Insurrections in the age of counter-revolutions: Rethinking cultural politics and political education

Abstract

The United States is at a turning point in its history. Insurrection has become a dominant motif describing a country torn between the promises and ideals of democracy and an emergent authoritarianism that trades in lies, lawlessness, and a rebranded fascist politics. In this article, I analyze the contrasting visions, politics, and role of education that are central to both notions of insurrection. In the first instance, I argue that insurrectional authoritarianism is wedded to a fascist legacy that calls for racial purity, militarism, ultra-nationalism, and state terrorism. In the second instance, I analyze insurrectional democracy as a mode of resistance that has a long legacy in the battle for racial justice, economic equality, and a politics of inclusion. The article explores how both positions are motivated by particular understandings of education, agency, and the future. Within this distinctive historical moment, both participate in a landscape in which images, the social media, and the Internet play a decisive role in merging political education, power, and cultural politics. Both notions of insurrection infuse cultural politics with a specific language that narrate their visions and work to produce particular modes of agency, identifications, and social relations. At the core of the article is an analysis of how each narrative uses language and cultural politics to define their different notions of insurrection and how education and politics merge to create militarized identities operating in a warring environment in which the very categories of politics, education and democracy are on trial. I conclude that insurrectional authoritarianism has created the context for a civil war marked by a number of counter-revolutionary interventions in which ideas are married to violence and present a threat to democracy. I conclude with a call for an insurrectional democracy that makes education central to politics in order to produce an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a mass movement in defense of socialist democracy.

Keywords:

• Civil war
• counter-revolution
• critical pedagogy
• fascist politics
• neoliberalism

Notes

1 On white supremacy and systemic racism, see Belew (2021); Also see, Goldberg (2001, 2015). On the relationship between freedom and whiteness, see Stovall (2021). For theoretical analysis of race and difference, see Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (2021). For analysis of race in a time of crisis, see Yancy (2017).

2 There are many sources now available to document this issue, but some of the more interesting include: Dean (2020), DiMaggio (2022a), Ridgeway (2022), Woodward and Costa (2021), Trump (2021). One of the best sources on the meaning of fascism is Guerin (2000).

3 The historian Timothy Snyder has made this point many times in his books, commentaries, and scholarly papers. See for instance: Snyder (2021a, 2021b), Henderson (2021).

4 On the issue of inequality and the problematic notion of freedom, see Eppard and Giroux (2022b).

5 The doomsday scenario has also been taken up by some conservatives such as David Brooks. See Brooks (2022).

6 For a useful summary of the forces at work in the unraveling of America, see Hartmann (2022).

7 Some of the more prominent theorists of a coming civil war in the United States include Goldberg (2021), Marche (2022), Walter (2022). I consider Goldberg's Dread (2021) far and away the most important book on this issue.

8 This was made clear in a brilliant essay by Eco (1995).

9 A number of conservatives, journalists, scholars, and pundits support the notion that the US when it comes to the slide into authoritarianism may well be past the point of no return. For a summary of these positions, see Edsall (2021).

10 One prominent example appeared in an issue of Vox (Mathews, 2021). Ignored in this piece was the crucial work of historians such as Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, Sarah Churchill, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

11 See Seth Adler (2018); also see the important work of the late Stanley Aronowitz, especially Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (Aronowitz, 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux, currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021), and Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022).