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.

You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.

[Ruling elie] haven't given up on neoliberal ideology, they use it. And I think they've normalized that ideology, the notion that, for instance, that economics should govern all of social life, to such a degree that it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge it.

The ideology of neoliberalism, with its privatization, its deregulation, its emphasis on consumption, its elimination of basically apparatuses that can provide alternative points of view, has been so powerful and so normalized.

The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.

The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.

Trump is the hyperventilating yellow canary in the coal mine reminding us all that social death is a looming threat. He is emblematic of a kind of hyper-masculinity that rules dead societies. He is the zombie with the blond wig holding a flamethrower behind his back. He is the perfect representation of the society of spectacle, with the perverse grin and the endless discourse of shock and humiliation.