What's Happening to America

A Forum on the State of the Nation

Frances Fox Piven Peter Hitchcock and Henry Giroux

There is reason to believe that the United States is plumbing the depths of moral and political crisis. The easy response to this claim pins the blame squarely on George W. Bush, and his crooked cronies in the White House. And yet, upon further reflection, the Bush administration seems more a symptom than a cause of the crisis.

Put plainly, our national life has been swept up in its own failures and weaknesses. Our menu of problems should cause concern. To begin with, the rhetoric through which issues of national import should be debated has been whittled to its most base elements, then distorted through the phony prisms of patriotism and national security. Hopes for the resurrection of a meaningful civil rights movement have been likewise suffocated, as the country resists gay marriage, and continues its tradition of segregation behind the mask of public education. Meanwhile, our economy slouches ever-closer to recession while at the same moment millions rush out with their stimulus package buy-offs to purchase iPhones and other momentary satisfactions. And in the international realm, the country’s foreign policy has abdicated any responsibility to future generations, and opted instead to become an adjunct of corporate interests.

Of course, there are millions of citizens who do not consider the present moment worrisome, who are comfortable with the fruits of their American experience, who view the United States as the defender of opportunity, democracy and the exercise of freedom, who regard the idea of moral-political crisis as alarmist, extremist. Many more regard our current condition as the concluding chapter in the nightmare that has been the Bush presidency. They see the last eight years as a bump in an otherwise acceptable historical trajectory. For these observers, the American system–our political methods and institutions–will correct any errors that may have been committed at the ballot box in years past.

Yet throughout the country, the sense that people are frustrated and fed-up has grown palpable. The call for urgent change has been sounded, and people — young and old — have responded. Barack Obama’s groundbreaking presidential run is evidence enough. And still, the demand for change rippling through our nation somehow rings hollow. The question of “change who?” is clear enough. But equally important, and perhaps more challenging, questions have received less attention. Change what? Change where? How?

The Advocate seeks to initiate an intelligent, considered, and provocative debate on these issues. In this, we are not without precedent. Concerned about the direction of national life, and understanding that they stood at a pivotal moment in the country’s history, the editors of The Partisan Review queried prominent intellectuals in ‘67, encouraging responses to a series of questions seeking to understand “What’s Happening to America?” The responses received in 1967 offer a brilliant, often disturbing, glimpse into an America about to be hurled into chaos the following year. That America looks awfully similar to the one we have now.

The turbulence of 1968 marked a proud moment for the American left, but set the country on a course that produced the politics of today. In the words of Michael Walzer, writing in a recent issue of Dissent, 1968 “changed American culture for the better in many ways. But it did not produce a sustainable politics; its institutional legacy is virtually nil. In fact, it contributed to forty years of rightward momentum…Next time, we have to do better.”

With all due respect to Professor Walzer, “next time” is now.

With a reverent nod to the past, and a hopeful eye on the future, we issued a call-to-arms for provocative, informed debate to many of the nation’s brightest, most exciting minds. Needless to say, this call was broadcast across the political spectrum, and we have received a tremendous response. Over the course of this coming semester, if not longer, The Advocate will publish the thoughts of public intellectuals, academics, social activists, and of course, students motivated by the following agenda of suggested questions to focus productive discussion.

1. Does it matter who is in the White House? Or is there something in our system which would force any president to act as any other?

2. What role, if any, do public intellectuals play in American life?

3. Must the American intellectual or artist adapt him or herself to mass culture? If s/he must, what forms can this adaptation take? Or, do you believe that a democratic society necessarily leads to a leveling of culture, to a mass culture which will overrun intellectual and aesthetic values traditionally embraced by American intellectuals and artists?

4. Where in American life can artists and intellectuals find the basis of strength, renewal, and recognition as our new century progresses?

5. What is the biggest open secret in American life?

6. Where do you think our foreign policies are likely to lead us?

7. What, if any, issues do you feel deserve more attention from Barack Obama and/or John McCain in their bids for the presidency?

8. What, in general, do you think is likely to happen in the United States during the next presidential administration?

For our inaugural forum, The Advocate is proud to publish essays by three of the world’s leading authorities on American politics and culture. In her opening essay, France Fox Piven offers the exciting prospect of a significant realignment of American electoral politics in the wake of our November election, a realignment that could render future regimes vulnerable to progressive social movements. But movements for meaningful change, as Peter Hitchcock usefully reminds us in his essay, will undoubtedly crash into the walls of inertia that have come to characterize our country’s economic and political life. If these walls are successfully torn down, credit will certainly be due in large part to our country’s youth, a segment of our population Henry Giroux forcefully argues are increasingly reared on punishment and fear. Together, the three authors combine to deftly illustrate an America at the crossroads of crisis and possibility, a country suffering derailed democracy, and ripe for reconstruction.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN Real Change

The list of our problems in the United States is long. The economy is sliding into recession, and turmoil in the financial sector resulting from reckless antics by managers is spreading, threatening something much worse than recession. Meanwhile, as at the end of the 1920s, the illusion of prosperity is parting to reveal the facts of staggering increases in inequality as the rich become fabulously richer and most working and poor people work harder and longer for less. The corruption of our politics worsens markedly, the result of massive increases in the graft called lobbying, of the manipulation and stealing of elections, and the ever-louder din of propaganda, much of it stemming from government itself. Daring reinterpretations of the constitution whittle away at restraints on presidential power in order to allow the pursuit of rash and unpopular wars by whatever means necessary, including the use of mercenaries, and the practice of torture. The always inadequate regulatory measures of the New Deal that went part of the way toward constraining market actors are chipped away, and so are the economic security programs for the poor, the aged and the unemployed that were inaugurated in the 1930s and expanded in the 1960s. Environmental safeguards are given short shrift as a predatory government allied with corporate power proceeds to privatize the public weal. I could go on, and so could you. We are reaping consequences of four decades of political domination by big business and its rightwing populist allies. The nation as we imagined it is no more, and this means vast uncertainties about our future and, because the United States is so powerful and its footprint so large, the future of humankind.

But wait! A glow of light is on the horizon. It is of course the approach of the 2008 election. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not making fun. In fact I’m desperate for the 2008 election. I think the sheer scale of public disillusion with the Bush administration guarantees large margins of victory for the Democrats in the congressional contests. Of course, the Democratic majorities yielded by the 2006 election led to only feeble efforts to control the bellicose and delusional team in the White House. But larger majorities, especially a veto-proof majority in the Senate, would surely help. So, at the very least the head-long rush over the cliffs of financial breakdown, spreading war, and ecological disaster may be cushioned and slowed. But our problems are truly serious, and we need a president to lead in reversing course and setting new directions, a strong president with good sense, and democratic inclinations. Even more urgently, we need to get rid of the Bush administration, and as soon as possible before yet more harm is done. But public dismay with current policy directions notwithstanding, I don’t think Barack Obama’s victory is by any means assured. I hope of course, but I am worried about stolen votes and rigged computers, the right-wing rumor network, the formidable propaganda machine, and also the residual racism and xenophobia of lots of Americans that this apparatus will tap.

Push all that aside for a moment. My ruminations are, after all about, what we don’t and probably can’t know. Maybe Obama and his team can pull off a victory. Think of the excitement, the exhilaration of the campaign they’ve run so far. Was there ever a better slogan than “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for?” Bush and Cheney can be routed! If they can, it will be in significant part because Obama’s youthful charisma, his mantra of change, and his campaign’s ground strategy are changing the shape of the electorate, making it younger, and darker. This is no mean feat, and a step toward making American politics more democratic.

Americans take pride in being the world’s leading democracy. But in fact we have very low levels of voter participation compared to other developed democracies, and turnout is skewed to over-represent older and better-off whites. The reasons for this are embedded in a history of party competition that relies not only on the fabled democratic process of mobilizing voters, but on party strategies for deterring prospective opposition voters from casting their ballots. Election contests can be won either way, by bringing more voters to the polls, or by preventing the voters who support the opposition from casting their ballots.

The strategies by which vote suppression is accomplished have been crystallized over time in obstructive voter registration and balloting procedures, and are rejuvenated at each election by party machinations to suppress unwanted voters. The result is a constricted electorate that under-represents the young, the poor, blacks and other marginal groups. In effect, not only do the voters pick the parties, but the parties pick the voters. The enormous turnouts of the young and African-Americans in the primary races argue that is changing, spurred by the excitement of the Obama campaign. Grit and enthusiasm can go far to helping people hurdle the barriers created by well-known tactics of long lines, broken machines, obstructive voter registration requirements and harassment at the polls by party operatives and off-duty cops. Moreover, the campaign is not relying on enthusiasm alone but has fielded a massive grass roots voter registration volunteer effort.

OK, so he wins. But once an election is over, voters are not much of a force. In office, anyone with the ego and ambition to run for president is likely to look to accumulate political capital (and star status) in the usual ways and this means bending toward those who have influence, wealth, prestige. Indeed, we’ve seen some of this already in the general campaign, as Obama backtracks and compromises: on FISA, on Iraq, on health care.

However, I think fastening on Obama’s policy statements may miss the point. Think about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic campaign in 1932. His speeches were memorable, and replete with attacks on the “economic royalists” who had brought us the Great Depression. But his platform was overcooked mush, not distinguishable from the platform of 1928. Nevertheless, his rhetoric and the swell of voters surging to Democratic columns, energized social movements and set in motion a process that changed the United States, whether FDR intended it or not. The emerging but still unstable electoral alignment of 1932 created a big new political space in which insurgent movements flourished, nourished by the sense that the new administration could not afford to ignore their demands It was these movements of the unemployed, of the aged, of industrial workers and farmers that actually forced Roosevelt to act on relief and public employment, labor rights and farm supports, and old age pensions. They pressed FDR hard, and because they did, they helped to forge the policy initiatives that we now know as the New Deal.

If turnout remains high, an Obama victory could mean a realignment of American electoral politics around a majority coalition similar to the one forged in the New Deal era, with African Americans and Latinos replacing the white South as the reliable core of the coalition. The composition of this new coalition would encourage presidential rhetoric that in turn could spur movement activism. It would simultaneously generate the hope that is always the fuel of movements from the bottom of society, and it would put in place a regime that is vulnerable to those movements. If there is political salvation in the American future, it can only be forged through the dynamic interplay between progressive social movements and elected politicians.

Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the GC and is the author of numerous books, including The War at Home: the Domestic Causes and Consequences of Bush’s Militarism (2004) Why Americans Still Don’t Vote (2000) and with Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare (1971).

PETER HITCHCOCK “No Problem”

A decade or so ago while living in Taibei I was asked to address a group of Taiwanese Fulbrighters about the United States to which they were heading. I chose to group my comments around a polemical history of space and race. While these were hardly surprising choices, their exact purchase on the political unconscious of American history remains vexed. Most of my listeners got the references, whether to Melville, Jim Crow, the Exclusion Acts, or internment camps, but such history was only obliquely connected to their present. Today, I would still stress the importance of the historical genealogy, but 9/11 has proved a resilient dividing line between what was and what is in American cultural and political life, despite the fact that it has been a flagrant alibi for other agendas. (Thus, to the above, we might add Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Black Sites, the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, the border wall, etc.) Another difference, of course, is that those Taiwanese are more likely heading for direct flights to the mainland than they are the land of “whatever” for edification and rapid accumulation.

There is still plenty of space in the United States but it is a country that feels considerably smaller in its outlook. Suburban sprawl and the growing of grass in deserts still goes on but such lateral exploitation was always dependent on less than 6% of the world’s population being able to consume 25% of its power resources — fossil fuels in particular. The lonely long commute in a seven seat SUV was a natural extension of American pioneer spirit and individualism and it mattered little if the supporting hegemony was secured by the excesses of military or trading might. It was a given, like Superbowl winners being “world” champions. The Advocate Editors ask: “What is the biggest open secret in American life?” My reply would be that this form of American life is absolutely unsustainable. This has been known for a long time of course, but public discourse in this great country is dominated by plausible denial, America’s homegrown derivative that will bundle reality and anxiety as triple A security. It is not that the American dream is more properly defined as American psychosis but there is something compulsive about American denial that hasn’t been seen since, well, the last time an empire found itself naked. In a world of dog-eat-dog capitalism, the American “middle” class (basically those caught between abject poverty at one end and a Netjets subscription at the other: only in America is this a valid sociological, economic or political category) is counting pennies and wondering if debt/asset ratio might actually mean something. The denialists trumpet that a thirteen trillion dollar economy is too big to fail and there is much truth to the idea. Yet one still has the nagging suspicion U.S. credit worthiness is not guaranteed in perpetuity and for the most part its heroic consumer (70% of U.S. economic activity) is maxed out. Space only feels large when one can afford to live in it.

Race drives American identity. Thanks to massive protest, resistance, and laudable civil rights activism American ideals are less encumbered by the awkward discursive binds of the founding fathers. Diversity does not automatically guarantee a diminution of racism, open, implied, or institutionally inclined. It has, however, made the presence of race in American life more creatively agonistic, a place where white supremacism has less and less warped ratio on which to build. The possibility of a Black president must be welcomed in this regard. But even here, Obama’s mixed-race heritage might be just as forcefully foregrounded lest America merely repeat the odious follies of the French Code Noir or one drop rule. There has been much discussion of race trumping gender on the road to the White House and it is an important point. Obama, however, is an exception and in the Senate at least white men appear to trump everything (uh-oh, the warped ratio lives!). Is capital race blind in America? Certainly not, but if you’re going to represent, you better come with a half billion in the wallet. Capital just says “exploit,” so if that means someone who shares the same skin tone so be it. Obama’s payback may be entirely conventional, but of course one dares to “hope.”

Let’s briefly comment further on the crisis economically, politically, and academically. We are witnessing the end of a chronotope; namely, the time/space of American consumer capitalism. This is far from the end of America, or consumer capitalism, but it will be a tough act to follow. Equitable distribution of life on the planet is not around the corner but there is enough global competition to ensure the United States will not be the world’s leading economy for much longer. Who cares? Quality of life is not measured by the most calorie consumption (go US!), energy consumption (go US!) or military power (go US!) but it’s hard to imagine that Americans will be weaned from all you can eat menus, stuff-itis and killing foreigners in the national interest any time soon. Americans are incredibly kind-hearted, but when push comes to shove, they don’t hesitate to warn that “this is my food, my stuff, and my gun so back off or I will eat you, own you, and kill you but not necessarily in that order.” The crippling of this beast, however, is of very serious consequence.

So much of commerce in the world depends on American economic decisions (by which I mean, decisions with respect to America, not necessarily the acts of Americans) that the nature of the crisis must be understood through the eye of America’s role. The denialists, stung by the somewhat truncated nature of the “new American century” as well as an inkling that global warming might not be a communist plot, may place less faith in the end of history as one in the win column of American triumphalism but they still cling to message repetition as the truth serum of the hour. Capital likes that repetition but American capitalists have long since abandoned the idea that accumulation must itself be American for the wealthy to get even more obscenely wealthy. An individual may still need a passport, but exotic financial instruments and mundane species of bank accounts are slippery on questions of nation and nationalism, especially where the dreaded t-word (taxes) is to mind. The problem is not the omniscience of strategic nationalism but whether other global players of this breed can get by if America is perceived as the land of diminishing returns. Will they ask for debt to be paid (China and Japan, for instance, hold oodles of U.S. bonds)? Will the phantom international community, including demonstrably American surrogates like the IMF and the World Bank, call for urgent and painful “structural adjustment”? If, as Noam Chomsky has suggested, the United States displays more than a few symptoms of the failed state, who in their right mind would dare suggest intervention? No, the thinking goes, America has cleaned so many other people’s houses it must be left (for fear of nuclear annihilation) to clean its own. And, since even amateur economists know the nostrums of the Federal Reserve are much over blown, the world is a bit jittery about long-term prognoses.

The political institutions of the United States have formed a beacon for global democracy yet even here there are systemic issues that will not right themselves. After the dubious presidential elections of 2000 (the Supreme dysfunction) and 2004 (“that fall I heard the drumming, democracy dead in Ohio”) you would think that the world’s election observers would flock by the hundreds to validate the coming election. The US political establishment, however, is very proud of its broken machine (and machination) even if it produced the worst president in US history, so the rot will remain (different counting machines, flagrant redistricting, the annulment of meaning to votes outside swing states, etc.). The decay is most evident in the survival of the Electoral College and in campaign finance; the latter is the baldest statement yet devised by humans on economic power determining social policy. Taking private money out of public decisions is tantamount to treason and flies in the face of privatization in general.

Privatization. It is the solution to all that is decrepit in the public sphere and yet its cure is poison (the original meaning of the Pharmakon). The academy itself becomes a pharmacy in this respect. Higher education is where the American dream comes full circle. Harvard College incorporated (America’s oldest corporation) and the history of the American academy became one of incorporation. It has taken quite some time but public institutions of learning have learned to privatize. In CUNY we have nurtured an administration that equates fiscal responsibility with private investment. We can rightly claim this lesson derives from city and state directives and changed (e)valuations of public education. Still, it has wrought incalculable effects on the “business” of teaching. That CUNY gets by with less and less is well known so its leaders must all be accumulators first (often directly from the financial community) who must treat public education as primarily a calculus of profit and loss. Along the way public higher education has moved from a sign of social health to one in which it is an adjunct of excellence, one that, without its excellent adjuncts, would surely dive into Chapter Eleven. The crass exploitation of adjuncts in public education is not the last stand of privatization (that would be virtualization) but deprofessionalization is the academy’s cruelest trick and condemns large numbers of otherwise highly-trained intellectuals to a job that is barely one and even greater numbers of undergraduates to a system in which they are customers not learners. When Chomsky talks of the failed state, he must mean this too. But of course the travesty of public education is also an arena of plausible denial.

This affects the politics of race deeply, not just because public education has often nurtured those that racism would otherwise spurn but because it flattens or depreciates the positive gains around race America has achieved in general. If my Taiwanese Fulbrighters shuddered to consider the meaning of race in American history, the prospect of a black or mixed-raced president must count as a tremendous advance for an America that only just beat South Africa to reform. Commentators have been quick to elaborate the continued complexity of race, despite Obama’s symbolism of creative change. His candidacy points to differences on race between political generations but also to the nuance of class in that emergence. The nation of immigrants continues to be quite picky about who among them has the right to represent them. And if the response to Katrina is the stuff of failed states, no one could have missed the primary constituencies who were subjected to failure. It is said that in under forty years whites in the United States will represent less than half the population and, while it would be incautious to proffer socio-political and economic change purely on the basis of demographics (after all, apartheid was the product of a white minority) it should strengthen the argument for a radical recasting of American identity as at one with global difference generally.

The means of change, however, are more complicated still. As I have indicated, there is a certain inertia in the economic and political life of the United States that is highly resistant to the closing down of all that made W possible. The two party game is no better than a one party game in this respect and the economic barriers alone will keep really new newcomers out of the fray. Radical theory now abhors party politics which has made it easier to deride both theory and third party options (denialism is not the monopoly of the Heritage Foundation). The political and economic hegemony may be suffering but is largely intact. Meanwhile, the political possibilities emergent in new media technology appear pinned to a rather nostalgic subjectivity: I-phone, Wii, You-tube, My-space, etc. The role of the public intellectual has been reduced to “Twitter,” and “viral video” simply has more alliteration than “advertising.” If the revolution is to be text-messaged would the people need to control bandwidth first? Is the flash mob a flash in the pan? If we find ourselves with GPS isn’t someone finding us too? New organizational tools are being privatized as fast as they are being socialized. And information overload can produce quiescence as efficiently as ignorance. The vocation of the public intellectual is far from dead but her voice barely registers above noise as existential doxa.

Edward Said provocatively suggested that “the [public] intellectual’s provisional home is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solutions. But only in that precarious exilic realm can one first truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then go forth to try anyway.” One does not require actual exile to engage this task, nor does one only need theories of space and race to fathom America. A significant problem in the current crisis, however, is what is left of the public domain and would this America trust the intellectual to speak in it? At a time when certain banks may have to be nationalized to save them we might assert the same remedy for the public university (at a fraction of the cost). The reason we can laugh at this idea is itself symptomatic of the crisis. And when laughter is precarious we will be left to enjoy our symptom in silence.

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at the Graduate Center, and teaches in the Certificate Programs in Women’s Studies and Film Studies. His books include: English Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice (1989); Dialogics of the Oppressed (1993); Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1998); and Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (2003). His Latest book, The Long Space, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press next year.

HENRY A. GIROUX Youth and the Crisis of the Future

While there is little question that the United States — with its burgeoning police state, its infamous status as the world leader in jailing its own citizens, and its history of foreign and domestic “torture factories” — has, over the last eight years, moved into lockdown (and lockout) mode both at home and abroad, it is a mistake to assume that the George W. Bush administration is solely responsible for this transformation. Such claims risk reducing the serious social ills now plaguing the United States to the reactionary policies of the Bush regime — a move which allows for complacency as Bush’s reign comes to a close on January 20, 2009. The complacency caused by this sense of immanent regime change fails to offer a truly political response to the current crisis because it ignores the extent to which Bush’s policies merely recapitulate Clinton era social and economic policy. What the United States has become in the last decade suggests less of a rupture than an intensification of a number of already existing political, economic, and social forces that have unleashed the repressive anti-democratic tendencies lurking beneath the damaged heritage of democratic ideals. What marks the present state of American ‘democracy’ is the uniquely bipolar nature of the degenerative assault on the body politic, which combines elements of unprecedented greed and fanatical capitalism with a new kind of politics more ruthless and savage in its willingness to abandon — even vilify — those individuals and groups it renders disposable. Nowhere is this intensified assault more evident than in what might be called the “war on youth,” a war that constitutes not only attempts to erase the democratic legacies of the past, but disavows any commitment to the future.

Any discourse about the future has to begin with the issue of youth because young people inevitably embody the projected dreams, desires, and commitments of their society. Lauded as a symbol of hope for the future while scorned as a threat to the existing social order, youth have become objects of ambivalence caught between contradictory representations, discourses, and spaces of transition. Pushed to the margins of political power within society, youth nonetheless have become a central focus of adult fascination, desire, and authority, especially in the realm of popular culture. Increasingly denied opportunities for self-definition and political interaction, youth are transfigured by representations, discourses and practices that subordinate the language of individual freedom, social power, and critical agency.

At stake here is not merely how American culture is redefining the meaning of youth, but how it constructs children in relation to a future devoid of the moral and political obligations of citizenship, social responsibility, and democracy. As their identities are constructed primarily within the language of the market and the increasingly conservative politics of media culture, contemporary youth appear unable to constitute themselves through a defining generational referent that gives them a sense of distinctiveness and vision, as did the generation of youth in the 1960s. Of course, the relations between youth and adults have always been marked by strained generational and ideological struggles, but the new economic and social conditions that youth face today, along with the callous indifference to their spiritual and material needs, suggest a qualitatively different attitude on the part of many adults toward American youth — one that indicates simply that the young have become our lowest national priority. Put bluntly, American society at present exudes both a deep rooted hostility and chilling indifference toward youth, reinforcing the dismal conditions that young people are increasingly living under. The hard currency of human suffering that impacts children is evident in some astounding statistics that suggest a profound moral and political contradiction at the heart of our culture: for example, the rate of child poverty actually rose in 2004 to 17.6 per cent, boosting the number of poor children to 12.9 million. In fact, according to McClatchy newspapers “[a]bout one in three severely poor people are under age 17.” Moreover, the Seattle Times reports children make up 26 per cent of the total population but constitute an astounding 39 per cent of the poor. Just as alarming is the fact that 9.3 million children in America lack health insurance and millions lack affordable child care and decent early childhood education. Sadly, the United States ranks first in billionaires and defense expenditures and yet ranks an appalling twenty-fifth in infant mortality. As we might expect, behind these grave statistics lies a series of decisions that favor economically those already advantaged at the expense of the young. Savage cuts to education, nutritional assistance for impoverished mothers, veterans’ medical care, and basic scientific research, are often cynically administered to help fund tax cuts for the already inordinately rich.

This inversion of the government’s responsibility to protect public goods from private threats further reveals itself in the privatization of social problems and the vilification of those who, for whatever reason, fail to thrive in this vastly iniquitous social order. Rather than investing in the public good and solving social problems, the state now punishes those who are caught in the downward spiral of its economic policies. Consequently, the implied contract between the state and its citizens has been broken, and social guarantees for youth, as well as civic obligations to the future, have vanished from the public agenda. Within this utterly privatizing market discourse alcoholism, homelessness, poverty, joblessness, and illiteracy are not viewed as social issues, but rather as individual problems — that is, such problems are viewed as the result of a character flaw or a personal failing and in too many cases such problems are criminalized. In this sense black youth are especially disadvantaged. Not only do a mere 42% who enter high school actually graduate, but they are increasingly jobless in an economy that does not need their labor. Marked as a surplus and disposable population, the New York Times reports that “black American males inhabit a universe in which joblessness is frequently the norm [and] over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates in their 20s who were jobless has ranged from well over a third to roughly 50 percent.”

Under the reign of ruthless neoliberal politics with its hyped-up social Darwinism and theatre of cruelty, the popular demonization of the young now justifies responses to youth that were unthinkable 20 years ago, including criminalization and imprisonment, the prescription of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric confinement, and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons. School has become a model for a punishing society in which children who violate a rule as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell. Such was the case recently in Florida when the police handcuffed and arrested 6-year-old Desre Watson, who was taken from her kindergarten school to the Highlander County jail where she was fingerprinted, photographed for a mug shot, and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors. Her crime? The six-year old had thrown a tantrum in her kindergarten class. Couple this type of domestic terrorism with the fact that the United States is the only country that voted against a recent United Nations resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children under the age of 16. Moreover, it is currently the only nation that locks up child offenders for life. A report issued in 2007 by the Equal Justice Initiative claims that “there are 73 Americans serving [life] sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.”

Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order. Youth within the last two decades are increasingly represented in the media as a source of trouble rather than as a resource for investing in the future and are increasingly treated as either a disposable population, cannon fodder for barbaric wars abroad, or defined as the source of most of society’s problems. The attack on youth and its related effects are best exemplified in various representations of youth that shape the contemporary political landscape of American culture. Every society creates images and visions of those forces that threaten its existence and how a society understands its youth is partly determined by how it represents them. Popular representations, in particular, constitute a cultural politics that shapes, mediates, and legitimates how adult society views youth and what it expects from them. Such representations produced and distributed through the mass media in sites such as television, video, music, film, publishing, and theater, function as a form of public pedagogy actively attempting to define youth through the ideological filters of a society that is increasingly hostile to young people. All of these sites make competing claims on youth and their relation to the social order. Images of youth, especially in popular culture, invoke not simply a discourse of political and social responsibility, but also bear witness to a cultural politics in which the struggle over meaning is, in part, defined as the struggle over identity, agency, and power. And it is precisely in the name of such a struggle that images of youth must be constructed by, with, and for young people within public spheres that not only take justice, equality, and democracy seriously, but also give substance to social movements willing to develop democratic struggles in which the lives of young people matter.

We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance. But power as a form of domination is never absolute and oppression always produces some form of resistance. For these reasons, the collective need and potential struggle for justice should never be underestimated even in the darkest of times. To confront the war on young people, we need to create the conditions for multiple collective and global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as the measure of democracy. Fortunately, more and more young people nationally and internationally are mobilizing in order to fight a world dominated by corporate interests and struggling to construct an alternative future in which their voices can be heard as part of a broader movement to make democracy and social justice realizable. As Hannah Arendt insisted, making human beings superfluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and the war against youth and critical education suggests a new form of authoritarianism is ready to take over if we cannot work together to develop a new politics, a new analytic of struggle, and, most important, a renewed sense of imagination, vision, and hope. We live in a historic moment of both crisis and possibility, one that presents educators, parents, artists, and others with the opportunity to take up the challenge of re-imagining civic engagement and social transformation, but these activities only have a chance of succeeding if we also defend and reinvigorate the pedagogical conditions that enable the current generation of young people to nurture thoughtfulness, critical agency, compassion, and democracy itself.

Henry A. Giroux is Professor and Global Television Network Chair in cultural studies at McMaster University, Ontario Canada. Giroux’s many books include: Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling (1997). The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, (2007) and most recently Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008).