Students need to learn how to unlearn those elements of a market driven society that deform their sense of agency, reducing them to simply consumers or even worse to elements of a disposable population. So we need to understand who controls the means of public education and the larger forms of what Raymond Williams called the cultural apparatuses of permanent education both in terms of the dangers they pose and the possibilities they harbor.

I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.

What we are seeing in cities such as Chicago, Athens and other dead zones of capitalism throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that make critical education and community the center of a robust, radical democracy. This is a challenge for young people and all those invested in the promise of a democracy that extends not only the meaning of politics, but also a commitment to economic justice and democratic social change.

It seems to me that we make a terrible mistake in talking about Trump as some kind of essence of evil. Trump is symptomatic of something much deeper in the culture, whether we're talking about the militarization of everyday life, whether we're talking about the criminalization of social problems, or whether we're talking about the way in which money has absolutely corrupted politics. This is a country that is sliding into authoritarianism.

Clearly, one does not have to give up being an academic, retreat from rigorous research, or renounce the importance of specialization in order to address major social issues. I don't think you give up theoretical rigor by writing in a way that addresses major social concerns and is at the same time accessible to wider informed general audiences.

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.