Neoliberalism’s Plague: The Erosion of Conscience in Education

Public Goods  •  December 12, 2024  •  Henry A. Giroux

For decades, neoliberalism – a predatory form of capitalism – has waged a relentless war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and eroded the common good. Disguised in the rhetoric of freedom, it elevates market logic to the status of a governing ideology, insisting that every aspect of society must conform to the demands of economic activity.¹ In practice, neoliberalism concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite while celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, deregulation, and privatization. It reduces citizenship to consumerism and strips public life of its collective purpose, creating a society where everything is commodified, yet nothing of real value is safeguarded. Within this framework, the devastating social costs of its policies – ranging from systemic racism and militarism to staggering inequality – are not merely tolerated but normalized. Neoliberalism is a systemic force of political, economic, and cultural violence, fostering despair while obliterating any vision of justice, solidarity, or care.

The 2008 financial crisis laid bare the catastrophic failures of this system, exposing its inherent corruption, its indifference to human suffering, and the complicity of the Democratic Party in preserving the status quo. This was no anomaly but a revelation of a deeply entrenched order that privileges markets and whiteness over life itself. Between 2020 and 2023, the Covid-19 pandemic further stripped neoliberalism of its veneer, unmasking a brutal social order indifferent to the most basic human needs: accessible healthcare, secure food systems, fair wages, humane working conditions, and quality education. Neoliberalism’s ethos – portraying government as the enemy, reducing society to isolated individuals and insular families, and championing a shallow, consumer-driven hedonism – reveals a calculated assault on the public good. The pandemic illuminated the machinery of neoliberalism: systemic inequality, environmental destruction, and a culture of cruelty. Beneath its economic policies lies a pedagogy of repression, one that derides critical education and stifles the very tools – historical awareness, critical thinking, and civic engagement – that empower individuals to challenge domination.

Overt Authoritarianism

As neoliberalism collapses into overt authoritarianism, its machinery of repression intensifies. Dissent is silenced, social life is militarized, and lies, hate, and racism are normalized. These dynamics have fueled the rise of a fascistic politics that systematically dismantles democratic accountability. Among its most embattled targets is public and higher education. For decades, the far-right has sought to undermine education, recognizing it as a critical site of resistance. This assault has escalated with the rise of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, whose adherents view critical education as a profound threat to their authoritarian aims. They fear an educational system capable of producing critically literate citizens – individuals who question power, expose injustice, and demand accountability.

The far-right’s animosity toward critical education stems from its recognition that education is never neutral; it is a battleground for the fight against domination and oppression. As Edward Said observed, true education equips students with “the power to analyze, to get past cliché and straight-out lies from authority, the questioning of authority, [and] the search for alternatives.”² This vision of education, grounded in critical thought and the pursuit of truth, directly challenges authoritarian demands for conformity and control. It is this radical potential of education – to inspire hope, resistance, and transformation – that authoritarianism seeks to extinguish. Yet it is precisely this vision of education that offers a path toward reclaiming the public good and renewing the democratic project.

Return of Trump

Under these circumstances – and especially with Trump’s return to power – higher education, once a bastion of intellectual freedom and civic engagement, has become a prime target. Those who seek to stifle dissent and erase the possibility of an informed, engaged citizenry understand that undermining education is a prerequisite for consolidating their agenda of unchallenged power and oppression.

Another global crisis unfolded as students, galvanized by the fight for Palestinian freedom and statehood, took a bold stand on the right side of history. In their courageous resistance to Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, they exposed the complicity of the neoliberal arms industry and university investment policies that perpetuate these atrocities. The result: over 44,000 Palestinians dead, including thousands of women and children, and the annihilation of Gaza’s universities, hospitals, and vital infrastructure. Despite the staggering scale of these crimes, peaceful student protests were met with brutal state repression, laying bare the pervasive violence of an emerging global fascism. Armed police forces unleashed a chilling display of authoritarian violence against cries for justice, underscoring the tightening grip of power on those who dare to resist. Yet in the face of such oppression, these students’ defiance – rooted in principles of justice and human rights – stands as a beacon of hope in a world increasingly defined by dispossession, cruelty, violence, and domination.

While the protests have become less obvious as the new year unfolds, universities have continued their crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism, imposing strict rules and punishment for minor modes of protest. Isabelle Taft, writing in the New York Times, sums up this new wave of repression. She writes:

“Harvard temporarily banned dozens of students and faculty members from libraries after they participated in silent ‘study-ins’ – where protesters sit at library tables with signs opposing the war in Gaza – though a similar protest did not lead to discipline in December 2023. At Indiana University Bloomington, some students and faculty members who attended candlelight vigils were referred for discipline under a new prohibition on expressive activity after 11 p.m. University of Pennsylvania administrators and campus police officers holding zip ties told vigil attendees to move because they had not reserved the space in compliance with new rules.”³

With Trump’s election to the presidency, an escalation of state and academic repression against pro-Palestinian activism – and any form of dissent – has become not just inevitable but imminent, signaling a broader crackdown on critical voices and democratic resistance. Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, once declared that students who legally exercise their rights to free speech and assembly by calling for an end to genocide in Gaza should face punishment. She went as far as to claim that these students “need to be taken out of our country, or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away.”⁴ Bondi’s stance mirrors Trump’s own authoritarian rhetoric. During his campaign, he proclaimed that “student protesters should be deported.”⁵ In fact, Congressional Republicans have warned “that protest leaders, activists and those who help them raise money could face an onslaught of federal investigations and possible indictments.”⁶

This assault on student dissent and on protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is emblematic of a broader MAGA-led offensive against higher education. This movement harbors a visceral hatred for universities as democratic public spheres – spaces where the free exchange of ideas, historical memory, critical thinking, and academic autonomy are cultivated. J.D. Vance, now Vice President of the United States, has made his disdain for education explicit, stating bluntly, “I hate the professors.”⁷

Bondi, Trump, and Vance are not merely opponents of dissent – they are enemies of reason, critical literacy, and the pursuit of knowledge necessary for an informed and engaged citizenry. Their agenda weaponizes academic freedom, critical pedagogy, and even the conditions of academic labour to serve the goals of surveillance, indoctrination, and manufactured ignorance. This represents not only an attack on education but a calculated effort to dismantle the foundations of democracy itself.

Increasingly, democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, health systems, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege. The promise, if not ideals, of democracy are receding as those who breathe new life into a fascist past are once again on the move, subverting language, values, civic courage, vision, and critical consciousness. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination, as entrepreneurs of hate target workers, the poor, people of color, refugees, immigrants, and others considered disposable. The present moment stands at a historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism are vying to shape a future that appears to be either an unthinkable nightmare or a realizable dream.

There is no more urgent moment than now to make education the heart of our politics. What is at stake is not simply a view of education but a vision of it as both a moral imperative and a political project – one that roots itself in the goal of emancipation for all. At this moment, what is being assaulted by the far right and the fascists is not just a method of teaching but a mode of critical pedagogy that encourages human agency. This pedagogy empowers people not only to be critical thinkers but to become active, engaged social actors in the world.

Critical Pedagogy

To forge a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, we must center critical pedagogy in our work. This is not a luxury but a necessity – a force that shapes identities and values, one that fosters a citizenry that is not only knowledgeable but critically engaged, informed, and willing to hold power accountable. Drawing from the radical legacy of Paulo Freire, we recognize that there is no true democracy without citizens who are not only well-informed but also actively engaged in the struggles for justice, equality, and freedom.

This pedagogical project calls students beyond themselves, asking them to recognize the ethical responsibility to care for others, to affirm historical memory, to challenge and dismantle the structures of domination that persist in our societies. It is a pedagogy that invites students to become subjects of history, not its passive objects – agents of their own fate, rather than recipients of a fate imposed upon them by those in power.

If we are to build a politics capable of awakening the critical, imaginative, and historical consciousness of students, we must approach education as a project of individual and collective empowerment. This project is rooted in the relentless search for truth, in the expansion of our civic imagination, and in the practice of freedom. In an age where the unthinkable has become normalized, where anything can be said and everything that matters is left unsaid, this work becomes more urgent than ever.

The degradation of truth and the erosion of language have made it ever more difficult to distinguish good from evil, justice from injustice. In such a climate, democratic societies are losing the very language and ethical framework that could challenge the political, racial, and economic machinery of cruelty, state violence, and exclusion. We are in dire need of a language of critique and possibility – one that can expose, resist, and overcome the fascist nightmares descending upon countries like the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Hungary, and many others plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements and neo-Nazi parties.

In this age of social isolation, information overload, a culture of immediacy, consumerism, and the normalization of spectacular violence, the stakes are higher than ever. Democracy cannot endure, let alone thrive, without citizens who are civically literate, critically engaged, and capable of resisting the forces that seek to reduce us to mere spectators in our own lives.

Critical pedagogy, both as a symbol of resistance and as an institutional force, holds a pivotal role in resisting the dark tide of our times. It resists the false renderings of history, the resurgence of white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, militarism, and the toxic allure of ultra-nationalism. In a world where fascists distort the past to stoke hatred and division, education must be reclaimed as a sanctuary for historical memory and moral resistance. At its best, it is both a form of historical consciousness and an act of bearing witness – a defiant refusal to let the truth be buried beneath the rubble of social amnesia.

The struggle against fascism and for a radical democracy is more urgent at a moment when the foundations of civic culture are crumbling. Historical erasure and social amnesia have paved the way for the whitening of the public sphere, the desertion of the working class, and the normalization of white supremacy. A creeping fascist politics thrives in this void, feeding on ignorance, fear, the silencing of dissent, and the politics of hate.

The silence of mainstream institutions echoes this betrayal. Bernie Sanders captures this betrayal in his critique of the Democratic Party’s “abandonment of the working class.”⁸ By aligning themselves with neoliberal orthodoxy and the financial elites of Wall Street, the Democrats surrendered the moral and political ground of solidarity to reactionary forces. This retreat not only weakened labour protections and public services but also gave far-right ideologues the tools to weaponize economic despair and racial grievances.

This failure extends far beyond the corridors of political power. As Sherrilyn Ifill incisively observes, the deeper truth is that “a majority of white Americans in fact have chosen to embrace white supremacy rather than the promise of a multi-racial democracy.” If Bernie Sanders’ critique of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class scratches the surface, Ifill’s insight cuts to the core of a fractured nation: a country that has refused to reckon with its past and lacks the moral vision to imagine a future of shared justice and equality.⁹

The issue of abandonment is not confined to politics alone – it pervades the pedagogical realm, where the right has long understood the transformative power of culture as an educational force. For decades, they have used it to coerce white, Latino, and Black workers into turning their backs on their own interests, binding them to an authoritarian cult of white supremacy. This ideology exploits alienation, smothers critical agency, and replaces solidarity with resentment and hate. The battle for hearts and minds has been waged not through reason or justice but through a cultural pedagogy of fear and division.

It would be a grave error to reduce this crisis to economics alone. Trump’s election was not merely a rebellion against neoliberal neglect; it was a collective affirmation of a more sinister identity. Americans did not just vote for a man – they voted for what they have become. They voted for a racist, convicted felon, sexual offender, and power-hungry authoritarian. More profoundly, they endorsed a vision of citizenship that excludes all but white Christian nationalists – Christian fundamentalists cloaked in self-righteousness, their faith grounded not in morality but in the privilege of white skin and theocratic certainties.¹⁰

If education is to reclaim its role as a force for liberation, it must rise to meet this moral and political collapse. It must confront the lies that have hardened into dogma and the fears that have become weaponized into hate. Only then can we begin to imagine a democracy that does not merely survive but thrives on the shared labour of justice, equality, and historical truth.

“In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.”¹¹

Economic and Social Anxieties

Yet, many of the anxieties over inflation, soaring food costs, stagnant wages, and deepening inequality – compounded by the scourge of mass shootings, drug addiction, gambling, loneliness, and alcoholism – found fertile ground in Trump’s relentless propagation of a toxic, racist lie. He hammered home the claim that Black people, immigrants, and others “poisoning the blood of America” were stealing working-class jobs while undeservedly draining tax dollars and social benefits. To reduce Trump’s victory to mere economic grievances is to overlook a far more unsettling truth: the economic argument was enflamed by a rhetoric of racial panic. It was not just racial hatred at play but a calculated fearmongering that painted these disposable “others” as symbols of mass anxiety, moral decay, and a future riddled with precarity and despair. Heather McGhee aptly captures this strategy as a skewed narrative, endlessly amplified by conservative media outlets like Fox News. What the Democratic Party missed was how the far-right made immigrants not only the object of racist diatribes but also blamed them for all the economic hardships working class people were enduring. As McGhee writes:

“The right-wing message is a simple zero-sum racial argument: You’re worse off because liberals in government are giving your jobs, opportunities, and tax dollars to undeserving racialized Others. Today, the Other is a criminal immigrant, caricatured as so nefarious and inhuman that unprecedented millions of Latino citizens chose to distinguish themselves as not-them at the ballot box. What Democrats often missed was how much the radical right made immigrants the main bogeyman for the economy, not just for racial panic: J.D. Vance’s big affordable housing plan was to deport the immigrants supposedly buying up all the good homes. This message is false, of course.”¹²

Trump’s rise to power was driven by a version of white supremacist identity politics –white replacement theory. It is undeniable that a sizable portion of Americans knowingly voted for a racist, criminal, rapist, and authoritarian whose lust for power mirrors their own fantasies of dominance. Trump did not hide who he was; he made it abundantly clear. What he offered – and what they embraced – was a vision of America rooted in a legacy defined by the KKK, where citizenship is restricted to white Christian nationalists.¹³

The erasure of historical consciousness and the cultivation of supremacist nostalgia laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise, allowing his authoritarianism to be embraced not as a threat but as a restoration of a falsely idealized past. The merging of power, new digital technologies, and everyday life have not only altered time and space, but they have also expanded the reach of culture as a repressive educational force. A culture of lies, cruelty, and hate, coupled with a fear of history, and a 24/7 flow of information now wages a war on attention spans, and the conditions necessary to think, contemplate, and arrive at sound judgments.¹⁴ What makes this clear is that education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influences. It plays a crucial role both as a form of domination and as a powerful pedagogical force in challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.¹⁵

Any meaningful vision of critical pedagogy must have the power to provoke a radical shift in consciousness – a shift that helps us see the world through a lens that confronts the savage realities of gangster capitalism. This capitalism thrives on staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that uphold it. A true shift in consciousness is not possible without pedagogical interventions that speak directly to people in ways that resonate with their lives, their struggles, and their experiences. Education must help individuals recognize themselves in the issues at hand, understanding how their personal suffering is not an isolated event but rather a part of a broad, systemic crisis.

Pedagogy of Identification

In other words, there can be no authentic politics without what I call a pedagogy of identification – an education that connects people to the broader forces shaping their lives, an education that not only helps them understand the roots of their oppression but also empowers them to imagine and fight for a world where they are no longer victims but active agents of change. Without this, we risk perpetuating a politics that is disconnected from the lived realities of those it seeks to empower. The poet Jorie Graham emphasizes the importance of engaging people through experiences that resonate deeply with their everyday lives. She states that “it takes a visceral connection to experience itself to permit us to even undergo an experience.”¹⁶ For language, words, and appeals to truly resonate, they must be anchored in the tangible realities and struggles that shape people’s existence. Only then can communication penetrate consciousness, forging connections between body, mind, and others beyond the poisoned solidarities that sustain hatred, war, and consumerist obsessions.

Without this approach, pedagogy risks numbing the mind and body, a condition easily reinforced by a broader culture dominated by screens, virtual reality, game shows, and reductive oversimplifications. In such a context, teaching can devolve into symbolic violence, shaming rhetoric, or inaccessible jargon that alienates rather than educates. Instead of reaching broader publics, it becomes insular and disconnected. For academics to function effectively as public intellectuals, they must embrace their roles as both critical educators and active citizens, weaving these responsibilities together in ways that inspire meaningful dialogue and action. In doing so, they should not only address their work to a broader public and important social issues, they also need to develop a language that connects everyday troubles to wider structures and presses the claim for economic and social justice.

One of the most pressing challenges for educators, students, and cultural workers today is to ask: What should education accomplish in a society? More specifically, what is the role of education in a democracy? How, for instance, can education both defend and enable democracy in such dark times? As authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe – even in countries once regarded as democratic, such as Turkey, Hungary, India, and Italy – the question becomes even more urgent. What political, pedagogical, and ethical responsibilities do educators, artists, musicians, journalists, and other cultural workers have in such times? How can education and pedagogy contribute to the resurrection of historical memory, the formation of new solidarities, and the renewal of radical imagination, all in service of broad-based struggles for a democracy that is not only insurrectional but transformative?

Education must rise to meet these challenges and be enlisted as a tool to resist what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called neoliberalism’s most brutal weapon – the “slow cancellation of the future.”¹⁷ The vision of education we need must help us imagine a life beyond a social order trapped in the clutches of massive inequality, endless environmental destruction, and a glorification of war and militarization as sacred national ideals. In this context, education cannot be reduced to a narrow focus on accountability, testing, market values, or the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed, market-driven society. Nor can it surrender to the call of several academics who now claim in the age of Trump that there is no room for politics in higher education or the classroom. This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in its silence over the current far-right politicization of education, manifest in erasing critical ideas, books, and liberal faculty from education – a project that serves to maintain oppressive systems of power by presenting classrooms as apolitical spaces. The call for neutrality among many universities in North America is a retreat from social and moral responsibility. The ideologically driven claim to neutrality covers over the fact that universities are steeped in power relations both within these institutions and in relation to broader interests. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta are worth repeating on this issue. They write:

“Institutional neutrality serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate. It obscures the fact that virtually every activity conducted in universities is political, from decisions regarding who is permitted to enrol to which research gets funding to policies on holding events and putting up posters. Small and large decisions by university administrators inevitably involve political choices.”¹⁸

The forces at work in the age of the new media, especially Elon Musk’s X, have become powerful teaching machines, operating to serve the forces of the far right. In addition, high-tech companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Google are deeply indebted to the values of gangster capitalism, and they are actively attempting to reshape higher education into a training ground for workers in their entrepreneurial image. This vision of education as mere workforce preparation must be rejected outright.

Education, in its truest sense, must be about more than training students to be workers or indoctrinating them into a white Christian nationalist view of who counts as an American and who doesn’t; it must equip them to sustain and nourish democracy. It must cultivate the intellectual rigor and critical thought necessary for keeping a democracy alive and vibrant. An education for empowerment, as the practice of freedom, should create a space where students not only engage in rigorous thinking but also find the freedom to voice their experiences, aspirations, and dreams. It should be a protective and courageous space – one in which students speak, write, and act from a position of agency and informed judgment, and where their voices are not only heard but valued. In such a space, education serves as a bridge, connecting schools to society, self to other, and theory to practice. It should prompt students to confront and engage the pressing social and political issues of our time.

Furthermore, education should provide the conditions for students to align themselves with a deeper sense of social responsibility, driven by a passion for justice, equality, and freedom. Critical pedagogy, as a rupturing practice, must refuse to equate capitalism with democracy, making it clear that one cannot discuss fascism without addressing capitalism. To be truly transformative, any viable critical pedagogy must be inherently anti-capitalist, reviving the discourse of radical democracy, and creating new political formations beyond the conventional liberal and conservative paradigms.

This brings us to one of the most serious challenges facing educators today: how to develop pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading of both the word and the world in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people. This task requires educators to cultivate an environment in which students can acquire the knowledge, values, and civic courage needed to make hope practical and to counter the desolation and cynicism that threaten to dominate our age. In this work, educators must not only teach but also create the conditions for students to become critical agents – agents capable of forging a new, more just world through both thought and action.

Democracy should embody a way of thinking that defends and empowers education, linking pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethical engagement, and individual agency to the demands of social responsibility and the public good.¹⁹ Neoliberal capitalism strips hope of its utopian possibilities and thrives on the notion that we live in an era of foreclosed hope, and that any attempt to think otherwise will result in a nightmare.

The current fight against a growing fascist politics across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, identifications, the power of persuasion, and the ability to shift the culture itself. It is also a struggle to reclaim historical memory. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.²⁰

In an era marked by the resurgence of fascism and the ascendancy of far-right governments worldwide, including the second Trump administration, education must go beyond defending reason, informed judgment, and critical agency – it must ignite the transformative power of collective resistance. Hope, in this context, is not a naïve ideal but a radical necessity – a defiant force that challenges us to envision possibilities beyond the suffocating confines of the present. It demands that we confront oppressive forces determined to stifle the radical imagination, silencing its transformative potential before it can awaken a broader public. This is no small task. For educators and the wider public alike, it is a struggle fraught with obstacles, yet it must be embraced with unwavering urgency and fierce conviction.

Hope must be anchored in the complexities of our time – not as a fleeting sentiment but as an active, transformative project. It is the foundation for collective agency, fostering resistance, and sparking the political imagination necessary for meaningful change.²¹ Hope demands participation, the courage to dissent, and the resolve to resist. Without it, there can be no struggle, no dissent, and no path to liberation. Hope is more than a vision of a future that does not imitate the present; it is the lifeblood of resistance.

Effective resistance to the rise of fascist politics in the United States and beyond cannot occur without making education central to our political struggle. This begins with recognizing that the transformation of consciousness and the transformation of institutions are deeply interrelated. As I’ve argued before, we must heed Pierre Bourdieu’s warning that the most insidious forms of domination are not just economic – they are intellectual and pedagogical, rooted in belief and persuasion. This insight calls on academics to recognize that the current battle against emerging authoritarianism and white nationalism is not only a contest over economic structures or corporate power. It is equally a battle for ideas, for the very consciousness of society, and for the power to reshape culture itself. Any fight to realize the promises of democracy will fail if lies are allowed to eclipse reason, ignorance undermines informed judgment, and truth is drowned out by the demagogic appeals of unchecked power.

Amid the current assault on public and higher education, educators must reclaim their role as architects of imagined futures, fostering a language of possibility that aligns education with the broader struggle for democracy. Such a language must reject the neoliberal paradigm of education as a private investment in “human capital” and instead cultivate a critical pedagogy that disturbs complacency, inspires critical thinking, and energizes students to confront the societal forces shaping their lives.

Education’s critical function lies in its power to create informed, engaged citizens who possess the civic courage to challenge injustice. This necessitates teaching students to think intersectionally, historically, and relationally. In a world dominated by fragmented knowledge and the tyranny of metrics, students must become border crossers, fluent in multiple literacies – print, visual, and digital – capable not only of consuming culture but also producing it as cultural critics and creators.

Critical pedagogy must be defended as the search for truth and the practice of freedom. It is a pedagogy that empowers students to act from a position of agency, equipping them to unsettle power, challenge common sense, and take risks in pursuit of justice and mutual respect. Educators must inspire students to think dangerously, imagining futures where democracy, equality, and freedom are not only values but achievable goals. This involves confronting injustice as an ongoing struggle and recognizing that the fight for justice is never fully complete.

Moreover, education must be understood as inherently political. Pedagogy is always implicated in power relations, shaping notions of agency, civic life, and societal futures. Schools, at their best, should be spaces where students are encouraged to think critically and realize themselves as informed, ethical citizens. Educators, in turn, must push back against efforts to censor their work, regain control over the conditions of their labour, and resist the creeping casualization of their profession – a trend that diminishes their ability to shape education as a public good.

Universal Rights

Finally, education must be reimagined as a universal right, free and accessible to all. A society that spends $842-billion on militarism while burdening students with debt undermines the very foundation of democracy. Eliminating student debt and redirecting public funds toward education is not only a moral imperative but also an investment in the future. This vision may seem out of reach under a Trump presidency, but it offers a rallying cry for young people to mobilize in the name of a democratic education system that prioritizes justice, equity, and opportunity.

There is no justice without a democratically driven education system. The greatest threat to education in North America and around the globe is anti-democratic ideologies and market values that believe public schools and higher education are failing because they are public and should not operate in the interests of furthering the promise and possibility of democracy. If schools are failing it is because they are not only being defunded, privatized, and viewed as adjuncts of the corporations, testing centers, and reduced to regressive training practices, they are also being transformed into white Christian nationalist indoctrination centers. As Peter McLaren writes, under the Trump administration a full-scale attack will take place on public and higher education that is almost unprecedented. He predicts that under Trump we should expect the following:

“A power slam of reforms that risks turning classrooms into ideological gladiatorial arenas, with equity and inclusion counted out before the emperor manages to raise his thumb. Public schools, already struggling under the weight of systemic inequities, could face a plethora of changes that strip away federal protections, divert resources to privatization, and even lead to the ultimate finisher: the abolition of the Department of Education itself.”²²

This dystopian vision is exemplified by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s transformation of New College into a chilling model of pedagogical conformity and authoritarian control. What is clear is not, as the far-right claims, that schools are failing – but rather that they represent a vital space for sustaining the relationship between education, civic literacy, justice, truth, and democracy. This is precisely why the far-right wages war on higher education: their attack is the vanguard of a broader counterrevolution, aimed at dismantling the democratic aspirations that have shaped educational struggles since the 1960s and evolved into a global movement.

Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee offers a prescient diagnosis of this counterrevolution. Though his remarks predate the current wave of campus revolts for Palestinian freedom, his insights resonate with even greater urgency as Trump’s presidency unfolds. Coetzee’s words underscore the stakes in this battle: the fight for education is inseparable from the fight for democracy itself. He writes:

“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. The campaign to rid the academy of what was variously diagnosed as a leftist or anarchist or anti-rational or anti-civilisational malaise has continued without let-up for decades and has succeeded to such an extent that to conceive of universities any more as seedbeds of agitation and dissent would be laughable.”²³

In a society where democracy is under siege and fascism casts a growing shadow, educators must recognize not only that alternative futures are possible but that acting on this belief is essential to achieving social change. This urgent political and pedagogical mission demands both a language of critique and a language of possibility. Critique exposes abuses of power, unmasks deceit, and holds authority accountable, while a vision of educated hope dares us to imagine new horizons, empowering us to think and act beyond the confines of the present. It calls on us to reject the inevitability of injustice, to defy the predatory forces shaping our future, and to summon the courage to envision a world grounded in justice, equity, and freedom – a world we actively strive to build.

With Trump’s rise to the presidency, America faces an era of dangerous repression: state violence against dissenters, the silencing of critical voices, the dismantling of institutions committed to critical thought and social responsibility, and environmental collapse. In such dark times, hope and the drive for collective struggle may be wounded, but they are not lost. •

This article first published on the LA Progressive website.

1. For an informed read on neoliberalism, a few books will suffice. I suggest David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005); Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2020), and Heather Gautney, The New Power Elite (New York; Oxford, 2023).
2. Edward Said, “At the Rendezvous of Victory,” Culture and Resistance: Interviews with David Barsamian, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), pp.159.
3. Isabelle Taft, “How Universities Cracked Down on Pro-Palestinian Activism,” New York Times (November 25,2024).
4. Chris Walker, “Trump’s AG Pick Pam Bondi Once Called for Deporting Student Protesters,” Truthout (November 25, 2024).
5. TOI Staff, “Trump says he’ll deport anti-Israel student protesters if elected – report,” The Times of Israel (May 28, 2024).
6. Simone Weichselbaum, “How the Trump administration and congressional Republicans may crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters,” NBC News (November 24, 2024).
7. Henry Reichman, “‘The Professors are the Enemy,’ Right-Wing attacks on academic freedom have real repercussions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 14, 2021).
8. Mitti Hicks, “Bernie Sanders Says Democrats Have ‘Abandoned Working Class People’,” Black Enterprise (November 8, 2024).
9. Sherrilyn Ifill, “Why Are We Here?,” Sherrilyn’s Newsletter (November 6, 2024).
10. See, for instance, Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2007).
11. Chris Hedges, “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” The Chris Hedges Report (November 6, 2024).
12. Heather McGhee, “Fighting the Right’s Narrative Dominance,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (November 25, 2024).
13. Ibid, Hedges.
14. Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond The Digital Age To A Post-capitalist World. (London: Verso Books 2022).
15. Henry A. Giroux, Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).
16. Nawal Arjini interviews Jorie Graham, “The Appall,” New York Review of Books (December 5, 2024).
17. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (London: Zero Books, 2014), p. 2.
18. Ibid. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.
19. Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).
20. Nicola Bertoldi, “Are we living through a new ‘Weimar era’? Constructive resolutions for our future,” OpenDemocracy (January 3, 2018).
21. For a remarkable interrogation of hope, see Ronald Aronson, We: Reviving Social Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
22. Peter McLaren, “No Holds Barred: The Trump-McMahon Approach to Education,” LA Progressive (November 22, 2024).
23. JM Coetzee, “JM Coetzee: Universities head for extinction” Mail & Guardian, (November 1, 2013).