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

Of course, the new domestic paramilitary forces will also undermine free speech and dissent with the threat of force while simultaneously threatening core civil liberties, rights and civic responsibilities.

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.

I also think that one of the things we often fail to realize is that that kind of violence is now legitimated in multiple public spheres.

Ruling elite have think tanks, they have research institutes, they've invaded universities, they've monopolized the cultural apparatuses.

All too often the worst thing that can happen to the young is to depoliticize them. When that happens, not only are young people told that they do not count – your agency is worthless, your experiences are worthless, and your voice should remain silent – but they are also told that there is no alternative to current state of affairs.

In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.