civic government, non-profit organizations, food co-ops, energy co-ops, health co-ops, neighborhood safety groups, local investment clubs, or Transition groups. Get involved with existing organizations or start new ones. Yes, it takes a lot of time. But friends are more important than money in the bank—especially in times of social and political upheaval.
4. Direct some of your resilience-building efforts toward long-term and nature-centered concerns. This might take the form of conservation work of various kinds. In my last essay, I discussed assisting the migration of forests in the face of climate change. Carbon farming and providing wild bird and insect refuges are other options—not (only) because they’re enjoyable hobbies but because they help maintain the biophysical resilience of the ecosystems we depend on. Again, this is work that proceeds best in the company of others.
5. Take some time for the conservation of culture—arts and skills that are their own reward. Connecting with others in your community by enjoying or playing music together, singing, dancing, or making visual art deepens relationships and gives life more dimension and meaning.

While the legal and social functions of of liberal democracy persist, vigorous and sustained protest efforts could help rein in the fascist tendencies of the new American government. Participating in protests could enable you to get to know other members of your community.

On the other hand, protest could further fragment your community if that community is already deeply divided politically—and it could eventually get you in a lot of trouble depending on how things work out, since protest under fascist regimes doesn’t produce the same result as protest in a liberal democracy.

Don’t obey the new leaders when they call for actions that undermine democracy and justice; instead, choose to actively disobey in ways that actually matter in the long term. Refuse to define yourself in terms of the regime.

Yes, at certain moments in history it is necessary to take a stand one way or the other on a particular issue (such as the issue of slavery in mid-nineteenth century America), and in the days ahead some issue may require you to plant your flag.

But this historical moment may be one when many real heroes and heroines choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

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Tribes divest DAPL bankers

SUBHEAD: Defunding spreads across Indian Country as tribes divest pipeline backers.

By Frances Madison on 2 February 2017 for YEs Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/defund-dapl-spreads-across-indian-country-as-tribes-divest-20170202)


Image above: Detail from painting by A. Scott Eidson of Wells Fargo stage coach in battle with Native Americans as it passes through "Indian Country". From (http://www.boxartden.com/gallery/var/resizes/Boxart-Collection/Artists/A-Scott-Eidson/Wagons/Wells%20Fargo%20Stage%20Coach%20Rev-H501-960.jpg).

The Navajo Nation is making moves to join a growing number of tribes that have already respectfully, but conclusively, shown Wells Fargo the door.

Like the call and response in Lakota ceremonial prayer songs, tribes are answering the Standing Rock’s Sioux plea for all of Indian Country to move its money out of banks that have invested in the Dakota Access pipeline and help further destabilize the pipeline’s already shaky financing.

“Many people are, rightfully, afraid that executive support [President Trump’s]now means that the pipelines are full steam ahead,” said Melanie Yazzie, co-founder of The Red Nation, an activist coalition dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism.

She views divestment as obstruction—the good kind—something akin to water protectors locking down on construction equipment and as a continuation of the widespread resistance that has united under the cry of #NoDAPL.

“The investors and financiers will not move forward if the projects are deemed financially unfavorable,” Yazzie said. “We must continue to deny settlers their desired profits, profits they reap from colonizing our non-human relatives—the land and water.”

That is the hope of a growing cohort of tribal leaders, activists, researchers, and strategists who have come to see divestment, which is catching on all across Indian Country, as a winning tactic in a wider strategy of non-cooperation. It’s a cohort that at first glance appears to have some strange bedfellows: radical academics and Wall Street professionals.

Since last August, when the Standing Rock Sioux severed their own relationships with DAPL-invested banks, financial adviser Lynn Rapp has been fielding a steady stream of questions from her tribal clients. She is managing director of Seacrest Investment Financial Management in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota.

“Tribes want to divest themselves as external supporters,” explained Rapp, who is Oglala Sioux. “It speaks really highly to their level of long-term commitment to the cause.”

The cause is mni wiconi, Sioux for “water is life,” or as some are now translating it: “water is alive.” And as Rapp sees it, it’s also about securing Indian rights.

“American Indians have to be able to stand up for what they believe about the environment, the economics of their time, and the social impact of situations like this,” she said.

Even in very poor nations like the Navajo, where 47 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, there are grassroots efforts to help move the divestment needle. Duane “Chili” Yazzie, president of the Shiprock Chapter of the Navajo Nation, has referred to the #NoDAPL struggle as the “ultimate stand for Mother Earth.”

He’s advocating for Speaker Lorenzo Bates, President Russell Begay, and Vice President Jonathan Nez to divest from Wells Fargo and all other DAPL-invested banks, beginning with the more than $2 billion in the Nation’s Permanent Trust Fund. In mid-December, the Shiprock Chapter and the Northern Navajo Agency Council passed resolutions that point to the dishonor and indignity of using Navajo money to lay waste to Mother Earth.

“The Diné people are the caretakers of the Earth in concert with people of good hearts around the world,” he explained. “I want to see my nation put some serious substance behind the verbal expressions of support for the Standing Rock Sioux.”

Or, as he put it more plainly: “Money talks.”

If this effort succeeds, the Navajo Nation will join a growing number of tribes that have already respectfully, but conclusively, shown Wells Fargo the door. The Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota have already severed fiscal ties, while the Alliance of Colonial Era Tribes, a consortium of tribes located along the East Coast, has indicated some of its members may soon do the same.

Of the U.S. banks, Wells Fargo is the second-largest financier of DAPL parent Energy Transfer, having committed $467 million to the family of companies, according to researcher Hugh MacMillan of Food & Water Watch. 

That includes $120 million directly to DAPL. So far, Wells Fargo has borne the brunt of divestments from Indian Country. (Citibank is the largest DAPL financier, having committed $521 million in credit to Energy Transfer, including $235 million directly to DAPL.)

In a written statement, Wells Fargo said it has been “serving Native American governments and communities for more than 50 years.” It provides financial services to more than 200 tribal and Native entities in 27 states, including many tribal community development projects. Over the past three years, the bank says, it has granted tribes $11 million, including $3 million for scholarships and educational programs though the American Indian Graduate Center.

Despite the longstanding relationships, what’s happened with DAPL changed everything for the tribes.

On the night of Nov. 20, when law-enforcement officers used tear gas and water cannons as part of their assault on unarmed water protectors, Janene Yazzie, a research associate in the Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science at the University of Arizona, decided she could not remain silent. Armed with the Shiprock resolutions, she’s been actively lobbying the executive and legislative branches of Navajo Nation to divest.

“As a Navajo Woman,” she wrote in an email, “watching the videos on social media disturbed me to my core. They captured proof that the so-called ‘Indian Wars’ have never ended but are, rather, coming to a culmination.”

In Idaho, acting quickly after the Standing Rock Sioux’s call for divestment, the Nez Perce tribe withdrew millions from Wells Fargo on the grounds that the bank’s investment in DAPL was “inconsistent with the views and policies of the Nez Perce.” Mary Jane Miles, chair of the tribe’s executive committee, explained why they divested:

“I feel that tribal nations need to support each other in their efforts to remind the big companies of our stewardship responsibility. Our voice needs to be heard, and if there is any way that we can enhance our position we need to do so. The Nez Perce tribe supported their sister nation in other ways as well, such as tribal members voluntarily traveling to the site to camp in the bitter cold. The protest was well warranted in our worldview and was supported in all the ways we felt was necessary,” 
Miles wrote.

Rudolph Ryser, a member of the Cowlitz Tribe and board chair of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a research and education organization, wants Indians everywhere to follow the lead of the Nez Perce.

“It is no longer tenable for the leaders of American Indian [tribes], Canadian Indian [tribes], and Indian leaders throughout the Americas to operate as if the leaders of hemispheric nations can or will act in responsible ways toward the indigenous people or the living earth.

Fourth World nations in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific are in a strong position to apply pressure on investors in the Dakota pipeline banks.”

Ryser hopes to see tribes act in unison for greater impact, banding together to “demand investment changes or withdraw funds.”

The nuts and bolts of divestment are easy to accomplish, Rapp explained.

“It’s very simple,” she said. “Establish an account with another financial institution that meets your political and social needs. The tribal council signs the transfer form, and it’s done. The new institution will request the funds be transferred, and that’s all there is to it.”

Lists of non-DAPL invested banks are being circulated, and Native-owned banks are being promoted as alternatives to the 17 U.S. banks invested in DAPL.

The Standing Rock Sioux continue to encourage and applaud divestment. On Jan. 16, Indigenous Environmental Network released a focused statement on recent efforts to influence DAPL banks to renegotiate or cancel their loans. It's likely to rev up the divestment engine. A billboard in Times Square broadcasts the rolling tally of self-reported dollars already divested (more than $55 million now); it's also reported on the Defund DAPL website.

Meanwhile, cities of varying sizes are pursuing divestment, including Seattle, where a final vote is scheduled Monday. It would make Seattle the first municipality to divest over Dakota Access, but it’s a trend that’s occurring in the context of a worldwide fossil-fuel divestment movement.

According to a recent Arabella Advisors report, “The Global Fossil Fuel Divestment and Clean Energy Investment Movement,” as of December 2016, institutions and individuals with assets over $5 trillion have committed to divest from fossil fuels.

Longtime White Earth Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke of Honor the Earth wrote a letter to Canadian energy giant Enbridge, noting that the company hasn’t yet put in some $1.3 billion toward the pipeline.

“They're sitting on it,” she said. “This is the pipeline that doesn’t have all its needs for capital met.”
Native prophecies speak of a choice, LaDuke said, “between a well-worn, scorched path, and a new path, which is green. This scorched path is a path of violence, a path of billions of dollars of oil infrastructure we don’t need, and the new path is the path of peace.”

“And that’s what this moment is,” she continued after a pause. “We can ensure we have a future where they can’t harm us all.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Army Corps okays DAPL easement 2/8/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump orders shale oil pipelines 1/24/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Army Corps denies DAPL easement 12/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama hints at DAPL rerouting 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama hints at DAPL rerouting 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: New military attack on NODAPL 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How to Support NoDAPL 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Rock has changed us 12/9/16
Ea O Ka Aina: As Standing Rock celebrates... 12/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Army Corps denies easement 12/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: My Whole Heart is With You 12/2/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Loving Containment of Courage 12/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Beginning is Near 12/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Feds to shutdown NoDAPL Camp 11/25/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL people are going to die 11/23/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Hundreds of vets to join NoDAPL 11/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama must support Standing Rock 11/21/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump's pro oil stance vs NoDaPL 11/15/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai NoDAPL Demonstration 11/12/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama to Betray Standing Rock 11/12/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump impact on Standing Rock 11/12/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Ann Wright on Standing Rock 11/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Turning Point at Standing Rock 11/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jackson Browne vs DAPL owner 11/5/16
Democracy Now: Boycott of DAPL Owner's Music Festival
Ea O Ka Aina: World responds to NoDAPL protests 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL victory that was missed 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: DAPL hid discovery of Sioux artifacts 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Dakota Access Pipeline will leak 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Route of the Dakota Access Pipeline 11/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sanders calls for stopping DAPL 11/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama hints at DAPL rerouting 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: New military attack on NODAPL 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How to Support NoDAPL 11/3/16
Unicorn Riot Tweets NoDAPL 11/2/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Rock & the Ballot Box 10/31/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL reclaim new frontline 10/24/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How far will North Dakota go? 10/23/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Amy Goodman "riot" charge dropped 10/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Amy Goodwin to face "Riot Charge" 10/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Shutdown of all tar sand pipelines 10/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why Standing Rock is test for Oabama 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why we are Singing for Water 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Labor's Dakota Access Pipeline Crisis 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Firm for Standing Rock 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Contact bankers behind DAPL 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL demo at Enbridge Inc 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Militarized Police raid NoDAPL 9/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Stop funding of Dakota Access Pipeline 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: UN experts to US, "Stop DAPL Now!" 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: No DAPL solidarity grows 9/21/16
Ea O Ka Aina: This is how we should be living 9/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: 'Natural Capital' replacing 'Nature' 9/14/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Big Difference at Standing Rock 9/13/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jill Stein joins Standing Rock Sioux 9/10/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Pipeline temporarily halted 9/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Native Americans attacked with dogs 9/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Mni Wiconi! Water is Life! 9/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sioux can stop the Pipeline 8/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Officials cut water to Sioux 8/23/16 


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Combating Trump's Neo-Fascism

SUBHEAD: The great collective power of resistance has ignited. Hope and a sense of humanity are in the air.

By Henry Giroux on 7 February 2017 inTruth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39378-combating-trump-s-neo-fascism-and-the-ghost-of-1984)


Image above: Illustration by Jared Rodriguez of Donald Trump with his tie slightly lengthened and his hair tinted closer to his orange mane. From original article.

"Ignorance is Strength."
-- George Orwell

In a strange but revealing way, popular culture and politics intersected soon after Trump first assumed the presidency of the United States.

On the side of popular culture, George Orwell's dystopian novel, "1984", surged as the number one best seller on Amazon both in the United States and Canada. This followed two significant political events.

First, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's advisor, echoing the linguistic inventions of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, coined the term "alternative facts" to justify why press secretary Sean Spicer lied in advancing disproved claims about the size of Trump's inauguration crowd.

Second, almost within hours of his presidency, Trump penned a series of executive orders that compelled Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, to rethink the relevance of 1984.

He had to go back to Orwell's book, he writes, "Because the single most striking thing about [Trump's] matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump's brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be."

In this amalgam of Trump's blatant contempt for the truth, his willingness to embrace a blend of taunts and threats in his inaugural address, and his eagerness to enact a surge of regressive executive orders, the ghost of fascism reasserts itself with a familiar blend of fear and revenge.

Unleashing promises he had made to his angry, die-hard ultranationalist and white supremacist supporters, Trump targeted a range of groups whom he believes have no place in American society.

These include Muslims, Syrian refugees and undocumented immigrants, whom he has targeted with a number of harsh discriminatory policies.

The underlying cruelty, ignorance and punishing, if not criminogenic, intent behind such policies was made all the clearer when Trump suggested that he intended to roll back a wide range of environmental protections.

He asserted his willingness to resume the practice of state-sponsored torture and deny funding to those cities willing to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.

Trump reaffirmed his promise to lift the US ban on torture by appointing Gina Haspel as the new CIA deputy director. Haspel not only played a direct role in overseeing the torture of detainees at a black site in Thailand, she also participated in the destruction of videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations.

Trump's enthusiasm for committing war crimes was matched by his willingness to roll back many of the regulatory restrictions put in place by the Obama administration in order to prevent the financial industries from repeating the economic crisis of 2008.

In Trump's worldview, there exists no contradiction between the principles and ideals of a democracy, on the one hand, and implementing state-sponsored torture, running "black sites" and waging an assault on poor people, immigrants, health care and the environment.

And this is just the beginning. The ruling elites, banks and other major financial institutions now find their savior in Trump as they will receive more tax cuts and happily embrace the loosening of government regulations, while their greed spins out of control. Should we be surprised?

The memory of totalitarianism, with its demand for simplistic answers, intoxication with spectacles of vulgarity, and a desire for strong leaders, has faded in a society beset by a culture of immediacy, sensations and civic illiteracy.

Under such circumstances, it is difficult to underestimate the depth and tragedy of the collapse of civic culture and democratic public spheres, especially given the profound influences of a permanent war culture that trades in fear, and the ever-present seductions of consumerism, which breeds depoliticization and infantilism.

Another shocking and revelatory indication of the repressive fist of neo-fascism in the Trump regime took place when Trump's chief White House right-wing strategist, Steve Bannon, stated in an interview that "the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while....

You're the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party....

The media is the opposition party. They don't understand the country." This is more than an off-the-cuff angry comment. It is a blatant refusal to see the essential role of a robust and critical media in a democracy.

Such comments suggest not only a war on the press, but the very real threat of suppressing dissent, if not democracy itself. Unsurprisingly, Bannon referred to himself in the interview as "Darth Vader."

A more appropriate comparison would have been to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda in the Third Reich.

What is clear is that the dire times that haunt the current age no longer appear as merely an impending threat. They have materialized with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Trump and his administration of extremists epitomize the dire dangers posed by those who longed to rule American society without resistance, dominate its major political parties, and secure uncontested control of its commanding political, cultural and economic institutions.

The consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the financial elite along with the savagery and misery that signifies their politics is no longer the stuff of Hollywood films, such as Wall Street and American Psycho.

If George W. Bush's reign of fearmongering, greed and war on terror embodied the values of a kind of militarized Gordon Gekko, Trump represents the metamorphosis of Gekko into the ethically neutered Patrick Bateman.

Yet, Trump's ascent to the highest office in America is already being normalized by numerous pundits and politicians who are asking the American public to give Trump a chance or are suggesting that the power and demands of the presidency will place some restraints on his unrestrained impetuousness and often unpredictable behavior.

Those members of Congress who railed against both Obama's alleged imperial use of executive orders and later, during the Republican primaries, denounced Trump as unfit for office now exhibit a level of passivity and lack of moral courage that testifies to their complicity with the dark shadow of authoritarianism.

Wrongheaded Calls to "Give Trump a Chance"
As might be expected, a range of supine politicians, media pundits and mainstream journalists are already tying themselves in what Tom Engelhardt calls "apologetic knots" while they "desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power."

As comedian John Oliver pointed out on his show, "Last Week Tonight," Trump is not ordinary and his politics forebode the storm clouds of an American version of authoritarianism.

Oliver brought his point home by shouting repeatedly "This is not normal," and, of course, he is right! It is even more surprising that Lesley Stahl's "60 Minutes" interview with Trump portrayed him less as a demagogue than as a transformed politician who was "subdued and serious."

In addition, NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported approvingly upon the transition, as if proposed White House counselor Steve Bannon and proposed attorney general Jeff Sessions, two men with racism in their pasts, were ordinary appointments.

High-profile celebrity, Oprah Winfrey, stated without irony, in an interview with "Entertainment Tonight" that "I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House, and it gave me hope."

This is quite a stretch given Trump's history of racist practices, his racist remarks about Blacks, Muslims and Mexican immigrants during the primary and the presidential campaigns, and his appointment of a number of cabinet members who embrace a white nationalist ideology.

The New York Times's opinion writer, Nicholas Kristof, sabotaged his self-proclaimed liberal belief system by noting, in what appears to be acute lapse of judgment, that Americans should "Grit [their] teeth and give Trump a chance." Bill Gates made clear his own and often hidden reactionary worldview when speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

The Microsoft cofounder slipped into a fog of self-delusion by stating that Trump had the potential to emulate JFK by establishing an upbeat and desirable mode of "leadership through innovation."

Such actions by the mainstream media and such highly visible pundits not only point to a retreat from responsible reporting and discourse, and a flight from any vestige of social responsibility, they also further the collapse of serious journalism and thoughtful reasoning into the corrupt world of a corporate-controlled media empire and an infantilizing celebrity culture.

Normalizing the Trump regime does more than sabotage the truth, moral responsibility and justice; it also diminishes and sidelines the democratic institutions necessary for a future of well-being and economic and political justice.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow observes insightfully that under a Trump administration:

The nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified, undignified demagogue [who surrounds] himself with a rogue's gallery of white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate change deniers.... This is not normal [and] I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity.

Blow is right. Any talk of working with a president who has surrounded himself with militarists, racists, neo-fascists, anti-intellectuals and neoliberal fundamentalists should be resisted at all cost. It is well worth remembering that Trump chose Steve Bannon, a notorious anti-Semite and white supremacist to occupy the center of power in the White House.

As Reuters reported, "White supremacists and neo-Nazis have rarely, if ever, in recent history been so enthusiastic about a presidential appointment as Donald Trump's choice of Steve Bannon to be his chief White House strategist."

Trump has also surrounded himself with militarists and corporate ideologues who fantasize about destroying all vestiges of the welfare state and the institutions that produce the public values that support the social contract. Neal Gabler argues that the normalizing of Trump by the mainstream media is about more than the dereliction of journalistic duty. In his piece "And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election," he writes:

Far more serious is their normalization not of Trump but of his voters. The former is typical cowardice under threat of reactionary populism. The latter is an endorsement of reactionary populism that may have far-reaching consequences for whether the country can ever be reunited after having been torn asunder.

Normalization is code for a retreat from any sense of moral and political responsibility, and it should be viewed as an act of political complicity with authoritarianism and condemned outright. What is being propagated by Trump's apologists is not only a reactionary popularism and some fundamental tenets of an American-style authoritarianism, but also a shameless whitewashing of the racism and authoritarianism at the center of Trump's politics.

In addition, little has been said about how Trump and his coterie of semi-delusional, if not heartless, advisors embrace a version of Ayn Rand's view that selfishness, war against all competition and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals.

In addition, arguments in defense of such normalization appear to overlook with facile indifference how the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become normalized in many parts of the world, to grave effect, and that the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated an affinity with that sort of hateful rhetoric.

How else to explain the support that Trump has received from a number of ruthless dictators who head reactionary governments, such as the Philippines, Turkey and Egypt, among others? Such a danger is all the more ominous given the current collapse of civic literacy and the general public's increasing inability to deal with complex issues on one hand, and the attempt, on the other hand, by those who maintain power to ruthlessly promote a depoliticizing discourse of lies, simplicity and  manufactured distortions.

Ominous Echoes of a Totalitarian Past
The United States has entered a new historical conjuncture that echoes elements of a totalitarian past. Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin and Robert Paxton, the great theorists of totalitarianism, believed that the fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us and that as long as they are, they will crystalize in different forms.

Far from being fixed in a frozen moment of historical terror, these theorists believed that totalitarianism not only "heralds as a possible model for the future" but that its "protean origins are still with us."

Arendt, in particular, was keenly aware that a culture of fear, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the attack on labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism and the attempts by demagogues to undermine education as a foundation for producing critical citizenry were all at work in American society.

Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent and human rights.

More recently, Robert Paxton in his seminal work, The Anatomy of Fascism, provides a working definition of fascism that points to both its anti-democratic moments and those elements that link it to both the past and the present.

Paxton's point is not to provide a precise definition of fascism but to understand the conditions that enabled fascism to work and make possible its development in the future. Accordingly, he argues that fascism is:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic and leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.

American politics today suggests a more updated if not different form of authoritarianism or what might be called the curse of totalitarianism. In Trump's America, there are strong echoes of the fascism that developed in Europe in the 1920s and 30s.

For instance, there are resemblances to a fascist script in Trump's scapegoating of the "other;"

• his claim that the United States is in a period of decline;  
• his call to "Make America Great Again;" 
• his blatant appeal to ultra-nationalism;  
• his portrayal of himself as a strongman who alone can save the country; 
• his appeal to aggression and violence aimed at those who disagree with him; 
• his appeal to xenophobia, national greatness and support for a politics of disposability; 
• his courting of anti-Semites and white supremacists; 
• his flirtation with the discourse of racial purity;
• his support for a white Christian public sphere; 
• his contempt for weakness and his enthusiasm for hyper-masculinity;
• his use of a kind of verbal waterboarding to denigrate Muslims, Blacks, undocumented immigrants and women's reproductive rights; 
• his contempt for dissent; his deep-rooted anti-intellectualism, or what Arendt called "thoughtlessness" (i.e., denial that climate change is produced by humans) coupled with 
• his  elevation of instinct and emotion over reason;

Trump's totalitarian mindset was on full display both during his inaugural speech and in his actions during his first few days in office. In the first instance, he presented a dystopian view of American society laced with racist stereotyping, xenophobia and the discourse of ultra- nationalism.

Frank Rich called the language of the speech "violent and angry -- 'This American carnage stops right here' -- reeking of animosity, if not outright hatred [and that] the tone was one of retribution and revenge."

As soon as the speech ended, the normalizing process began with the expected tortured clichés from various Fox News commentators calling it "muscular," "unifying," "very forceful," "just masterful," and Charles Krauthammer stating that it was "completely nonpartisan."

The fog of self-delusion and denial was in full swing at CNN when the historian Douglas Brinkley called Trump's inaugural address not only "presidential" but "solid and well-written" and the "best speech" Trump has made "in his life."

Once in the Oval Office, Trump not only enacted measures to facilitate building a wall on the Mexican border and prevent people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, he also cleared the way for resurrecting the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

Trump's broader assault on environmental protections is indicative of his disregard for the rights of the Native Americans who protested the building of a pipeline that both crossed their sacred burial lands and posed a risk to contaminating the Missouri River, which is the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux.

In response to Trump's inaugural address and early policy measures, Roger Cohen, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote a forceful commentary suggesting that Trump's neo-fascist tendencies were on full display and that his presence in American politics contains echoes of former dictators and augurs badly for American democracy. He argued:

But the first days of the Trump presidency ... pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire. To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses.

To speak of "American carnage" is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of "a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before" is to demonstrate consuming megalomania.

To declaim "America first" and again, "America first," is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman, is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.

The grave period Americans are about to enter into under a Trump regime cannot be understood without an acknowledgement of the echoes of a totalitarian past.

With Trump's election, the crisis of politics is accompanied by a crisis of historical conscience, memory, ethics and agency exacerbated by an appeal to a notion of common sense in which facts are regarded with disdain, words reduced to slogans, and science confused with pseudo-science.

Under such circumstances, language is emptied of any meaning and constitutes a flight from ethics, justice and social responsibility. As language rapidly loses meaning, the American public is inundated with empty slogans such as "post-truth" and "fake news."

This culture is part of what Todd Gitlin calls "an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the country around the bend." Against the background of an infantilizing culture of immediacy, spectacle and sensationalism, Trump will govern as if he is running a reality TV show, endlessly performing for an increasingly depoliticized public.

But there are more dangers ahead than the toxic seduction of politics as theater and the transformation of the mainstream media as an adjunct of the entertainment industry or for that matter, a growing distrust of democracy itself.

The Complicity of the Media and Attacks on the Press
Under casino capital, the alleged celebration of the principle of a free press hides more than it promises.

Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers and Robert McChesney, among others, have observed that the mainstream media now work in conjunction with the financial elite and the military-industrial-academic complex as an echo chamber while further indulging in the rituals of shock, celebrity culture and spectacularized violence in order to increase their ratings.

Earlier this year, CBS CEO Les Moonves stated that his network's inordinate and disastrous coverage of Trump "may not be good for America but it's damn good for CBS." Moonves openly gloated not only because the network was pumping up its ratings but was also getting rich by inordinately covering Trump's presidential campaign.

As he put it, [T]he money's rolling in ... [T]his is going to be a very good year for us.... It's a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going." Moonves made it clear that the power of mainstream media in general has little to do with either pursuing the truth or holding power accountable.

On the contrary, its real purpose was to normalize corruption, lies, misrepresentation, accumulate capital and allow the transformation of the press to become an adjunct of authoritarian ideologies, policies, interests and commodified values -- if that is what it takes to increase their profit margins.

Normalization is about more than dominant media outlets being complicit with corrupt power or willfully retreating from any sense of social responsibility; it is also about aiding and abetting power in order to increase the bottom line and accumulate other cowardly forms of power and recognition.

This is evident in the fact that some powerful elements of the mainstream press not only refused to take Trump seriously, they also concocted embarrassing rationales for not holding him to any viable sense of accountability.

For instance, Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, publicly announced that in the future he would not allow his reporters to use the word "lie" in their coverage.

NPR also issued a statement arguing that it would not use the word "lie" on the grounds that "the minute you start branding things with a word like 'lie,' you push people away from you."

In this truly Orwellian comment, NPR is suggesting that calling out lies on the part of governments and politicians should be avoided by the media on the grounds that people might be annoyed by having to face the contradiction between the truth and misinformation.

This is more than a retreat from journalism's goal of holding people, institutions and power to some measure of justice; it also legitimizes the kind of political and moral cowardice that undermines informed resistance, the first amendment and the truth.

While such actions may not rise to the level of book burning that was characteristic of various fascist and authoritarian regimes in the past, it does mark a distinctive retreat from historical memory and civic courage that serves to normalize such actions by making dissent appear, at best, unreasonable and at worst, an act of treason.

Such actions become apparent in efforts by the mainstream press to rage against the rise of "fake news," suggesting that by doing so, their integrity cannot be questioned.

Of course, the term "fake news" is slippery and can be deployed to political ends -- a maneuver which is on full display particularly when used by Trump and his merry band of liars to dismiss anyone or any organization that holds him accountable for his fabrications.

Hence, there were no surprises when Trump at his first president-elect press conference refused not only to take questions from a CNN reporter because his network had published material critical of Trump but also justified his refusal by labeling CNN as fake news -- reducing the term to a slogan used to silence the press.

Clearly, we will see more of this type of bullying repression and censorship, and traditional democratic public spheres, such as higher education, will also feel the brunt of such an attack.

Any analysis of the forces behind the normalization of the Trump administration and its assault on the truth, if not democracy itself, must include the powerful role of the conservative media in the United States.

Former conservative radio talk show host Charles Sykes recently published a remarkable op-ed arguing that over the last few decades, right-wing media played a major role in discrediting and delegitimizing the fact-based media. In doing so, it destroyed "much of the right's immunity to false information."

According to Sykes, conservatives, including himself, created a "new post-factual political culture" that has become so powerful that even when the Trump administration is caught lying, it does so with impunity because it believes that "the alternative-reality media will provide air cover" that allows it to pollute "political discourse" and discredit "independent sources of information."

Evidence of this major assault on truth can be measured in part by the magnitude of the lies the administration produces, which are truly Orwellian. For instance, Kellyanne Conway attempted recently to justify Trump's executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries by referring to what she called the "Bowling Green Massacre", an alleged terrorist attack by Iraqi refugees that was to have taken place in 2011. According to Conway, Obama instituted a six-month ban on Iraqi resettlements.

The attack never happened, no Iraqis were involved and the Obama administration never instituted such a ban. It gets worse. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer recently claimed that Iran had committed an act of war by attacking a US Naval vessel. That never happened. What did happen is that a Saudi ship off the coast of Yemen was attacked by Houthi rebels.

Normalization has many registers and one of the most important is the control by the financial elite over commanding cultural apparatuses that produce, legitimize and distribute highly selective media narratives that shore up the most reactionary ideologies and financial interests.

The mainstream press says little about how such actions serve as an apology for the egregiously reactionary nature of Trump's ideology and policies.

Moreover, they fail to note how distortions of the truth, the endless production of lies by governments, politicians and corporations, along with the media's flight from civic literacy, serve to bolster authoritarian societies willing to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent.

Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that Trump's authoritarian and hateful discourse, threats of violence, loathing of dissent and racist attitudes toward Muslims, Blacks and Mexican immigrants are downplayed in the mainstream media.

These structured silences have become more and more apparent given the benign manner in which the supine press and its legion of enervated anti-public intellectuals and pundits treat Trump's endless nighttime Twitter outpourings and his incessant choreographed public fabrications.

For instance, The Wall Street Journal's refusal to address critically Trump's endless lies and insults is matched by the highbrow New Yorker's publishing of a piece on Trump that largely celebrates uncritically how he is viewed by conservative intellectuals, such as Hillsdale College president, Larry Arnn.

Arnn supports Trump because he shares his view that "the government has become dangerous." If Arnn were referring to the rise of the surveillance and permanent war state, it would be hard to disagree with him. Instead, he was referring to the government's enforcement of "runaway regulations."

What Arnn and Kelefa Sanneh, the author of the New Yorker article, ignore or conveniently forget is the fact that the real danger the government poses is the result of it being in the hands of demagogues, such as Trump, who are truly dangerous and threaten the planet, American society and the rest of the world.

When Kelefa Sanneh mentions Trump's connection to the "alt-right," he underplays the group's fascist ideology and refuses to use the term "white supremacist" in talking about such groups, reverting instead to the innocuous-sounding term, "white identity politics."

Trump's misogyny, racism, anti-intellectualism, Islamophobia and hatred of democracy are barely mentioned. Sanneh even goes so far as to suggest that since Trump has disavowed the "alt-right," his connection to neo-fascist groups is tenuous.

This is more than an apology dressed up in the discourse of ambiguity; such reporting is a shameful retreat from journalistic integrity -- an assault on the truth that constitutes an egregious act of normalization. This is only one example of what is surely to come in the future under Trump's rule.

The Hard Road Ahead        
Under Trump's regime of economic, religious, educational and political fundamentalism, compassion and respect for the other will almost certainly be viewed with contempt while society will increasingly become more militarized and financial capital will likely be deregulated in order to be free to engage in behaviors that put the American public and planet in danger.

A form of social and historical amnesia appears set to descend over American society.

A culture of civic illiteracy will likely be produced and legitimated along with a culture of fear that will enable a harsh law and order regime.

Policies will almost certainly be enacted in which public goods, such as schools, will be privatized, and a culture of greed and selfishness will be elevated to new heights of celebration. There will likely be a further retreat from civic literacy, civic courage and social responsibility, one matched by a growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance to the common good.

Fear and the threat of state violence are threatening to shape how problems are addressed, and a growing culture of dissent may soon be ruthlessly suppressed in all of the public spheres in which it has functioned in the past.

The free-market mentality that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will likely accelerate under the Trump administration and continue to drive politics, destroy many social protections, celebrate a hyper-competitiveness and deregulate economic activity.

Under Donald Trump's reign, almost all human activities, practices and institutions are at risk of becoming subject to market principles and militarized.

The only relations that matter will likely be defined in commercial terms, just as civil society will be organized for the production of violence.

It is most likely that the most dangerous powers of the state will be unleashed under Trump against protesters, Black people, Muslims and undocumented immigrants. They will also be unleashed against the environment and against public and higher education.

Surely, all the signs are in place given the coterie of billionaires, generals, warmongers, Islamophobes, neoliberal cheerleaders and anti-public demagogues Trump has appointed to high-ranking government positions.

Americans may be on the verge of witnessing how democracy ends and this is precisely why Trump's election as the president of the United States must not be normalized.

Trump's repressive and poisonous attitudes and authoritarian policies will not change his role as president. If his first two weeks in office are any indication, he plans to consolidate his power and will be more reckless than he was during the primaries and presidential campaigns.

 Trump's narcissism, indifference to the truth and intensive use of the spectacle will further increase his view of himself and his policies as unaccountable, especially as he institutes a mode of governance that suppresses the opposition and deals with his audience directly through the social media.

Fortunately, a number of diverse groups, including unions, immigrant rights groups, anti-fascist organizations, Black liberation groups, congregations and faith-based organizations, legal coalitions and reproductive rights groups, along with teachers, actors and artists are organizing to protest Trump's neo-fascist ideology and policies.

As George Yancy pointed out to me in a personal correspondence, such actions are unique in that they make the political more pedagogical by elevating protests, modes of resistance and criticism to the level of the cultural rather than allowing such criticism to reside in the voice and presence of isolated, prophetic intellectuals.

Moreover, a number of independent publications, along with various public intellectuals, such as Anthony DiMaggio, Robin Kelley and members of the Black Lives Matter Movement, are producing instructive articles on both the nature of resistance and what forms it might take.

The current onslaught of revenge and destruction produced by Trump's updated version of authoritarianism is glaringly visible and deeply brutal, and points to a bleak future in the most immediate sense.

We live at a time in which totalitarian forms are with us again. US society is no longer at the tipping point of authoritarianism; we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt called "dark times." Individual and collective resistance is the only hope we have to move beyond this ominous moment in our history.

Fortunately, the arrogant presence of this neo-fascist regime is not going entirely unchecked.

The great collective power of resistance has ignited. Hope and a sense of humanity are in the air and the relevance of mass action has a renewed urgency. Demonstrations are taking place every day; some mayors are refusing to allow their cities to be placed under Nazi influence; and marginalized people and their co-strugglers are marching in record-breaking numbers to protect their rights.

This resistance will continue to grow until it becomes a movement whose power is on the side of justice not injustice, bridges not walls, dignity not disrespect, compassion not hate.

Let's hope this resistance will dispel Orwell's nightmarish vision of the future in our own time.

Note: This piece draws on some ideas that appeared first in "Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism Is Not an Option," an article published by Tikkun Magazine on January 19, 2017.

• Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and dis the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America's Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016) and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017). He is also a contributing editor to a number of journals, including Tikkun, the Journal of Wild Culture and Ragazine. Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

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