Mis/Education and Zero Tolerance: Disposable Youth and the Politics of Domestic Militarization

There is growing evidence in American life that citizenship is being further emptied of any critical social and political content. Of course, citizenship itself is a problematic and contested concept; even in its best moments historically, when it was strongly aligned with concerns for human rights, equality, justice, and freedom as social provisions, it never completely escaped from the exclusionary legacies of class, gender, and racial inequality.¹ Yet, in spite of such drawbacks, social citizenship contained, even within the watered-down version characteristic of liberal democracy, the possibility for both reflecting critically on its own limitations and implementing the promises of radical democracy. Accentuating the importance of public issues, social citizenship provided a referent, however limited, for individuals to think of themselves as active citizens and not merely as taxpayers and homeowners. Moreover, as the site of many diverse struggles, citizenship often brought to the fore models of political agency in which people were encouraged to address public issues that would benefit the larger collective good. Substantive citizenship also recognized that, for democracy to work, individuals must feel a connection with each other that transcends the selfishness, competitiveness, and brutal self-interests unleashed by an ever expanding market economy. In this context, the state was forced at times to offer a modicum of social services and forums designed to meet basic social needs. State-supported social provisions paralleled modest efforts to affirm public goods such as schools and to provide public spaces in which diverse individuals had the opportunity to debate, deliberate, and acquire the know-how to be critical and effective citizens. This is not meant to suggest that before neoliberalism’s current onslaught on all things public, liberal, democratic culture encouraged widespread critical thinking and inclusive debate. On the contrary, liberal democracy offered little more than the swindle of formalistic, ritualized democracy, but at least it contained a referent for addressing the deep gap between the promise of a radical democracy and the existing reality. With the rise of neoliberalism, referents for imagining even a weak democracy, or, for that matter, understanding the tensions between capitalism and democracy, which animated political discourse for the first half of the twentieth century, appear to be overwhelmed by market discourses, identities, and practices. Democracy has now been reduced to a metaphor for the alleged free market. It is not that a genuine democratic public space once existed in some ideal form and has now been corrupted by the values of the market, but that these democratic public spheres, even in limited forms, seem no longer to be animating concepts for making visible the contradiction and tension between what Jacques Derrida refers to as the reality of existing democracy and “the promise of a democracy to come.”²

With the advent of neoliberalism, corporate culture has made efforts to privatize all things social, stripping citizenship of its emancipatory possibilities. As a result, the state has been hollowed out as its police functions increasingly overpower and mediate its diminishing social functions. Consequently, the government at all levels is largely abandoning its support for child protection, health care for the poor, and basic social services for the aged.³ The government is now discounted as a means of addressing basic economic, educational, environmental, and social problems. Market-based initiatives are touted as the only avenue for resolving issues such as unemployment, education, housing, and poverty. Public goods are now disparaged in the name of privatization, and those public forums in which association and debate thrive are being replaced by what Paul Gilroy calls an “info-tainment telesector” industry driven by dictates of the marketplace.⁴

Consumerism increasingly drives the meaning of citizenship as the principles of self-preservation and self-interest sabotage political agency, if not public life itself. As the public sector is remade in the image of the market, commercial values replace social values, and the spectacle of...