No, that's wrong. It's not that we're losing freedom, but worse; it's that we're giving it away. We've sold our freedom to the lowest bidder, trading it in for the illusion of the American Dream which now turns out to be a nightmare...
source: YouTube
The world over citizens are fleeing into the arms of authoritarian and fascist strong men - a strong woman in the case of Italy - using democracy, or opposing democracy, to end freedom. Fascism looks different everywhere, but has certain traits by which it can be identified and certain preconditions under which it shows its ugly face. I you're thinking that fascism is rising simultaneously in many different countries, you're not crazy. It's real, and it's happening all over the world because the preconditions for it to rise are established all over the world by global capitalism. Global late stage capitalism, to be exact.
The last threat of global fascism was the Second World War; had the Nazis won that war, who knows how far fascism would have spread by now. But we won. In the rubble of two World Wars and a global Great Depression in between, we had learned some valuable lessons and created social safety nets, made healthcare universally affordable and education free. We instituted progressive taxation which allowed wages to keep up with productivity, somewhat tampering the growth of the wealth-gap. And we became free; freedom is, in essence, not having to worry about tomorrow, about next month's rent or tomorrow's bread. Freedom is the ability for your children to be able to choose their education freely, not just an education that enables them to repay student loan debts. Freedom is not having to worry about healthcare, should you need it. In Europe we learned those lessons better than in America because here's where the wars were fought.
And because America didn't learn those lessons well, it's the place where the American Dream lasted shorter than here in Europe. The middle class, the white picket fence around the garden of the nuclear family, was created by the lessons learned while defeating fascism. The dream was not a result of capitalism, but of the politics that inhibited capitalism and capitalists, giving rise to a manufactured middle class. Yes, the middle class was manufactured. Capitalism, left to its own devices, only has two classes; capitalists and workers, employers and employees, owners and beggars. The dream ended in the 1970s during the terms of Reagan in America and Thatcher in Great Britain.
We entered a new era of restoring capitalism's natural order. The very thing that made most people more free, progressive taxation, we got rid of. Taxation is theft, don't you know? Robin Hood is just a children's tale. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor is immoral. Thus began the war on the poor, which were predominantly the non whites. The "welfare queen" became public enemy number one, and the government, the great redistributor giving these welfare queens "free money", wasn't the solution but the problem. Slowly but surely taxes were cut and everything was handed over to the market. Wages stopped rising with productivity, healthcare became more expensive and education unaffordable. To keep up the appearance of a thriving middle class, everyone got a credit card and debts replaced income. The war on drugs and Clinton's "three strikes" laws filled the privatized prison system with young black men. The preconditions for "otherizing" were set and reconfirmed in the name of neoliberalism or, as I like to call it because it's more honest, late stage capitalism.
What happened is plain and simple; the social contract that held western societies together was ripped apart. No longer were we united in a society that takes care of us, where people, through the government, take care of each other. There's no such thing as society, said Thatcher, and of capitalism she said: There Is No Alternative. That purely individualist and atomized perspective on that which we once called society prepared the fertile ground where fascism could grow. Worldwide because it's a matured, globalized version of the age of the robber barons. The "otherizing" side-effect of the complete submission to a neoliberal order of global capitalism gave rise to the language now used by our current strongmen. With no one left to blame for the loss of a sense of belonging, and now even the white citizens falling victim to the ravenous hunger of the capitalist world economy, we turn against each other. And the resentments of the predominant group, white males in western society, show themselves as the fascism we now see rise worldwide. The language of otherizing and dehumanizing accompanying this development is the subject of the below linked audio.
Henry Giroux: The Language Of Neoliberalism & Towards A Fascist Politics
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