In the second edition of Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of
Casino Capitalism, Henry A. Giroux uses the metaphor of the zombie to
highlight how America has embraced a machinery of social and civil death
that chills any vestige of a robust democracy. He charts the various
ways in which the political, corporate, and intellectual zombies that
rule America embrace death-dealing institutions such as a bloated
military, the punishing state, a form of predatory capitalism, and an
authoritarian, death-driven set of policies that sanction torture,
targeted assassinations, and a permanent war psychology. The author
argues that government and corporate paranoia runs deep in America.
While maintaining a massive security state, the ruling forces promote
the internalization of their ideology, modes of governance, and policies
by either seducing citizens with the decadent pleasures of a
celebrity-loving consumer culture or by beating them into submission.
Giroux calls for a systemic alternative to zombie capitalism through a
political and pedagogical imperative to address and inform a new
cultural vision, mode of individual subjectivity, and understanding of
critical agency. As part of a larger effort to build a broad-based
social movement, he argues for a new political language capable of
placing education at the center of politics. Connecting the language of
critique to the discourse of educated hope he calls for the reclaiming
of public spaces and institutions where formative cultures can flourish
that nourish the radical imagination, and the ongoing search for
justice, equality, and the promise of a democracy to come.
