Half a century of neoliberalism has transformed the politics of the globe. The supremacy of free market ideology has stripped away the commons and reduced most states to their purely military and repressive functions. In this urgent discussion on the relationship between neoliberalism and the corrosion of democracy, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Professor Wendy Brown. 

Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her latest book is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.

Production/Post-Production: Nicholas Grieves

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Wendy Brown:

I’m Wendy Brown. I’m currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but for 20 years, until two years ago, I taught at UC Berkeley, where I taught politics, critical theory, political economy, some other things. And there’s a life before that as well. And my work mostly concerns contemporary predicaments of power, who’s got it, who’s subject to it, what we do about it, how we think about the question of democracy amidst it, and some other things as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, Professor Brown, Wendy, it is really an honor to be sitting with you here today. I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long time, both as a academic and former academic, but just really, really love the way that you think, the way that you write, the questions that you pose. I think that they’ve really been instrumental to my way of thinking. And so I’m really pumped to be here with you. We’re obviously here at the Media Inequality and Change Center, which is a joint Venture between the schools of communication at Penn University and Rutgers University. We’ve got your big keynote tonight. We’ve got this great conference where we’re going to be talking about media, politics, power, and everything in between. And so I’m very grateful to you for squeezing us in to do this interview before all the events kick off.

And I wanted to talk to you about, I guess, the things we’re going to be talking about for the next two days, right? Because I think that as time has gone on, as the world feels like it’s getting progressively weirder, with the election of Donald Trump, with COVID-19, climate change getting worse and worse and worse, I feel as if, for me, your work on neoliberalism just gets truer every day.

Wendy Brown:

Sorry about that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So first, thanks.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But I wanted to sort of start there because your last two books really, really dig into this. And one of them was very formative to me, your great book published a few years ago called Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. And just to sort of center us, because it’s a big book, theoretically sophisticated, I’m not going to make you go over all of it, but I wanted to just center us in the central argument of this book, and we could kind of talk about, I guess, how this thesis has evolved in the, what, six years since you published this.

So you write early in the book, in chapter one, “My argument is not merely that markets and money are corrupting or degrading democracy, that political institutions and outcomes are increasingly dominated by finance and corporate capital, or that democracy is being replaced by plutocracy, rule by and for the rich, rather neoliberal reason. Ubiquitous today in state craft, in the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity is converting the distinctly political character, meaning an operation of democracies, constituent elements into economic ones. The institution’s and principles aimed at securing democracy, the cultures required to nourish it, the energies needed to animate it, and the citizens practicing, caring for, or desiring it, all of these things are challenged by neoliberalism’s economization of political life and of other here to forward non-economics spheres and activities.” And this frame-

Wendy Brown:

Sorry, that was a mouthful.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It was, but-

Wendy Brown:

And you spatted out well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, so-

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I guess let’s start by just-

Wendy Brown:

Let’s open it up.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… by just kind of unpacking that. Yeah.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah. Okay. Look, there’s a kind of standard account of neoliberalism, finally. It was a term that Americans came to very late. Other parts of the world, knew it earlier, and understood it earlier, but the standard account goes something like this. In the late seventies, early eighties, a series of economic crises, especially stagflation, opened up to a challenge that was mounting for decades before then, but finally had an opportunity. And that challenge was a challenge to the welfare state, to social spending, to progressive taxation, to lots of regulation, in short, a challenge to the post-war, especially Euro-Atlantic states that had gone in what we often call a Keynesian direction, but also social justice directions. So we had not just the Democrats, but also the Republicans engaging in wars on poverty and trying to clean up the environment and holding corporate feet to the fire for various kinds of egregious things.

The movement, the neoliberal movement that challenged that said, “Look, what we need is states to do nothing more than facilitate capital growth and get out of the way.” That means strip down taxation, especially to create good business climates, get rid of progressive taxation altogether, stop punishing the wealthy for being wealthy, deregulate everything that you can, privatize public goods, and let every individual fend for themselves, stop taking care of them. Margaret Thatcher was the best known for this. She just said, “There’s no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families. And what we need is for them to become responsible for themselves and stop expecting the state to take care of them.” That’s the standard account of neoliberalism, and I don’t disagree with it, but the stealth revolution that I wanted to talk about in this book that I think is the key in understanding what’s happened to democracy is that this way of thinking and this way of taking apart the social contract and the social state involved a whole form of governing reason.

And that form of governing reason basically came down to this. Everything that legislatures and social movements and social justice warriors try to do is both wrong-headed because it’s social engineering, and dangerous because it’s totalitarian. It’s imposing the will of the few on the whole. The only thing that keeps us free, and that is fair, and that produces good for the whole is, on the one hand, markets, because they just evolve and develop and spontaneously produce and distribute, and nobody masterminds the whole thing, and on the other hand, traditional morality. And traditional morality is important because it also evolves and develops and responds to needs and without anybody coining it and imposing it. So the neoliberal program, the form of neoliberal reason that challenges democracy is one that says democracy is basically, if it’s more than just civil rights, civil liberties, and voting, if it’s legislating, if it’s really ruled by the people, it’s totalitarianism.

The only thing that makes us free is unleashing markets and morals. So to put a bow on this, what makes the challenge of neoliberalism to democracy more than just growing inequality that’s there, more than just corporatization of everyday life that’s there, is the phenomenon in which everything is submitted to markets. And the other part of it is treating traditional morality as the only form of morality that is not social engineering. Now, you’re nodding like, oh yeah, this is recognizable. This is what I see going on. And what I want to suggest is that what this does to democracy is not only attack it as neo totalitarian when it’s robust, but it also takes what basically composes democracy, namely the idea of political equality and the idea of a people ruling for themselves according to what they think the good is, and throws it out, but it also takes democratic processes and turns them into market behavior.

So what do we see today? A kind of winner takes all approach in even ordinary legislating, instead of deliberation, common interests, compromise, and so forth. What you see is basically, even legislators and movements of voters, behaving like market competitors trying to destroy one another. That destroys democracy. Democracy is an specific political domain. We’ve never realized it, we’ve never completed it, but it is a political formation for people governing themselves, as opposed to being what? Governed by a part, governed by something else like a corporation or a tyrant, or governed by markets. And neoliberalism says, yeah, that’s bad stuff. Be governed by markets, be governed by traditional morality, nothing else.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right.

Wendy Brown:

Okay. I won’t talk so long in the rest of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, no.

Wendy Brown:

But we needed to lay it out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. And I essentially gave you the impossible task of, “Okay, so sum up your last two books in 10 minutes.”

Wendy Brown:

We did it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I’ve been thinking a lot about what this looks like, because I think one of the things I value so much about your work, one of many is like, is that you theorize the quiet revolution of neoliberalism in a way that I think is much more historically rich, because it theorizes that revolution not just as a top down sort of project that was imposed by radicals in high places, be they boardrooms or government offices, but you have that sort of attention to people and the ways that this manifests in our daily lives-

Wendy Brown:

Everywhere.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… our psychologies, our interactions.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so that’s where it really starts to become visible for me.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess just maybe taking the one example of the area that I focus on most, which is with working people, organized labor, you can see that trajectory you described kind of written over the past half century-

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… in this country. Obviously, union density in the United States is at a historic low, or at least since the labor movement really emerged in earnest in the 20th century.

Wendy Brown:

But coming back.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Coming back, hopefully, and we got to push as hard as we can there, but we’re still hovering barely above 10%-

Wendy Brown:

Right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… union density in this country, a far cry from where we were in the middle of the 20th century. But basically from the 1980s onwards, that takes a nose dive with the Thatcher and Reagan revolution, so on and so forth.

Wendy Brown:

Can we talk about that for a sec?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Absolutely.

Wendy Brown:

Okay, so one thing just to say here is that one part of neoliberal reason is getting rid of the very idea of capital and labor, and instead simply talking about everything as capital, including human capital.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right.

Wendy Brown:

And human capital, of course, doesn’t organize with other human capitals. Why? Because human capital, all capital, competes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right.

Wendy Brown:

And in fact, this has been so successful as a, let’s just call it a discursive transformation, that I think it took everyone by surprise when labor organizing started heating up again about eight, 10 years ago, and especially in the last five, with everything from Walmart to Amazon to university labor and student labor, and teachers and nurses and so forth, who’d had it with being human capital that was unprotected, underpaid, without decent benefits and insurance, no prospect of a comfortable retirement, and so forth.

But I just want to say that the whole business of turning us all into human capital is exactly what you were talking about a minute ago with really paying attention to how this happens at the level of people. And as a university teacher, you can’t miss it, the ways in which, over the last 40 years, students have gone from coming in to see what might happen for them, especially first gen students, when they come to college, and take classes on topics and subjects and in domains they’ve never known anything about, and are changed and are opened up, and the world gets bigger and they feel more empowered. That has given way to, what is this going to do to enhance my human capital? It’s basically changed college from a place where you learn how to be a member of a democratic citizenry to a place where you get job training. Now, there’s nothing wrong with job training, but job training is not what university educations in building democratic knowledge was built to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah.

Wendy Brown:

But it’s what it’s been reduced to-

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. No, I think you’re following the same track here because I think that’s the change that I can see and hear, and I’ve experienced myself, is just the very concept of unions as… In the ideal form, what a union ultimately means is translating the ideal of democracy into the workplace. That’s what it should be, right? Workers banding together, having more of a collective voice in the place where we spend the majority of our lives, and working together to achieve that. That was so alien to me growing up as a millennial.

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It was not only alien, but it was seen as outdated-

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… as passe, and in fact bad, right? Because it impeded the ability of the businesses that we were working at to grow and adapt, it impeded our ability to advance-

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… and get… If we wanted to get promoted, something like a union would impose a sort of strict barrier with things like seniority, or what have you, it was always posed as an obstacle to that highly individualized notion of human capital flourishing. And I think in the Cold War era, that was a time when it felt like this fantasy could be true. It felt like the pie that “free market,” liberalism, whatever we wanted to call it, was going to create a big enough pie for all of us, and if we just improved our human capital, went to school, got a good education, the best education you could get, no matter how much debt it took to get there, that you could attain that comfortable, dignified, middle, upper-middle class, or even maybe you could get rich, right? But it was all up to you as an individual.

Wendy Brown:

And of course, the same story accompanied the idea of home ownership. And we should just add that story in here, where not only could you go into debt to invest in yourself as a bit of human capital to get an education, you could go into massive debt debt that you actually couldn’t afford to get a little starter home or to get a home to be part of what Bush called the ownership society. And we know how that ended up in 2008, not just because of the junk mortgages, but also because of the speculation in housing that neoliberalism unleashed when it deregulated the banks and basically attacked every restriction there was on speculation in real estate. And that, what we call the fire sector in economics, which is real estate and insurance and banking, and so forth, it’s the financialized world, has been the biggest growing sector in US capitalism over the last 40 years. But we know where that wealth is. It’s at the top. And we know who it took the skin off of, the bottom half of America.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. And just thinking… Because what we’re talking about, to go back to that quote that I read from your book, what we’re talking about is this viral kind of reason that infects more and more segments of society, reshapes more and more individual psyches, organizations, be they governmental or private.

Wendy Brown:

In the book, I call it termite-like-

Maximillian Alvarez:

Termite-like.

Wendy Brown:

… that bores into everything, and pretty soon, you find yourself bored into. You find yourself thinking about investing in yourself so that others will invest in you. Do not think about solidarity with others, caring for others, social worlds, social connections. You think about what you can do to improve your own human capital so that others will find your capital value attractive and invest in you. And that’s the students we’ve been talking about. That’s how workers were taught to think of themselves, and how [inaudible 00:19:20]. Neoliberalism did a frontal attack on labor. It attacked all solidarities. It basically killed off most labor law, or law that favored unions, and beefed up the capacity of capital to do what it wanted, and especially through a whole series of legal moves that allowed or required workers to sign contracts that any grievances they had would be privately negotiated and privately solved. And if unions weren’t already wobbly, that pretty much finished them off. So it is a wonder that they’re coming back. It is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that’s a great example-

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… of the number that neoliberalism has done on us in our society, is the notion of the class action lawsuit-

Wendy Brown:

Exactly.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… as a class action has been replaced by individual arbitration.

Wendy Brown:

Absolutely.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And who’s the one who benefits from that?

Wendy Brown:

Yeah. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s the employers and-

Wendy Brown:

No, it’s Thatcher dream come true. There is no such thing as a class.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No.

Wendy Brown:

And as you say, it just got eliminated from the Supreme Court level all the way down.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I think perhaps one of my hypotheses for why we’re seeing this sort of fatigue with the world that neoliberalism has created, and we are revivifying things like senses of social solidarity, collective solidarity, organizations like unions that can allow us to work together to counteract this disease that essentially has dominated our society for my entire lifetime, and that I myself subscribe to in so many ways. And I guess what I think about when I think about what this looks like, because again, that whole thesis of the termites eating away at the very foundations and possibilities and individuals desire for democracy. So the more neoliberalism takes over, the more it destroys the possibility of democracy in so many ways that you lay out. And I just think of about what it looks like on a day-to-day level-

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… how that transmogrification from being part of a society to just being these sort of individual actors in a competitive marketplace and the sort of perverse rationalities that we develop to justify the inhumane society and social relations that result. I think about a family member of mine, who I won’t name, but when the financial crash happened, which meant that my family eventually lost the house that I grew up in.

Wendy Brown:

I’m sorry about that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you. It was exceedingly painful.

Wendy Brown:

It’s hard, yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it was a slow burn, right?

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it wasn’t ever a societal problem. It was our personal failure-

Wendy Brown:

Right. Right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… like we had done something wrong. And I remember this family member who did not lose their house standing in our kitchen with me, my mom, my sister, and saying that God had rewarded them for being a good Catholic and told them to pay off their mortgage before the crash, thereby implying in our house that-

Wendy Brown:

You were not only-

Maximillian Alvarez:

… we were not good enough.

Wendy Brown:

… losers, but you were godless.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. So it was ultimately we just weren’t good enough-

Wendy Brown:

I’m so sorry. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… Catholics. But that’s the only rational outlet you have when you live in that sort of mental framework.

Wendy Brown:

Either that or you just go to the bad luck thesis, which is also part of neoliberal reason, to just say it does not subscribe to the Horatio Alger myth. It does not say those who work hard will be rewarded. In fact, Hayek, one of the leading neoliberal intellectuals thought Horatio Alger was just offering the worst justification and legitimacy for capitalism there could be. Why? Because he said, “Look, you can work your whole life and still end up in the gutter. Capitalism distributes, rewards, not according to work, but according to the market. And you might be lucky, you might not be lucky. You might invest wisely, and you could say it was wise, but you might go belly up too.” And so the bad luck idea, that I tried, but I made a few bad decisions or whatever, even if you don’t engage in all that self blame, you’re also not seeing, as brother Bernie put it, that the system is rigged.

You just don’t see it. And I grew up in what was California in the crash, the foreclosure capital of the world. In the Central Valley, the town I grew up in Modesto, I think was something like 60 or 70% with mortgages underwater by the end of the crash. And it also is Trump country. When I grew up, it’s a different world of agricultural, political, and cultural values then, but it has become deeply conservative and suffering. So it’s little wonder that when Trump came in and said, “The system’s rigged,” but he meant it in a different way, “and I’m here to anoint your wounds. And the people haven’t been fair, and those coastal elites are making off with all the goods,” and blamed everything from feminists to migrants to black people to criminals for their problems that it was bait that was pretty tasty.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and you know what? I guess I’d never thought of it this way until I was listening to you talk just then, but in a way, the sort of Trumpian phenomenon is consistent with this.

Wendy Brown:

Absolutely.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right? Because my dad, Jesus, a Mexican immigrant, we lost everything in the recession. First episode of my podcast ever recorded was with him after he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because-

Wendy Brown:

Good for you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… he talks about feeling like it was between the devil he knew and the devil he didn’t.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But even going back to that moment, it’s almost like the sort of Trumpian animosity that tapped into real pain, resentment, hurting, all the things that we’re talking about, all the real structural reasons that neoliberalism has immiserated the livelihoods and dignity and futures of most of us, for the benefit of a very few, that grievance is articulated in these neoliberal terms. It’s because certain special groups are getting favorable treatment that is out of sync with this sort of neoliberal reason. Therefore, the attacks on anything resembling affirmative action, anything attempting to sort of counteract historical inequities is taken as-

Wendy Brown:

It’s unions. If we stay away from, for a moment, the racism and the anti-immigrant stuff and all of that, it’s unions, it’s affirmative action, it’s overeducated elites, and so forth. They’re hogging it, they’re controlling it, and it’s the people who are globalizers. That’s the other part. We need to hunker down before the nation. And for these people. Of course, Trump never had a plan, and he never was going to deliver on any of this, but he knew how to touch the wound, and did it quite brilliantly.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Yeah. I think so.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just the last thing I would say on that before we move on is just, again, thinking about the cruelty that neoliberalism has embedded in us or that is brought out of us. I’m not going to go all Hobbs here and say that it was always there, right? I think-

Wendy Brown:

No, I don’t think it was,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. But I think it really cultivates the sort of cruelty in people that on… If you can distance yourself enough from it, you see how irrational and cruel and absurd it is, but it’s not easy to get that distance. But again, thinking about the realm that I cover at The Real News, primarily labor, I talk to so many people who have done it the right way. They have improved their human capital. They’ve gone to college or trade school, they’ve done apprenticeships, they’ve worked their way from this company to that company, and then the plant closes, or the call center closes, or there’s downsizing, mass layoffs.

Wendy Brown:

That’s my dad’s story. So he did it all right, and then his plant literally closed. He had given his whole life to it. He wasn’t up to speed in new technologies because he was keeping an old chemical plant running. And when it closed, he was in his fifties, and he was tossed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And then the cruelty is just like, tough shit.

Wendy Brown:

Yeah, it was tough shit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

He ended up following the pieces of that plant down to Metamoros, Mexico, where it was rebuilt piece by piece. Because why had it closed? It was toxic, it was processing barium, and the labor unions were killing it. It couldn’t compete anymore. So it was one of those [foreign language 00:29:00], only this was quite literally just, they dismantled the thing, and piece by piece, he found himself eventually in Brownsville, living, drinking, and kind of tending the plant.

Wendy Brown:

Wow.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah.

Wendy Brown:

So anyway, we have dad stories.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We got dad stories.

Wendy Brown:

Let’s move on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, I think what we’re talking about is just like we kind of know the endpoint of this, is it’s just like what fabric there was holding together what semblance of society we still believed in-

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… continually fraying.

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And all manner of social and individual psychosis kind of result from that.

Wendy Brown:

Yes. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I guess now we’re kind of up to where we are.

Wendy Brown:

I’m glad you mentioned psychosis and neurosis because I think we talk about the epidemic of mental illness today without talking about, very often, what the governing values are that put everything on the individual, and yet make it nearly impossible for the individual to do or succeed at what that top rung of the ladder holds out for reasons we haven’t discussed yet, but we have other things to talk about.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We do. Generally-

Wendy Brown:

No wonder there’s so much self blame and self emulation in there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I could talk to you about this for days, and I’m just going to have to have you back on, if I can be so bold. But in that way, that kind of leads us up to the event that we’re here in Philadelphia to participate in. Because I think what the media Inequality and Change Center has brought us here to discuss is really important, which is, where does media fit into all of this, both, I think, in the good and bad side? Because I can think of both, right? I can think about how… I won’t go into the whole last century, tracing the political economy of the journalism industry, how we wedded the democratic function of journalism in a free press to the corporate prerogatives of advertisers. And then when advertisers no longer had what they needed have journalism, they dropped it like a bad habit. And then you get the sort of ripple effects of losing local journalism.

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And yada, yada yada. But so I think there’s an argument to be made about how that trajectory of the political economy, of the journalism industry in the US traced along the same historical lines that we’ve been talking here has also contributed to that loss of sense of society-

Wendy Brown:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… democracy, so on and so forth. But I want to just focus on one particular part of that. Because I think when in the 20th century, to make that marriage work between a free press that’s supposed to be a pillar, fourth state of democracy, wedded it to the prerogatives of advertisers and corporate capital, so on and so forth, to make that model work, journalism understood, the institutions and operators within the journalism industry, I think understood that the goal was not to make active informed democratic citizens, but predictable consumers of information. And I think that the more that that was effectively the model for keeping us subscribed, reading, watching, listening, the more that it makes out of you, the kind of subject that you need to be in that sort of arrangement, which is just someone who’s constantly consuming, someone who’s constantly trying to staying on top of the news.

Wendy Brown:

So I would just add to… I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I would add to it, which is that I think not only does the shift you depict shift toward consumption, it also shifts toward, I want to put it boldly, addictive satisfaction. You have to keep the consumer of your particular media site on your site. You’re not going to do that with careful, slow, thoughtful presentation of the world. You’re going to do that with hot shit. You’re going to do that with stuff that’s exciting, whether it is just trash talk or Hollywood or scandal or… When I was young, this was the joke about the local news, that it was just always ambulance chasing and train wrecks and that sort of thing, and that it had to do that, not just because it was local, but because that’s the only way it could peel people off from the national news.

So I think it’s important for us to understand that everything from social media to corporate media to independent media is fighting for that bite, that addiction. And that is really different from media or the fourth estate that is there to do what we have to do in democracy, which is already educated citizens. We’ve already diseducated them because we no longer have education organized for democracy. It’s organized for job training. And then on top of that, you pour media that is not there to inform them, but to keep you hooked on its particular site. It’s a mess. We need to correct both.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I think that’s beautifully put. And there’s so many, I think ways that we can use the media that are available to us and harness them for that, but it’s going to take a lot of work, right? But I think the hopeful thing, for the same reason that we’re seeing this rise in interest in collective worker mobilization, I think people are getting exhausted with just watching the world burn with 3D glasses on, right?

Wendy Brown:

I completely agree, and I would end here. Your generation is the one that was just steeped in neoliberal rationality and economics. The generation that comes just after you is the one that saw what a dumpster fire it was, not just because of the crash, but also because that’s the generation that saw that it was just a hamster wheel they were on, and they weren’t going to get anywhere, that many of them were deep in debt, whether they went to college or whether they went to vocational school on those crazy loan schemes that we haven’t even talked about. And they also saw the world burning, and they saw racial violence and racial injustice, and they saw just a whole series of things that, especially massive inequality, that didn’t make neoliberalism look good and didn’t make anything about this world look good. So they’re the generation that we’re seeing them everywhere. They’re the generation that have taken us into the streets for everything from climate change to the movement for black lives, to immigrants rights.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And they’re in the labor movement too. Starbucks workers are a lot of Gen Z folk.

Wendy Brown:

That’s what I was going to say. What you see is just a ton of young people just saying, “Mm-mm, I’m off this train. If we don’t make a different kind of world, there is no world. There is no future.” So they’re the hope. I’m not going to go through the usual thing where I apologize to them for having handed this. I’m just going to say I’m with them. We’re going to do it together.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity Forever.