The nature of the issues facing U.S. students is a bit more complicated in the U.S. because the assault on the social state, until recently, has been more incremental [i.e. the stripping of public services and so forth], whereas in Britain with the rise of the conservative-liberal government, it was immediate and bold in its assault on the social state and higher education.

This violence is so pervasive. We see it in our schools, where we have more security guards now than teachers. We see it in California where more prisons are being built than colleges. It goes on and on. We see it in a trillion-dollar war budget, politics becoming an extension of war rather than vice versa. This violence is like a fog. It covers everything.

Donald Trump's slogan: "Let's make America great again." And when I hear that, that seems to suggest there was a moment in the past when America really was great, you know, when women knew their places, when we could set dogs on black people in Mississippi, when young people went and sit in at lunch counters and were assaulted by others. That's about the death of memory. That's about memory being basically suppressed in a way that doesn't allow people to understand that there were things that happened in the past that we not only have to remember, we have to prevent from happening again.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.

The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.

And look, we have young people in this country who are thirty years old living with their parents. We have young people in this country who don't have jobs, who graduate from college and are fed the lie of meritocracy. "You get a degree, you get a job." That's not happening. We have young people who have become the Zero Generation: zero hope, zero employment, zero possibilities. Do we really believe that this young generation is going to stand by and not take note of an economic system that - however it calls itself - has completely betrayed them?