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Trump and the legacy of a menacing past

ABSTRACT The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism. In this project, education is central to politics, which demands understanding and critically interrogating, in particular, the role of the conservative media in suppressing history, normalizing a discourse of racial hatred, and advancing the most poisonous elements of neoliberalism. The essay calls for a comprehensive notion of politics and education that draws from history, imagines a present that does not imitate the future, and employs a language of critique and hope in the service of building a new broad-based political formation. If fascism begins with language so does the possibility of a radical social imaginary in which to envision a democratic socialist order that both challenges the menacing momentum of a fascist politics and the savagery of neoliberal capitalism.