Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

Mostly out of step, young people, especially poor minorities and low-income whites, are increasingly inscribed within a machinery of dead knowledge, social relations and values in which there is an attempt to render them voiceless and invisible.

Even the notion that, you know,[Bill] Clinton was the black president strikes me as the greatest irony of all times.

You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.

You can't wait neoliberalism out, because the class war will become more consolidated; the punishing state will increase. They'll increasingly solve problems by putting more people in jail and by criminalizing all kinds of behaviors and by appealing to racist attitudes about immigrants, blacks, minorities. They'll just intensify class warfare, that's all. It'll get to the point where the true nature of the authoritarian state will be obvious.

The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

This is a moment in our history - that we can thank neoliberalism for - that has really destroyed what Hannah Arendt called "the virtue of thoughtfulness."