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We've entered a world in which politics has no shape, people don't feel they fully understand the rules of the political system they operate in, hence the sense that what needs to change is to have less of it. That's frightening, because all the precedent that I can think of then points against faith in democracy, rather than the belief in more democracy.
-Tony Judt
The Violence of Neo liberalism
We live in a time of deep foreboding, one that haunts any discourse about justice, democracy, and the future. Not only have the points of reference that provided a sense of certainty and collective hope in the past largely evaporated, but the only referents available are increasingly supplied by a hyper-market driven society, mega-corporations, and a corrupt financial service industry. The commanding economic and cultural institutions of American society have taken on what David Theo Goldberg calls a "militarizing social logic."1 Market discipline now regulates all aspects of social life and the regressive economic rationality that drives it sacrifices the public good, public values, and social responsibility to a tawdry consumerist dream while simultaneously creating a throwaway society of goods, resources, and individuals now considered disposable.2 This militarizing logic is also creeping into public schools and colleges with the former increasingly resembling the culture of prisons and the latter opening their classrooms to the national intelligence agencies.3 In one glaring instance of universities endorsing the basic institutions of the punishing state, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, concluded a deal to rename its football stadium after the GEO Group, a private prison corporation "whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents."4 Armed guards are now joined by armed knowledge and militarized naming rights. Corruption, commodification, and repressive state apparatuses have become the central features of a predatory society in which it is presumed irrationally "that markets should dominate and determine all choices and outcomes to the occlusion of any other considerations."5
The political, economic, and social consequences have done more than destroy any viable vision of a good society. They undermine the modem public's capacity to think critically, celebrate a narcissistic hyperindividualism that borders on the pathological, destroy social...