The "Suicidal State" and the War on Youth
10 April 2012
In spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, market fundamentalism has once again assumed primacy as
a dominant force for producing unprecedented inequalities in wealth and income, runaway environmental devastation,
egregious amounts of human suffering and what Alex Honneth has called an "abyss of failed sociality."(1) The Gilded Age is back with big profits for the ultra-rich and large financial institutions and increasing
impoverishment and misery for the middle and working class. Political illiteracy and religious fundamentalism have
cornered the market on populist rage providing support for a country in which, as Robert Reich points out, "the very
richest people get all the economic gains [and] routinely bribe politicians" to cut their taxes and establish policies
that eliminate public goods such as schools, social protections, health care and important infrastructures.(2)
It gets worse. Everywhere we look, the power of the rich and powerful operates to create a "suicidal state"(3) in which regulations meant to restrict their corrupting power are shredded; shamelessly and without apology, they use
their unchecked power to lay off millions of workers while simultaneously cutting the benefits and rights of those on
the job in order to dramatically increase corporate profits. As social protections are dismantled, public servants
denigrated and public goods such as schools, bridges, health care services and public transportation deteriorate, the
current neoliberal social order embraces the ruthless and punishing values of economic Darwinism and a
survival-of-the-fittest ethic. In doing so, the major political parties now reward as its chief beneficiaries the mega
banks, ultralarge financial industries, the defense establishment and big business.
Reinvigorated by the passing of tax cuts for the superrich, the right-wing dominated House of Representatives along with
number of right-wing state governorships have launched an ongoing war on women's rights, the welfare state, workers,
students, and anyone who has the temerity to speak out against such attacks. The corporate-controlled media, especially
Fox News and Clear Channel Communications, emulate the former Soviet Union's version of Pravda, its once laughable
propaganda rag. At the same time, the liberal media is as spineless as it is complicit with existing relations of power
- more willing to compromise with right-wing ideology than exercising civic courage in searching for the truth and
exposing the lies of normalizing power.
Hiding behind the mantle of balance and objectivism, the liberal media is incapable of a discriminating judgment and
moral position and, increasingly, resembles a game show nervously repeating bad jokes, promoting sensationalist stories,
emulating celebrity culture and garnering elevated ratings in order to lure in big money from advertisers.
Neoliberalism is once again imposing its values, social relations and forms of social death upon all aspects of civic
life.(4) One consequence is that the United States has come to resemble a "suicidal state," where governments work to destroy
their own defenses against anti-democratic forces;(5) or as Jacques Derrida has put it, such states offer no immunity against authoritarianism and in fact emulate "that
strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to
immunize itself against its 'own' immunity ... What is put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunity logic," he grimly
stated, "is nothing less than the existence of the world...."(6) Susan Searls Giroux follows up this logic with a series of important questions. She writes:
Since then, I've wondered about the troubling figure of societal suicide. How is it possible that a free and democratic
society, precisely in the act of securing itself, or claiming to secure itself, could quicken its own demise? Where does
the suicidal urge come from - is it a function of a deep, abiding illness in the collective psyche or a fleeting impulse
linked to traumatic loss, or some imagined heroism? Is this really the future we face and, if so, how do we determine
our degree of risk? Do we invoke the same assessment scale used for individual suicides? Gender, for example, is a
factor; males are at greater risk, but how does one determine the gender of a society - by its masculinist inclination?
Evidence of depression is another sign. Does one look to dips in the stock market or consumer confidence indices? Sales
of anti-depressant medications? How about recent suicide attempts? Derrida describes the Cold War as a "first moment," a
"first autoimmunity." Recent significant trauma or loss? Without question. Capacity for rational thinking lost? So it
would seem. Little or no social support? Would loss of global support work here? Going down such a list, the signs don't
look promising.[7]
For over thirty years, the North American public has been reared on a neoliberal dystopian vision that legitimates
itself through the largely unchallenged claim that there are no alternatives to a market-driven society, that economic
growth should not be constrained by considerations of social costs or moral responsibility, that war is a permanent
condition of society and that democracy and capitalism are virtually synonymous.
At the heart of this market-driven regime is materialist and instrumental rationality that sells off public goods and
services to the highest bidders in the private sector, while simultaneously dismantling those public spheres, social
protections and institutions serving the larger society. As economic power succeeds in detaching itself from government
regulations, social costs and ethical considerations, a new global financial class reasserts the prerogatives of capital
and systemically destroys those public spheres - including public and higher education - that traditionally advocated
for social equality and an educated citizenry as the fundamental conditions for a viable democracy.
At the same time, the bloated financial class and their lobbyists do their magic by buying off politicians who are all
too willing to squander the public coffers on wars abroad, while attempting to establish across the globe what can be
called death zones inhabited by drones, high-tech weaponry and increasingly private armies.(8) Andrew Bacivich captures the expanding parameters of this militarized death march in the following commentary. He
writes:
Pentagon outlays running at something like $700 billion annually, the United States spends as much or more money on its
military than the entire rest of the world combined. The United States currently has approximately 300,000 troops
stationed abroad, again more than the rest of the world combined (a total that does not even include another 90,000
sailors and marines who are at sea); as of 2008, according to the Department of Defense, these troops occupied or used
some 761 "sites" in 39 foreign countries, although this tally neglected to include many dozens of U.S. bases in Iraq or
Afghanistan; no other country comes even remotely close to replicating this "empire of bases" - or to matching the
access that the Pentagon has negotiated to airfields and seaports around the world.[9]
Empire now provides the salutes, spectacles and high drama to overlook the predatory violence that shapes domestic
politics. Unfortunately, despite our knowledge of the corrupt profiteering practices that instigated a global financial
meltdown, free-market fundamentalism appears to be losing neither its claim to legitimacy nor its claims on democracy.
On the contrary, in this new era in which we live, consumerism and profit-making are defined as the essence of
democracy, while freedom has been reconceived as the unrestricted ability of markets to govern economic relations free
from government regulation or moral considerations.
As the principle of economic deregulation gradually merges with a notion of unregulated self-interest, one consequence
is that people eager to protect what they believe is their freedom are all too willing to relinquish their power, civil
rights and social protections to unaccountable and unchecked forms of authoritarian corporate and state control. Of
course, since September 2011, the paralyzing fog of depoliticization has been ruptured by the Occupy movement, the roar
of angry workers and of young people who refuse to cede their future to the new oligarchs, bankers, the Koch brothers,
hedge fund managers, Christian extremists and the corporate-controlled liberal and conservative media apparatuses.(10)
As a result of the triumph of corporate power over democratic values - made visible recently in the Citizens United
Supreme Court case that eliminated all controls on corporate spending on political campaigns - the authority of the
state does more than defend the market and powerful financial interests, it also is expanding its disciplinary control
over the rest of society. There is more at work here than, as David Harvey points out, a political project designed "to
re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites"(11); there is also a reconfiguration of the state into what might be called a merging of the warfare and punishing state,
or what I am calling, borrowing a Virilio term, "a suicidal state."(12)
Lending muscle to corporate initiatives, the "suicidal state" becomes largely responsible for managing and expanding
mechanisms of control, containment and punishment over a vast number of public institutions. As a weakened social
contract comes under sustained attack, the model of the prison, along with its accelerating mechanisms and practices of
punishment, emerges as a core institution and mode of governance under the suicidal state - a hyper mode of punishment
creep now seeps into a variety of institutions.(13)
Agencies and public services that once offered relief and hope to the disadvantaged are now being replaced with a police
presence along with other elements of the criminal justice system.(14) The brutal face of the emerging police state is also evident in the attack on young black people, youthful protesters
and "stop and frisk" policies initiated in major urban cities which contain a large black, brown and immigrant
populations. In Bloomberg's New York City, a "Clean Halls" program allows the police to conduct repressive search
policies in private apartment buildings, stopping people in hallways and demanding an ID, and in too many cases
harassing and arresting people needlessly. The extent of the brazenly illegal legalities have prompted Matt Taibbi,
writing in Rolling Stone, to state that he has just discovered that the punishing state is as much as a threat to
democracy than the threat of white-collar corruption. He writes:
"Stories like this 'Clean Halls' program are beginning to make me see that journalists like myself have undersold the
white-collar corruption story in recent years by ignoring its flip side. We have two definitely connected phenomena,
often treated as separate and unconnected: a growing lawlessness in the financial sector and an expanding, repressive,
increasingly lunatic police apparatus trained at the poor and especially the nonwhite poor."[15]
Democracy is on life support and the list of casualties in the war to empty it of any substance is long. We are
witnessing the ongoing privatization of public schools, health care, prisons, transportation, the military, public air
waves, public lands, and other crucial elements of the commons along with the undermining of our most basic civil
liberties. Privatization in this case not only turns public goods over to the savage interests of the corporate elite,
but puts such goods in the hands of market-based fundamentalists who can exercise control over the production of
identities, values, modes of agency and dissent.
Home schooling, vouchers, charter schools and the rhetoric of school choice all serve as code for privatizing public
goods, spheres and non-commodified institutions. Similarly, the bridges between public and private life are being
dismantled, while the market - with its disregard for the complex web of systemic forces that bear down on people's
lives, not to mention its disregard for human life itself - becomes the template for structuring all social relations.
Already disenfranchised by virtue of their age, young people are under assault today in ways that are entirely new
because they now face a world that is far more dangerous than at any other time in recent history. Not only do they live
in a space of social homelessness in which precarity and uncertainty lock them out of a secure future, they also find
themselves living in a society that seeks to silence them as it makes them invisible. Victims of a war against economic
justice, equality and democratic values, young people are now told not to expect too much, to accept the status of
"stateless, faceless and functionless"(16) nomads, a plight for which they alone have to accept responsibility. At best, they are told to assume sole
responsibility for their fate. At worse, they are viewed as unproductive, excess and utterly expendable. But the
discourse of redundancy has a darker side, one that reveals not just a society that is no longer willing to invest in
poor minority and white youth, but also a social order that views many young people as a prime target of its governing
through youth crime complex.
Today's young people inhabit an age of unprecedented symbolic, material and institutional violence - an age of grotesque
irresponsibility, unrestrained greed and unchecked individualism. Youth now constitute a present absence in any talk
about democracy. Their absence or disappearance is symptomatic of a society that has turned against itself, punishes its
children and does so at the risk of killing the entire body politic. The "suicidal state" produces an autoimmune crisis
in which a society attacks the very elements of a society that allow it to reproduce itself, while at the same time
killing off of any sense of history, memory and ethical responsibility.
Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate
private matters into public concerns, what is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of
the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic courage infused by the
principles of social justice. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism which emphasizes a
survival-of-the-fittest ethic, concepts and practices of community and solidarity have been replaced by a world of
cutthroat politics, financial greed, media spectacles and a rabid consumerism. We are witnessing the triumph of
individual rights over social rights, nowhere more exemplified than in the gated communities, gated intellectuals and
gated values that have become symptomatic of a society that has lost all claims to democracy.
The threat to democracy is now overridden by the fear of youth as the other, viewed largely as a threat to authority.
The eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is right in claiming, "Visions have nowadays fallen into disrepute and we tend to
be proud of what we should be ashamed of."(17) Politics has become an extension of war, just as state sponsored violence increasingly finds legitimation in popular
culture and a broader culture of cruelty that promotes an expanding landscape of fear and undermines any sense of shared
responsibility toward others.
As is evident in the recent killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, poor minority youth are not just excluded from "the
American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that no longer considers
them of any value. Such youth, already facing forms of racial and class-based exclusion, now experience a kind of social
death as they are pushed out of schools, denied job-training opportunities, subjected to rigorous modes of surveillance
and criminal sanctions and viewed less as chronically disadvantaged than as flawed consumers and civic felons. Some such
as Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd experience something more ominous - death by homicide.
No longer tracked into either high- or low-achievement classes, many of these youth are now pushed right out of school
into the juvenile criminal justice system.(18) Under such circumstances, matters of survival and disposability become central to how we think about and imagine not
just politics, but the everyday existence of poor white, immigrant and minority youth. Too many young people are not
completing high school, but are, instead, bearing the brunt of a system that leaves them uneducated and jobless and,
ultimately, offers them one of the few options available for people who no longer have available roles to play as
producers or consumers - either poverty or prison. When the material foundations of agency and security disappear, hope
becomes hopeless and young people are reduced to the status of waste products to be tossed out or hidden away in the
global human waste industry.
Not only have social safety nets and protections unraveled in the last thirty years, but the suffering and hardships
many children face have been greatly amplified by both the economic crisis and the austerity policies that are being
currently implemented, with little justification in the current historical moment. Young people now find themselves in a
world in which sociality has been reduced to an economic battle ground over materialistic needs waged by an army of
nomadic, fiercely competitive individuals, just as more and more people find their behavior pathologized, criminalized
and subject to state violence.(19) Youth now inhabit a social order in which bonds of trust have been replaced by bonds of fear. As Zygmunt Bauman puts
it, "Trust is replaced by universal suspicion. All bonds are assumed to be untrustworthy, unreliable,
trap-and-ambush-like - until proven otherwise."(20)
All forms of social solidarity are now abandoned to a free-market fundamentalism logic that has individualized
responsibility and reduced civic values to the obligations of consumer-driven self-interest advanced against all other
larger social considerations and social costs. How else to explain the fate of generations of young people, especially
poor white, brown and black youth, who find themselves in a country which is the world's leader in incarceration, one in
which such youth are considered the nexus of crime.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults,
incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as super predators, pepper sprays them for
engaging in peaceful protests and in an echo of the discourse of the war on terror describes them as "teenage time
bombs."(21) Young people have become the enemy of choice, elevated to the status as an all-pervasive threat to dominant authority.
Instead of nurturing such children, we now taser them, sequester them to dangerous prisons and demonize them in order to
divert our attention from real social problems, while at the same time engaging a public purification through the ritual
of imposing harsh disciplinary practices on them.
Current statistics paint a bleak picture for young people in the United States: 1.5 million are unemployed, which marks
a 17-year high; 12.5 million are without food; and in what amounts to a national disgrace, one out of every five
American children lives in poverty. Nearly half of all US children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food
stamps at some point during childhood.(22) Increasingly, kids are forced to inhabit a rough world where childhood is nonexistent, crushed under the heavy
material and existential burdens they are forced to bear.
The deteriorating state of youth may be the most serious challenge facing educators, social workers, youth workers, and
others in the 21st century. It is a struggle that demands a new understanding of politics, one that demands that we
think beyond the given, imagine the unimaginable and combine the lofty ideals of democracy with a willingness to fight
for its realization. But this is not a fight that can be won through individual struggles or fragmented political
movements. It demands new modes of solidarity, new political organizations and a powerful social movement capable of
uniting diverse political interests and groups. It is a struggle that is as educational as it is political. It is also a
struggle that is as necessary as it is urgent. It is also a struggle that cannot be ignored.
One way of addressing our collapsing intellectual and moral visions regarding young people is to imagine those policies,
values, opportunities and social relations that invoke adult responsibility and reinforce the ethical imperative to
provide young people, especially those marginalized by race and class, with the economic, social and educational
conditions that make life livable and the future sustainable. Clearly such a vision, one that moves beyond what Alain
Badiou has called the "crisis of negation,"(23) which is a crisis of imagination, historical possibility and an aversion to new ideas, can be found in the global
protests of the Occupy movement in North America and other youth resistance movements around the globe. What is evident
in this worldwide movement of youth protests is a bold attempt to imagine the possibility of another world, a refusal of
the current moment of historical one dimensionality, a refusal to settle for reforms that are purely incremental.
The "suicidal state" devalues any viable notion of rationality, ethics and democracy and has given rise to a suicidal
society marked by a culture of cruelty in which the ultimate form of entertainment has become the pain and suffering of
others, especially those considered throwaways, other, or without consumer privileges and rights. High-octane moral
panics, a flight from civic responsibility, extreme callousness and the reproduction of human suffering have become the
by-products of a market-driven society marked by an autoimmunity disease that destroys its own protections against a
creeping authoritarianism.
My emphasis here is on how the "suicidal state" is organized around the primacy of sadistic impulses and how widespread
violence and modes of hyper-punishment now function as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine
pleasure into a mode of sadism that creates the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral
vitality. The prevalence of institutionalized injustice, illegal legalities and expanding violence in American society
suggest the need for a new conversation and politics that address what a just and fair world looks like. We see the
beginning of such a conversation among the protesters who inhabit the Occupy movement. This is a conversation infused by
the need for a new political language that needs to be formulated with great care and self-reflection by intellectuals,
artists, workers, unions, parents, educators, young people, and others whose individual protections and social rights
are in grave danger from the threat of a creeping fundamentalism that spreads its poison everywhere in the body politic.
The rise of the "suicidal state" and its apparatuses of violence have crept into in all aspects of social life, making
clear that too many young people and others marginalized by class, race and ethnicity have been abandoned by American
society's claim to democracy, especially in light of the rising forces of militarism, neoliberalism, religious
fundamentalism and state terrorism. America has become a "suicidal state," prompting a new urgency for a collective
politics and social movements capable of both negating the established order and imagining a new one. In this discourse,
critique merges with a sense of realistic hope and individual struggles merge into larger social movements. Until we
address what Stanley Aronowitz has brilliantly analyzed as our "Winter of Discontent," the "suicidal state" will
continue to engage in autoimmune practices that attack the very values, institutions, social relations and hopes that
keep the ideal of democracy alive.(24)
At the very least, the American public owes it to its children and future generations to begin to dismantle this
machinery of death and reclaim the spirit of a future that works for life rather than the death worlds of the current
authoritarianism, dressed up with a soft edge of the spectacle of consumerism and celebrity culture. It is time for the
99 percent to connect the dots, educate themselves and develop social movements that can not only rewrite the language
of democracy, but put into place the institutions and formative cultures that make it possible. There is no room for
failure here because failure would cast us back into the clutches of an authoritarianism - that while different from
previous historical periods - shares nonetheless the imperative to proliferate violent social formations and a
death-dealing blow to democracy.
Henry A Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies
Department. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and
the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror
(Paradigm, 2010); The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (co-authored with Grace Pollock, Rowman and
Littlefield, 2010); Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2011); Henry Giroux on
Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011). His newest books: Education and the Crisis of Public Values (Peter Lang) and
Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm Publishers) will be published in 2012).
Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
*************
Footnotes:
1. Alex Honneth, "Pathologies of Reason" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 188.
2. Robert Reich, "The Fable of the Century," Robert Reich's Blog (April 6, 2012). Online here.
3. Paul Virilio, "The Suicidal State," in J. DerDerian, ed. "The Virilio Reader" (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), pp. 29-45.
4. Some useful sources on neoliberalism include: Lisa Duggan, "The Twilight of Equality" (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003);
David Harvey, "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wendy Brown, Edgework:
"Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Alfredo Saad-Filho and
Deborah Johnston, eds. "Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader" (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Neil Smith, "The Endgame of
Globalization" (New York: Routledge, 2005); Aihwa Ong, "Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and
Sovereignty" (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Randy Martin, "An Empire of Indifference: American War and the
Financial Logic of Risk Management" (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism" (New York: Knopf, 2007); Henry A. Giroux, "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism" (Boulder: Paradigm
Publishers, 2008); David Harvey, "The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism" (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010) and Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, "The Crisis of Neoliberalism" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2011).
5. Paul Virilio, "The Suicidal State," in J. DerDerian, ed. The Virilio Reader (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
6. Giovanna Borradori, ed, "Autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides - a dialogue with Jacques Derrida," "Philosophy in
a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida" (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2004), p.
94.
7. Searls Giroux, "Generation Kill: Nietzschean Meditations on the University, Youth, War and Guns," in "Academic
Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era," Eds. Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing. (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp.
130-131.
8. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, "The Best Congress The Banks' Money Can Buy," Comon Dreams (April 6, 2012). Online here.
9. Andrew J. Bacevich, "Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War," (New York, N.Y.: Metropolitan Books, Henry
Hold and Company, 2010), p. 25.
10. For an insightful list of some of these anti-democratic forces, see Les Leopold, "Ten Ways Our Democracy is
Crumbling Around Us," AlterNet (April 5, 2012). Online here.
11. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 19.
12. Ibid., Paul Virilio, "The Suicidal State."
13. Anne-Marie Cusac, "Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America," (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2009).
14. There are a number of important books that address this issue, see most recently Michelle Alexander, "The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" (New York: The New Press, 2010).
15. Matt Taibbi, "Bloomberg's New York: Cops in Your Hallways," Rolling Stone (April 5, 2012). Online here.
16. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity Press, 2004), p. 76-77.
17. Zygmunt Bauman, "Introduction and in Search of Public Space," In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999), p. 8.
18. See, for example, Annette Fuentes, "Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse" (New York: Verso,
2011). Also see, Henry A. Giroux, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" (New York: Palgrave, 2010).
19. On the rise of the punishing state, see Loci Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social
Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
20. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (New York: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 92-93.
21. Anne-Marie Cusac, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2009), p. 175.
22. Lindsey Tanner, "Half of US Kids Will Get Food Stamps, Study Says," Chicago Tribune (November 2, 2009), Online here.
23. John Van Houdt, "The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou," Continent, 1.4 (2011). Online here.
24. Stanley Aronowitz, "The Winter of Our Discontent," Situations, IV, no.2, (Spring 2012). Pp. 37-76.