Reject the affirmative’s fear-driven politics---critical analysis of the politics of security gives us a new political vocabulary with which to articulate democracy---activating your role as an ethical educator is the only way to avert permanent warfare

In addition, as the state is hijacked by the financial-military-industrial complex, the “most crucial decisions regarding national policy are not made by representatives, but by the financial and military elites.”53 Such massive inequality and the suffering and political corruption it produces point to the need for critical analysis in which the separation of power and politics can be understood. This means developing terms that clarify how power becomes global even as politics continues to function largely at the national level, with the effect of reducing the state primarily to custodial, policing, and punishing functions—at least for those populations considered disposable.

The state exercises its slavish role in the form of lowering taxes for the rich, deregulating corporations, funding wars for the benefit of the defense industries, and devising other welfare services for the ultra-rich. There is no escaping the global politics of finance capital and the global network of violence it has produced. Resistance must be mobilized globally and politics restored to a level where it can make a difference in fulfilling the promises of a global democracy. But such a challenge can only take place if the political is made more pedagogical and matters of education take center stage in the struggle for desires, subjectivities, and social relations that refuse the normalizing of violence as a source of gratification, entertainment, identity, and honor.

War in its expanded incarnation works in tandem with a state organized around the production of widespread violence. Such a state is necessarily divorced from public values and the formative cultures that make a democracy possible. The result is a weakened civic culture that allows violence and punishment to circulate as part of a culture of commodification, entertainment, distraction, and exclusion. In opposing the emergence of the United States as both a warfare and a punishing state, I am not appealing to a form of left moralism meant simply to mobilize outrage and condemnation. These are not unimportant registers, but they do not constitute an adequate form of resistance.

What is needed are modes of analysis that do the hard work of uncovering the effects of the merging of institutions of capital, wealth, and power, and how this merger has extended the reach of a military-industrial-carceral and academic complex, especially since the 1980s. This complex of ideological and institutional elements designed for the production of violence must be addressed by making visible its vast national and global interests and militarized networks, as indicated by the fact that the United States has over 1,000 military bases abroad.54 Equally important is the need to highlight how this military-industrial-carceral and academic complex uses punishment as a structuring force to shape national policy and everyday life.

Challenging the warfare state also has an important educational component. C. Wright Mills was right in arguing that it is impossible to separate the violence of an authoritarian social order from the cultural apparatuses that nourish it. As Mills put it, the major cultural apparatuses not only “guide experience, they also expropriate the very chance to have an experience rightly called ‘our own.’”55 This narrowing of experience shorn of public values locks people into private interests and the hyper-individualized orbits in which they live. Experience itself is now privatized, instrumentalized, commodified, and increasingly militarized. Social responsibility gives way to organized infantilization and a flight from responsibility.

Crucial here is the need to develop new cultural and political vocabularies that can foster an engaged mode of citizenship capable of naming the corporate and academic interests that support the warfare state and its apparatuses of violence, while simultaneously mobilizing social movements to challenge and dismantle its vast networks of power. One central pedagogical and political task in dismantling the warfare state is, therefore, the challenge of creating the cultural conditions and public spheres that would enable the U.S. public to move from being spectators of war and everyday violence to being informed and engaged citizens.

Unfortunately, major cultural apparatuses like public and higher education, which have been historically responsible for educating the public, are becoming little more than market-driven and militarized knowledge factories. In this particularly insidious role, educational institutions deprive students of the capacities that would enable them not only to assume public responsibilities, but also to actively participate in the process of governing. Without the public spheres for creating a formative culture equipped to challenge the educational, military, market, and religious fundamentalisms that dominate U.S. society, it will be virtually impossible to resist the normalization of war as a matter of domestic and foreign policy.

Any viable notion of resistance to the current authoritarian order must also address the issue of what it means pedagogically to imagine a more democratically oriented notion of knowledge, subjectivity, and agency and what it might mean to bring such notions into the public sphere. This is more than what Bernard Harcourt calls “a new grammar of political disobedience.”56 It is a reconfiguring of the nature and substance of the political so that matters of pedagogy become central to the very definition of what constitutes the political and the practices that make it meaningful. Critical understanding motivates transformative action, and the affective investments it demands can only be brought about by breaking into the hardwired forms of common sense that give war and state-supported violence their legitimacy. War does not have to be a permanent social relation, nor the primary organizing principle of everyday life, society, and foreign policy.

The war of all-against-all and the social Darwinian imperative to respond positively only to one’s own self-interest represent the death of politics, civic responsibility, and ethics, and set the stage for a dysfunctional democracy, if not an emergent authoritarianism. The existing neoliberal social order produces individuals who have no commitment, except to profit, disdain social responsibility, and loosen all ties to any viable notion of the public good. This regime of punishment and privatization is organized around the structuring forces of violence and militarization, which produce a surplus of fear, insecurity, and a weakened culture of civic engagement—one in which there is little room for reasoned debate, critical dialogue, and informed intellectual exchange. Patricia Clough and Craig Willse are right in arguing that we live in a society “in which the production and circulation of death functions as political and economic recovery.”57

The United States understood as a warfare state prompts a new urgency for a collective politics and a social movement capable of negating the current regimes of political and economic power, while imagining a different and more democratic social order. Until the ideological and structural foundations of violence that are pushing U.S. society over the abyss are addressed, the current warfare state will be transformed into a full-blown authoritarian state that will shut down any vestige of democratic values, social relations, and public spheres. At the very least, the U.S. public owes it to its children and future generations, if not the future of democracy itself, to make visible and dismantle this machinery of violence while also reclaiming the spirit of a future that works for life rather than death—the future of the current authoritarianism, however dressed up they appear in the spectacles of consumerism and celebrity culture. It is time for educators, unions, young people, liberals, religious organizations, and other groups to connect the dots, educate themselves, and develop powerful social movements that can restructure the fundamental values and social relations of democracy while establishing the institutions and formative cultures that make it possible. Stanley Aronowitz is right in arguing that:

the system survives on the eclipse of the radical imagination, the absence of a viable political opposition with roots in the general population, and the conformity of its intellectuals who, to a large extent, are subjugated by their secure berths in the academy [and though] we can take some solace in 2011, the year of the protester…it would be premature to predict that decades of retreat, defeat and silence can be reversed overnight without a commitment to what may be termed “a long march” through the institutions, the workplaces and the streets of the capitalist metropoles.58

The current protests among young people, workers, the unemployed, students, and others are making clear that this is not—indeed, cannot be—only a short-term project for reform, but must constitute a political and social movement of sustained growth, accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the development of democratic public spheres, new modes of education, and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new identities, and collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. Without broad political and social movements standing behind and uniting the call on the part of young people for democratic transformations, any attempt at radical change will more than likely be cosmetic.

Any viable challenge to the new authoritarianism and its theater of cruelty and violence must include developing a variety of cultural discourses and sites where new modes of agency can be imagined and enacted, particularly as they work to reconfigure a new collective subject, modes of sociality, and “alternative conceptualizations of the self and its relationship to others.”59 Clearly, if the United States is to make a claim to democracy, it must develop a politics that views violence as a moral monstrosity and war as virulent pathology. How such a claim to politics unfolds remains to be seen. In the meantime, resistance proceeds, especially among the young people who now carry the banner of struggle against an encroaching authoritarianism that is working hard to snuff out all vestiges of democratic life.