Disposable populations are no longer hidden in the shadows or relegated to the margins. They have been thrust into the harsh spotlight of a militarized spectacle, orchestrated by Trump’s Christian white supremacist nationalist regime. The faces of the undocumented, people of color, and those labeled as “gang members” are now paraded across a media landscape that eagerly captures their arrests, handcuffs, and deportations to brutal prisons. As the violence of this regime expands, it no longer confines itself to domestic borders. Its reach now stretches to women, children, and the elderly—both within the United States and abroad. This is starkly evident in the genocidal war against Palestinians, where thousands of children in Gaza are killed, their lives deemed expendable. What we are witnessing is a war on democracy itself—one that has come home. It is no longer concealed behind the terrorizing war on immigration and its expanded politics of disposability—reinforced with the racist language of invasions, poisoning of the blood of Americans, and charges of criminality. The same violence that targets the most vulnerable at home now extends its reach abroad, exposing the brutal, interconnected systems of oppression for the world to see.

Youth, once heralded as the hope and future of democracy, now find themselves among the most vulnerable and ignored. Their symbolic status as the face of disposability accelerates the necropolitics of state violence, the kind of violence Orlando Patterson warned us about—where “social death” is not just a metaphor, but a reality, erasing young lives both literally and figuratively. How else can we explain the scene of 20 federal immigration agents breaking into a women’s home in Oklahoma City, seizing her phones, her laptops, and her life savings—yet never identifying themselves or the reason for their assault? They terrorized the woman and her daughters, forcing them out into the rain, half-dressed, before even allowing them to put on their clothes. This is the same regime that deported three children who were U.S. citizens, including a 4-year-old receiving treatment for metastatic cancer. This is no mere war on immigrants—this is the unmistakable sign of how democracy crumbles when state-sanctioned terrorism is allowed to reign, targeting anyone, including American citizens and children, with impunity. This is an upgraded, unleashed American fascism on steroids.

The rise of neoliberal fascism, rooted in violence and exclusion, exploits a youth culture defined by disposability and disempowerment. This crisis, far from a distant threat, is already dismantling democracy—already frayed and largely destroyed. Yet, this destruction is not irreversible. Across the globe, sparks of resistance are igniting, and as we will see, the struggle for education, culture, and solidarity will be central to any hope for transformation and resistance.

A recent Yale Youth Poll confirms what some of us have long insisted: youth alone will not rescue a democracy hollowed out by gangster capitalism and governed by demagogues who turn cruelty into spectacle and governance into organized theft. The comforting liberal fantasy that generational turnover will automatically usher in justice is a dangerous delusion—one that frees older generations from accountability and blinds us to the structural forces that shape political consciousness. In fact, while many youth are deeply involved in a number of social and political struggles, a number of youth are shifting toward the Republican.

We are not witnessing a temporary crisis. We are witnessing collapse: of public institutions, civic imagination, and the ethical vocabulary that once made collective life thinkable. Neoliberalism, far from dead, has mutated into a violent form of capitalist necropolitics or neoliberal fascism, one that celebrates greed, rewards cruelty, and administers violence and death in slow and spectacular forms. It has privatized not only resources but hope itself,  replacing dreams with debt, solidarity with consumerism, and public goods with algorithmic governance and militarized policing.

Higher education, once regarded, though not without its flaws, as a sanctuary where youth could study in classroom environments that were intellectually rigorous and methodologically adventurous, connect the knowledge learned to a more critical and capacious understanding of themselves, others and the larger world. When possible, at its best, higher education provided the conditions for students to narrate themselves in a way that suggested that the future is open and that they could connect their education with the struggle for a better life and inhabit a sense of agency that enabled them to speak, write, and act from a position of agency and empowerment. Yet, this model of education, imperfect though it was, is now under siege as never before in American history, revealing the intensifying assault on youth and the essential role of higher education in cultivating critically informed agents. The nature of this crisis is brilliantly summarized by Maximillian Alvarez in an interview he conducted with Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the most influential scholar of McCarthyism. He writes:

A dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities: ICE agents are snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight; student visas are being revoked en masse overnight; funding cuts and freezes are upending countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure; students are being expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An all-out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by law enforcement, internet vigilantes, and even university administrators. Today’s climate of repression recalls that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist Red Scare in the 1950s, but leading scholars of McCarthyism and political repression say that the attacks on higher education, free speech, and political repression we’re seeing today are “worse” and “much broader.”

In this cultural wasteland, justice becomes an object of repression and love is marketed back to us as a luxury product—authoritarian populism finds fertile ground. It offers not just scapegoats, but meaning—identity, certainty, and belonging—to a generation adrift in a society that commodifies their existence and brands their suffering as failure. Young people are not exempt from the seductions of reaction. Fractured by class, race, and gender, and raised in a society that renders them both hyper-visible and politically disposable, many drift toward nihilism, while others are drawn to the false promises of domination dressed up as empowerment.

In the age of Trump, working-class, Black, and Brown youth have been systematically erased from the script of democracy. These young people, who have long been marginalized, are now seen as expendable—dehumanized, put at risk, and subjected to the brutality of state violence. In this authoritarian era, the very ideas and actions that hold power accountable and demand truth are criminalized. Those who dare to challenge the structures of domination, to fight for justice, are now marked as threats. These youth, considered unworthy of full citizenship, are relegated to surplus populations, discarded by a system that has no place for them. Their existence is reduced to a nightmare of surveillance, containment, and a lethal politics of disposability. The state’s role is not merely to repress but to obliterate; it dismantles any notion of social and ethical responsibility. As capitalism expands its reach, it fortifies its grip through algorithmic authoritarianism and a deadly agenda of blame and exclusion,  especially regarding young people. In Youth in a Suspect Society, I argue that these young people, once the hope of democracy, are now viewed as potential threats, surveilled and criminalized at every turn. Their future is shaped by the state’s insidious drive to make them invisible, a move that strips away not just their rights but their humanity. As William I Robinson so succinctly describes, this emergent fascism is powered by a politics of disposability—where entire populations are reduced to nothing more than refuse, discarded in the name of state power.

He writes.

The digital revolution is bringing about a rapid expansion of surplus populations — billions have been expelled and must be controlled and even exterminated. Nightmarish strategies of containment include the Gaza option of outright genocide, the Salvadoran option of mega-imprisonment, and a radical expansion of the global police state, applying the new technologies for mass surveillance, social control, and repression. Another form of dealing with surplus humanity is simple abandonment, as in the case of rural United States, where opioids conveniently wipe out whole communities. Trump has proposed a $1 trillion Pentagon budget as military spending around the world escalates. Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression are pivotal to sustaining global accumulation and controlling rebellion from below.

And yet, there are sparks.

Across the globe, young people and others are naming the violences that structure their lives—against the earth, against Black and brown bodies, against gender autonomy, and against memory itself. From climate strikes and police violence to campus occupations and state sanctioned abductions, they are raising their voices. But what remains largely absent is a sustained, mass movement with the clarity and radical imagination to connect these struggles into a broader anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and life-affirming vision. The crisis is not just political—it is pedagogical.

Education is not secondary to politics; it is the foundation of any political struggle. As Gramsci taught us, all politics is pedagogical, and in our times, culture itself has become the primary terrain where consent is manufactured and dissent is criminalized. In this age of manufactured ignorance and historical amnesia, authoritarianism doesn’t just need lies—it needs forgetfulness; it thrives on eliminating or rewriting dangerous memories. It thrives on the erasure of memory, on civic illiteracy, and on a public numbed into submission. For the far-right extremists in power, education as the practice of freedom, informed judgment, and critical thinking is dangerous. That is why reclaiming education—in schools, in art, in media, in everyday life—is no longer a luxury, but a vital precondition for democratic struggle. As one of the critical institutions in civil society that function as a bulwark of democracy or what remains of it, public and higher education is a fundamental public good capable of both defending and enabling the search for the truth, democratic values, compassion, and networks of solidarity.

What kind of human beings are we cultivating? What dreams do we nurture, what histories do we honor, what futures do we allow to breathe? These are not abstract questions. They cut to the heart of how we resist. We need a language that breaks through despair, a pedagogy that names domination in all its forms but also dares to imagine something radically different. A language that can wound, yes, but also one that can heal and galvanize.

That means rejecting the seductive language of isolated differences and embracing a politics of totality—a vision that understands how racism, patriarchy, ecological devastation, militarism, and economic dispossession all are bound together in the same machinery of domination. We must refuse the comforts of liberal gradualism and technocratic fixes and instead summon the courage to name capitalism itself as incompatible with democracy.

Resistance cannot be episodic; it must become a permanent way of life. Youth must not only protest but organize—link arms with workers, unions, educators, feminists, cultural workers, and all those deemed disposable by the existing order. We must occupy not just physical spaces but cultural ones—turn classrooms, social media, poetry, film, and song into sites of political awakening and radical dreaming. Direct action must be met with deep coalition-building. Mutual aid must be paired with revolutionary pedagogy. We need insurgent schools and abolitionist universities, but also radical art collectives, community libraries, political theaters, and street universities where the dispossessed teach each other how to fight and how to hope.

We cannot merely resist the effects of fascism—we must dismantle the institutions that make it possible. That means confronting the militarization of everyday life, the normalization of surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, and the systemic violence embedded in a political economy that treats vast portions of the population as disposable. We need a vision of democracy that is not a cover for capitalist rule but a rupture with it, a democracy rooted in socialist principles, collective joy, mutual responsibility, and ecological care.

This is not a time for despair, but for a militant hope and mass resistance. A time to build—not just new alliances, but new ways of thinking, new languages of resistance, and new institutions of care that will nourish and sustain a socialist democracy. It is a time to reject neoliberal fascism’s politics of death—a politics that seeks to extinguish life. Instead, we must embrace a politics that dares to imagine the unimaginable, to fight for a future where all are worthy, all are seen, and treated with respect, dignity, and the conditions that make the flourishing of agency and democracy possible. As Ernst Bloch reminds us, “Hope… is the possibility of a place where the lost will find their homes.” This hope is not passive but active; it is the revolutionary force that fuels our struggle.

The fire next time is no mere metaphor; it must be the spark that awakens rebellion from the roots, a fire ignited by collective knowledge, courage, and civic responsibility—a flame that pierces through the lies and the abyss of neoliberal fascism, relentless and unquenchable. 

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