Introduction: Expendable Futures: Youth and Democracy at Risk

Abstract

In spite of the almost unprecedented financial and credit crises gripping the United States, the legacy of jaded excess lives on as both a haunting memory and an ideological register that continues to shape contemporary politics. After all, it was only a few years ago that it was widely recognized, if not celebrated, that the New Gilded Age and its updated “‘dreamworlds’ of consumption, property, and power” had returned to the United States with a vengeance.2 The exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues publicly invoked and celebrated the period in nineteenth-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic, and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even the New York Times ran a story in the summer of 2007 that contained not only a welcome endorsement of Gilded Age greed but also praise for a growing class of outrageously rich chief executives, financiers, and entrepreneurs, described as “having a flair for business, successfully [breaking] through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal” and using “their successes and their philanthropy [to make] government less important than it once was.”3 But there was more at work in these examples of Gilded Age excess than a predatory narcissism, a zany hubris, and a neofeudal worldview in which self-interest and the laws of the market were seen as the only true measure of politics.KeywordsYoung PeopleSocial ContractPublic SphereCivil LibertySocial InvestmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.