Democracy is on life support in the United States. Throughout the social order, the forces of predatory capitalism are on the march. Their ideological and material traces are visible everywhere — in the dismantling of the welfare state, the increasing role of corporate money in politics, the assault on unions, the expansion of the corporate-surveillance-military state, widening inequalities in wealth and income, the defunding of higher education, the privatization of public education, and the war on women’s reproductive rights. As Marxist geographer David Harvey, political theorist Wendy Brown, and others have observed, neoliberalism’s permeation is achieved through various guises that collectively function to undercut public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, public institutions and public spheres are first downsized, then eradicated. When these important sites of democratic expression — from public universities to community health care centers — vanish, what follows is a serious erosion of the discourses of justice, equality, public values, and the common good. Moreover, as literary critic Stefan Collini has argued, under the regime of neoliberalism, the “social self” has been transformed into the “disembedded individual,” just as the notion of the university as a public good is now repudiated by the privatizing and tomistic values at the heart of a hyper-market-driven society.We live in a society that appears to embrace the vocabulary of “choice,” which is ultimately rooted in a denial of reality. In fact, most people experience daily an increasing limitation of choices, as they bear the heavy burden of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, a racist justice and penal system, the conversion of schools into detention centers, and a pervasive culture of violence and cruelty — all of which portends a growing machinery of social death, especially for those disadvantaged by a ruthless capitalist economy. Renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz is one of many public intellectuals who have repeatedly alerted Americans to the impending costs of gross social inequality. Inequality is not simply about disproportionate amounts of wealth and income in fewer hands, it is also about the monopolization of power by the financial and corporate elite.As power becomes global and is removed from local and nation-based politics, what is even more alarming is the sheer number of individuals and groups who are being defined by the free-floating class of ultra-rich and corporate powerbrokers as disposable, redundant, or a threat to the forces of concentrated power. Power, particularly the power of the largest corporations, has become less accountable, and the elusiveness of illegitimate power makes it difficult to recognize. Disposability has become the new measure of a neoliberal society in which the only value that matters is exchange value. Compassion, social responsibility, and justice are relegated to the dustbin of an older modernity that now is viewed as either quaint or a grim reminder of a socialist past.A regime of repression, corruption, and dispossession has become the organizing principle of society in which an ironic doubling takes place. Corporate bankers and powerbrokers trade with terrorists, bankrupt the economy, and commit all manner of crimes that affect millions, yet they go free. Meanwhile, across the United States, citizens are being criminalized for all sorts of behaviors ranging from dress code infractions in public schools to peaceful demonstrations in public parks. As Michelle Alexander has thoroughly documented in her book The New Jim Crow, young men and women of color are being jailed in record numbers for nonviolent offenses, underscoring how justice is on the side of the rich, wealthy, and powerful. And when the wealthy are actually convicted of crimes, they are rarely sent to prison, even though millions languish under a correctional system aimed at punishing immigrants, low-income whites, and poor minorities.An egregious example of how the justice system works in favor of the rich was recently on full display in Texas. Instead of being sent to prison, Ethan Couch, a wealthy teen who killed four people while driving inebriated, was given ten years of probation and ordered by the judge to attend a rehabilitation facility paid for by his parents. (His parents had previously offered to pay for an expensive rehabilitation facility that costs $450,000 a year.) The defense argued that he had “affluenza,” a “disease” that afflicts children of privilege who are allegedly never given the opportunity to learn how to be responsible. In other words, irresponsibility is now an acceptable hallmark of having wealth, enabling the rich actually to kill people and escape the reach of justice. Under such circumstances, “justice” becomes synonymous with privilege, as wealth and power dictate who benefits and who doesn’t by a system of law that enshrines lawlessness. In addition, moral and political outrage is no longer animated by the fearful consequences of an unjust society. Rather than fearing injustice at the hands of an authoritarian government, nearly all of us define our fears in reference to overcoming personal insecurities and anxieties. In this scenario, survival becomes more important than the quest for the good life. The American dream is no longer built on the possibility of social mobility or getting ahead. Instead, it has become for many a nightmare rooted in the desire to simply stay afloat and survive.One consequence of the vicissitudes of injustice is the growing number of people, especially young people, who inhabit zones of hardship, suffering, exclusion, and joblessness. As renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has stated, this is the zero generation — a generation with zero hopes, jobs, or future possibilities. The plight of the outcast now envelops increasing numbers of youth, workers, immigrants, and a diminishing middle class. They live in fear as they struggle to survive social conditions and policies more characteristic of authoritarian governments than democratic states. Indeed, Americans in general appear caught in a sinister web of ethical and material poverty manufactured by a state that trades in suspicion, bigotry, state-sanctioned violence, and disposability. Democracy loses its character as a disruptive element, a force of dissent, and an insurrectional call for responsible change. In effect, democracy all but degenerates into an assault on the radical imagination, reconfigured as a force for whitewashing all ethical and moral considerations. What is left is a new kind of authoritarianism that thrives in such a state of exception, which in reality is a state of permanent war. A regime of greed, dispossession, fear, and surveillance has now been normalized.The ideological script recited by the disciples of neoliberalism is now familiar: there is no such thing as the common good; market values provide the template for governing all of social life, not just the economy; consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship; a survival-of-the-fittest ethic should govern how we think and behave; militaristic values should trump democratic ideals; the welfare state is the arch enemy of freedom; private interests should be safeguarded, while public values wane; law and order is the preferred language for mobilizing shared fears rather than shared responsibilities; and war becomes the all-embracing organizing principle for developing society and the economy.As individual responsibility has been promoted as a weapon in order to tear up social solidarities, experiences that once resonated with public purpose and meaning have been transformed into privatized spectacles and fragmented modes of consumption that are increasingly subjected to the surveillance tactics of the military-security state. The endpoint is the emergence of what the late British historian Tony Judt called an “eviscerated society” — “one that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities” integral to any viable democracy. This grim reality has produced a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips society of any democratic ideals and renders its democratic character inoperative.Neoliberalism succeeds, much like authoritarian regimes of the past, through the efforts it expends in the production of desires, identities, values, and modes of identification aligned with its worldview and values. Its adherents are increasingly produced by, and in turn reproduce, forms of neoliberal public pedagogy. And these new modes of pedagogy are distributed through a variety of educational sites and cultural apparatuses that call into being subjects defined exclusively by market-driven values and the priori-tization of commercial values over public values. This is why it is crucial that American educators continue to address important social issues and to defend democratic modes of pedagogy, which must include mounting a spirited defense of higher education as a democratic public sphere or public good. The power of the imagination and critical reasoning, the willingness to dissent, and the capacity to hold power accountable — historically fostered by sites of higher learning — constitute a major threat to authoritarian regimes. Yet, it is increasingly the case that many institutions of higher education fail to take a position against the neoliberal state, instead defining themselves as part of a larger neoliberal rationality and social order.Under the reign of neoliberalism, the university is turning into a modern-day version of the sweatshop for adjunct and non-tenured faculty. A university without a proper faculty and governance structure cannot be a university wedded to democratic values and education for empowerment and autonomy. On the contrary, it is a site of reactionary power where all vestiges of critical thinking and exchange are wiped out. Under such circumstances, education becomes obsessed with accountability schemes, redefining students as consumers, deskilling faculty, governing through the lens of a business culture, and dumbing down the curriculum by substituting training for a critically informed education. How else to explain the following comment made by the president of Macomb Community College? “Macomb is working with the federal government and other community colleges to better prepare students for the world that exists, not the world they want to live in.” And how else to explain the attempts in Florida, Texas, and other states to defund the humanities and reward those disciplines and programs that blatantly serve corporate interests? Increasingly, it appears that the ideological assault waged by a range of religious, economic, and political fundamentalists on the university, which began during the radicalization of U.S. colleges in the 1960s, is now almost complete.As South African novelist J.M. Coetzee puts it:This assault on the [independence of universities] commenced in the 1980s as a reaction to what universities were doing in the 1960s and 1970s, namely, encouraging masses of young people in the view that there was something badly wrong with the way the world was being run and supplying them with the intellectual fodder for a critique of Western civilisation as a whole.What has become clear in the last forty years is that illegitimate corporate rule has moved from occupying the state to dismantling all those public spheres over which it does not have full control, including higher education. Harnessing higher education to the demands of the warfare state and the needs of corporations has become normalized, fixated in the fog of common sense. If neoliberalism succeeds in reducing higher education to nothing more than job training, then imagination will be effectively banished from a once vibrant site of critical engagement.The current crisis in public and higher education has made it alarmingly clear that educators, artists, intellectuals, and youth need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources — financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological — to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and other cultural workers are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now-transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject the deliberate blurring of market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. Nothing will change unless the Left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of neoliberal oppression. In the current historical moment, politics must involve not only the struggle over power and economics, but also the struggle over particular modes of subjectivity and agency.Resisting the neoliberal assault on politics, education, and culture means developing forms of subjectivity capable of challenging casino capitalism and other anti-democratic forces, including the growing trend simply to criminalize social problems such as homelessness. What is needed is a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond the “dream world” of capitalism, beyond the socioeconomic institutions that produce ever-widening circles of misery, suffering, and immiseration. In opposition to the conservative assaults on critical thinking and the power of the imagination, it is crucial for educators, intellectuals, young people, artists, and others to resurrect the formative cultures necessary to challenge the various threats being mobilized against the very ideas of justice and democracy, while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, social relations, and politics. At stake here is the educative nature of politics itself, and the development and protection of those institutions that make such a politics possible.In both conservative and progressive discourses today, education is often narrowed to the teaching of pre-specified subject matter and stripped-down skills that can be assessed through standardized testing. The administration of education is similarly confined to a set of corporate strategies rooted in an approach that views schooling as merely a private act of consumption. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of education to an adjunct of corporate and neoliberal interests — which have no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility, or the demands of citizenship — a critical approach to education illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power. Critical forms of pedagogy raise questions regarding who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge. Is the production of knowledge and curricula in the hands of teachers, textbook companies, corporate interests, the elite, or other forces? Central to the perspective informing critical pedagogy is the recognition that education is always implicated in power relations because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. Critical pedagogy matters because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to oneself, others, and the larger world. This unsettling process is what English professor Kristen Case has called “moments of classroom grace.” In her Chronicle of Higher Education article “The Other Public Humanities,” she writes,There is difficulty, discomfort, even fear in such moments, which involve confrontations with what we thought we knew, like why people have mortgages and what “things” are. These moments do not reflect a linear progress from ignorance to knowledge; instead they describe a step away from a complacent knowing into a new world in which, at least at first, everything is cloudy, nothing is quite clear. . . . We cannot be a democracy if this power to reimagine, doubt, and think critically is allowed to become a luxury commodity.Education has always been part of a broader political, social, and cultural struggle over knowledge, subjectivities, values, and the future. Sites of public and higher education are currently under a massive assault in a growing number of countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, because they represent some of the few places left that are capable of teaching young people to be critical, thoughtful, and engaged citizens who are willing to take risks, stretch their imaginations, and, most importantly, hold power accountable. The consequence of turning universities into sites that commodify both knowledge and people is a broader social order that embraces neoliberalism’s methodical ruthlessness toward others, its hatred of democracy, and its fear of young people, who will increasingly lack the self-awareness and social consciousness to realize how they have been shut out of the language of democracy, justice, and hope.One of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, youth, and other cultural workers is the challenge of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means insisting that democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of vital public spheres such as higher education, where civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democratic processes should always involve thinking about education — a kind of education that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good. Democracy, as Michael Lerner has argued in another context, needs a Marshall Plan in which funding is sufficient to make all levels of education free, while also providing enough social support to eliminate poverty, hunger, inadequate health care, and the destruction of the environment. Democracy needs a politics that not just restores hope, but also envisions a different future — one in which the struggle for justice is never finished and the highest of values is caring for and being responsible to others.Neoliberalism is a toxin that is generating a class of predatory zombies who are producing what might be called dead zones of the imagination. These cannibalistic walking dead are waging a fierce battle against the possibility of a world in which the promise of justice and democracy is worth fighting for. We may live in the shadow of the authoritarian corporate state, but the future is still open. The time has come to develop a political language in which civic values and social responsibility — and the institutions, tactics, and long-term commitments that support them — become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic engagement, a renewed sense of social agency, and an impassioned international social movement with the vision, organization, and set of strategies capable of challenging the neoliberal nightmare that now haunts the globe and empties out the meaning of politics and democracy.