What is distinctive about the U.S. is that higher education is under attack not because it is failing but because it is public. It is now considered dangerous because it has the potential to function as a site where a culture of questioning can operate, the imagination can blossom, and difficult questions can be openly debated and critically engaged.

I think the other side of this is that while the contradictions matter, one of the things that you cannot lose sight of is that even with a guy like [George] Soros the thing that he doesn't question, which does unify that class, is that they don't want to get rid of the capitalist system, they don't see an alternative.

Public values are not only under attack in the United States and elsewhere but appear to have become irrelevant just as those spaces that enable an experience of the common good are now the object of disdain by right-wing and liberal politicians, anti-public intellectuals and an army of media pundits.

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.

You don't have any vestige of democracy in this country. A report recently came out of Princeton University claiming that, of all the policies that have been made in the last thirty years, 95% of them were in the interest of the rich and had nothing to do with what people wanted - basic services, roads, all of that. They called it an oligarchy.

The rise of the punishing state and the governing-through-crime youth complex throughout American society suggests the need for a politics that not only negates the established order but imagines a new one, one informed by a radical vision in which the future does not imitate the present.

It seems to me that we make a terrible mistake in talking about Trump as some kind of essence of evil. Trump is symptomatic of something much deeper in the culture, whether we're talking about the militarization of everyday life, whether we're talking about the criminalization of social problems, or whether we're talking about the way in which money has absolutely corrupted politics. This is a country that is sliding into authoritarianism.