Henry Giroux
Violence, soaked in blood and stripped of shame, has become the defining language of governance in the age of Trump and the global resurgence of authoritarianism. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, and with it, the very notion of moral and social responsibility. In its place, we find a brutal political grammar scripted by modern-day barbarians, disciples of greed, corruption, racial purity, ultra-nationalism, and permanent war. Compassion is mocked as weakness. The social state is vilified and hollowed out, derided in the language of a deranged anti-communism. And policies that produce mass suffering, engineered by the powerful and shielded by the myths of meritocracy and social Darwinism, are deemed not only acceptable, but inevitable.
Among the MAGA elite, democracy is no longer a cherished ideal but a target of scorn and contempt. Echoing Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, democracy is now replaced with illiberal democracy, with its call to eliminate racial mixing and unleash a torrent of repression against free speech, universities, the press, and organized dissent. In this case, fascist politics and strategies have become the new governing norm. Embracing the playbook of ruthless dictators such as Putin and Orbán, Trump expands presidential power, wages war on the rule of law and dismantles democratic institutions, especially those that nurture critical thought, all the while feigning uncertainty about whether the Constitution even applies to him.
Trump’s financial backers and ideological allies, like Peter Thiel, openly endorse authoritarianism, with Thiel bluntly declaring that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible. Trump’s sycophantic enablers Elon Musk and Steve Bannon pay hollow tribute to democracy by offering their followers Nazi salutes. As Judith Butler astutely observes, too many in positions of power, politicians, powerful lawyers, academic administrators, and the financial elite, surrender to fear, greed, or corruption, allowing cowardice to silence their conscience. In doing so, they “proclaim the inevitable end of democracy at the hands of authoritarianism, effectively giving up the struggle in advance.” Without any sense of irony, Theil, Musk, Bannon and others proclaim themselves to be champions of freedom, but the only freedom endorsed by this group is for white Christian nationalist and rich billionaires-a notion of freedom rooted in racialized authoritarian impulses. These are authoritarians drunk on power in the service of violence and domination. What they despise is any embrace or articulation of power as both a moral force and force for radical democratic change.
We are not adrift in a moment of historical ambiguity, nor suspended in a mere transition between epochs, as some would have us believe. The notion of uncertainty has been shattered by an era fueled by the passionate mobilization of fascism. This intoxicating force has seduced millions with its lies and emotionally charged racism, redirecting their economic anxieties into a maelstrom of hate and the false swindle of fulfillment. Fascism from below does not merge with fascism from above, it thrives in the abyss of misplaced rage. The once-clouded vision of what America has become is now as clear as day. The ghosts of the past have returned, cloaked in bloodlust, armed with a language of dehumanization. They are driven by the vision of a new unified Reich, one populated by totalitarian subjects unburdened by truth, morality, critical thought, or democratic agency. The long descent from liberal democracy into the abyss of neoliberalism, more brutally, gangster capitalism, with its worship of markets, cruelty, and survival of the fittest, has reached its terminal point. An unholy alliance with fascism now stands at the helm, enshrining racial cleansing, lawless power, and the erasure of dissent as governing principles.
To understand the devastating impact of the current political and social climate on marginalized communities, it is essential to distinguish between two forms of eugenics that have shaped the modern era: hard eugenics and soft eugenics. Hard eugenics, with its violent, lawless application, is historically linked to overt violence, policies of sterilization, genocide, and forced elimination of those deemed “undesirable.” The brutal methods that defined this version of eugenics still echo in history, reminding us of the violence that can be enacted in the name of racial purity and nationalistic ideals.
In contrast, soft eugenics operates through more covert, systemic means. It does not require physical violence or open lawlessness but instead utilizes policies embedded in the legal and economic structures of society. Soft eugenics is the weaponization of policy and law to create conditions of exclusion and suffering, targeting vulnerable populations with austerity measures, limited access to education and healthcare, and the stripping away of rights.
In many ways, it is the quieter, more insidious form of state violence, one that does not physically eliminate the “undesirable” but ensures their long-term marginalization and, in some cases, their slow destruction.
This distinction is crucial as we turn to the policies of the Trump administration, where both hard and soft forms of eugenics converge to shape a new machinery of governance, one that normalizes disposability and entrenches racial hierarchies. These are not abstract doctrines; they are enacted through the daily erosion of healthcare, the criminalization of dissent, and the abandonment of the most vulnerable. Nowhere is this logic more visible than in the war on children, where youth of color are sacrificed to the brutal arithmetic of austerity, privatization, and neoliberal neglect. Yet this eugenicist project does not end with children. It deepens and expands through immigration policy, where the same cruel calculus is used to preserve a white supremacist vision of the nation. Here, belonging is not only regulated by law, it is reengineered by ideology. Immigrants of color are cast as contaminants, while white refugees are welcomed as preservers of a racial ideal. In this context, eugenics reappears not as pseudoscience, but as policy, a political weapon wielded to reshape the nation’s genetic future under the guise of national security and demographic control.
While cruelty has deep roots in the history of the United States, it has now become inextricably linked to an ever-accelerating culture of dehumanization and violence.
This culture both fuels the rise of fascist politics and menaces individuals through the weaponization of fear, alongside policies of extreme deprivation and immiseration. These forces strip individuals and entire communities of their power, rendering them not only powerless but also depoliticized.
What sets this moment apart from the past is the language that sustains it, a language that reproduces racial, social, and financial hierarchies steeped in the toxic discourse of social Darwinism.
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
It aligns with the neoliberal creed of “survival of the fittest,” where personal responsibility is heralded as the sole determinant of success, if not, indeed, of existence itself.
Moreover, the cruelty embedded in this rhetoric, as exemplified in the GOP’s budget bill, does more than line the pockets of the wealthy with enormous tax breaks. It exacts a savage toll on the poor, with benefit cuts so severe that they will cost lives. Paul Krugman rightly refers to this assault on social benefits as an “attack of the sadistic zombies,” but his description only scratches the surface. What we are witnessing, especially with the draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, is a form of sadism endemic to gangster capitalism. How can one be indifferent to eliminating health insurance for millions of poor people or defunding nursing homes? This is a sadism that draws its power from the same well as the death and misery imposed by the SS in the concentration camps, and the indifference of those who tossed dissenting students from planes during the Pinochet regime. This is cruelty without limits. This is the cruelty of monsters, turbocharged by a neoliberal resurgence of the “survival of the fittest” ethos, a cruelty that echoes the worst of human history. It is what I once called zombie politics in the age of casino capitalism, where human lives are nothing more than disposable commodities in the ruthless, unforgiving colonial game of empire.
This era of unchecked cruelty marks the resurgence of Eugenics. Hard Eugenics in its most violent versions has an extensive history in the United States and is linked to the forced sterilization of Black women, and forms of immoral medical practices and experiments applied to slaves, and later in the century to Black men. One particularly horrendous example of medical apartheid took place in what is known as the Tuskegee Study, in which 600 Black men with syphilis were left untreated to order to see how the disease progressed.
Soft Eugenics has resurfaced in the United States, becoming a central motif for both the Trump administration and far-right ideologues, fueled by the resurgence of white nationalism. This ideology, rooted in the belief of racial superiority, demands that white power and control be safeguarded at any cost by the ruling elite and relies on policies of deprivation to shorten or weed out those who do not measure up to what constitutes a white nationalist ethos and mode of superiority.
The deeply entrenched notion of white supremacy is historically intertwined with the insidious logic of soft eugenics, a concept that underpins policies often rooted in dehumanization and social Darwinism. This dangerous ideology is embodied in the rhetoric of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, has promoted the idea that resistance to diseases such as measles is part of a natural survival process. In this worldview, the vulnerable are left to fend for themselves, with no support or protection.
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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.
Source: CounterPunch
