As Steven Levitsky
and Daniel Ziblatt note in How
Democracies Die, authoritarianism no longer announces itself with
marching boots or military coups. It now emerges through culture, through the
seductive rhythms of social media, viral spectacles, and the normalization of
cruelty. Today, culture is not just a backdrop to politics and historical
amnesia; it is politics embedded in the erasure of historical memory. It
teaches us how to see, what to remember, whom to fear, and what to forget. In
this age of resurgent authoritarianism, culture functions as a powerful
pedagogy of domination.
We are living through a dismal age, one where
anti-intellectualism is no longer masked, but paraded as a form of virtue. A
fascist monoculture thrives, dull and mechanized, overrun by wooden stuntmen,
empathy-hating billionaires, and artists like Kanye West who unashamedly praise
Hitler. Meanwhile, podcast ventriloquists spew algorithmic bile into the void. In
the ruins of the university, too many so-called leaders and their bureaucratic
accountants now lend legitimacy to what Herbert Marcuse once called “scholarshit,”
a travesty of thought, dressed in the empty rituals of managerial reason,
budget-cutting cruelty, and unapologetic brutality. “Scholarshit'” masquerades
as intellectual discourse while stripping it of genuine engagement with
critical inquiry. It thrives on jargon and pretension, prioritizing form over
substance, and favoring self-congratulatory cleverness over meaningful
argument. In its hollow rhetoric, the complexities of society are reduced to
buzzwords and superficial analyses, its practitioners more concerned with
appearing intellectually sophisticated than engaging in any real critique. This
approach to scholarship fosters intellectual laziness, encouraging an
atmosphere where complexity is simplified, nuance is erased, and true critical
thought is marginalized in favor of what passes for cleverness but lacks depth
or insight. Never has the need for critical education and a shift in mass
consciousness been more urgent. Never has it been more crucial to recognize
education as both a force for empowerment and a powerful mode of
colonization.
In an age when instrumentalism and techno-fascism
dominates the culture, reducing education to mere training and suffocating
pedagogy under the weight of indoctrination, it becomes more urgent than ever
to reclaim the university as a space for reflection, critique, and ethical
imagination. Instrumentalism erases social responsibility, dismisses matters of
justice, and detaches learning from the deeper relations of power. It exchanges
depth for compliance and, in the process, robs education of its emancipatory
promise.
We have witnessed this logic unfold in so-called liberal
movements like "teaching
to the test" and in the ongoing proliferation of Teaching and Learning
Centers, which often reduce education to a toolbox of technical skills. As Ariella Aïsha
Azoulay warns, these practices resemble the workings of "imperial
technologies", systems designed to manage learning without nurturing an
awareness of injustice, to flatten thought, and to detach education from the
struggle for democratic agency and pedagogical citizenship.
Consider Elon Musk, hailed by some as a visionary for
creating Tesla and fueling fantasies of colonizing Mars. Beneath this gleaming
myth, however, lies
a far more disturbing reality. Musk has made Nazi salutes, trafficked in
dangerous conspiracy theories, and, as Michelle
Goldberg noted in The New York Times, exhibits a chilling disdain
for empathy, paired with "breathless cruelty." This cruelty is not
abstract; it manifests in the real world, where the policies Musk champions
have contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Africa.
His power is not merely technological; it is ideological, shaping a culture
that confuses megalomania with genius and elevates indifference to suffering as
a mark of strength. This is more than a collapse of civic literacy, it is a toxic
poison, destroying any vestige of civic consciousness, solidarity, and social
responsibility.
Cruelty has become the currency of power, the measure by
which dominance is asserted and human worth discarded. Bill Gates, in a moment
of moral clarity, acknowledged the gravity of shuttering USAID, conceding that
he “bore the responsibility of risking a resurgence of diseases such as
measles, HIV, and polio.” But his warning grew even more damning when, in The
Financial Times, he described Elon Musk—once heralded as a symbol of
techno-utopian promise—as “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest
children.” Yet even Gates understates the larger architecture of violence at
work. Trump’s so-called “beautiful budget bill” is not merely a policy
document—it is a blueprint for social abandonment, a death sentence rendered in
the language of austerity. It slashes funding for child nutrition programs,
strips health care from millions, and eviscerates what remains of the social
state. In its wake rises a machinery of disposability—a punishing state that
targets the poor, the vulnerable, and people of color, turning the politics of
governance into a war zone where compassion is silenced and suffering
normalized. This is gangster capitalism on steroids--unleashed, utterly devoid
of any social responsibility and drunk on its own greed, power, corruption, and
fascist principles.
This silence speaks to a deeper void in higher education,
one that raises crucial questions about the
burden of conscience in education. It is no longer enough to champion STEM
disciplines while starving the liberal arts and humanities. It is not enough
for humanities students to dwell only in critique, disconnected from the
technological world around them. What we need is a fusion of literacies, a
pedagogy that teaches technical competence without sacrificing moral
imagination; a pedagogy that nurtures civic literacy, historical awareness, the
capacity to think beyond disciplines, and the courage to cross borders of
culture, identity, and thought.
The attacks facing higher
education today are more than a political or economic crisis, they also
speak to a cultural catastrophe, a struggle over civic consciousness, critical
literacy, and the promise of higher education as a
democratic public good. Higher education has become prime target because it
offers the promise to students of pedagogical citizenship—a pedagogy that
enables young people to attentive, critical, knowledgeable, and able to hold
power accountable. That is why higher education is viewed as dangerous to the
authoritarian neanderthals attacking higher education. At the core of the
crackdown on higher education is a project that successfully enables society to
forget how to think, to feel, and to remember, practices that provide a fertile
ground for creating fascist subjects. Under such conditions, grotesque acts become
normalized, children are starved in
Gaza, immigrant families are torn apart, and the horror of state terrorism
fades into the background noise of spectacle and distraction.
And yet, culture remains a vital site of possibility. José
Mujica, former president of Uruguay, reminded us that real change does not
begin with laws or institutions, but with the values that shape how people see
the world. You cannot build a society rooted in justice with individuals
trained to prize greed, selfishness, and domination. As he put it, “You can’t
construct a new kind of future with people whose hearts still belong to the old
one.” The struggle for radical democracy must begin in the realm of culture,
where imagination is nurtured, public conscience awakened, and the seeds of
transformation take root.
Language itself has been hijacked, bent to the will of a
colonizing legacy steeped in hatred, disposability, genocide, and a culture of
unapologetic cruelty. Neo-Nazis march without shame, white supremacists shape
the conservative cultural machinery, and racist policies are no longer
whispered but codified. Nazi salutes are back in fashion. Universities are
increasingly transformed into sites of indoctrination and surveillance, more
attuned to the logic of police precincts than places of critical learning. Students
who dare to protest the genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza are abducted,
vilified, and silenced. The most powerful white nationalist on the planet
parades corruption as a political virtue and deploys state terror as a primary
tool of governance. Solidarity is reconfigured into communities of hate, while
resistance to fascism is rebranded as terrorism. Beneath these crimes against
humanity lies a culture hollowed out by the absence of reason, moral clarity,
and the capacity to hold power accountable. The ghost of fascism has not merely
returned; it has taken up residence and been made ordinary.
The age of lofty visions has been cast aside, discarded like
ideological refuse. Yet without such visions, rooted in the hard labor and
hopeful promise of democracy and the critical function of education, we are
left adrift. In their place stand administrators who act as high-powered
accountants, students shaped by a culture of commodification and conformity,
and a precarious academic labor force paid less than Wall-Mart greeters and
clerks. Meanwhile, racism, white nationalism, and Christian fundamentalism
gather momentum, extinguishing the flickering lights that once illuminated the
path toward a radical democracy. When higher education no longer serves as a
vessel for ethical imagination and collective hope, it becomes complicit in its
own undoing, and with it, democracy itself teeters on the edge.
As educators, we must fight for a vision of higher education
as both sanctuary and catalyst, a place where democracy is not only studied but
enacted, where students are not trained to be efficient machines, but
cultivated into thinking, feeling, and acting human beings. We need an
education in which a culture of questioning is not punished but nurtured, where
talking back is a civic virtue, and where the pursuit of equity and justice is
central to the very purpose of teaching and learning. Such an education must be
grounded in the principles of civic literacy, historical consciousness, and a
systemic understanding of power—one that connects private troubles to public
issues and expands the possibilities for individual and collective agency.
This is the foundation upon which a radical democracy must
be built, and it is the defining pedagogical task of our time. If we fail in
this responsibility, higher education will surrender its role as a vital civic
sphere—one essential to producing the narratives, knowledge, and capacities
that sustain the promise of equality, justice, freedom, and compassion. In
abandoning that mission, it will not merely falter; it will aid in its own
unraveling. And with it, democracy will edge ever closer to collapse.
Donald Trump understands this. That is why he fears critical
education. That is why he wages war on it.
