America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system.

Neoliberalism is vulnerable. When it comes to talking about social provisions, the only argument they have is the argument of barbarians: that social provisions make people dependent, and dependency is an evil, and people have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. And that is such bullshit that it boggles my mind.

It seems to me that as economics drives politics and money markets set policies, what we have is an enormously powerful emergence of both a police state on the one hand and an incredible culture of cruelty on the other. All of the sudden, shared hopes are replaced by shared fears.

Neoliberalism is going to fail by being replaced. The system is entirely broken. Whenever you have a system that equates a market economy with a market society and claims that capitalism is democracy, you've not only got a massive lie being imposed on the people, but you've got the foundation for a form of authoritarianism and a much more intensive form of class warfare.

Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

We're talking about race. It's ideology, it's a mode of policy. It's a practice. And it intertwines with class in a very specific way to create something very distinctive that we see now being legitimated in the United States by fascists who absolutely are unapologetic about what they're saying.

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.