In the current age of free-market frenzy, privatization, commodification and deregulation, Americans are no longer bound by or interested in historical memory, connecting narratives or modes of thinking that allow them to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. As Irving Howe once noted, "the rhetoric of apocalypse haunts the air" accompanied by a relentless spectacle that flattens time, disconnects events, obsesses with the moment and leaves no traces of the past, resistance or previous totalitarian dangers. The United States has become a privatized "culture of the immediate," in the words of Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni: It is a society in which the past is erased and the future appears ominous. And as scholar Wendy Brown has noted in Undoing the Demos, under the rule of neoliberalism, the dissolution of historical and public memory "cauterizes democracy's more radical expressions."
Particularly now, in the era of Donald Trump, US politics denotes an age of forgetting civil rights, full inclusion and the promise of democracy. There is a divorce between thought and its historical determinants, a severance of events both from each other and the conditions that produce them. The growing acceptance of state violence, even its normalization, can be found in repeated statements by Trump, the leading Republican Party presidential candidate, who has voiced his support for torture, mass deportations, internment camps and beating up protesters, and embraced what Umberto Eco once called a cult of "action for action's sake" - a term Eco associated with fascism. Ominously, Trump's campaign of violence has attracted a commanding number of followers, including the anti-Semitic and former Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke, and other white supremacists. But a death-dealing state can operate in less spectacular but in no less lethal ways. Cost-cutting negligence, malfeasance, omissions, and the withholding of social protections and civil rights can also inflict untold suffering.
Flint provides a tragic example of what happens to a society when democracy begins to disappear.
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