social practices was greatly diminished.18 Large social movements fragmented into isolated pockets of resistance mostly organized around a form of identity politics that largely ignored a much-needed conversation about the attack on the social and the broader issues affecting society, such as increasingly harmful disparities in wealth, power, and income. Tony Judt argues this point persuasively in his insistence that politics
devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. “Identity” began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. . . . However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasizing these carries an unavoidable cost: the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.19
As forms of state sovereignty gave way to market-centered private modes of political control, the United States morphed into an increasingly authoritarian space in which young people became the most visible symbol of the collateral damage that resulted from the emergence, especially after 9/11, of a new kind of domestic terrorism. If the enemy abroad was defined as the Islamic other, young people increasingly obtained the status of the enemy at home, especially youthful protesters and young people of color. Neoliberalism’s war on youth is significant as both a war on the future and on democracy itself. Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams. Instead, youth are becoming the site of society’s nightmares. Within neoliberal narratives, youth are defined opportunistically in terms of contradictory symbols, whether as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or as an intransigent menace.20
Young people increasingly have become subject to an oppressive disciplinary system that teaches them to understand citizenship through the pecuniary practices of the market and to follow orders and toe the line in the face of authority, no matter how counterintuitive, unpleasant, or oppressive doing so may be. They are caught in a society in which almost every aspect of their lives is shaped by the dual forces of the market and a growing police state. The message is clear: get in on buying/selling or be ignored or punished. Mostly out of step, young people, especially people of color and low-income whites, are inscribed within a machinery of dead knowledge, social relations, and values in which there is an attempt to render them voiceless and invisible. Often relegated to sites of terminal exclusion, many young people are forced to negotiate their fates alone, bearing full responsibility for a society that forces them to bear the weight of problems that are not of their own making and for which they bear no personal blame. For example, what prospects are waiting for teenagers who age out of the foster care system at eighteen years old and go out into our minimum-wage society on their own? What future do they have? For many, the answer is military recruitment or prison. What is particularly new is the way in which young people have been increasingly denied a significant place in an already weakened social contract and the degree to which they are absent from how many countries’ leaders now envision the future.21
How young people are represented betrays a great deal about the economic, social, cultural, and political constitution of American society and its growing disinvestment in young people, the social state, and democracy itself.22 The structures of neoliberal violence have diminished the vocabulary of democracy, and one consequence is that subjectivity and education are no longer the lifelines of critical forms of individual and social agency. This is most evident in the attack on public schools in the United States, an attack that is as vicious as it is authoritarian. The war on schools by billionaires such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and the Walton family (Walmart), among others, is attempting to corporatize classroom teaching by draining pedagogy of any of its critical functions while emphasizing “teaching to the test.” Similarly, schools are being reorganized so as to eliminate the influence of unions and the power of teachers. As Michael Yates points out, they have begun “to resemble assembly lines, with students as outputs and teachers as assembly-line-like mechanisms who do not think or instill in their students the capacity to conceptualize critically and become active participants in a democratic society.”23 Such schools have become punishing factories waging a war on the radical imagination and undermining those rationalities where desire is constructed and behavior specified that embraces civic courage and the common good.
The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom, and hope as part of the project of extending and deepening the ideals of democracy have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality. Modernity has reneged on its promise to young people to provide them with social mobility, economic well-being, and collective security. Long-term planning and the institutional structures that support it are now fully subservient to the financial imperatives of privatization, deregulation, commodification, flexibility, and short-term profits. Social bonds have fragmented as a result of the attack on the welfare state and the collapse of social protections. Moreover, all possible answers to socially produced problems are now limited to the mantra of individual, market-based solutions.24 It gets worse. Increasingly, those individuals and groups who question the savage logic of the free market or are unable to function within it as atomized employees/consumers are viewed contemptuously as either traitors or moochers and are rendered disposable by corporate and government elites.25
Public problems now collapse into the limited and depoliticized register of private issues. Individual self-interest now trumps any consideration of the good society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her personal control. Under neoliberalism, everyone has to negotiate their fate alone, bearing full responsibility for problems that are often not of their own doing. The implications politically, economically, and socially for young people are disastrous and are contributing to the emergence of a generation that will populate a space of social abandonment and terminal exclusion. Job insecurity, debt servitude, impoverishment, enlistment to war zones, incarceration, and a growing network of real and symbolic violence have dismissed too many young people to a future that portends zero opportunities and zero hope. This is a generation that has become a primary target for disposability through prison or war, consignment to debt, and new levels of surveillance and consumer control.
The severity and consequences of this shift for youth are evident in the fact that this will be the first generation in which the “plight of the outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation.”26 Zygmunt Bauman argues that today’s youth have been “cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.”27 That is, the generation of youth in the early twenty-first century has no way of grasping if it will ever “be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.”28 Neoliberal violence—originating in part from a massive accumulation of wealth by the elite 1 percent of society, growing inequality, the reign of the financial service industries, the closing down of educational opportunities, and the stripping of social protections from those marginalized by race and class—has produced an entire generation without jobs, an independent life, and even the most minimal social benefits.
Youth no longer inhabit the privileged space, however compromised, that was offered to previous generations. They now move listlessly through a neoliberal notion of temporality as dead time, devoid of faith in progress and entranced by a belief in those apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak, and insecure. Progressive visions pale and recede next to the normalization of wealth-driven policies that wipe out pensions, punish unions, demonize public servants, raise college tuition, and produce a harsh world of joblessness—all the while giving billions of dollars and “huge bonuses, instead of prison sentences . . . to those bankers
