Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism

FEATURING HENRY A. GIROUX – A year ago most Americans would have been skeptical of the idea that white supremacist hate groups like the KKK would become the subjects of national dialogue.

Yet here we are today within the first year of Donald Trump’s administration and a sense of despair about the nation’s future has sunk in as hate groups get nods from the President and the corporate oligarchy is dismantling regulations and pillaging resources.

Framing the political conversation around the health of our democracy is critical to understanding what ails the US and how to fix it. That framing can spur social movements to regain control of the narrative and begin resisting the multi-pronged assault of Trumpism in a more effective way.

Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (2015), America at War with Itself (2017), and, co-authored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (2015). His latest book is called The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism.