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.
Henry GirouxWhat is invaluable about Angela Davis work is that she does not limit her politics to issues removed from broader social considerations, but connects every aspect of her scholarship and public interventions to what the contours of a truly democratic society might look like.
Henry GirouxWhen you look at the Koch brothers, who make three million dollars an hour on their dividends alone, you begin to get a sense of what we're talking about. The estimates now are that the upper 1% control something like 40% of all wealth. Eighty families in the world control as much as half the world's population. These figures are being produced every day. We need to put a human face to these figures. We need to make clear that something is being taken from the vast majority of people, and is causing an enormous amount of suffering.
Henry GirouxThey're rights that should be endemic to any democracy. The right to a free quality education, from elementary school right through higher education. The right to have a decent social wage. The right to a decent job. Political rights; the right to vote. These are all parts of the social contract, from the New Deal onwards, that never went far enough.
Henry GirouxWhat has changed about an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society's disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes and stillborn projects.
Henry Giroux