Youth in an Authoritarian Age: Challenging the politics of disposability by Henry

Giroux
Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th
century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has
descended upon the United States. (1) Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of
authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the
political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of
infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking
children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and
subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and
cripple their ability to be imaginative. (2)
Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing antiintellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and
celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who
support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration,
the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others.
There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and
emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and
inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of
violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public
life.
The citizen is now urged to become a consumer, politicians are now mouthpieces
for money and power (3) and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in
the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of
compassion, the commons and democracy itself. Education is no longer viewed as
a public good but as a private right, and critical thinking is no longer valued as a
fundamental necessity for creating engaged and socially responsible citizens.
Neoliberalisms contempt for the social is now matched by an utter disdain for
the common good. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas,
enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange
have been replaced by corporate entities whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing
profit margins and producing a vast commercial culture that tends to function
so as to erase everything that matters.(4)
One outcome of this tangle of forces is that we live at a time in which
institutions that were designed to limit human suffering and indignity and

protect the public from the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist markets have
been either been weakened or abolished. (5) Free market policies, values and
practices, with their now unrestrained emphasis on the privatization of public
wealth, the denigration of social protections and the deregulation of economic
activity, influence practically every commanding political and economic institution
in North America. Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in
unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young
people for short-term political and economic gains.
Nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war on
their children.
Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has come into
view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have
implicitly declared war on their children, offering a disturbing index of societies
in the midst of a deep moral and political catastrophe. (6) Far too many youth
today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to
imagine a life beyond the dictates of a market-driven society or to transcend
the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.
As Jennifer Silva has pointed out, this generation of especially young workingclass men and women are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a
world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support
networks. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs
more frequently and start families later. (7)
Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present;
they are also the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward
mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation
as a whole. (8) It is little wonder that these youngsters are called Generation
Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future, and zero
expectations. (9) Or to use Guy Standings term, the precariat, (10) which he
defines as a growing proportion of our total society forced to accept a life of
unstable labour and unstable living. (11) Too many young people and other
vulnerable groups now inhabit what might be called a geography of terminal
exclusion, a space of disposability that extends its reach to a growing number of
individuals and groups.
The human face of those who inhabit this geography of exclusion has been
captured in a story told by Chip Ward, a former librarian in Salt Lake City, who

writes poignantly about a homeless woman he calls Ophelia, who retreats to the
library because like many homeless people she has nowhere else to go to use the
bathroom, secure temporary relief from bad weather or simply be able to rest.
Excluded from the American dream and treated as both expendable and a
threat, Ophelia, in spite of her obvious mental illness, defines her own existence
in terms that offer a chilling metaphor for her own plight and those of many
others. Ward describes Ophelias presence and actions in the following way:
Ophelia sits by the fireplace and mumbles softly, smiling and gesturing at no one
in particular. She gazes out the large window through the two pairs of glasses
she wears, one windshield-sized pair over a smaller set perched precariously on
her small nose. Perhaps four lenses help her see the invisible other she is
addressing. When her nobody there conversation disturbs the reader seated
beside her, Ophelia turns, chuckles at the womans discomfort, and explains,
Dont mind me, Im dead. Its okay. Ive been dead for some time now. She
pauses, then adds reassuringly, Its not so bad. You get used to it. Not at all
reassured, the woman gathers her belongings and moves quickly away. Ophelia
shrugs. Verbal communication is tricky. She prefers telepathy, but thats hard
to do since the rest of us, she informs me, dont know the rules. (my emphasis)
(12)
Ophelia represents just one of the 3.5 million people who are homeless at some
point in the year in the United States, many of whom use public libraries and any
other accessible public spaces to find shelter. Many are women and children;
they are often sick, disoriented and suffering from substance abuse or mental
health issues, and many are barely able to cope with the stress, insecurity and
dangers they face every day. And while Ophelias comments may be dismissed as
the ramblings of a mentally ill woman, they speak to something much deeper
about the current state of US society and its desertion of entire populations
who are now considered the human waste of a neoliberal economic order.
People who were once viewed as facing dire problems and in need of social
protection are now seen as a problem threatening society. This becomes clear
when the war on poverty is transformed into a war against the poor, when the
plight of the homeless is defined less as a political and economic issue in need of
social reform than as a matter of law and order or when government budgets for
prison construction eclipse funds for higher education.
Problem People

The transformation of the social state into the corporate-controlled punishing

state is made startlingly clear when young people, to rephrase W.E.B. Du Bois,
become problem people rather than people who face problems. Young people,
especially low-income and poor people of color, are now viewed as trouble rather
than being seen as facing troubles. As such, they are increasingly subject to the
dictates of the criminal legal system rather than subject to assistance from
social programs that could address their most basic needs.
If youth were once the repository of societys dreams, that is no longer true.
Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a society that fails to provide for its
youth, the symbolic and real violence waged against many young people reflects
nothing less than a collective death wish especially visible when youth protest
their conditions. As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is near
zero tolerance for democratic resistance and infinite tolerance for the crimes
of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions. (13)
How else to explain the FBIs willingness to label as a terrorist threat youthful
activists speaking against corporate and government misdeeds, while at the same
time the Bureau refuses to press criminal charges against the banking giant
HSBC for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and terrorist
groups linked to al-Qaeda?(14) Equally disturbing are the revelations that the
Department of Homeland Security, which was created in large part to combat
terrorism, has put under surveillance members of the Black Lives Matter
movement who have been organizing against the racist conditions producing
police violence against Black people in the United States. (15)
If youth were once the repository of societys dreams, that is no longer true.
Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned
into a nightmare. Many youth are forced to negotiate a post-9/11 social order
that positions them as a prime target of its governing through crime complex.
Consider the many get tough policies that now render young people criminals,
while depriving them of basic health care, education and social services.
Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the
most important modalities for mediating the relationship of youth to the larger
society, all too evident by the upsurge of zero-tolerance laws in schools along
with the expanding reach of the punishing state in the United States. (16) When
the criminalization of social problems becomes a mode of governance and war its
default strategy, youth are reduced to soldiers or targets not social

investments. As anthropologist Alain Bertho points out, Youth is no longer

considered the worlds future, but as a threat to its present. (17)
Increasingly, the only political discourses available to many young people derive
from privatized regimes of self-discipline and emotional self-management. (18)
Youth are now removed from any meaningful register of democracy. Their
absence is symptomatic of a society that has turned against itself, punishing its
children at the risk of bringing down the entire body politic. What I call the war
on youth emerged in its contemporary forms when the social contract, however
compromised and feeble, came crashing to the ground around the time Margaret
Thatcher married Ronald Reagan. Both were hard-line advocates of a market
fundamentalism, and announced, respectively, that there was no such thing as
society and that government was the problem not the solution to citizens woes.
Within a decade, democracy and the political process were hijacked by
corporations and the call for austerity policies became a cheap copy for
weakening the welfare state, public values and public goods. The results of this
emerging neoliberal regime included a widening gap between the rich and the
poor, a growing culture of cruelty and the dismantling of social provisions. One
result has been that the promise of youth has given way to an age of marketinduced angst, and a view of many young people as a drain on short-term
investments and a threat to untrammelled self-interest and quick profits.
Many young people are being depoliticized because they are struggling just to
survive, not only materially but also existentially.
The war on youth is spreading out across the United States. How else might we
explain the United States turning of schools into training centers, modelling
many after prisons, or promoting the rise of pedagogies of repression such as
teaching to the test and high-stakes testing, all in the name of educational
reform? What is the role of education in a democracy when a society burdens an
entire generation with high tuition costs and student loans? I think David
Graeber is right in arguing, Student loans are destroying the imagination of
youth. If theres a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way
than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your
society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves?
There goes your music. There goes your culture. Were a society that has lost
any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people. (19)
What he does not say is that many young people are also being depoliticized

because they are struggling just to survive, not only materially but also
existentially.
Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy.
What is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of
interpersonal responsibility, a commitment to the collective good, a democratic
notion of the commons, the idea of connecting learning to social improvement
and the promise of a robust democracy dedicated to a full measure of personal,
political and economic rights. Under the regime of a ruthless economic
Darwinism, we are witnessing the crumbling of social bonds and the triumph of
individual desires over social rights, nowhere more exemplified than in the
growth of civic illiteracy, gated minds in gated communities, simplistic
intolerance, atrophied social skills, a culture of cruelty and a downward spiral
into the dark recesses of an oligarchic social order. Children pay most acutely
for this. Consider that the United States is the only country in the world that
has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls
for a commitment to promote and respect the human rights of children,
including the right to life, to health, to education and to play, as well as the
right to family life, to be protected from violence and from any form of
discrimination. (20)
Politics is now driven by a much-promoted hypercompetitive ideology with a
message that surviving in society demands reducing social relations to forms of
social combat. Too many young people today learn quickly that their fate is solely
a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. As
such, politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic
insecurity and anxiety and state-sponsored violence increasingly find
legitimation in the discourses of austerity, privatization and demonization, which
promote anxiety, moral panics and fear, and undermine any sense of communal
responsibility for the well-being of others. The curse of privatization in a
consumer-driven society is intensified by the market-driven assumption that for
young people the only obligation of citizenship is to consume. Yet, there is more
at work here than the mechanisms of depoliticization; there is also a flight from
social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those
social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural
apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society.
As one eminent sociologist points out, Visions have nowadays fallen into
disrepute and we tend to be proud of what we should be ashamed of. (21) For

instance, politicians, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, not only refuse
to apologize for the immense misery, displacement and suffering they have
imposed on the Iraqi people principally Iraqi children but also they seem to
gloat in defending such policies. Doublespeak takes on a new register as
President Obama employs the discourse of national security to sanction a
surveillance state, a targeted assassination list and the ongoing killing of young
children and their families by drones. This expanding landscape of lies has not
only produced an illegal and global war on terror and justified state torture,
even against children; it has also provided a justification for the United States
slide into barbarism after the tragic events of 9/11. Yet, such acts of state
violence appear to be of little concern to the shameless apostles of permanent
war.
The War Against Youth
In what follows, I want to address the intensifying assault on young people
through the related concepts of soft war and hard war. (22) The idea of the
soft war considers the changing conditions of youth within the relentless
expansion of a global market society. Partnered with a massive advertising
machinery, the soft war targets all children and youth, devaluing them by
treating them as yet another market to be commodified and exploited, and
conscripting them into the system through relentless attempts to create a new
generation of hyper consumers.
This low-intensity war is waged by a variety of corporate institutions through
the educational force of a culture that commercializes every aspect of kids
lives, and now uses the internet and various social networks along with the new
media technologies such as smart phones to immerse young people in the world
of mass consumption in ways that are more direct and expansive than anything
we have seen in the past. Commercially carpet-bombed by an advertising industry
that in the United States spent $189 billion in 2012, the typical child is exposed
to about 40,000 ads a year and by the time they reach the fourth grade,
children have memorized 300 to 400 brands.
Many young people, recast as commodities, can only recognize themselves in
terms preferred by the market.
An entire generation is being drawn into a world of consumerism in which
commodities and brand loyalty become both the most important markers of

identity and the primary frameworks for mediating ones relationship to the
world. Increasingly, many young people, recast as commodities, can only
recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market. As the sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman points out, youth are simultaneously promoters of commodities
and the commodities they promote defined as both brands and merchandise,
on the one hand, and marketing agents on the other. (23)
What are the consequences of the soft war? Public spaces have been
transformed into neoliberal disimagination zones, which make it more difficult
for young people to find public spheres where they can locate themselves and
translate metaphors of hope into meaningful action. The dreamscapes that make
up a society built on the promises of mass consumption translate deftly into ad
copy, insistently promoting and normalizing a neoliberal order in which economic
relations now provide the master script for how young people define themselves,
and their relations with others and the larger world.
The data-mining marketers make young people think they count when in fact all
they want to do is count them. (24) The dominant cultures overbearing ecology
of consumption now works to selectively eliminate and reorder the possible
modes of political, social and ethical vocabularies made available to youth. Young
peoples most private experiences are now colonized by a consumerist ethic that
deforms their sense of agency, desires, values and hopes. Trapped within a
spectacle of marketing, their capacity to be critically engaged and socially
responsible citizens is significantly compromised.
The Hard War
The hard war is a more serious and dangerous development for young people,
especially those who are marginalized by virtue of their ethnicity, race, gender,
sexuality and class. The hard war refers to the harshest elements of a growing
youth crime-control complex that operates through a logic of punishment,
surveillance and control. The young people targeted by its punitive measures are
often poor youth of color who are considered failed consumers and who can only
afford to live on the margins of a commercial culture that excludes anybody
without money, resources and leisure time. They are youth considered
uneducable and unemployable, and therefore troublesome, if not a threat to the
existing order.

Poor youth and youth of color become objects of a new mode of governance
based on the crudest forms of disciplinary control.
The imprint of the youth crime-control complex can be traced back to the now
normative practice of organizing life in schools through disciplinary practices
that subject students to constant surveillance through high-tech security
devices while imposing on them harsh and often thoughtless zero-tolerance
policies that closely resemble measures used by the criminal legal system. In
this instance, poor youth and youth of color become objects of a new mode of
governance based on the crudest forms of disciplinary control. Punished if they
dont show up at school and punished even if they do attend school, many of
these students are funnelled into what has been ominously called the school-toprison pipeline. If middle- and upper-class kids are subject to the seductions of
market-driven public relations, working-class youth are caught in the crosshairs
between the arousal of commercial desire and the harsh impositions of
securitization, surveillance and policing.
How else do we explain the fact that in the United States today 500,000 young
people are incarcerated and 2.5 million are arrested annually, and that by the
age of 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime? (25)
What kind of society allows 1.6 million children to be homeless at any given time
in a year? Or allows massive inequalities in wealth and income to produce a
politically and morally dysfunctional society in which 45 percent of U.S.
residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet? (26) Current
statistics paint a bleak picture for young people in the richest country in the
world. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of unemployed
youth was 2.8 million in July 2015; (27) 12.5 million are without food; and in
what amounts to a national disgrace, one out of every five US children lives in
poverty. Nearly half of all US children and 90 percent of Black youngsters will
rely on food stamps at some point during childhood. (28)
What are we to make of a society in which there were more young people killed
on the streets of Chicago since 2001 then US soldiers killed in Afghanistan? To
be more exact, 5,000 were people killed by gunfire in Chicago, many of them
children, while 2,000 troops were killed between 2001 and 2012. (29) What kind
of society is indifferent to the fact that this country sees an average of 92
gun deaths per day [with] more pre-schoolers shot dead each year than
police officers are killed in the line of duty? (30) Near weekly mass shootings

aside, what has flown under the radar is that in the last four years more than
500 children under the age of 12 were killed by guns.
As the war on terror comes home, public spaces have been transformed into war
zones as local police forces have taken on the role of an occupying army,
especially in poor neighborhoods of color, accentuated by the fact that the
police now have access to armored troop carriers, night-vision-equipped rifles,
Humvees, M-16 automatic rifles, grenade launchers and other weapons designed
for military tactics. (31) Acting as a paramilitary force, the police have become a
new symbol of domestic terrorism, shaking down youth of color and Black
communities in general by criminalizing a multitude of behaviors.
The rise of the punishing state and the war on terror has emboldened police
forces across the nation.
This was especially true in the stop-and-frisk policies so widespread under
former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City. In Ferguson, Missouri, the
entire population was subject to a form of legal lawlessness in what can only be
described as a practice of racist extortion. Rather than defined as a population
to be protected, the largely Black citizens of Ferguson were arrested and fined
for being unable to pay their debts, violating trivial rules such as letting their
grass grow too high or jaywalking, all of which made them a prime target for the
criminal legal system. As a result, the police viewed the Black residents of
Ferguson as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down
operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by
any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of
Fergusons citizens had outstanding warrants. (32)
The rise of the punishing state and the war on terror has emboldened police
forces across the nation and in doing so feeds their use of racist violence
against young people of color, resulting in what has been called an epidemic of
police brutality. Sadly, even children are not immune to such violence, as the
killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on November 22, 2014, by a white police officer
has made clear. Even more tragic is the fact that the City of Cleveland tried to
blame the boy for his own death. (33) Rice was holding a BB gun when he was
shot to death by a police officer judged unfit for duty just two years prior. The
killing of Black youth and adults has taken on the image of a cruel sport
suggestive of a police force spiralling downward into a form of authoritarianism
that merges lawlessness with a dangerous form of militarism. (34)

Against the idealistic rhetoric of a government that claims to venerate young

people lies the reality of a society that increasingly views youth through the
optic of law and order, a society that appears all too willing to treat youth as
criminals and when necessary disappear them into the farthest reaches of the
carceral state. What are we to make of a society that allows New York City
Police Department officers to come into a school and arrest, handcuff and haul
off a 12-year-old student for doodling on her desk? (35) Or, for that matter,
school systems that allow a 6-year-old in Georgia and a 5-year-old kindergarten
pupil in Florida to be handcuffed and taken to police stations for having
tantrums in their classrooms? (36) Where is the public outrage when two police
officers called to a day care center in central Indiana to handle an unruly 10year-old decide to taser the child? (37) Or when a school administration allows a
police officer in Arkansas to use a stun gun to discipline an allegedly out of
control 10-year-old girl?
One public response to this incident came from Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for
Taser International Inc., who insisted that a Stun gun can be safely used on
children. (38) -Sadly, this is but a small sampling of the ways in which children
are being punished instead of educated in US schools, especially inner-city
schools. All of these examples point to the growing social disregard for young
people and the number of institutions willing to employ crime-and-punishment
measures that together constitute not only a crisis of education, but the
emergence of a new mode of politics that Jonathan Simon has called governing
through crime. (39)
Stolen Childhoods
Of course, we have seen this ruthless crime optic in previous historical periods,
but at least crime was followed by attempts at reforms and rehabilitation, not
revenge, as characterizes the contemporary criminal legal system. (40) For one
historical example of this broader understanding of crime and punishment, I
want to turn to Claude Brown, the late African-American novelist, who
understood something about this war on youth in its mid-century articulation.
Though his novel, Manchild in the Promised Land, takes place in Harlem in the
1940s and 1950s, there is something to be learned from his autobiographical
novel. Take for example the following passage:

If Reno was in a bad mood if he didnt have any money and he wasnt high hed
say, Man, Sonny, they aint got no kids in Harlem. I aint never seen any. Ive
seen some real small people actin like kids, but they dont have any kids in
Harlem, because nobody has time for a childhood. Man, do you ever remember
bein a kid? Not me. Shit, kids are happy, kids laugh, kids are secure. They aint
scared a nothin. You ever been a kid, Sonny? Damn, you lucky. I aint never been
a kid, man. I dont ever remember bein happy and not scared. I dont know what
happened, man, but I think I missed out on that childhood thing, because I dont
ever recall bein a kid. (41)
In Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown wrote about the doomed lives of his
friends, families and neighborhood acquaintances. The book is mostly
remembered as a brilliant, but devastating portrait of Harlem under siege a
community ravaged and broken by heroin, poverty, unemployment, crime and
police brutality. But what Brown really brought into focus was that the raw
violence and dead-end existence that plagued so many young people in Harlem,
stole not only their future but their childhood as well. In the midst of the social
collapse and psychological trauma wrought by the systemic fusion of racism and
class exploitation, children in Harlem were held hostage to forces that robbed
them of the innocence that comes with childhood and forced them to take on
the risks and burdens of daily survival that older generations were unable to
shield them from.
At the heart of Browns narrative, written in the midst of the civil rights
struggle in the 1960s, is a manchild, a metaphor that indicts a society that is
waging a war on those children who are Black and poor and have been forced to
grow up too quickly. The hybridized concept of manchild marked a liminal space
in which innocence was lost and childhood stolen, and any meaningful sense of
adult agency and autonomy was aggressively compromised. Harlem was a wellcontained, internal colony and its street life provided the conditions and the
very necessity for insurrection. But the many forms of rebellion young people
expressed from the public and progressive to the interiorized and selfdestructive came at a cost, which Brown reveals near the end of the book: It
seemed as though most of the cats that wed come up with just hadnt made it.
Almost everybody was dead or in jail. (42)
Young people are not dissatisfied with democracy but with its absence.

Childhood stolen was not to be salvaged by self-help that shortsighted and

mendacious appeal that would define the reactionary reform efforts of the
1980s and 1990s, from Reagans hatred of government to Clintons attack on
welfare reform and his instrumental role in creating one of the worlds largest
prison systems. (43) At that time, it was a clarion call for condemning a social
order that denied children a viable and life-enhancing present and future. While
Brown approached everyday life in Harlem more as a poet than as a political
revolutionary, politics was embedded in every sentence of the book not a
politics marked by demagoguery, hatred and orthodoxy, but one that made
visible the damage done by a social system characterized by massive inequalities
and a rigid racial divide. Manchild created the image of a society without
children in order to raise questions about the future of a country that had
turned its back on its most vulnerable population.
Like the great critical theorist, C. Wright Mills, Browns lasting contribution was
to reconfigure the boundaries between public issues and private suffering. For
Brown, racism was about power and oppression not ignorance, not fear and
could not be separated from broader social, economic and political
considerations. Rather than denying systemic causes of injustice (as did the
discourses of individual pathology and self-help), Brown insisted that social
forces had to be factored into any understanding of both group suffering and
individual despair. Brown explored the suffering of the young in Harlem, but he
did so by utterly refusing to privatize it, or to dramatize and spectacularize
private life over public dysfunction, or to separate individual hopes, desires and
agency from the realm of politics and public life.
Fifty years later, Browns metaphor of the manchild is more relevant today
than when he wrote the book, and the Promised Land more prescient than ever
as his revelation about the sorry plight of poor children of color takes on a more
expansive meaning in light of the current economic meltdown and the dashed
hopes of an entire generation now viewed as a generation without hope for a
decent future. Youth today are forced to inhabit a rough world where childhood
is non-existent, and they are crushed under the heavy material and existential
burdens they are forced to bear.
Efforts to Break Free
The plight of poor youth of color also extends beyond the severity of material
deprivations and violence they experience daily. Many young people have been

forced to view the world and redefine the nature of their own youth within the
borders of hopelessness, insecurity and despair. There is little basis on which to
imagine a better future lying just beyond the highly restrictive spaces of
commodification and containment. Neoliberal austerity in social spending means
an entire generation of youth will not have access to the decent jobs, material
comforts, educational opportunities or security that was available to previous
generations. These are a new generation of youth who have to think, act and talk
like adults. Many must worry about their family members inability to find work
or about the incarceration of a parent.
In the United States, young people are further burdened by registers of
extreme poverty that pose the dire challenge of food security and access to
even the most basic health care in communities ravaged by those illnesses and
special needs that accrue in impoverished conditions. These young people inhabit
a new and more unsettling scene of suffering, a dead zone of the imagination,
which constitutes a site of terminal exclusion one that reveals not only the
vast and destabilizing inequalities in neoliberal economic landscapes, but also
portends a future that has no purchase on the hope that characterizes a vibrant
democracy.
Educators, individuals, artists, intellectuals and various social movements need
to make visible both the workings of market fundamentalism in all of its forms
of exploitation whether personal, political, or economic [and they] need to
reconstruct a platform and a set of strategies to oppose it. (44) Clearly, any
political formation that matters must challenge the savage social costs that
casino capitalism has enacted and work to undue the forms of social, political and
economic violence that young people are daily experiencing. This will demand
more than one-day demonstrations. Urgently needed are new public spheres in
which there is a resurgence of public memory, civic literacy and civic courage
that is, a willingness to both effectively analyze the structures and mechanisms
of capitalist power [in order] to formulate a sophisticated political response
and the willingness to build longstanding oppositional movements. (45) Traces of
such movements are beginning to emerge in the United States among fast-food
workers and among students protesting crushing debt and police brutality. These
traces are also apparent in the ongoing development of social movements in
countries such as Spain and Greece that are rejecting the harsh neoliberal
austerity policies imposed by the bankers and global financial elite.

We live at a time in which it is more crucial than ever to imagine a future that
does not repeat the present.
In North America, we are seeing important, though inconclusive, attempts on the
part of young people to break the hold of unaccountable governmental and
financial power. This was evident in the Occupy movement, the Quebec student
movement, the Idle No More movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The New York Times recently reported that people all over the world are losing
faith in democracy. What it missed is that young people are not dissatisfied with
democracy but with its absence. In the United States, there is a new political
momentum to reclaim a real democracy, one that provides all Americans with a
liveable minimum wage or guaranteed income; removes money from politics;
reclaims the commons by reversing the pernicious nature of privatization; reins
in the ravaging effects of unfettered casino capitalism; abolishes the bogus
concept of corporate personhood; dismantles the permanent warfare state;
reverses global warming; redistributes wealth in the interest of a vibrant
democracy; nationalizes health care; breaks up the banks; eliminates the
punishing-mass incarceration state; and eradicates the surveillance state, among
other reforms. (46)
This is a language that says that no society is ever just enough and calls for new
collective struggles in the hope of creating a future that refuses to be defined
by the dystopian forces now shaping US society. These reforms are both
profound and instructive for the time in which we live because they point to the
need to think beyond the given, and to think beyond the distorted, marketbased hope offered to us by the advocates of casino capitalism. Such thinking
rooted in the radical imagination is a central goal of civic education, which, in the
words of poet Robert Hass, is to refresh the idea of justice which is going dead
in us all the time. (47)
Current protests in the United States make clear that young people need to
enlist all generations to develop a truly global political movement that is
accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital
technologies, the production of new modes of education and the safeguarding of
places where democratic expression, new civic values, democratic public spheres,
new modes of identification and collective hope can be nurtured and developed.
A formative culture must be put in place pedagogically and institutionally in a
variety of spheres extending from churches and public and higher education to
all those cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of collective knowledge,

desire, identities and democratic values. Crucial to the success of any collective
struggle that matters is the necessity to embrace education as the center of
politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the
imperatives of unfettered free-market capitalism.
There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers
to develop a language of both critique and hope in which people can address the
historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being
waged by the corporate and repressive state, and to make clear that government
increasingly subsumed by global market sovereignty is no longer responsive to
the most basic needs of young people. Nowhere will this struggle be more
difficult than on the education front, a front in which a long-term organizing
effort will have to take place to change consciousness, convince people that
capitalism and democracy are not the same thing and indeed are often in
conflict offer up a new vision of democracy, and create the ideological and
collective momentum to create a broad-based social movement that moves
beyond single-issue politics.
The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nations wealth, shape
the parameters of the social state, steward and protect the globes resources
and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible
members of society is not a rhetorical issue. This challenge offers up new
categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic
justice and politics are to be defined and fought over. This is a difficult task,
but what we are seeing in cities such as New York, Athens, Quebec, Paris,
Madrid and other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the
beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that
make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy.
We live at a time in which it is more crucial than ever to imagine a future that
does not repeat the present. Given the urgency of the problems we face
mounting economic inequality, creeping disenfranchisement, the rise of the
incarceration state, entrenched racism, the expanding surveillance state, the
threat of nuclear destruction, ecological devastation and in the United States,
the collapse of democratic governance I think it is all the more crucial to take
seriously the challenge of Jacques Derridas provocation: We must do and think
the impossible. If only the possible happened, nothing more would happen. If I
only did what I can do, I wouldnt do anything. (48)

My friend, the late Howard Zinn, got it right in his insistence that hope is the
willingness to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.
(49) History is open, and the space of the possible is larger than the one on
display.
Footnotes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
New York: 2001).
2. See, for instance, Andre Spicer, Adults with colouring books, kids with CVs
its a world turned upside down, The Guardian (April 8, 2015). Online:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/adults-colouringbooks-kids-cvs-lego-children
3. According to a Princeton University Study, American is not a democracy but
has devolved into an oligarchy controlled by a financial elite. See, for instance,
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:
Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Perspectives on Politics, 12:3
(September 2014). Online: http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=
%2FPPS
%2FPPS12_03%2FS1537592714001595a.pdf&code=1a1bc2717f1d6a1491f4e
05f6aebbcf2
4. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture,
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 91.
5. This theme is taken up powerfully by a number of theorists. See C. Wright
Mills,The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974); Zygmunt
Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and
Henry A. Giroux,Public Spaces, Private Lives (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
2001).
6. J.F. Conway, Quebec: Making War on Our Children, Socialist Project, EBulletin No. 651, (June 10, 2012). Online:
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/651.php

7. Jennifer M. Silva, Young and Isolated, International New York Times (June
22, 2013). Online: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/youngand-isolated/?_r=0
8. Zygmunt Bauman, On Education, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), p. 46.
9. Zygmunt Bauman, This Is Not A Diary, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), p.
64
10. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, (London, Bloomsbury
Academic, 2011).
11. Sara Mojtehedzadeh, Q&A with precarious work expert Guy Standing, The
Toronto Star, (April 09, 2015). Online:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/04/09/qa-with-precarious-workexpert-guy-standing.html
12. Chip Ward, America Gone Wrong: A Slashed Safety Net Turns Libraries
into Homeless Shelters, TomDispatch.com (April 2, 2007). Online:
http://www.alternet.org/story/50023
13. Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso,
2012), pp. 18-19
14. Matt Taibbi, After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC
Executives Avoid Jail? Democracy Now! (December 13, 2012). Online:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/13/matt_taibbi_after_laundering_8
00_million
15. George Joseph, Exclusive: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter
Since Ferguson, The Intercept (July 24, 2015). Online:
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/24/documents-show-departmenthomeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/
16. See, for example, David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social
Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed
American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009); Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting

(San Francisco: City Lights, 2014); Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable
Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco:
City Lights, 2015).
17. Quoted in Jean-Marie Durand, For Youth: A Disciplinary Discourse
Only,Truthout (November 15, 2009), trans. Leslie Thatcher. Online:
http://www.truthout.org/1119091
18. Jennifer M. Silva, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood In An Age of
Uncertainty, (Oxford Press, New York, NY, 2013), 10
19. Alexander Reed Kelly, David Graeber: There Has Been a War on the Human
Imagination, Truthdig, (August 12, 2013). Online:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/david_graeber_there_has_been_a_war
_on_the_human_imagination_20130812/
20. Steve Straehley, Somalia Ratifies Rights of Children Treaty, Leaving United
States as only Holdout, AllGov.com (October 04, 2015), Online:
http://www.allgov.com/news/us-and-the-world/somalia-ratifies-rights-ofchildren-treaty-leaving-united-states-as-only-holdout-151004?news=857561
21. Zygmunt Bauman, Introduction and in Search of Public Space, In Search of
Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 8.
22. Quoted in Jean-Marie Durand, For Youth: A Disciplinary Discourse
Only,Truthout (November 15, 2009), trans. Leslie Thatcher. Online:
http://www.truthout.org/11190911
23. Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (London: (London: Polity, 2007), p. 6.
24. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyons, Liquid Surveillance, (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2013), pp. 54.
25. Erica Goode, Many in US Are Arrested by Age 23, Study Finds, The New
York Times (December 19, 2011). Online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/nearly-a-third-of-americans-arearrested-by-23-study-says.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

26. Reuters, 45% Struggle in US to Make Ends Meet, MSNBC: Business Stocks
and Economy (November 22, 2011). Online:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45407937/ns/businessstocks_and_economy/#.T3SxhDEgd8E
27. See: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm
28. Lindsey Tanner, Half of US Kids Will Get Food Stamps, Study Says, The
Associated Press (November 2, 2009). Online:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/food-stamps-will-feedhal_n_342834.html
29. Daily Mail Reporter, These kids dont expect to lead a full life: Fears for
Chicago teens as fatal shootings in city outnumber US troops killed in
Afghanistan, Mail Online, UK (June 19, 2012). Online:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161690/Chicago-crime-More-peopleshot-dead-Chicago-killed-duty-Afghanistan.html
30. As Nicholas Kristof points out: Its not just occasional mass shootings like
the one at an Oregon college but a continuous deluge of gun deaths, an average
of 92 every day in America. Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns
than died in all US wars going back to the American Revolution. If that doesnt
make you flinch, consider this: In America, more pre-schoolers are shot dead
each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013),
according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
the FBI. See, Nicholas Kristof, A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths, The New
York Times (October 3, 2015). Online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-a-newway-to-tackle-gun-deaths.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0
31. Taylor Wofford, How Americas Police Became an Army: The 1033
Program,Newsweek (August 13, 2014). Online: http://www.newsweek.com/howamericas-police-became-army-1033-program-264537
32. David Graeber, Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life,
Gawker(March 19, 2015). Online: http://gawker.com/ferguson-and-thecriminalization-of-american-life-1692392051
33. Oliver Laughland, Tamir Rice directly and proximately responsible for own
police shooting death, says city, The Guardian (March 1, 2015). Online:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/01/tamir-rice-directlyproximately-responsible-police-shooting-death-city
34. Rich Juzwiak and Aleksander Chan, Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police,
1999-2014, Gawker (December 8, 2014). Online: http://gawker.com/unarmedpeople-of-color-killed-by-police-1999-2014-1666672349
35. Rachel Monahan, Queens Girl Alexa Gonzalez Hauled Out of School in
Handcuffs after Getting Caught Doodling on Desk, New York Daily News
(February 4, 2010). Online: http://www.nydailynews.com/newyork/education/queens-girl-alexa-gonzalez-hauled-school-handcuffs-caughtdoodling-desk-article-1.194141
36. Rene Lynch, Kindergartner Throws Tantruym at School, Is Handcuffed by
Police, Los Angeles Times (April 17, 2012), Online:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/17/nation/la-na-nn-six-year-oldhandcuffed-20120417 ; and Antoinette Campbell, Police Handcuff 6-year-old
Student in Georgia, CNN.com (April 17, 2012), Online:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/17/justice/georgia-studenthandcuffed/index.html. See also Robert Winnett, Californian 5-year-old
Handcuffed and Charged with Battery, The Telegraph (November 25, 2011).
Online:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8914514/Califor
nian-5-year-old-handcuffed-and-charged-with-battery.html
37. The Associated Press, Officers Suspended after Using Taser on 10-yearold,CBC News (April 1, 2010), Online:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2010/04/01/police-indiana-taserdaycare.html. More recently, see The Huffington Post, Boy Recklessly Tasered
by Police Officer During Career Day, Lawsuit Says, October 31, 2012, Online:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/31/10-year-old-tasered-newmexico_n_2050463.html
38. Quoted in Carly Everson, Ind. Officer Uses Stun Gun on Unruly 10-Year
old,The Associated Press (April 3, 2010). Online:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POLICE_SHOCK_CHILD?
SITE=FLPLA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

39. Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime
Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.
40. See, for instance, Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age
the Great Wealth Gap (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014)
41. Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Signet Books, 1965).
42. Ibid., p. 419.
43. Jeff Stein, The Clinton Dynastys Horrific Legacy: More Drug War, More
Prisons, Salon (April 2015), http://www.alternet.org/drugs/clinton-dynastyhorrific-legacy-more-drug-war-more-prisons
44. Chris Hedges, Tariq Ali: The Time Is Right for a Palace Revolution,
Truthdig(March 1, 2015). Online:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tariq_ali_the_time_is_right_for_a_pala
ce_revolution_20150301
45. Ibid.
46. I have borrowed many of these ideas from the National Endowment for
American Renewal. See the NEAR Foundation Agenda at http://n-e-a-r.org/abroad-agenda/
47. Robert Hass cited in Sarah Pollock, Robert Hass, Mother Jones
(March/April, 1992), p. 22.
48. Jacques Derrida, No One is Innocent: A Discussion with Jacques About
Philosophy in the Face of Terror, The Information Technology, War and Peace
Project, p. 2 available online:
http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/911/derrida_innocence.html
49. Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States (New York: Harper
Perennial; Reprint edition, 2003), p. 634.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission of the author.

HENRY A. GIROUX
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship
in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and the
Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for
Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning. He also is a Distinguished
Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most recent books include Youth in
Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013),Americas Educational
Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013),Neoliberalisms War
on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), The Violence of Organized
Forgetting: Thinking Beyond Americas Disimagination Machine (City Lights,
2014), Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism, 2nd edition (Peter Lang
2014),Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the
Spectacle, co-authored with Brad Evans, (City Lights Books 2015), Dangerous
Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Paradigm Publisher 2015). The
Toronto Star named Henry Giroux one of the 12 Canadians changing the way we
think! He is one of Tikkun's most deep, insightful, and provocative, authors!
This article appeared first in the wonderful daily website of our ally Truth Out
and can be read there also at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33312youth-in-authoritarian-times-challenging-neoliberalism-s-politics-ofdisposability. If you send the link out, please also attach the introduction
written above by Rabbi Michael Lerner (which does not appear on the Truth-Out
website).
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