Universities in Dark Times: Beyond the Plague of Neoliberal Fascism

Henry Giroux

 November 4, 2024

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao

Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire.

– bell hooks

In an era marked by unprecedented threats to democracy from rising authoritarian forces, universities—once celebrated citadels of democratic learning and public service—now find themselves caught in a profound political and ideological siege. Rather than championing social justice or fostering spaces for rigorous intellectual exchange, many institutions have shifted their priorities to profit, silencing dissent and embracing market-driven models that serve a predatory capitalism, thus betraying their democratic mission. This crisis has deep roots, but the recent onslaught by far-right politicians and a reactionary billionaire elite is without precedent in its intensity and scale. This trend weakens the humanities and liberal arts, stripping higher education of its capacity to serve as a democratic public sphere and robbing it of the potential to cultivate socially aware students who challenge injustices and hold power to account. Increasingly, higher education runs the risk of becoming either right wing indoctrination centers or dead zones of the imagination.

Neoliberal ideology, marked by the irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve all problems, has deeply infiltrated public life, depoliticized critical issues and shifted education’s focus to workforce training. As education becomes increasingly privatized and subordinated to right-wing agendas, students are steered away from engaging with collective issues, ethics, or democratic participation. In the neoliberal university, students are encouraged to abandon any commitment beyond personal gain. Education is stripped of its civic purpose, no longer a path to responsible citizenship but a high-stakes financial transaction—a competition for entry into the lucrative world of hedge funds and exploitative financial ventures. This transformation reduces learning to mere careerism, undermining the university’s potential to cultivate engaged, socially conscious citizens.

In doing so, it fosters a dangerous form of historical and political amnesia, obscuring the reality that neoliberalism, which facing a crisis of legitimacy has aligned itself with a fascist politics steeped in white nationalism, white supremacy, and the politics of disposability. This alignment signals the rise of what I have called neoliberal fascism, a fusion of market-driven policies and authoritarian ideologies. Moreover, right-wing billionaires such as Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund CEO, are putting enormous pressure on universities to suppress dissent, particularly among critics of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and Lebonon and impose a curriculum that weakens the power and autonomy of faculty and students while turning colleges such as New College in Sarasota, Florida into citadels of indoctrination—a MAGA model for all of higher education.

This market-driven transformation has reshaped universities, reorienting them toward profitability and marginalizing disciplines that foster critical thinking, social responsibility, and collective imagination. The resulting commodification of education deprives students of the tools to challenge injustice or envision a more equitable society. Under such circumstances, the language of the market replaces civic language with personal, consumer-oriented perspectives, isolating individuals and obstructing a shared understanding of public concerns. In short, the critical function of higher education is under siege. Under such circumstances, higher education increasingly resembles disimagination machines.

The shift has also marginalized public intellectuals—scholars who contribute to society’s understanding of critical issues by connecting academic work to larger social problems. Instead, universities increasingly favor faculty who align with corporate values, reinforcing depoliticized, market-oriented approaches to education. This trend has led to the rise of  what George Scialabba calls the “anti-public intellectual,” figures who endorse market policies without addressing issues of justice and democracy. Or as in the case of  anti- public intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson whose writing legitimizes an outright fascist such as Trump. These corporate-aligned “anti-public intellectuals,” supported by neoliberal foundations like the Heritage Foundation, champion policies that erode public resources and democratic institutions. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, for instance, aims to dismantle the welfare state and punish dissenters—a blueprint for an authoritarian reordering of American society under a potential second Trump administration.

Against this tide, public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Cornel West have long advocated for a different vision of education, one that invites students to question authority, seek justice, and cultivate democracy. Rather than focusing solely on producing economically viable graduates, universities must also strive to cultivate active, engaged citizens who can imagine a future free of climate catastrophe, militarism, systemic racism, and predatory capitalism.

Historically, universities have largely supported resistance and critical engagement, playing pivotal roles in movements for free speech, civil rights, and gender equality. However, this legacy is at risk. Neoliberal ideologies target universities because of their potential to promote democratic values and critical thought. As a result, right-wing movements and corporate interests increasingly attack universities’ public roles and democratic functions.

In response to these threats, a coalition of young people, critical public intellectuals, and progressive social movements has emerged, asserting that universities must be protected as bastions of democracy. As white nationalists, authoritarian billionaires, and neo-fascists wage war on education, it becomes clear that treating education as a public good is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy. Public intellectuals, students, and workers must defend educational institutions as sites of social justice and resistance against corporatization and the authoritarian impulses encroaching on democracy. Universities have a moral responsibility to press for social and economic justice, countering both corporatization and the rise of authoritarian ideologies.

The crisis in higher education is part of a broader neoliberal assault on democracy, which systematically privatizes education, undermines public trust, and weakens collective institutions. This relentless assault corrodes the very foundations of democratic life, replacing the values of cooperation, civic responsibility, and community with self-interest, competition, and social isolation. In this climate, public intellectuals play an essential role as guardians of engaged citizenship and intellectual integrity, equipping students and the public to see that democracy cannot sustain itself passively; it demands an active, vigilant defense. Universities, when aligned with their true purpose, become crucial spaces for cultivating the capacities, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to confront and resist the encroachments of authoritarianism. What must be stressed here is that habits of power are learned and must in some cases be unlearned. This is an important pedagogical task.

The path forward for universities is clear: they must resist corporatization and recommit to fostering critical thinking, academic freedom, civic engagement, and democratic renewal. If higher education is to fulfill its democratic mission, it must resist the neoliberal plague and foster young people equipped to challenge inequities and envision a just, compassionate society.

In an era of collapsing visions, emotional plagues, manufactured ignorance, staggering inequality, environmental ruin, human misery, and rising authoritarianism, it is vital for academics to affirm higher education’s claim on democracy. Above all, academics need to stand firm in their ethical convictions, engage with the pressing social issues of our time and bridge the gap between learning and everyday life. Evoking the spirit of James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire, our role as educators and citizens demands that we champion public intellectuals who dare to confront power, alleviate human suffering, and combat the moral vacuum of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, and economic exploitation. Intellectuals, when aligned with these commitments, transcend the constraints of academic disciplines, engaging in society’s most urgent struggles, resisting the commercialization of knowledge, and bringing truth to bear amid a deluge of lies and conspiracy theories. They embody, as Kiese Makeba Laymon notes, “the vital connection between a reflective self-awareness and a commitment to social responsibility. Without an informed public, democracy is imperiled; without a language that interrogates injustice, there can be no path to justice.” At stake here is the recognition that without an informed public, there can be no democracy, and without a language critical of injustice, there can be no path to justice.

 Today, the role of educators as public intellectuals aligned with broader social movements has never been more vital, especially when far-right extremists around the globe seek to turn education into a force for indoctrination. Education has always been political, but in this era of book bans, weakened faculty autonomy, restricted curricula, and whitewashed history, imagining education as a practice of freedom is a radical act. It is not merely a means to transfer knowledge or a method, but a site of struggle over agency, identity, history, and the future. In a time when education can also become a tool of oppression, it is crucial to imagine education as a living pathway toward a strong and vibrant democracy. This suggests that young people and academics engage in a  profound dialogue with history, a commitment to honoring the memories of the forgotten, the silenced, and the oppressed as part of a relentless pursuit to hold power to account. It also suggests taking seriously the idea that pedagogy is a powerful force for shaping identities, agency, and social values. As Homi Bhabha rightly observes, pedagogy demands vigilance “at that very moment when identities are being produced and groups are being constituted.” In such contexts, pedagogy becomes a catalyst for empowering individuals to take responsibility not only for themselves but also for their communities, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to question authority and expose abuses of power. It urges us to learn from history, sharpening our ability to recognize, comprehend, and resist the insidious forces of fascism.

The McCarthyite rhetoric espoused by figures like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump poses a grave threat to the foundations of higher education. Vance has publicly branded  professors as “the enemy,” while Trump has pledged to cleanse universities of so-called ‘leftists,’ whom he denigrates as ‘vermin.’ For Trump, labels like ‘leftists’ and ‘Marxists’ serve as sweeping condemnations for anyone who dares engage in critical thinking or challenges the status quo. These attacks reveal a deep-seated contempt for universities as spaces of intellectual freedom, dialogue, and the pursuit of truth. By framing educators, scholars, and the media as “enemies from within,” these political figures are not merely undermining public trust in academic institutions; they are working to extinguish open inquiry and eradicate the diversity of perspectives essential for a vibrant democratic society. Their ultimate aim is to strip universities of their cultures of criticism, unsettling knowledge, and democratic values—even those values that remain tenuous The consequences of this discourse are severe, and we have seen a similar script played out in Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and more recently in Orban’s Hungary. To put it bluntly, this rhetoric signals a project of repression that escalates toward expulsions, imprisonments, and, if Trump’s language is any indication, hints ominously at what Fintan O’Toolerefers to as “so many of European history’s lagers and gulags and prisoner-of-war camps.”

Reviving historical consciousness as a pedagogical practice illuminates patterns of repression and opens pathways for resistance. Simultaneously, it offers a vision of leadership that amplifies the power of both individual and collective agency—a fierce, binding force that calls us to the obligations of social responsibility, justice, and freedom. It is a foundation for a democracy that pulsates with the promise of a future where economic, social, and personal rights are not merely ideals but lived realities, untouched by fear, repression, or the shifting, ever-present ghosts of fascism.

Universities now stand at a crossroads: they can either continue down the path of market-driven values, eroding their purpose, or reclaim their democratic mission as spaces of critical inquiry and social responsibility. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism–a predatory form of capitalism–has systematically dismantled the welfare state, public sphere, and commitment to the common good, reshaping universities in its image. This ideology insists that the market should dictate not only the economy but all realms of society, concentrating wealth among a corrupt billionaire financial elite while promoting unchecked individualism, deregulation, and privatization as guiding societal principles. Under neoliberalism, education is commodified, and citizenship is reduced to consumerism. Universities—once spaces for cultivating democratic ideals and intellectual freedom—now risk becoming extensions of this form of gangster capitalism, mirroring the racialized inequalities, militarism, and extreme wealth gaps that define our broader social landscape. To surrender to the commodification, commercialism, and corporatization of education and the fascist currents shaping contemporary politics would be a profound betrayal of higher education’s foundational mission. The stakes could not be higher: without an unrelenting commitment to radical democratic ideals, universities risk not only forfeiting their own relevance but also imperiling the very future of democracy at a moment when the specter of fascism looms with renewed force.

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: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

EMOTIONAL PLAGUE

'Lethal syndrome': Epidemiologist says MAGA 'disease' causes Trump followers' violence

Matthew Chapman

RAW STORY
October 15, 2024 

Supporters of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump raise MAGA hats, on the day Trump returns for a rally at the site of the July assassination attempt against him, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Former President Donald Trump's movement should be considered a contagious disease with a primary symptom of violence, an epidemiologist argued Tuesday.

Dr. Gary Slutkin, who says his work abroad gave him 15 years' experience dealing with dictatorships, compared Trump's MAGA movement to a pathological phenomenon in conversation with Salon's Chauncey DeVega.

"In these countries, you can’t speak or act freely and don’t want to live there," Slutkin said. "Life is fear. People fear the government, their neighbors and even their family and friends. Businesses and the press can be taken away. People become suddenly imprisoned or disappear."

Slutkin argued the same kind of "epidemic" fear and hate that keeps people in line under such regimes has built the MAGA movement.

"I understand MAGA as an epidemic disease, infecting many through what I call 'brain flaws,'" he said. "There are brain pathways for copying and following others — in the cortex, dopamine system, and pain centers, to motivate conformity and violence ... Violence is a disease, and specifically, a contagious disease. The disease spreads through these brain processes."

In essence, Slutkin believes Trump's movement "is a dangerous and lethal syndrome of what I describe as 'Authoritarian Violence Disorder.'"

Under this interpretation, Trump is a "massive superspreader" using "streams of lies" to reprogram people's brains into a pathological state, causing them to "abandon their own decision-making and obey," the epidemiologist argued.

An Election Day victory for Vice President Kamala Harris could help contain the disease and allow the nation to heal, Slutkin argued — but the disease could worsen should Trump win.

"There will be more state violence, violence from private militia groups and other violence including mass deportations and promised detention or concentration camps," he argued.

 EMOTIONAL PLAGUE

New Lancet Commission calls for urgent action on self-harm across the world

University of Bristol

Self-harm remains neglected worldwide, with at least 14 million episodes yearly. A new Lancet Commission, led by University of Bristol researchers, urges policy action on societal drivers and health services’ response to this pressing issue. The report, involving an international team of experts, is published today [9 October].

Self-harm is not a psychiatric diagnosis; it is a behaviour shaped by society, culture, and individual factors. The social determinants of health, particularly poverty, heavily influence the distribution of self-harm within communities.

This new report highlights that at least 14 million episodes of self-harm occur each year[1], with the greatest burden felt in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and a higher incidence among young people. However, the authors suggest that this figure is likely an underestimate as people who self-harm often do not present to health services and there are few routine surveillance systems.

The authors also describe how attitudes lacking empathy, including in healthcare settings, can compound stigma around self-harm and keep people from seeking help. The report’s authors call on governments to recognise the public health impact of self-harm, and the need for mainstream and social media outlets need to report and publicise information about self-harm responsibly and sympathetically.

Paul Moran, Professor of Psychiatry and Head of the Centre for Academic Mental Health in the Bristol Medical School: Population Health Sciences (PHS) at the University of Bristol, and the Commission’s lead author said: “Self-harm signals deeper distress and affects millions globally, especially young people, yet it remains neglected due to stigma and lack of resources. This must change so that more people receive compassionate, tailored support.”

Report

‘The Lancet Commission on self-harm’ by Paul Moran, Helen Christensen et al. in The Lancet

 

---

Journal

The Lancet

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

Article Title

The Lancet Commission on self-harm

Article Publication Date

9-Oct-2024

How 2020's trauma created Trump's death cult

Thom Hartmann

ALTERNET
October 8, 2024 

New York public workers opposed to the city's vaccine mandate protest on October 25, 2021(AFP)

Could the Covid disaster of 2020 — which Trump botched so badly that America has had more Covid deaths than any other nation in the world except Peru (whose president denied Covid was dangerous) — be what’s fueling the Trump MAGA cult? Are we, in other words, as a nation suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that’s driving a national mental illness crisis that opened the door for Trump’s cult to grow?

— Colorado elections worker Tina Peters, for example, was just sent to prison for nine years for her role in trying to subvert the 2020 election; she’d completely bought into Trump’s lie that Democrats had stolen that election and is paying for it with the rest of her life.

— My barber was telling me this past weekend about how one of his regulars is stocking up on guns, ammunition, and dried food in anticipation of a second Civil War. This guy is now fully in the Trump cult and is thus perfectly willing to kill his neighbors for politics, once somebody declares the war is now underway (as many of these guys expect Trump to do in the next few weeks).


— All across America, families are being torn apart by the Trump cult, and sometimes the conflicts even lead to violence.


The rest of the world has figured this out. Over at the British newspaper The Independent, the headline says it all:

“She Escaped the Religious Sect She Grew Up In. Now She Says Trump’s MAGA Movement is Eerily Similar”

Although the economy right now is doing better than at any time since the 1960s, polls show a majority of Americans would rather believe Trump’s lies that inflation is still with us (it’s down to 1.7 percent now) and the historically low 4.1 percent unemployment rate is “fake news.” And tens of millions of Americans believe him.

So, what’s going on here in America? How did we get here and why?

Many otherwise normal and sane Americans seem to have gone nuts, leaping down the Qanon or Fox “News” rabbit holes in search of meaning, safety, and explanations for the feelings of doom that they just can’t shake. It’s as if some major event in their lives has created such a trauma that they’ve been knocked off balance, psychologically.


And that may be a big part of the answer, particularly given how neither our insurance industry nor our government-funded health insurance programs typically pay for mental health services that might otherwise help out people suffering from trauma-induced shock.

I still remember when I was on a flight out of New York in the late 1970s. Back then, planes took off in the middle of thunderstorms (and occasionally crashed as a result), and this 727 did exactly that. As we were climbing out through what was probably around 4,000 feet the plane was hit by a lightning strike, lighting up the cabin and killing at least one of the engines.

We started to fall out of the sky as the pilots struggled to stabilize the aircraft and restart the engine: the woman sitting next to me grabbed my arm and started sobbing; we all thought we were going to die. I was then (and still am) a licensed pilot and it scared me more than her, I’m guessing, because I knew full well everything that could go wrong to a plane in a thunderstorm, from the lightning strike taking out the jet’s electronics and engines to wind shear ripping us out of the sky. (It’s why they no longer fly through thunderstorms.)


It was at least a decade before I could get on a commercial plane without getting drunk first: That’s what untreated PTSD can do to you. (I finally did EMDR on it and am now fine on airplanes; this was a mild case, and didn’t lead me into a cult.)

Consider some of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD, something that’s often brought on by a near-death-experience, severe abuse, or surviving a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Each symptom would make a person more vulnerable to the siren song of Trump’s cult:


-— Hypervigilance and threat sensitivity, causing people to experience heightened alertness to potential and often imagined (like Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants) threats.
— Difficulty with trust, which may lead to skepticism of official sources and greater reliance on alternative information channels; vulnerability, in other words, to Trump’s lies and his claims of “fake news” when he’s fact-checked.
— Emotional dysregulation, making individuals like Tina Peters, the hundreds of January 6th rioters now in jail, and other Trump followers more vulnerable to emotionally-charged misinformation and MAGA cult membership.
— Cognitive changes impacting critical thinking skills needed to evaluate information that might contradict the lies Trump and his co-conspirators promulgate.
— Social isolation which may limit exposure to different perspectives and fact-checking from others who try to tell MAGA members how deluded and exploited they really are.
— Seeking explanations causing people to have a heightened need to understand and make sense of their experiences, making them more open to MAGA’s anti-science and politically charged explanatory narratives, even when they’re lies.
— Avoidance behaviors leading people to avoid exposure to diverse information sources, keeping them trapped in Trump cult bubbles like rightwing hate radio and Fox “News.”

Multiple studies have been done on the psychological impact of the Covid pandemic, finding anywhere from 5 to 55 percent of Americans suffering in a way that could be diagnosed as PTSD. The average across the studies find 26 percent of Americans having diagnosable PTSD from Covid.

Prior to the pandemic, the national rate of diagnosable PTSD was generally considered to be around 3.5 percent: Clearly, the pandemic had an impact on our psyches that Trump has been exploiting every day since.


Remember, for almost an entire year, we were afraid that just going to the grocery store could kill us. Over a million of us — one out of every 272 Americans — died because of Trump’s incompetence and malice.

Most of us knew people who died; my best friend, Jerry Schneiderman, succumbed to the disease as did several other people close to our family. This is trauma writ large, setting millions up to believe any random BS a cult leader like Trump decides to dish out.

As the lead author of a new study on the impact of Covid, Dr. Jeff Ashby, noted:

“While many people are insulated from deaths and economic hardships related to the pandemic, there is a universal experience of fear, concern for others, and social isolation. Among our findings is that the experience of COVID-19 is a traumatic stress. It isn’t just triggering earlier trauma, it’s a traumatic experience in and of itself.”

Literally millions of people have joined Trump’s cult — it is a cult, as its members are so impervious to factual information and it’s based on the personality of a single man — and the evidence suggests that many of them may have been made vulnerable to joining MAGA because of the trauma they experienced during the worst of the pandemic.

As Dr. Stephen Schwartz wrote for the National Library of Medicine:
“[T]his [million-plus Covid] death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout the MAGA world created by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. … Anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free but emotionally satisfying reality more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult. …

“There was a deliberate plan from the very outbreak of the Covid pandemic to take what should have been a fringe movement — there were the equivalent of anti-vaxxers in the Middle Ages with the Plague; there were anti-vaxxers with the 1918 Spanish Flu — and transform it into a mainstream political movement. What had been fringe became a death culture involving millions. Believers willingly subject themselves to a vastly higher risk of contracting and dying of Covid. And they do this in the face of a million dead, and 2000 people, or more, dying each day.”

The good news is that the way most cult members leave their cult is not through deprogramming or a sudden awakening (although those do happen) but, rather, because the cult leader dies or is discredited.


Trump decisively losing the 2024 election may well be that discrediting and thus liberating event in the lives of many of his followers.

The challenge for the next year or so will be — for those of us who recognize the cult-like slavish devotion to Trump of his followers — to provide support to those followers we know to make the transition from the Trump cult back into the normal world. Therapy for the PTSD that made them vulnerable in the first place will also be helpful.

America can recover from this trauma, but it’ll take time and effort.


This all assumes, of course, that Trump loses this election. And making that happen is up to us: vote!

PAKISTAN

AS THE OLD IS DYING, A NEW STRUGGLES TO BE BORN

Ammar Ali Jan 

Published September 22, 2024

 DAWN / EOS

Illustration generated using Microsoft Designer

There are a few unique moments in global history when multiple crises, accumulated over a long period of time, express themselves simultaneously with an unprecedented intensity. Such a ‘polycrisis’ combines to form a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling order, highlighting the repressed deficiencies that undergird its apparent stability.

One example of such a moment is the crisis of the global colonial order in the late 19th century, where the scramble for colonies created intense antagonisms between the great European powers of the time. This inter-imperialist rivalry culminated in two World Wars, the rise of fascism, communism and anti-colonial movements, and the emergence of the United States (US) as the primary hegemon in the global order.

The world is now entering another such period of a great transition, with the slow decline of the US and the rapid rise of China. This historical tendency is exacerbated by the polycrisis that involves climate change, economic disintegration, global debt crises, and the emergence of a lethal war industry that combine to undermine the stability of the current order.

An important element of such great transitions is the loss of ideological certainties, with old narratives losing their appeal and being replaced by new ideas, as is being witnessed in the crisis of liberal democracies and the rise of the far-right (and, at times, far-left) parties/figures across the world.

Third World countries such as Pakistan are incorporated into these larger structural tensions that are tearing apart the world today. Beyond the dizzying pace of breaking news, we must decipher the breakdown of the political, economic and ideological anchors that have fallen apart and thrown the Pakistani state into an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy.

Decades of economic, political and social neglect have now metastasised into a scenario that sees Pakistan seemingly heading down a blind alley. Many indicators point towards a worsening of the crises that plague the country. Ammar Ali Jan attempts to answer the questions: how did we as a nation end up here, and is there any way out?

A TIME OF TRANSITION

The multiple hybrid regimes, the rigged elections, the controlled media and a subservient parliament are all failing to cover-up the instability that haunts the present dispensation, demonstrating the intensity of the challenge faced by those who would want a return to ‘normalcy.’

One of the key elements of a crisis of legitimacy is that it destabilises conventional measures through which a crisis is often averted, producing a state of emergency where the past becomes a poor guide to resolve a radically novel situation.

My contention is that the current political, economic and social crisis engulfing Pakistan is part of long-term historical trends, both global and specific to our own history, that are now maturing into a full blown existential threat to our polity. The grievances have accumulated over time, exacerbated by the ruthless exploitation by the ruling elites and their refusal to follow any legal frameworks that may restrain their power.

On the other hand, the changing geopolitical situation, as well as the declining global economy, has meant that there is very little possibility of a bailout by Western powers. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) versus the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) drama, and the fissures in the judiciary, military and the media, are reflective of this larger breakdown of structures that once sustained the ruling dispensation.

Moreover, while Imran Khan represents the crisis in its most potent, disruptive element, our tragedy is compounded by the fact that neither he, nor any other political force, has emerged that can present an alternative vision to move beyond the punishing stagnation afflicting our society. The crisis of imagination makes our predicament all the more painful.

We are then living through the ‘End Times’ of a journey that contained much promise, but was derailed by despair, greed and short-sightedness. To discern this fall, the multiple crises of political economy, ideology and political leadership have to be understood in their historical formation that are now combining to impose a permanent form of destabilisation in our system.


The current political, economic and social crisis engulfing Pakistan is part of long-term historical trends, both global and specific to our own history, that are now maturing into a full blown existential threat to our polity. The grievances have accumulated over time, exacerbated by the ruthless exploitation by the ruling elites and their refusal to follow any legal frameworks that may restrain their power.

THE COLLAPSE OF A RENTIER ECONOMY

The roots of Pakistan’s economic crisis lay in the fateful decisions made by our political elites in the 1950s. Pakistan’s independence occurred at a heightening moment of Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. American author and journalist William Blum, in his fantastic book titled Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, explains how the “bipolar world”, split between the capitalist and the socialist camps, did not reflect the actual power imbalance that existed between the two sides.

The Soviet Union had suffered enormous destruction during the Second World War, including the death of 27 million people, as it fought against a punishing Nazi military occupation. On the other hand, the US did not see its mainland get attacked by war, emerging as the primary industrial power (50 percent of global industrial production) and became the primary creditor of the world.

This imbalance explains why the US aggressively thwarted any left-wing movement in Europe and across the colonial world while the Soviet Union maintained, contrary to the Western narrative, a minimalist interventionist position. This was a time of high prestige for left-wing movements, as they had played a pivotal role in anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles.

Thus, the US, with the aid of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), embarked upon a ruthless campaign of subjugating mass movements in the name of ‘fighting communism’, a crusade that led them to attack or destabilise countries as distinct as Italy, Korea, Angola, Guatemala, Syria, the Phillipines and a host of other countries in the 1950s.

The historian Christopher Simpson meticulously shows how the US camp did not consist of ‘liberal democrats’ but often involved former Nazi sympathisers who were given respectability by the US to fight the “communist threat” in Europe.

In the Third World, this alliance of the ‘free world’ was secured through an alliance with conservative forces that often denounced the more emancipatory ideals of the anti-colonial struggles. The key pillar of this alliance was the military, a conservative force that became the vanguard in the fight against socialism.

The US developed special relations with military officers in countries as diverse as South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and a host of other developing countries. In other words, developmental funds to these countries were tied to their participation in America’s war against communism, which often meant brutal repression at home.

Pakistan’s ruling elites, always anxious of their place in popular politics, made a Faustian pact with Washington by joining the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in 1954 and the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) in 1955, sealing the country’s fate for decades to come.

Pakistan’s incorporation into the global order as a client state meant a surrender of a sovereign path of development for the country. Pakistan’s economic growth was now permanently tied to its relationship with Washington, with massive aid flows generating impressive growth in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Incidentally, all these growth spurts were experienced under military regimes, solidifying the legitimacy of the institution and strangling the prospects of a democratic polity.

Pakistan’s pre-eminent social scientist Hamza Alavi described this expanding power of the coercive apparatuses by calling Pakistan an “overdeveloped state”, where a “military-bureaucratic oligarchy” controlled the levers of power. The power of the landed and industrial elites was secured through the military that used its role as the primary mediator of imperialist rents to cement its hegemony on the political scene.

The impressive growth stories under military regimes veiled a darker reality. Our economic engine was not fuelled by a long term vision for industrial growth, but was linked to perpetual wars in the region in

which we were expected to participate as proxies. In the 1960s, anchoring Pakistan into the anti-communist camp and wiping out Leftist elements in the nascent postcolonial state was central to the CIA’s strategy for the region.

Not only were Leftist organisations repressed, including the tragic murder of the Communist Party of Pakistan’s secretary general Hassan Nasir, democrats from across the spectrum were declared traitors to the federation, putting in place a tradition that continues to haunt us.

One of the most famous ‘traitors’ of this era was ‘Mother of the Nation’ Fatima Jinnah, who challenged Gen Ayub Khan’s dictatorship and suffered an electoral defeat in a presidential election widely believed to be rigged.

US President John F Kennedy, Gen Ayub Khan, and US Vice President Lyndon B Johnson pictured in the Oval Office in Washington on July 13, 1961: Ayub’s development model, built on extreme forms of class and regional inequality, experienced its slow demise when the US pulled its support after the Pakistan-India war in 1965 | John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

DIGGING THE HOLE DEEPER

This tendency of centralisation of state authority and the demonisation of opponents was further strengthened under Gen Ziaul Haq, whose draconian repression of political activists, including the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, stands out as a particularly brutal period.

To compound the problem, the aid flows to Pakistan were tied to the military junta’s commitment to fighting a US-sponsored Afghan jihad, turning the country into a bastion of right-wing militants from across the Muslim world.

The economic boom during the Zia regime was linked to the construction of this jihadi infrastructure, an infrastructure geared towards war, destruction and bigotry, which wrecked Afghanistan and Pakistan while fuelling conflicts across the region. Less than two decades later, Gen Pervez Musharraf’s economic success was also tied to imperialist rents, this time to dismantle this jihadi infrastructure.

The obverse side of this development model was not only economic inequality, but the recurrent collapse that we faced whenever we were abandoned by Washington. Ayub’s development model, built on extreme forms of class and regional inequality, experienced its slow demise when the US pulled its support after the Pakistan-India war in 1965.

The deteriorating economic situation led to riots across Pakistan in 1968-1969, an unexpected victory of anti-establishment forces in the 1970 elections, and a brutal military operation that ended in the dismemberment of Pakistan, concluding the “Decade of Development” with nothing to show but blood and tears.

The same pattern was repeated in the case of Zia and Musharraf regimes. In both cases, America’s diminishing interest in Afghanistan meant an abrupt drying up of resources for Pakistani governments. While Washington became involved in wars elsewhere, the Afghan wars crippled our polity, leading to a rise in religious extremism, prompting repeated internal military operations, and causing the deaths of at least 70,000 Pakistani citizens, including political leaders.

This boom and bust cycle has created a strong consuming class that has benefitted from this rent-seeking behaviour of the state. Yet, the parasitic nature of our elites can be gauged from the fact that their lifestyles are comparable to their counterparts in places such as India, South Korea etc while being decades behind them in industrial/economic output. Instead, their wealth was owed to their links to the Pakistani state, which in turn depended on borrowed money from the US as part of providing its territory and services for America’s proxy wars in the region.

My contention is that this arrangement has come to a definitive end. The US is no longer an industrial power that can give cheap loans to its client states. With a military budget of US$883 billion and a declining industrial base, its ability to demolish far exceeds its ability to reconstruct, as witnessed in a series of wars across the Middle East.

On the other hand, China’s model is geared towards trade and boosting industrial productivity, an enterprise that our rent-seeking elites are singularly incapable of undertaking, as demonstrated by the botched results of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

It is no wonder that abandonment by the US is leading to outbursts by the political leadership, with Imran Khan claiming that his government was overthrown by the US, while Ishaq Dar recently claimed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was punishing Pakistan for geostrategic reasons.

This angst is nothing but the painful withdrawal symptoms of a state addicted to proxy wars and the dollars associated with them. The result is an impossible debt burden that continues to get worse, with over 50 percent of our budget geared towards debt servicing. Instead of debating any reforms, the ruling elites are using the state to impose the costs of their own debt-fuelled lifestyles on to the public through increasing taxation.

Today, the political economy of Pakistan appears akin to what American political scientist Jodi Dean has described as “neo-feudalism”, a system where the rich increasingly impose rents upon society to feed their luxurious lifestyles. In other words, we are witnessing the end of citizenship and the emergence of a new kind of mass serfdom, with all the authoritarianism and militarised control such a tendency entails.

A man holds a placard during a protest in Karachi against inflation, unemployment and increased taxation on August 23, 2023: the ruling elites are using the state to impose the costs of their own debt-fuelled lifestyles on to the public through increasing taxation | AFP


IDEOLOGICAL DISARRAY

The state’s narrative about the ideology of Pakistan is also increasingly viewed with cynicism by an ever-growing section of society. As the American professor of history David Gilmartin has suggested, the Pakistan Movement was always an eclectic mix of Muslim nationalism and more mundane local realities that included social categories such as caste, region, language etc.

In other words, the universalising narrative of the state as an Islamic polity had to contend with historical differences, particularly the question of different nationalities/ linguistic groups that constitute Pakistan. This tension was felt in the early years, with conflicts raging in the peripheries during Jinnah’s own lifetime, including severe hostilities and riots, from the erstwhile North Western Frontier Province (NWFP, now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) to Dhaka in East Pakistan.

Such tensions were not unique to Pakistan, since most postcolonial national states had to engage with different ethno-national groups to create a unity of purpose. Yet, Pakistan’s fateful decision to join the US camp hastened the centralisation of the state with the excessive power of the military, which viewed assertion of ethnic difference as a negation of the idea of Pakistan.

It was not long before nationalist aspirations were also dubbed as ‘communism’, so that the great anti-communist crusade could be invoked to stifle dissent internally. The tragedy of 1971, where for the first time in human history, a majority population separated from a minority, did not soften the centralising tendencies of the state, as a brutal operation was launched in Balochistan in 1974 to defend the ‘integrity’ of the country.

Similarly, large sections of the Pakhtun population have grown under the shadow of US-sponsored proxy wars fought by the Pakistan state. The militarisation of everyday life, as well as the devastation caused by endless wars, has become an integral part of Baloch and Pakhtun identity.

Unfortunately, constitutional movements — such as the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) — have also been labelled as ‘traitors’, thus making any compromise increasingly difficult. The vacuum is resulting in the emergence of terrorist organisations, such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), that seek to exploit the ethnic cleavages in the country in order to push the region into a vortex of ethnic hate and bigotry.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that the state no longer even has a monopoly over political Islam. The state’s policy of waging jihad was part of a cynical world view of a rentier state rather than being reflective of any deep ideological commitment. As a result, jihadi and other religious forces have taken the initiative away from the state, often dictating Islam to the state rather than being dictated by it.

Gen Musharraf’s compliance in the US-led War on Terror, allowing drone strikes on Pakistani territory, and conducting military operations against religious groups, has hollowed out the state’s claim to be the primary representative of religion, depriving it of a key ideological cement to discipline populations.

The final frontier for the state was its monopoly over ‘Pakistaniat’, an elusive category that has intense emotional appeal for large sections of society. In that realm, PTI and Khan have decisively displaced the military as the primary expression of nationhood in mainland Pakistan.

For decades, the establishment projected Khan as a political alternative in whom the modernist, corporate aspirations of society coalesce with more traditional virtues of piety and personal integrity. After alienating political leaders from the peripheries and the mainstream, Khan was the final line of defence for the state.

Yet, in a bizarrely whimsical manner, the establishment switched sides, hoping that the military’s historical core support base would abandon PTI. Instead, they moved with the PTI, making Khan the embodiment of ‘Pakistani nationalism.’ Consequently, the state no longer has a monopoly over religion or nationalism, while also struggling to fend off intensifying challenges from ethno-nationalist forces.

IS THERE A BEGINNING AFTER THE END?

Adeel Malik, a scholar at the University of Oxford, has recently published some groundbreaking research on the social transformations occurring in society. Access to social media, university education and new employment opportunities have combined to reduce the influence of traditional power brokers across large parts of Pakistan. This fundamental shift has weakened old political parties that garnered their support from these patronage networks.

Such weakness is amplified by the fact that these parties have been targeted by the establishment for decades but have failed to develop any adequate vision for national politics. The result is that their primary politics now revolve around keeping one individual out of power, a task for which they are ready to jettison long-held principles of constitutionalism that they espoused in the past. In other words, they have been reduced to pure negativity, without a clear vision for what they offer to society.

Khan, on the other hand, represents the spirit of the time, insofar as these new social groups are more willing to coalesce around him. Yet, his stint in power was marred by the fact that he and his party offered precious little in terms of new ideas for Pakistan’s political economy. IMF conditionalities, bulldozing bills in the parliament (similar to what we recently witnessed with the clumsy attempt to pass the 26th Constitutional Amendment Bill), helplessness in front of rent-seeking elites while using severe repression against opponents, and very little discussion on redistribution of economic power were the hallmarks of his brief stint in power.

Even today, PTI’s strength remains its ability to harness the anger of the people through the production of a catchy narrative that feeds into the anxieties and aspirations of people. But a narrative is different from ideology, since the former can be moulded anytime to suit the particular audience one is addressing, while ideology requires a consistency of principles over an extended period of time.

This is why we hear very little from PTI in terms of a concrete vision for the future and a lot on how the current dispensation is a hopeless failure. Consequently, we have entered a stage of revolutionary aesthetics that veil a deep conservatism, an intensification of tactical manoeuvres but without any strategic horizons, and an increasing anger towards the status quo without any proposals for an alternative social contract.

What we are then witnessing in these multiple crises is the culmination of an order that began in the 1950s — a status quo that was propped up by foreign powers to do their bidding in the region, a political economy addicted to war, rents and excessive consumption, a failure to innovate, and a refusal to incorporate difference.

It is resulting in the dismantling of ideological underpinnings of the ruling order and a deep political disorientation, exemplified by the lack of imagination exhibited by political parties. In other words, the old order has lost its raison d’etre, and the instability we witness today is a symptom of a deeper crisis that signals the end of a historical epoch.

In moments of great transitions, repetition of old clichés is not possible. A crisis of imagination often turns into a crisis of adequate language itself. To answer the new questions we are confronted with, we must first be willing to situate ourselves in the novelty that stares us in the face.

There is no going back to becoming a client state for the US, just like there is little possibility of sustaining a rent-seeking economy that seeks to sacrifice the future of millions of children to sustain luxuries for the few. The spectre of ethnic hatred and religious extremism are no longer peripheral concerns but are becoming existential threats for our society.

One must remember that after every end, there is a new beginning. The moment is pregnant with extreme danger and unprecedented opportunities. The task of intellectuals in Pakistan is no longer to regurgitate clichés learnt from the West. Certainties have collapsed everywhere, and what we require are bold new ideas that can help us chart our journey anew in this transformed world.

In that sense, despite the tragic situation, there is an opportunity to rethink history and propose a new social contract around issues deemed taboo. Such ideas must be boldly generated and propagated to find new anchorage for Pakistan in the current moment.

The world is out of joint, and to seek illusions instead of truth in such moments will be a great abdication of intellectual responsibility. Our biggest failure will be if we continue to comfort ourselves with the belief that things will go back to a ‘normal’ equilibrium at some point.

The costs of failure are too high for us to remain comfortable in our illusions.

The writer is a historian, academic and political organiser. He is the founder and general secretary of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party. X: @ammaralijan

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 22nd, 2024