Neoliberalism eats its own children. Disposability is central to how neoliberalism functions. I would not like to romanticize that, though, by suggesting that it creates dreamers. I would like to suggest that the radical imagination is so powerful, when employed collectively, that people will attempt to find solutions in ways that challenge the very conditions that made them disposable. That's where this sort of thing becomes interesting. We need to be careful about the dreaming quality here.

As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.

Donald Trump's slogan: "Let's make America great again." And when I hear that, that seems to suggest there was a moment in the past when America really was great, you know, when women knew their places, when we could set dogs on black people in Mississippi, when young people went and sit in at lunch counters and were assaulted by others. That's about the death of memory. That's about memory being basically suppressed in a way that doesn't allow people to understand that there were things that happened in the past that we not only have to remember, we have to prevent from happening again.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

Individual interests now trump any consideration of the good of society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual, whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her capacity for personal responsibility.