Youth in a Suspect Society: Education Beyond the Politics of Disposability

Abstract

As the United States becomes increasingly more authoritarian in its role as a national (in)security state, its use of surveillance, its suspension of civil liberties, its plundering of public goods, its assault on the social state, its suspension of basic social services, and its increasing use of torture and pure thuggery on the political level, it has become clear that the current generation of young people are no longer viewed as an important social investment or as a marker for the state of democracy and the moral life of the nation. Young people have become a generation of suspects in a society destroyed by the marriage of market fundamentalism, consumerism, and militarism. This article analyses the various economic and political conditions that relegate youth to the lowest national priority as part of a broader effort to connect the current war against young people to the crisis of democracy itself. At stake here is the ongoing political project of reminding adults of their ethical and political responsibility to future generations and to retheorise the category of youth as a powerful referent for a critical discussion about the long term consequences of current neoliberal policies while also gesturing towards the need for putting into place those conditions that make a democratic future possible. Moreover, the article argues that while young people increasingly become the ‘vanishing point’ of moral debate, it is crucial to revive a discourse of critique and possibility that connects the imperatives of an inclusive democracy with the purpose and meaning of higher education and the role of academics as public intellectuals.