What 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 GirouxUnder the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters, and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are not of their own making, neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that poverty is a deserved condition.
Henry GirouxWhen the dominant media invites the torturers on their programs to defend the nature of torture and then label that as "just another position," these media apparatuses have really sunken into hell. They've become something really vile and despicable. And yet they do it with a smile.
Henry GirouxUnfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.
Henry GirouxThe difference between neoliberalism and fascism or Nazism or other forms of totalitarianism is that it takes questions of ideology seriously. It takes the educational sphere seriously, and it tells people there's no alternative; that market freedom is really freedom in general; that a rabid kind of individualism is all that matters; that as Ayn Rand used to say, "self interest is the ultimate virtue" - and people believe this stuff. Because they have no other discourse.
Henry Giroux