Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

Trump is the living embodiment of the main character in the film American Psycho, a symbol of corporate domination on steroids, an out-of- control authoritarian parading and performing unknowingly as a clown, and as a symbol of unchecked narcissism and a bearer of a suffocating culture of fear. He is the symbol of a failed sociality and a declining social order.

Edward Snowden's real "crime" is that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower people, to get them to think as critically engaged citizens rather than assume that knowledge and education are merely about the learning of skills - a reductive concept that substitutes training for education and reinforces the flight from reason and the goose-stepping reflexes of an authoritarian mindset.

Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.