The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

I know she [Hillary Clinton] comes out of a legacy with her husband in which the Democratic Party did more, it seems to me, to subjugate blacks to the dynamics of oppression, poverty. The mass incarceration state.

Schools should be democratic public spheres. They should be places that educate people to be informed, to learn how to govern rather than be governed, to take justice seriously, to spur the radical imagination, to give them the tools that they need to be able to both relate to themselves and others in the wider world. I mean, at the heart of any education that matters, is a central question: How can you imagine a future much different than the present, and a future that basically grounds itself in questions of economic, political and social justice?

Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.

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.

The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.