Drawing upon history, Masha Gessen argues that Trump's defeat offers a choice "between two paths: the path of reckoning and the path of forgetting." They further argue that the price for forgetting is too high and would leave in place a rationale for giving immunity to terror, lawlessness and corruption. More is necessary than simply impeaching Trump. In order to avoid becoming complicit with the crimes of Trumpism, it is necessary for the Biden administration to put in place a national project which would include investigations, hearings, court trials, public assemblies, journalistic inquiries, and other invented formats in order to hold accountable those who committed crimes under the Trump regime, including those individuals and politicians who advocated sedition by baselessly claiming voter fraud and attempting to overturn results of the Biden election.
Furthermore, there are two important points regarding Trump's impeachment that should be embraced. First, as Georgetown University professor Neal Katyal stated in an interview with Brian Williams, Trump should be impeached in the hope that he would then be barred from holding any political office in the future. Second, a signal needs to be sent to the 12 Republican senators and more than half of congressional Republicans who are dousing the Constitution with fire through their attempts to create what amounts to a coup by invalidating Biden's election and creating the groundwork for undermining free and fair elections in the future, if not democracy itself.
It is astonishing that in the face of Trump's attempt to overthrow the election, which closely resembles the actions of authoritarian regimes around the world, that 38 percent oppose his impeachment and 15 percent have no opinion. The data suggest little resistance on the part of such a large percentage of Americans who either willingly support the death of democracy or are misinformed about the U.S. being at the tipping point of becoming a full-fledged authoritarian regime. New York Times journalist Peter Baker did not miss the threat of authoritarianism posed by Trump's actions regarding his attempt to overturn an election he decisively lost, while entertaining the use of martial law to do so. Quoting Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Baker writes:
"Mr. Trump's efforts ring familiar to many who have studied authoritarian regimes in countries around the world, like those run by President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orba'n in Hungary...Trump's attempt to overturn the election, and his pressure tactics to that end with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, are an example of how authoritarianism works in the 21st century," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of "Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present." "Today's leaders come in through elections and then manipulate elections to stay in office until they get enough power to force the hand of legislative bodies to keep them there indefinitely."
With the possibility of instituting various layers of democratic accountability which now included impeaching Trump for a second time, the conditions can be laid for not only a project of truth-telling and answerability but also a narrative of remembrance in which crimes can be revealed and the stories of the victims heard. Under such circumstances, the historical record can become an object of critical inquiry, culpability and the rectifying of moral injury. Such reckoning can also serve as an educational and learning project in which the lessons of the past can create the conditions for connecting education to democratic values, relations, goals, and a redemptive notion of equity and inclusion. Desmond Tutu, in his opening remarks before the convening of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, rightly invoked the power of historical memory and the need to bear witness in the fight against tyranny. He stated: "We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay the ghosts of the past so that they will not return to haunt us." The power of education, reason, and the search for truth and justice are one mechanism for learning from the past and resisting the ghosts ready to emerge in the present.
The eradication of the public good, the continued growth of neoliberalism's disimagination machines, the individualizing of social problems, a collective indifference to the rise of the punishing state, the repression of historical consciousness, the failure to engage honestly with the full scope of the U.S.'s racist history, and the crushing role of racial and economic inequality are at their core educational issues. These issues speak powerfully to the task of changing consciousness by dismantling those depoliticizing forces that create apocalyptic visions that render the current social order a world without alternatives. In part, this means intellectuals, artists and other cultural workers must make the work they produce meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. This demands a revolutionary vision matched by a collective effort to create alternative public spaces that unpack how common sense works to prevent people from recognizing the oppressive nature of the societies in which they find themselves. The ideological tyranny and cultural politics of Trumpism demands a wholesale revision of how education and democracy mutually inform each other and how they are understood as part of a broader politics in which the oppressed can be heard and a world can be created in which the voices of the suffering find a public space for articulation.
Any movement for resistance needs to become more accessible to working-class people, and there is a crucial need to connect personal and political rights with economic rights. Democracy can only survive as a social state that guarantees rights for everyone. The question of who holds power, and how power is separated from politics, with politics being local and power being global, has to be addressed as a condition for international resistance. Neoliberal capitalism has morphed into a form of Trumpism which produces zones of abandonment where individuals become unknowable, faceless and lack human rights.
Under Trumpism, society increasingly reproduces pedagogical "death zones of humanity" that triumph not only in violence but also ignorance and irrationality, writes ?????tienne Balibar in "Outline of a Topography of Cruelty." These are zones that undermine the capacity for people to speak, write, and act from a position of empowerment and be responsible to themselves and others. Against this form of depoliticization, there is the need for modes of civic education and critical literacy that provide the bridging work between thinking critically and the possibility of interpretation as intervention. Critical pedagogy is a moral and political practice committed to the realization that there is no resistance without hope, and no hope without a vision of an alternative society rooted in the ideals of justice, equality and freedom.
Trumpism evokes the shadow of authoritarianism in the form of a resurgent fascist politics that dehumanizes all of us in the face of a refusal to confront its specter of racism, lawlessness and brutality. Trump's impeachment is only the beginning of confronting the fascist ghosts of the past which Trump proved are no longer in the shadows or on the margins of U.S. politics.
The influence and legacy of Trumpism will long outlast the aftermath of Trump's presidency making it all the more urgent to reclaim the redemptive elements of government responsibility, democratic ideals and the public spheres that make a radical democracy possible. In the current historical moment, the time has come to reclaim the great utopian ideals unleashed by a long history of civil rights struggles, the insights and radical struggles produced by the Black Lives Matter movement, and a cultural politics and pedagogy written in the language of justice, compassion, and the fundamental narratives of freedom and equality.
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