As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

Marginalized youth, workers, artists and others are raising serious questions about the violence of inequality and the social order that legitimates it. They are calling for a redistribution of wealth and power - not within the old system, but in a new one in which democracy becomes more than a slogan or a legitimation for authoritarianism and state violence.

FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements.

We need a new political language with broader narratives. Such a language has to unravel the pervasive ideological, pedagogical, and economic dynamics of a form of economic Darwinism that now governs much of the world. This system must be demystified, politicized, and recognized for the ways in which it has come to pose a dire threat to democracy.

With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy.