Henry Giroux Counterpunch
Marx famously observed that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” With Stephen Miller’s elevation to the highest corridors of political power, history threatens to repeat itself as farce converted to catastrophe. The ghosts of fascism are no longer confined to the past. They have found new life in a regime that fans the flames of racial hatred, corruption, accelerating inequality, organized cruelty and the militarization of public life central to governing.
Coming on the heels of MAGA’s devastating electoral defeat, Miller’s appointment as Trump’s White House chief of staff should end any remaining illusions about the forces governing the United States. To describe him merely as a “fiery hard-liner,” as the New York Times has done, is to conceal the danger. He is a doctrinaire ideologue, fiercely anti-communist, contemptuous of democratic compromise, and openly hostile to those who challenge his authority. He revels in ramped-up confrontation, dismissing Democrats as “extremists, freaks, and America-hating lunatics.” He is the chief architect of a vast propaganda machinery that turns politics into an endless spectacle of outrage, resentment, and cruelty. His worldview is imprisoned within an iron cage of ideological certainty, impervious to criticism, unmoved by reason, and unrestrained by any sense of moral responsibility.
He speaks in the barren language of commands, barking orders and spewing ideological drivel whenever he steps before the cameras, as if the sheer force of his fanatical certainty could silence every challenge to his authority. For Miller, political opponents are not adversaries to be debated but enemies to be defeated, punished, crushed, and, whenever possible, jailed. His politics are rooted in a doctrine of permanent war and a twisted vision of revenge, waged against anyone who challenges his authority or refuses to submit to his ideological demands. His answer to dissent is not persuasion but coercion. John Harwood notes that Miller “calls adverse judicial rulings…‘legal insurrection’.”
For Miller, democratic dialogue is an object of contempt. Devoid of empathy, he embodies a politics of cruelty that turns the machinery of state repression into an instrument of domination. His contempt for historical consciousness and his profound anti-intellectualism are evident in his ideologically driven attacks on democratic education, creativity, critical thought, and the emancipatory power of the imagination. But they also reveal something more chilling: an intellectual vacancy, a programmed rigidity of thought that reduces political language to threats and ideological dogma.
What remains is a barren world of deadening certainties, stripped of moral imagination and consumed by what Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls an “annihilating nihilism,” one that extinguishes ethical responsibility and creates the conditions in which modern-day monsters flourish. For Miller, this nihilism finds its political expression in fantasies of omnipotence and the creation of zones of abandonment, where state violence, incarceration, and punishment become the defining instruments of governance. His political record embodies a disturbing convergence of white nationalism, fascist politics, gangster capitalism, systemic racism, and an insatiable appetite for domination and state violence.
His promotion makes clear that the Trump regime has learned nothing from the voters who repudiated its white nationalist and racist politics. Rather than retreating, Trump is doubling down on repression. The message is unmistakable: an electoral defeat will not deter a regime determined to consolidate its authoritarian power. As David Smith wrote in The Guardian, “Donald Trump just gave the middle finger to millions of American voters…. It was a declaration of war.” Kurt Bardella describes Miller as “the id to Trump’s authoritarian impulses.” Joe Lowndes in a Facebook post rightly argues that under Miller the Trump regime is “likely … to accelerate the brutal deportation machine. It likely also means that they will come after the antifascist left much harder than they have, which they see as the first line of defense for immigrant rights, trans rights, reproductive rights, labor rights, etc.” Permanent repression is the guiding ethos of the Trump/Miller regime.
Even some of Trump’s hard-line supporters recognize the political cost of the policies Miller champions. As one critic within the MAGA camp put it, “the reason the GOP lost across the board [on Tuesday] is because of the [immigration] enforcement that Stephen Miller was pushing.” Rather than confront the political repudiation of his policies, Trump retreats into his familiar refuge of lies and conspiracy theories, once again claiming that the election was rigged. His response to defeat is not reflection but denial, not a retreat from authoritarianism but a renewed determination to intensify it. More ominously, his refusal to accept defeat appears to be giving way to threats of political vengeance. As Thom Hartmann reports, Trump used his social media platform to denounce Democratic members of Congress as “extortionists,” demand their imprisonment, and call on the Justice Department to investigate them. Electoral defeat, it seems, has only deepened Trump’s willingness to turn the machinery of state power into an instrument of political revenge.
Miller’s worldview is built on a core set of authoritarian assumptions: that presidential power should face few restraints, judges who interfere are enemies, dissent is disloyalty, and immigrants are threats to be expelled. Miller has openly advocated suspending habeas corpus, a fundamental constitutional safeguard against unlawful detention, while advancing immigration enforcement policies that would suspend due process and the rule of law. His language of white nationalism and racial purification, his obsession with brute force, and his willingness to turn state power against vulnerable populations evoke some of the darkest chapters of a fascist past. His contempt for democratic restraints was laid bare in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, when he declared: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” For Miller, power is not a public trust bound by ethical responsibility, but a singular instrument of domination, stripped of moral restraint and emptied of any obligation to the common good.
Miller’s toxic influence now extends across the machinery of American power. He has pushed Trump’s lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean, helped weaponize federal power against political opponents and universities, and played a central role in the federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. His poisonous influence seeps into the arteries of American power, from the border to the university, from the streets of American cities to the killing fields of the Caribbean. Running through these assaults is the fascist logic of a state that criminalizes dissent, renders human lives disposable, and turns violence and repression into instruments of political domination.
The Anatomy of Authoritarian Cruelty
Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger documents the principal place of cruelty in Miller’s political formation. His political vision is shaped by a relentless hostility toward those deemed undesirable, an embrace of state violence, and a willingness to turn human suffering into an instrument of political power. What emerges from Guerrero’s account is the portrait of a ruthless political operative whose ideological commitments and policies evoke some of the darkest chapters of authoritarian history. In Miller’s political universe, democracy is stripped of its moral and political substance, while racial hatred, the glorification of violence, the demonization of vulnerable populations, and the demand for unquestioning obedience threaten to become organizing principles of the Trump regime. This is the terrain on which fascist passions take root.
Miller’s cruelty is not confined to his policies; it also finds expression in a public persona marked by ideological fanaticism, arrogance, and contempt for those who challenge him. Accounts from former colleagues portray him as deeply abrasive and condescending, a figure whose hostility toward others has alienated even some of his political allies. His political language reveals a similar disposition: an intolerance of dissent, a rigid division of the world between enemies and loyalists, and a vindictive impulse to humiliate those he regards as inferior. What makes Miller particularly dangerous is the fusion of this authoritarian temperament with the immense powers of the state. His disdain for others is translated into public policy, his ideological rigidity into demands for obedience, and his hatred of those he deems inferior into a machinery of organized punishment and terror.
For Miller, personal ruthlessness and political fanaticism reinforce each other. His role in Trump’s family-separation policy and his reported demand for inhumane ICE detention facilities reveal a politics in which the suffering of others becomes an instrument of domination. As the United States moves toward what John Ganz describes as a partial fascist state, Miller emerges in Ganz’s chilling formulation as our Nazi “prime minister.”
In Miller’s public bearing, fascism is more than ideology or a set of hateful policies; it is carved into the very architecture of his body, hardened into a posture of absolute command, emotional desolation, and a profound contempt for human vulnerability. His public demeanor evokes a cold, relentless machinery, his rigid bearing and metallic speech suggesting a disturbing absence of warmth or spontaneity. The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich might have recognized in this image what he called character armour: a rigid psychic shell formed through repression, manifesting itself in physical stiffness, emotional withdrawal, and the suppression of spontaneity. Miller stands as a haunting metaphor for this condition, his ideological fanaticism seemingly hardened into a suffocating second skin. He is the spectacle of authoritarianism made flesh, a disturbing reminder that fascism is never merely a system of political beliefs. It is also a way of inhabiting the world. It is a learned, embodied hostility toward difference, vulnerability, and the very possibility of human solidarity.
The historical echoes are impossible to dismiss, though the difference in scale and circumstances matter. Miller’s defense of mass deportations, family separation, racialized immigration restrictions, white Christian nationalism, and the weakening of constitutional protections recall some of the governing practices through which Nazi Germany transformed prejudice into state policy. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 institutionalized a racial hierarchy of citizenship,while the Nazi regime’s expansion of police powers enabled detention without judicial review. Miller’s campaign against birthright citizenship, his support for transferring immigrants to foreign prisons, and his defense of aggressive ICE raids that have terrorized communities, ripped families apart, and swept people into detention without due process are not simply attacks on constitutional rights.
These policies are part of a larger Gestapo-like politics of fear, racial hatred, and organized brutality, in which the state turns its powers of repression against those it has marked as enemies or rendered disposable. Miller is a principal architect of what can only be described as a politics of domestic terrorism, in which the threat of abduction, imprisonment, deportation, and even death becomes an instrument of state-sanctioned terror, aimed at Muslims, immigrants, and entire communities. The objective is not simply punishment or terminal exclusion, but the manufacture of fear as a means of enforcing obedience, crushing resistance, and making state brutality a permanent condition of everyday life. In this instance, punishment is used as a public spectacle.
Perhaps nowhere is Miller’s moral depravity and sheer propensity for evil more evident than in his war on immigrant children. He helped engineer a policy that tore children, including infants, from their parents, consigning them to government shelters while their parents were often sent to ICE prisons, often without any clear path to reunification. Their suffering was not an accident of policy; it was part of its purpose. Nor did his cruelty end there. Miller “met with Texas’s Republican legislators and asked them why they hadn’t passed a bill that banned undocumented children from public schools.” He also sought to turn records of migrant children and their relatives into tools of immigration enforcement.
A society can be judged by how it treats its children, for in their lives it reveals the moral worth of its institutions, its commitment to democratic ideals, and the future it is willing to defend. By that measure, America’s treatment of immigrant children represents a profound moral failure. Miller’s war on children is part of a larger politics of cruelty that extends beyond America’s borders, linking the terror inflicted on immigrant families at home to the devastating consequences for children of U.S.-backed military violence abroad, most visibly in Gaza. What emerges is a politics in which even childhood offers no refuge from the machinery of state violence.
The historical circumstances and scale may differ, but the authoritarian logic is unmistakable. Under Trump, the law is increasingly stripped of its role as a safeguard against arbitrary power and turned into a weapon of political persecution. State violence is given the appearance of legality, while the Department of Justice risks becoming an instrument of political vengeance, wielding the power of prosecution against perceived enemies. What emerges is a chilling inversion of justice: the institutions entrusted with defending democratic rights become instruments for crushing them. Pinochet’s Chile offers another historical warning about the authoritarian logic underlying Miller’s politics.
Under Pinochet, national security became the ideological justification for transforming political opponents into enemies of the state. The regime’s secret police, DINA, carried out arbitrary arrests, torture, forced disappearances, and assassinations, while the military dictatorship systematically dismantled democratic institutions. Miller’s characterization of immigrants as invaders, his attacks on political opponents as domestic extremists, including members of the Democratic Party, his call to use ICE thugs in enforcing immigration policies, and his willingness to circumvent due process evoke this authoritarian playbook.
The United States has not replicated the scale of Pinochet’s system of organized disappearances and political murder, but the comparison illuminates the danger of treating entire populations as enemies whose rights can be suspended in the name of national survival. The lesson of Chile is that state terror does not begin with the disappearance of thousands. It begins when governments cultivate a political culture in which fear replaces justice, obedience becomes patriotism, and the exercise of unchecked power is presented as the defense of civilization.
Roy Cohn supplies a closer American genealogy. Cohn taught Trump the politics of intimidation, calculated falsehoods, moral corruption, and contempt for democratic institutions that Trump would later make his own. Cohn dissolved the boundaries between truth and falsehood while making a mockery of ethics and civic responsibility. But Miller is not simply another ruthless fixer. He is an ideological architect of a governing apparatus that transforms racial resentment into public policy, dehumanization into administrative practice, and state violence into a spectacle of national renewal. Where Cohn perfected a style of power, Miller gives it institutional permanence. He is more than a Cohn-like consigliere; he is a driving force behind an authoritarian project in which the state becomes an instrument for punishing those deemed unworthy, excluded from the orbit of white Christian nationalism, or unwilling to surrender their freedom, dignity, and political agency to the demands of authoritarian power.
The Culture That Makes Fascism Possible
We live in a time when monsters no longer hide in the shadows. They speak from the commanding heights of power, dressing cruelty in the language of patriotism and law. Toni Morrison understood the violence concealed within such language. In her Nobel lecture, she described what she called “dead language,” a language that does not merely justify oppression but becomes an instrument of violence itself. As she warned, oppressive language “does more than represent violence; it is violence.” Miller’s political rhetoric offers a disturbing illustration of Morrison’s insight. His language of invasion, criminality, national purity, and internal enemies does more than demonize vulnerable populations; it prepares the moral and political ground for their punishment, exclusion, and disposability. It dresses the violence of racial exclusion in the respectable language of patriotism, turns state repression into a defense of national security, and conceals the brutality of domination beneath the moral vocabulary of law, order, and national renewal. Such language makes the unthinkable appear reasonable and state-sanctioned brutality a measure of political virtue. To paraphrase Theodor Adorno, it “shackles consciousness,” “speaks the language of false escape,” and turns its contempt for democracy into a spectacle of vulgarity and domination.
Yet to make Miller the whole story would be to misunderstand the conditions that produced him. Fascism did not arrive outside a society’s history. Sarah Churchill observes that fascism has deep roots in America and often has its “own local identity,” echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s insight that Jim Crow white supremacy could itself be regarded as a form of fascism. Indeed, Nazi jurists studied America’s Jim Crow laws and racial citizenship restrictions as they developed the legal foundations of the Nuremberg race laws. Fascism grows out of that history, nourished by its silences, unacknowledged cruelties, and enduring structures of racial domination. It does not emerge from the ambitions of demagogues alone; it requires a culture that prepares people to accept the unacceptable, a political economy that renders human beings disposable, and institutions that surrender their moral authority. It demands a culture that undermines any vestige of civic consciousness, civic literacy, dangerous memories, and imagination itself. Miller’s rise is rooted in this history, nourished by decades of neoliberal gangster capitalism, the erosion of solidarity, and a ruling class and tech-media elite that profit from civic ignorance. Together, they sustain a disimagination machine that transforms resentment, hatred, and cruelty into political identities.
Miller is the product of a regime of pedagogical terror. As I have noted in Assassins of Memory, culture is not simply a reflection of authoritarian transformation. It is one of its most powerful educational forces. It instructs people whom to fear, whose suffering to ignore, whose lives matter, and whose humanity can be erased without moral consequence. The cultural apparatuses that reproduce these lessons remain deeply embedded in institutions of political and economic power, including media platforms controlled by reactionary financial elites. Electoral victories alone cannot dismantle these structures or the political identities they sustain.
The United States need not be declared a fully fascist state to recognize the fascist features already visible in its national politics: the concentration of executive power, the criminalization of dissent, systemic corruption, racial scapegoating, the militarization of everyday life, and the systematic assault on democratic institutions. Waiting for some final, unmistakable arrival of fascism is itself a form of political blindness. Its ideological assumptions and cultural machinery are already being normalized; its practices are made ordinary before our eyes.
Between Crisis and Catastrophe: The Politics of Resistance
The distinction between crisis and catastrophe is decisive here, one that is essential to understanding the historical moment in which we find ourselves. A crisis lays bare the contradictions of an existing order, reveals the forces responsible for its failures, and opens the possibility of collective resistance and transformation. Catastrophe begins when those contradictions seem permanent, when historical memory weakens and people lose the capacity to imagine a different future. Catastrophe also produces a pedagogy of powerlessness in which the intolerable becomes normalized and resistance appears futile. This is precisely the political and cultural terrain on which fascism thrives. Its power rests not only on repression, but on convincing people that there is no alternative to the world it has created. Yet resistance is not confined to the United States.
Across Europe, young people are refusing a politics of resignation. Student protests in France, sustained resistance to authoritarianism and corruption in Serbia, and mobilizations elsewhere have challenged austerity, racism, militarism, and a political economy that steals the future while demanding obedience from those it abandons. These movements are not simply expressions of anger at corrupt politicians or failed policies. At their most radical, they represent a moral and political awakening, a refusal to surrender the future to a capitalist order that treats young people as disposable and democracy as an obstacle to the accumulation of wealth and power. Their significance lies not only in their demands, but in their insistence that history remains unfinished, that collective agency still matters, and that the existing order is neither natural nor inevitable.
What these young people understand, and what the American political establishment has abandoned, is that democracy cannot be reduced to elections or the changing of political leaders. It is an ongoing struggle over power, justice, equality, and the promise of freedom. In reclaiming politics as an act of sustained collective resistance, they reject the pro-business policies, hollowed-out social state, and manufactured helplessness imposed by authoritarian culture. Their struggle reminds us that defeating fascism requires more than removing its leaders. It demands new forms of solidarity, collective agency, and political movements capable of dismantling the economic and cultural structures that give it life.
When Civilization and Barbarism Coexist
The defeat of fascism at the ballot box does not mean its defeat as a culture, a structure of power, or a way of organizing everyday life. The same society that mobilizes democratic resistance against Trump’s authoritarianism continues to sustain the economic interests, political institutions, and cultural forces that make fascism possible. Democratic aspirations coexist with organized viciousness, appeals to human rights accompany American support for Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza and the West Bank, and the language of freedom is mobilized to legitimate repression.
The deeper contradiction is that electoral resistance to fascism can coexist with an unwillingness to confront the capitalist order that nourishes it. Rejecting fascist politicians does not necessarily mean challenging the structures of domination that produce them. Walter Benjamin’s warning that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism speaks directly to this contradiction. Cultural refinement, democratic rhetoric, and moral self-congratulation offer no protection against violence when divorced from ethical responsibility and the struggle over power. The question is not whether a society celebrates freedom, but whether it confronts the structures that make freedom a privilege for some and disposability the fate of others.
The electoral repudiation of Trumpism may have opened a breach in the machinery of authoritarian power, but it has not dismantled that machinery. Even with Democrats controlling Congress, the presidency retains formidable powers, particularly over immigration, foreign policy, and the instruments of state enforcement. Miller’s ascent to the center of executive power raises the possibility that Trumpism, even in electoral defeat, may enter an even more punitive phase.A wounded political movement, increasingly detached from the public’s rejection of its authoritarian politics, clings to the delusional belief that state-engineered violence, organized cruelty, and political revenge still command the allegiance of the American people. Such a movement mistakes the capacity to inflict suffering for the ability to command consent, and the exercise of raw power for political legitimacy.
With this contradiction in mind, I return us to the distinction between crisis and catastrophe. The question is whether resistance to authoritarianism can transform political crisis into a struggle against the structures of power that threaten catastrophe. Historical memory, critical pedagogy, and civic courage are indispensable, but only when joined to collective action. Without political organization, culture risks becoming an elegy for a world we have surrendered the power to change. The challenge is not merely to remember the horrors of fascism, but to turn that memory into a political force capable of preventing their return.
Miller’s ascent shows how deeply authoritarianism has entered the American state. Yet the struggles unfolding across the United States and beyond show that its victory is not assured. Fascism seeks to close history, extinguish hope, and make domination appear eternal, reducing the present to an inescapable fate.Those taking to the streets are refusing that verdict. They are insisting that the future has not yet been written and that capitalism’s brutality is not humanity’s destiny.
The choice before us is not between managing the crisis and surrendering to catastrophe. It is between allowing fascism and gangster capitalism to decide the limits of human possibility, or building the collective power to make justice, equality, solidarity, and human dignity the foundations of democratic life. Around the globe, young people, workers, and others are rising against a poisonous system of global gangster capitalism that renders them disposable and robs them of a future. There can be no compromise with a system whose very survival depends on organized brutality, state terrorism, exploitation, and disposability. As Arundhati Roy insists, the task is to “terminate with extreme prejudice” the forces that sustain such barbarism. What is needed now is not the reform of a system built on injustice, staggering inequalities, and environmental destruction, but a collective struggle to dismantle its foundations and reclaim the future as a space of democratic possibility, human dignity, and human emancipation.
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. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
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