Reply to Henry Giroux by Steven L. Strauss Columbia, Maryland
In the aftermath of the Obama victory, noted radical educator and social critic Henry Giroux published an impassioned and eloquent appeal for progressive people to seize this “unprecedented moment” and work to “form a powerful progressive movement that can push Obama to the left rather than allow him to drift to the center and right” (Henry Giroux, “Obama and the Promise of Education”, Truthout/Perspective, Sunday 16 November 2008, http://www.truthout.org/111608A). Pushing to the left means that “corporate power” must be confronted, and that “the social state has to be resurrected once again against the power and interest of the corporate state.” The tool that this new progressive movement needs in order to advance its left-pushing agenda is the “appeal to thoughtfulness, critique and intelligence”, especially in understanding “the relationship between education and politics.” And, says Giroux, it is now possible to achieve this because the election of Obama “puts the brakes on many authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies operating both domestically and abroad”. He cites Nicholas D. Kristof in characterizing Obama as a “practicing intellectual”, adding that “the era of anti-intellectualism so pervasive under the Bush administration may be coming to an end.” Unfortunately, Giroux’s statement is just so much wishful thinking about the capacity of an Obama administration to carry out a progressive agenda. Giroux ignores not only the contradictions of his own analysis, but the stated positions of Obama himself. He imbues intellectualism with a progressive trait, without recalling that Henry Kissinger, Condaleezza Rice, and countless other architects of corporate power and murder were and still are “practicing intellectuals” as well. Obama has already made it crystal clear where he stands on education. He posted his position on his campaign website, in the form of a commencement speech he gave at Knox College several years back. In other words, he has held this position for most, if not all, of his political life, and nothing in his current program indicates he is about to change. What is Obama’s position on education? It is, quite simply, the neoliberal agenda, as advanced by corporate America and legislated by the corporate state, to use the public school system as a factory to manufacture 21st century workers who will be able to maintain corporate America’s hegemony in the global economy for the foreseeable future. Here is what Obama says: China is graduating four times the number of engineers that the United States is graduating. Not only are those Maytag employees competing with Chinese and Indian and Indonesian and Mexican workers, you are too. If you've got the skills, you've got the education, and you have the opportunity to upgrade and improve both, you'll be able to compete and win anywhere. If not, the fall will be further and harder than it ever was before.
Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let's imagine together what we could do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century. What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy?
In this statement, Obama declares his willingness to participate in the neoliberal agenda – the drive to maintain America as the number one capitalist power in the world by recruiting working people to participate in the game of global competitive insanity played by the bosses, and carried out only in the bosses’ interests. If this agenda did not carry with it the necessity for war, plunder, global misery, and environmental destruction, it would at best be debatable. But Giroux certainly knows that these catastrophes are built into the very nuts and bolts of the system. This neoliberal drive is making it clearer and clearer that children in public schools are being treated by corporate America as just workers in playclothes -- except that play is fast becoming a rare feature of the corporate-driven curriculum, otherwise known as “standards”. The logic of conscripting children into this planetary plunder is just the opposite of what progressive people advocate. NCLB’s corporate model and corporate standards cannot work without rigid accountability, that is, punitive consequences for poor performance. The outcome of NCLB-style accountability must be the blunting of critical, independent thinking. We will therefore wind up turning out generations of young people whose critical thinking edges are dull, not sharp, and whose sense of solidarity is with the handful of glamorized “success stories” rather than with the masses of oppressed people worldwide and at home. Obama is therefore simply the liberal face of corporate America. As a “practicing intellectual”, he will translate corporate America’s agenda for education into a discourse that appeals to progressive people, but which, in the end, will betray the pursuit of democracy. He has demonstrated this stance before and continues to demonstrate it every single day. His transitional economic team is one corporate guru after the next. He supports bailing out Wall Street. His continues to support No Child Left Behind, as if the demagogic appeal to “closing the achievement gap” has anything to do with its real intent – to turn schools into factories that manufacture workers, and to do it in an increasingly cruel and child-abusive manner. These factories will be indistinguishable from the ones that turn out chicken parts and pet dogs. Obama says “we’re all in it together”, a piece of propaganda that is simply another way of saying that what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA. Except that now General Motors is succumbing to the crisis of the capitalist economic system that Obama is charged with saving. Does corporate America have an interest in democracy? Do the interests of private profit in any way coincide with working people’s material interests – for good jobs, quality health care, a clean environment, compassionate education? Does corporate America have any interest in a population that can think critically? If not, then thinking that Obama can be pushed to the left is a delusion, because he has unabashedly declared his allegiance to corporate America and the profit system. What is the force, if not corporate America, that would let Obama “drift to the center and right”, as if he would somehow not be a willing participant in that drifting? And as if his starting point is somewhere on the left. It may be that the people who voted for Obama stand somewhere on the left. But what’s the evidence that Obama does too? What does “everybody’s got a shot at opportunity” mean? This is a fundamental lie, taught in all the schools. Even if it were true, which it certainly is not in this racist, sexist, and homophobic country (and especially in the domain of education), it says nothing more than what we hear when sportswriters declare at the beginning of the season that every team’s got a shot at winning the Super Bowl, or the World Series. In the end, the overwhelming majority won’t get there, no matter how hard they try. They can’t, because the system isn’t set up for that to happen. It has to be a different system for everyone to be a winner. Well, the athletes who don’t make it to the playoffs can just go home. But most working people will still face economic insecurity, unemployment, inadequate health care, mind-numbing school curricula, pollution of the environment, and wars. The task of progressive intellectuals is to recognize the reactionary essence behind Obama’s progressive veneer, to not deny the public record, to not put our heads in the sand, and to not pretend that just because someone is an intellectual, and just because people whose causes we support voted for him, that that means he is anything more than a demagogic, opportunistic misleader. Giroux is absolutely right that we need to “form a powerful progressive movement”. The danger in his reasoning, though, is that cultivates the illusion that Obama can be on our side. This means that many people will interpret the building of such a progressive movement as requiring that we hold back from challenging Obama, that we give him a chance, that we wait to see how he does. The danger is that the progressive movement, precisely because “progressive” Obama is president, will decide to take a long nap. Yes, we need to build a powerful progressive movement. But it must be based on recognizing certain truths – that the fundamental enemy of progressive movements is corporate America and its uncompromising drive for profit at any cost, and that you therefore cannot simultaneously build a progressive movement and support the material interests of corporate America. This is a matter of principle. Obama will drift further to the right than where he is already starting from, because that is the direction corporate America is moving in, and Obama has declared that he is on their side. “We're all in it together” is a reactionary lie, pronounced by America’s new commander-in-chief.
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