The Post-9/11 Militarization of Higher Education and the Popular Culture of Depravity: Threats to the Future of American Democracy

Abstract

This article argues that the values of militarization are no longer restricted to foreign policy ventures; the ideals of war in a post-9/11 America have become normalized, serving as a powerful educational force that shapes everyday lives, memories, and daily experiences.The military has become a way of life, producing modes of education, goods, jobs, communication, and institutions that transcend traditional understandings of the role, territory, and place of the military in American society. Military values, social relations, and practices now bleed into every aspect of American life.What is distinctive about the militarization of the social order is that war becomes a source of pride rather than alarm, a powerful cultural and pedagogical force in which organized violence is elevated to a place of national honor, recycled endlessly through a screen culture that bathes in blood, death, and war porn. A primitive tribalism now grips American society as its democratic institutions and public spheres become inseparable from the military. The article analyzes how militarization has furthered in the U.S. both an aesthetics of depravity and a culture of cruelty, influencing spheres as seemingly remote from each other as higher education and the broader cultural apparatuses of popular and media culture. The article concludes by pointing to a number of struggles both inside and outside of higher education that need to address the threat of the new militarism.