Democracy,  Patriotism, and Schooling After September 11^th

Critical Citizens or Unthinking Patriots?

Henry A. Giroux

From: The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear
reprinted with permission by the author

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.

Albert Camus

This is a difficult time in American history. The tragic and horrific terrorist acts of September 11 suggest a traumatic and decisive turning point in the history of the United States. Some commentators have compared it to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Others suggest that the history of the twenty-first century will be defined against the cataclysmic political, economic, and legal changes inaugurated by the monstrous events of September 11. Similarly, many people are now aware that, for better or worse, the United States is part of a global system, the effects of which cannot be completely controlled.¹  There is also a newfound sense of  unity organized not only around flag-waving displays of patriotism but also around collective fears and an ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space.  

As President Bush declared that the United States is at war, the major television networks capitalized on this militarized notion of patriotism,  repeatedly framing their news programs against tag lines such as “America at War,” “America Strikes Back,.” or “America Recovers.” Fox News Network delivered a fever-pitch bellicosity that informed much of its ongoing commentaries and reactions to the terrorists bombings, framed nightly against its widely recognized image, “America United.” A majority of both the op-ed commentaries in the dominant media and the television commentaries appearing on the major networks, such as ABC, NBC, and CBS, proclaimed their support for government and military action, while giving relatively  little exposure to dissenting positions.² Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of September 11 within the context of World War II,  invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation, and  war. Against an endless onslaught of images of U.S. jets bombing  Afghanistan, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, blow up apartment buildings, or unleash bio chemical agents on the American population. The increased fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously served to legitimatize a host of antidemocratic practices at home, including “the beginnings of a concerted attack on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press.”³ Such anxieties have also produced a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggests that terrorism should be analyzed, in part, within the context of American foreign policy should not be allowed “to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even make a speech at a college.”⁴ Against this militarization of public discourse,  Hollywood and television producers provide both Spielberg-type patriotic spectacles such as the made for television  HBO dramatic series, “Band of Brothers,” and Hollywood’s uncritical  homage to the military in  films such as “Behind Enemy Lines,” “Black Hawk Down,” “Spy Games,” “We Were Soldiers,” and “Wind Talkers” All of these narratives offer romanticized images of military valor and a hyper-masculine, if not over-the-top, patriotic portrayal of war and violence--while hoping to capitalize on the current infatuation with the military experience by raking in big box office receipts.  

In what follows, I illustrate the many ways in which life in post-September 11 America is both a rupture from some of the anti government politics that dominated before these tragic events and an uncanny continuity from the pre-September 11 worship of global capitalism and the virtual abandonment of any effort to create greater equality, especially for children.  In showing both these ruptures and continuities, I hope to help educators contemplate the role that public schools might play in facilitating an alternative discourse grounded in a critique of militarism, consumerism and racism. Such an alternative discourse would redefine democracy as something separate and distinct from the hyper-individualized market-based relations of capitalism and the retrograde appeal to jingoistic patriotism. 

Before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, popular perceptions of politics and government were that they were either corrupt or irrelevant. Recalled from exile, it appears that the government, especially the military and law enforcement, is once again a defining feature of American life, both pressing and despairing at the same time.⁵   Still, as significant as September 11 might be as a moment of rupture, it is imperative to look at the crucial continuities that either have remained the same or have escalated since the attacks. For instance, prior  to September 11th, there was a growing concern with the build up in racial profiling, the criminalization of social policies, the growth of the prison-industrial complex and multilayered systems of social control and surveillance,⁶ and the ongoing attacks by the police against people of color.⁷  These trends seemed disturbing before the events of September 11th, but now they have the cloak of official legitimacy, buttressed and intensified by  the sense of insecurity and fear that, in part, mobilizes the call for patriotism and national security. For instance, little has been reported in the dominant media about the attacks and violence waged against people perceived as Middle Eastern.  As Mike Davis observes: 

The big city dailies and news networks have shown patriotic concern for the US image abroad by downplaying what otherwise might have been recognized as the good ole boy equivalent of Kristallnacht. Yet even the fragmentary statistics are chilling. In the six weeks after 11 September, civil rights groups estimate that there were at least six murders and one thousand serious assaults committed against people perceived as ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’, including several hundred attacks on Sikhs.⁸  

While there has been some resistance in both the media and among diverse groups to the accelerated practice of racial profiling, the American public largely supported the indefinite detention by federal authorities of over 1,200 immigrants, only four of whom, according to Davis, have direct links to terrorist organizations.⁹ Only recently has the opposition been growing to the government’s decision to hold alleged terrorists indefinitely, including American citizens such as Yaser Esam Hamdi, as war captives, without charges, bail, and access to lawyers.  One example is evident in  a successful  lawsuit brough against the Bush Administration by the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and  a number of other groups which resulted in a federal judge ruling that the U.S. government must reveal the names of the detainees arrested after the September 11 terrorist attacks.   

Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists attacks, democracy appears even more fragile in this time of crisis as new antiterrorist laws have been  passed that make it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions. Against a government and media induced culture of fear, “Federal law enforcement is being restructured so that the FBI can permanently focus on the Wart against Terrorism–meaning that it will largely become an elite immigration police-while a mysterious new Pentagon entity, the Homeland Defense Command, will presumably adopt the Mexican border as a principal battlefield.”¹⁰  A further threat to democracy can be found in the USA Patriot Act of 2001. This legislation  increases law enforcement’s power to conduct surveillance, enact wire-taps that do not have to be disclosed to the public, engage in  secret searches, and detain legal immigrants indefinitely. It also authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency to resume spying on U.S. Citizens. The bill also authorizes secret immigration trials, unreviewable military tribunals, and the monitoring of attorney-client conversations. Not only does the bill introduce a broadly defined crime of “domestic terrorism,” it also allows people to be interned and tried on the basis of secret evidence. Many Americans view these laws as both a violation of the Constitution, and a threat to some of the most basic freedoms endemic to a democratic state.  For instance,  David Cole, a progressive lawyer, has argued that the Patriot Act “imposes guilt by association on immigrants...and resurrects the philosophy of McCarthyism, simply substituting ‘terrorist’ for ‘communist.’” He also argues that “the military tribunals eliminate virtually every procedural check designed to protect the innocent and accurately identify the guilty.”¹¹ There is even more reason for concern about the erosion of civil liberties in light of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s willingness to extend the powers of the F.B.I. to monitor and spy on a vast array of citizens and political groups, “even when there is no evidence of criminal activity.”¹² The concern over civil liberties is not limited to progressive critics. The widely read conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times, William Safire, has denounced the new unbridled powers given to the F.B.I.--without any recourse to public debate. He writes  that “Attorney General John Ashcroft–working with his hand-picked aide,  F.B.I. Director ‘J. Edgar’ Mueller III--has gutted guidelines put in place a generation ago to prevent the abuse of police power by the federal government. They have done this deed by executive fiat: no public discussion, no Congressional action, no judicial guidance.”¹³ 

The notion of what constitutes a just society is in flux, betrayed in part by the legacy and language of a commercial culture that collapses the imperatives of a market economy and the demands of a democratic society, and a present that makes humanitarian and political goals a footnote to military goals.¹⁴ Instead of seeing the current crisis as a break from the past, it is crucial for educators and others to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy in the aftermath of September 11. This suggests establishing a vision of freedom, equity, education, and justice, as Homi Bhabha, points out  “informed by civil liberties and human rights, which carries with it the shared obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.”¹⁵ 
 

Unity, Civil Liberties, and Patriotism  

Official calls for unity, burdened with rage and grief for those killed or injured in the terrorist attacks, waver between agitprop displays of patriotism and a genuine attempt to understand and  address the political reality of balancing civil liberties and national security, fear and reason, compassion and anger. The political reality that emerges from the crisis points to a set of choices the American people are being asked to make including ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan and the Philippines, with the possibility of wider military strikes on other Islamic nations,  and the demand to sacrifice some basic civil liberties to strengthen domestic security.  Of course, Americans have every right to demand that our children, cities, water supply, public buildings, and most crucial public spaces be safe from terrorists. And we must do something in response to such  brutal acts of violence.   But the demand for security and safety calls for more than military action and the rescinding of basic civil liberties; it also points to larger political issues that demand a diplomatic offensive based on a critical examination of the very nature of our own domestic and foreign policy. Educators have an important role to play in encouraging such an examination of American history and foreign policy among their students and colleagues. Equally important is the need for educators to use their classrooms not only to help students to think critically about the world around them but also to offer a sanctuary and forum where they can address their fears, anger, and concerns about the events of September 11, and how it has affected their lives. The events of  September 11 provide educators with a crucial opportunity to reclaim schools as democratic public spheres in which students can engage in dialogue and critique around the meaning of democratic values, the relationship between learning and civic engagement, and the connection between schooling, what it means to be a critical citizen, and the responsibilities one has to the larger world.¹⁶   

Nothing justifies the violence by terrorists committed against those innocent people who died on September 11^th.  Americans should be unified against that type of terror, and rightly so, but we need to define not only what we are against, but also what we stand for as a nation, and how such a project draws from the principles and values that inform the promise of a more fully developed democracy  in a global landscape.  In a time of crisis, unity is a powerful force, but it is not always innocent, and it must become part of a broader dialogue about how the United States defines itself and its relationship to the rest of the world, particularly to those Western and Middle eastern societies that reject or are resistant to democratic and egalitarian rule.   

If this national crisis has shattered the American sense of alleged complacency and purported self-indulgence, it has also aroused a sense of unity that has sent a chilling message of intolerance towards dissenting opinions about America’s role.  Early casualties included two journalists, Dan Guthrie, a columnist for the Daily Courier of Grants Pass, Oregon and Tom Gutting of  The Texas City Sun, both of whom were fired for criticizing President Bush soon after the terrorist bombings.¹⁷ Equally disturbing was a statement issued by both the chancellor and trustees of the City University of New York, condemning professors who criticized United States Foreign Policy at a teach-in.¹⁸  Neither the trustees nor the chancellor attended the teach-in, basing their response on articles that appeared in The New York Post.  Similar attacks were made by  Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president and former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Scott Rubush, an associate editor of FrontPage magazine. Cheney denounced Judith Rizzo, deputy chancellor of the New York City schools when she “said terrorist attacks demonstrated the importance of teaching about Muslim cultures.”¹⁹ Rubush, while appearing on National Public Radio in October 2001, argued that four faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who had been critical of American foreign policy should be fired because “They’re using state resources to the practical effect of aiding and abetting the Taliban.”²⁰ 

Cheney was also involved in what was one of the most disturbing attacks on people who have dissented against American foreign policy. She and Senator Joseph Lieberman founded an organization called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni which published  the recent report, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America, and What Can Be Done About It.”.²¹  This report includes a list of 117 comments made by faculty and students in the wake of September 11 and points to such comments to argue that American campuses are “short on patriotism and long on self-flagellation.”²² The report not only suggests that dissent is unpatriotic but it also reveals the names of those academics who are allegedly guilty of such crimes.²³  The report was sent to three thousand trustees, donors,  and alumni, across the country, urging them to wage a campaign on college campuses to  require the teaching of American history and Western civilization and to protest and take actions against those intellectuals who are not loyal to this group’s version of patriotism.²⁴ Commenting on the report, Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, sums up what he considers its contribution to the debate on “preferred forms of  free speech.”  He observes: “I’ve had occasion to read a good deal of fourth-rate agitprop over the last thirty years, but I don’t remember an argument as disgraceful as the one advanced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni under the rubric of ‘academic freedom, quality and accountability’.”²⁵ Wrapped in the warm glow of American innocence and the brandishing of flag pins, the call to patriotism by Cheney and her ilk undermines the very spirit of liberty and freedom it claims to defend. Patriotism cannot be defended as part of a holy crusade against evil-doers, especially when the latter includes anyone who believes that civic mindedness and acts of public conscience demands of any country, especially a super power such as the United States, that it pay scrupulous attention to its dream of power and the consequences it has for its effects on the rest of the world. Dissent is not the enemy of democracy, but an essential element in its ability to make visible the connection between ethics and politics, justice and the exercise of power.   As Jerome Binde observes, “Being able to act also means being able to answer for our actions, to be responsible.”²⁶ 

Across the United States, a number of professors have been either fired or suspended for speaking out critically about post-September 11 events.²⁷   Patriotism in this view becomes a euphemism for shutting down dissent, eliminating critical dialogue, and condemning critical citizenship in the interest of conformity and a dangerous departure from what it means to uphold a viable democracy. Needless to say, teachers in both K-12 and higher education are particularly vulnerable to these forms of censorship, particularly if they attempt to engage their students in pedagogical approaches that critically explore the historical, ideological, and political contexts of the attacks and the underlying causes of terrorism, not to mention any controversial subject that calls into question the authority and role of the United States in domestic and foreign affairs. Such censorship shuts down critical inquiry in the schools and prevents students from learning how to distinguish an explanation from a justification. Richard Rothstein, a New York Times reporter,  is right in arguing that “[T]eachers should be encouraged to explore whether there are specific policies that may give rise to terrorism, without being accused of undermining patriotism and national unity. Students who are not taught to question our policies will be ill-prepared as adults to improve on them.”²⁸  

There is a difference between justifying terrorism and trying to historically contextualize and explain it, and this distinction appears to be lost on those who are quick to argue that academic freedom and civil liberties are expendable in a post-September11th world.²⁹  Refusing to make a distinction between explaining an event and justifying it not only stifles a full range of public discourse by considering arguments from other parts of the world,  it also serves to suppress dissent. Rather than beginning with the assumption that everything about American power should be subject to debate and critical analysis, particularly on the part of academics and intellectual,  the Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft crowd seem to believe, as Lewis H. Lapham, observes,  that any criticism of American foreign policy amounts “to a charge of sedition against any university or scholar therein failing to pledge allegiance to the sovereign wisdom of President George W. Bush.”³⁰ 

Suppressing a culture of dissent does more than shut down critical voices, it also provides the conditions for intolerance and bigotry.  Unfortunately, an unparalleled sense of unity and display of  “patriotism” on the part of the American people have also given rise to what some journalists have called a display of “stunning intolerance,”³¹  exacerbating an already unrestrained and indiscriminate hatred towards the seven million Americans who are Muslims. In some cases, insults have been replaced by violence, resulting in death, and as the wave of hate speech and incidents escalate, the American people fall prey to the most retrograde and dangerous views. For instance, a Gallop Poll released on October 4, 2001 “indicated that 49 percent of the American people said yes to the idea that Arabs, including those who are American citizens, should carry special identification,” and 58 percent demand that Arabs, including those “who are U.S. citizens, to undergo special, more intensive security  checks before boarding airplanes in the United States"³²  

Such views reflect an uncritical notion of “patriotism”³³ and are at odds with the most basic principles of an effective democracy informed by a critical democratic education that encourages, rather than closes down, dialogue, critique, dissent, and social justice. At its best, patriotism means that a country does everything possible to question  itself, to provide the conditions for its people to actively engage and transform the policies that shape their lives and others. Patriotism in this sense connects a culture of questioning and dissent  with those democratic sentiments that inform public citizenship and provide the basis for access to decent health care, housing, food, meaningful employment, child care, and childhood education programs for all citizens.  At its worst, patriotism detaches itself from public citizenship and turns its back on citizens who are poor, homeless, hungry, and unemployed.³⁴  

In its most virulent form,  patriotism confuses dissent with treason, arrogance with strength, and brute force as the only exemplar of justice. The main obstacles to justice will not be found in weakening civil liberties, nourishing bellicose calls for revenge, or for drawing lines in the sand between the West and the rest.  As George Monblot points out, “[I]t seems that in trying to shout the terrorist out, we have merely imprisoned ourselves....[F]ree speech and dissent have now joined terrorism as the business of ‘evil doers.’ If this is a victory for civilization, I would hate to see what defeat looks like.”³⁵  Ignorance and arrogance are no substitute for reasoned analyses, critical understanding, and an affirmation of  democratic principles of social justice. Any call for further giving up civil liberties and freedom of speech suggests a dangerous silence about the degree to which civil liberties are already at risk and how the current call for national security might work to further a different type of terrorism, one not marked by bombs and explosions, but by state supported repression, the elimination of dissent, and the death of both the reality and promise of democracy.  

But  unreflective patriotism as home-team boosterism  runs the risk of not only bolstering the conditions for what Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, calls “The New McCarthyism,”³⁶ but of also feeding a commercial frenzy that turns collective grief into profits and reminds us how easy the market converts noble concepts like public service and civic courage into forms of civic vacuity.   Frank Rich, an op. ed. writer for The New York Times calls this trend “Patriotism on the Cheap” and captures its peon to commercialism  in the following commentary. 

 "9/11" is now free to be a brand, ready to do its American duty and move products. Ground zero, at last an official tourist attraction with its own viewing stand, has vendors and lines to rival those at Disneyland. (When Ashleigh Banfield stops by, visitors wave and smile at the TV camera just as they do uptown at the "Today" show.) Barnes & Noble offers competing coffee-table books handsomely packaging the carnage of yesteryear. On Gary Condit's Web site, a snapshot of the congressman's own visit to ground zero sells his re- election campaign. NBC, whose Christmas gift to the nation was its unilateral lifting of a half-century taboo against hard-liquor commercials, deflects criticism by continuing to outfit its corporate peacock logo in stars and stripes.³⁷ 

Red, white, and blue flags adorn a plethora of fashion items, including hats, dresses, coats, T-shirts,  robes, and scarves. Many corporations now organize their  advertisements around displays of patriotism–signaling their support for the troops abroad, the victims of the brutal terrorists acts, and, of course, American resolve--each ad amply displaying its respective corporate or brand-name logo, working hard to gain some cash value by defining commercialism and consumerism as the ultimate demonstration of patriotism.³⁸ Other companies have seized upon the remarkable flood of giving displayed by many Americans after the tragic bombings to sell their products by suggesting they are working with charities associated with September 11^th. In many cases, the connection with charities exist, but most of the profits go to the companies rather than to the victims they are supposed to benefit. . For instance, Sony Music produced a disc called “God Bless America,” which displays boldly on its cover the message, “For the Benefit of the Twin Towers Fund,” which refers to “a charity established by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for the families of uniformed rescuers killed in the World Trade Center collapse.”³⁹  On the back of the disc in small print is the message that “a substantial portion” of profits from the disc will be donated to the fund.  The New York Times reported that the company had no formal agreement with the fund and that  no money had gone to the Twin Towers Fund, even though the disc had sold over 1.2 million copies.⁴⁰ It gets worse. Steve Madden, the shoe designer, produced a sneaker emblazoned with an American flag of imitation gemstones that was part of the Bravest shoe line. “The sneakers were promoted across the country as a joint endeavor with a charity run by Denis Leary, star of ‘The Job’ on ABC, to ‘raise money for New York City’s fallen firefighters’.”⁴¹ According to The New York Times, Madden made  $515,783 in profits from the sneakers by February 2002 and at that time none of the profits  had been distributed to “the families of the firefighters killed September 11.” Under pressure to distribute some of the profits, Madden’s company agreed to give at least 10 percent to the charity, while retaining “more than $400,000 in profits from the Bravest.” When queried about the refusal of the company to hand over the profits made through an appeal to help the families of the firefighters, Jamie Karson, the Madden chief executive responded, without irony,  by arguing “The most patriotic thing we can do is make money.”⁴²  Of course, making profits is one thing, but making excessive profits through the discourse of compassion and patriotism at the expense of the bereaved families it uses promotionally to sell its products is simply shameful and makes clear how low corporations can reach in their attempts to rake in profits. As I point out in more detail in the following sections, in this register, consumerism and the squelching of dissent represent mutually compatible notions of a view of patriotism in which citizenship is more about the freedom to buy than the ability of individuals to engage in “critical public  dialogue and broadened civic participation leading (so it is hoped) to far-reaching change.”⁴³   

The moral panic following the September 11 attacks not only redefined  public space as the “sinister abode of danger, death and infection”⁴⁴ and fueled the collective rush to “patriotism on the cheap”, it also has buttressed the “fear economy.” Defined as “the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown,”⁴⁵ the fear economy promises astronomical financial gains for the defense department-- already asking for an additional 48 billion dollar increase from the Bush Administration for the 2003 budget with administration estimates of more than $2 trillion in military being spent over the next five years and annual budgets rising to $451 billion by  2007.⁴⁶ In addition to bloated defense budgets, the fear economy also spells big profits for the anti-terrorists-security sectors which are primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms.  The war on terrorism cannot be used to justify the profits of a bloated security industry, imprisoning American citizens such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi while not affording them a court hearing and any legal rights,⁴⁷ or ignoring the war that is being waged against children domestically through the elimination of basic child investments. Security is not limited to military defense, and as the Children’s Defense Fund observes  “The war on terrorism is no excuse not to prevent and stop the domestic terrors of child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and abuse and neglect right now.”⁴⁸ 

Democracy and Capitalism Are Not The Same 

Defined largely through an appeal to fear and a call to strengthen domestic security, the space of the social has been both  militarized and increasingly commodified. As such, there is little public conversation about connecting the social to democratic values, justice, or  what the public good might mean in light of this horrible attack as a moral and political referent  to denounce mass acts of violence and to attempt to secure  freedom and justice for all people.  In fact, since the terrorist attacks on September 11^th, the media has largely treated the notions of freedom and security without any reference to how these terms might be taken up as part of a wider  set of  political, economic, and social interests that were at work before the terrorists wreaked havoc on New York and Washington, D.C. In part, this is due to the willingness of the largely dominant  media, politicians, and others to substitute jingoistic drum-beating for a reasoned analysis of what it would mean to “put public affairs back on the American agenda, to revive people’s sense that they have a stake in the way our society is run.”⁴⁹   

Such questions are crucial to any national conversation about the relationship between security, freedom, and democracy and the future of the United States. But such a task would demand that we remember  the social and political discourse and conditions that were actually in place  prior to the events of September 11^th, and what particular limited notions of  freedom, security, and citizenship were available to Americans--the legacy and influence of which might prevent  them from critically addressing this national crisis. Instead of seeing the current crisis as a break from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy in the aftermath of  the bombings in New York and Washington, D.C.  Public schools should play a decisive role in helping students configure the boundaries between history and the present, incorporating a critical understanding of those events that are often left out of the rendering of contemporary considerations that define the roles students might play as critical citizens. Of course, this will be difficult since many public schools are overburdened with high stakes test and harsh accountability systems designed to get teachers to narrow their curriculum and to focus  only on raising test scores. Consequently, any struggle to make schools more democratic and socially relevant will have to link the battle for critical citizenship to an ongoing fight against turning schools into testing centers and teachers into technicians. 

How we define the social with its attendant notions of freedom and security cannot be separated from a legacy of neoliberalism,  in which the space of the social is largely defined through a set of market relations that commodify, privatize, and utterly commercialize the meaning of freedom and security. Construing  profit making as the essence of democracy, neoliberalism provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much of social life as possible to maximize their financial investments. Within this growing marketization and privatization of everyday life, market relations as they define the economy are viewed as a paradigm for democracy itself. Capitalism now defines the meaning of freedom, and to paraphrase Milton Friedman profit-making is the essence of democracy.⁵⁰ Defined almost exclusively through the rhetoric of commercial forces, the social under the economic policies of  neoliberalism has undermined  the discourses of moral responsibility, democratic values,  and political agency. Abstracted from its notion of the social has been the crucial issue of what it means to provide people with the capacities for them to be critical agents, capable of making collectively binding choices and to carry them out as part of the responsibility of translating social issues into collective action, and  to insist on a language of the public good. Even worse, the privatized notion of the social that has dominated American life for the last twenty years makes it increasingly difficult for people to invest in the notion of the public good as a political idea, or to believe they can be agents of change and that political and ethical values matter, or that democracy as an experience does not appear as surplus and is worth investing in and fighting for.  

The discourse of security and freedom prior to the September 11^th attacks pointed to a very different notion of the social, one that had very little to do with democratic social relationships, compassion, and non-commodified values. Freedom was largely defined as the freedom to pursue one’s own individual interests, largely free of governmental interference, and seemed at odds with a more democratic notion of freedom–which would include, as Edward Said has argued, the “right to a whole range of choices affording cultural, political, intellectual and economic development–[that] ipso facto will lead to a desire for articulation rather than silence.”⁵¹ Decoupled from freedom, security within the last twenty years has become synonymous with big government and a debilitating form of dependency.  Security traditionally also  meant  investing in a welfare state that provided individuals not only with basic rights, but also those social provisions that enabled them to develop their capacities as citizens free from the most basic wants and deprivations. This suggested  creating a state that provided a modicum of support and services to make sure people had access to decent health care, food, child care, public schooling, employment, basic financial support, and housing.  

Under neoliberal social and economic policies, such notions of security became highly privatized as the welfare state was hollowed out. With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in the 1980s, freedom was defined largely in market terms, removed from questions of equity,  and traditional notions of security became a referent point for attacking big government and dismantling the welfare state. The social, in this instance,  extending from the Reagan to the Clinton eras, collapsed under the weight of a market philosophy that could only imagine a privatized notion of agency, and viewed community as an obstacle to market-based values that stressed excessive individualism, privatization, commercialization, and the bottom line. Under such circumstances, the helping functions of society gave way to largely policing functions, and the logic of free market exchange undermined those collective structures that fought for social guarantees, public services, and equality of rights. As the social became individualized, uncertainty and fear worked to depoliticize a population that is educated to believe that social problems can only be addressed through private solutions. Within such a climate, shared responsibilities gave way to shared trepidation. 

In light of such views and practices, I want to suggest that while the social is being affirmed and reshaped as a result of this terrible tragedy, the terms through which  public life and citizenship are  being invoked need to be critically engaged within a legacy of neoliberalism that limits profoundly the vocabulary and values available for developing a language of critique and possibility for addressing the responsibilities of critical citizenship and the demands of a democratic society in a time of crisis. For instance, while the role of big government and public services have made a comeback on behalf of the common good, especially in providing crucial services related to public health and safety, President Bush and his supporters remain “wedded to the “same reactionary agenda he pushed before the attack.”⁵² Instead of addressing the gaps in both public health needs and the safety net for workers, young people, and the poor, President Bush has put into law a stimulus plan based primarily on tax breaks for the wealthy and  major corporations, while at the same time “pressing for an energy plan that features subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies and drilling in the arctic wilderness.”⁵³ Investing in children, the environment,  and those most in need as well as in crucial  public services, once again gives way, to investing in the rich and repaying corporate contributors and suggests that little has changed with respect to economic policy, regardless of all the talk about the past being irrevocably repudiated in light of the events of September 11. 

The collapse of public life over the last twenty years makes it all the more essential that the educators  rearticulate a notion of the social at the present time that is framed not only against the recent terrorist attacks on the United States but also in light of the emergence of a market based philosophy that undermines the promise of democracy, the meaning of critical citizenship, and the importance of public engagement. Crucial to such a debate is the role that  educators, educational researchers, theorists, and policy makers might play in intervening both with students and others in an ongoing public conversation about the national crisis arising out of the events of September 11^th. At the heart of such a debate is the need to decouple a market economy from the notion of democracy, to refuse the neoliberal notion that market relations and profit making constitute the meaning and substance of democracy. Sheldon Wolin has recently argued that we need to rethink the notion of loss and how it impacts upon the possibility for opening up democratic public life. Wolin points to the need for educators to resurrect and raise questions about “What survives of the defeated, the indigestible, the unassimilated, the ‘cross-grained,’ the ‘not wholly obsolete’.”⁵⁴   As I have argued elsewhere, “something is missing” in an age of manufactured politics and pseudo-publics catering almost exclusively to desires and drives produced by the commercial hysteria of the market.⁵⁵  What is missing is a language, movement, and vision that refuses to equate democracy with consumerism, market relations, and privatization. In the absence of such a language and the social formations and  public spheres that make it operative, politics becomes narcissistic and caters to the mood of widespread pessimism and the cathartic allure of the spectacle. This is especially important for reinvigorating the debate about public education, which is the last few years has been dominated by the discourse of testing, privatization, vouchers, and standards. If schools are not to be defined as either training hubs for the corporations or as high stakes testing centers, it is imperative for educators to reassert the discourse of critical citizenship, public participation, and democracy as central to the meaning and purpose of schooling. In part, this means challenging the most basic tenets of neoliberalism, with its central assumption that market relations define the nature of schooling, the social and public life. Or, as Lewis Lapham puts it, democracy cannot be “understood as a fancy Greek name for the American Express Card.”⁵⁶
 

Education and the Challenge of Revitalizing Democratic Public Life 

Since the beginning of the 1980s Americans have lived with a heightened sense of insecurity and uncertainty. The tools that were available in the past to deal with the most basic necessities of life such as healthcare, employment, shelter,  and education are increasingly disappearing as the welfare state is attacked in the name of market forces that equate profit making with the essence of democracy and consumption as the ultimate privilege of citizenship.⁵⁷ 

As the state is increasingly relieved of its welfare-providing functions, it defaults on its capacity to provide people with the most basic social provisions, extending from health care to public transportation, and simultaneously  withdraws from its obligation to create those noncommodified public spheres in which people learn the language of ethics, civic courage, democratically charged politics,  and collective empowerment. Within such a turn of events, schools are increasingly defined less as a public good than as sites for financial investment and entrepreneurial training–that is, as a private good.  As big business comes to play a central role in school reform, public schools are increasingly asked to operate under the imperative to conform to the needs of the market and reflect more completely the interests of corporate culture. Targeted primarily as a source of investments for substantial profits,  public schools are under pressure to define themselves as commercial spheres as part of a broader attempt to restructure civic life in the image of market culture and to educate students  as consumers rather than as multifaceted social agents.⁵⁸  

Public spheres disappear amid a flurry of commercial activity as shopping malls proliferate, outnumbering both secondary high schools and post offices.  Increasingly, the vocabulary of a market-based ideology substitutes the discourse of self-reliance and competition  for the language of democratic participation, community and the notion of the public good. One striking example can be seen in the corporate language of schooling in which notions of competition, self-reliance, and individual choice dominate the discourse of high-stakes testing, the standards movement, the school choice agenda, and the charter school movement.  Another example can be seen in many rural towns, where economic growth, is tied to a prison-industry complex that promises jobs by building new prisons. Policing and incarceration emerge as part of a larger pattern of social control, dressed up, in part, as strategic growth to reignite the economies of rural towns.⁵⁹  Missing from this unfortunate trend is any mention of the horror “at the spectacle of a society in which local officials are reduced to lobbying for prisons as their best chance for economic growth.”⁶⁰  Nor is there any mention in the rhetoric of such economic renewal projects that mostly white residents are securing their economic dreams on the transit and lockdown of largely poor African-Americans who make up fully half of the two million Americans currently behind bars in this country.⁶¹  Nor is there any room in this discourse for recognizing that increasing militarization abroad will mean more militarization on the domestic front, especially against “vulnerable groups such as immigrants and communities of color bearing the brunt of the intensified assault on civil liberties.”⁶²  Utopia now becomes privatized and racialized as social problems are translated as personal issues and the tools for translating personal considerations into public issues gradually disappear amid the alleged virtues of corporate competitive values and the incessant celebration in the media of those individuals who have made it in the marketplace because of their ability to “go it alone” through the sheer will of their competitive spirit.⁶³ As the social is refigured through the privatized lens of market relations, radical insecurity and uncertainty replace ethical considerations, social justice, and any viable notion of collective hope. 

As those public spaces that offer forums for debating norms, critically engaging ideas, making private issues public, and evaluating judgments disappear under the  juggernaut of neoliberal policies, it becomes crucial for educators  to raise fundamental questions about what it means to revitalize public life, politics, and ethics in ways that take seriously such values as patriotism, “citizen participation,... political obligation, social governance, and community,”⁶⁴ especially at a time of national crisis when such terms become less an object of analysis than uncritical veneration.  The call for a revitalized politics grounded in an effective democracy substantively challenges the dystopian practices of neoliberalism–with its all consuming emphasis on market relations, commercialization, privatization, and the creation of a world wide economy of part-time workers–against its utopian promises. Such an intervention confronts educators  with the problem as well as the challenge of analyzing,  engaging, and developing  those public spheres–such as the media, public education, and other cultural institutions-- that provide the conditions for creating citizens who are equipped to  exercise their freedoms, competent to question the basic assumptions that govern political life,  and skilled enough to participate in shaping the basic social, political, and economic orders that govern their lives. It is precisely within these public spheres that the events of September 11^th and military action against Afghanistan, the responsibility of the media, the civic obligation of educators, and America’s role in the world as a superpower  should be debated rather than squelched in the name of a jingoistic patriotism.  

Two factors work against such a debate on any level. First, there are very few public spheres left that provide the space for such conversations to take place. Second, it is increasingly difficult for young people and adults to appropriate a critical language, outside of the market, that would allow them to translate private problems into public concerns or to relate public issues to private considerations. For many young people and adults today, the private sphere has become the only space in which to imagine any sense of hope, pleasure, or possibility. Reduced to the act of consuming,  citizenship is “mostly about forgetting, not learning.”⁶⁵ The decline of social capital can be seen in research studies done by The Justice Project in 2001 in which a substantial number of teenagers and young people were asked What they thought democracy meant? The answers testified to a growing depoliticization of the social in American life and were largely along the following lines:  “Nothing,” “I don’t know,” or “My rights, just like, pride, I guess, to some extent, and paying taxes” or “I just think, like, what does it really mean? I know it’s like our, like, our government, but I don’t know what it technically is.”⁶⁶ Market forces focus on the related issues  of consumption and safety, but not on the economic, cultural, and political meaning of a vibrant democracy. And as social visions of equity and justice cede from public memory, unfettered brutal self interests combine with retrograde social polices to make security a top domestic priority. One consequence, once again, is that all levels of government are being hollowed out, reducing their role to dismantling the gains of the welfare state as they increasingly construct policies that  criminalize social problems and prioritize penal methods over social investments, even as the post September 11 events have rallied a renewal on the part of many Americans in the importance of big government as a provider of public services, public infrastructures, and public goods. Hence, it is not surprising that the current concern with security, with its implied notions of further militarizing and policing ever more aspects of daily life, is surprisingly disconnected from the disturbing rise of a prison-industrial complex that also prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation, containment over social investment.⁶⁷  

For many commentators, the events of September 11^th signaled a turn away from the complacency, cynicism, and political indifference that allegedly attested to civic disengagement and the “weak” character of the American public. In this discourse, the focus on character seemed to replace any sense of either the complexity of the American public or how it has been shaped by dominant political, cultural, and economic forces. Frank Rich, an op-ed writer for The New York Times argues that the terrorist acts had revitalized the patriotic spirit of a “country that during its boom became addicted to instant gratification.”⁶⁸ Rich seems to forget that the luxury of such “gratification” only applied to the top twenty percent of the population. He also ignores the fact that while most Americans exhibit a disinclination to vote or put too much faith in their government, they also have  been bombarded by a corporate culture that not only relentlessly commercializes and privatizes non commodified public spheres, but also  has almost nothing to say about civic values, civic engagement, or the importance of non-market values in enabling people to identify and fight for those public goods and spheres, such as public schools and a non-commercial media, that are essential to any vibrant democracy. When citizenship is reduced to the spectacle of consumerism, it should come as no surprise that people develop an  indifference to citizen engagement and to participation in democratic public life.⁶⁹  In fact, I want to stress once again that when notions of freedom and security are decoupled and freedom is reduced to the imperatives of market exchange,  and security is divested from a defense of a version the welfare state distinguished by its social provisions and  “helping functions,” not only does freedom collapse into brutal form of individualism, but also the state is stripped of its helping functions while its policing functions are often inordinately strengthened. Even as  the foundations of the security state are being solidified through zero tolerance policies, anti-terrorist laws, soaring incarceration rates, the criminalization of pregnancy, racial profiling, and anti-immigration policies, it is crucial that educators and scholars take up the events of September 11^th not through a one-side view of  patriotism that stifles dissent and aids the forces of domestic militarization, but as part of a broader effort to expand the United States’s democratic rather than repressive possibilities.  

Unlike some theorists who suggest that politics as a site of contestation, critical exchange and engagement has either come to an end or is in a state of terminal arrest, I believe  that the current, depressing  state of politics points to the urgent challenge of reformulating the crisis of democracy as part of the fundamental crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency. If it is possible to ‘gain’ anything from the events of September 11^th, it must be understood as an opportunity for a national coming together and soul searching–a time for expanding democratic possibilities rather than limiting them.  Politics devoid of vision degenerates into either cynicism, a repressive notion of patriotism,  or it appropriates a view of power that appears to be equated almost exclusively with the militarization of both domestic space and foreign policy initiatives. Lost from such accounts is the recognition that democracy has to be struggled over–even in the face of a most appalling crisis of political agency.  Educators, scholars, and policy makers must redress the  little attention paid to the fact that the struggle over politics and democracy is inextricably linked to creating public spheres where individuals can be educated as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities, and knowledge they need not only to actually perform as autonomous political agents, but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not simply about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,”⁷⁰ indicating that questions of civic education-learning how to become a skilled citizen-- are central to both the struggle over political agency and democracy itself.  Finally, there is the widespread refusal among many educators and others to recognize that the issue of civic education--with its emphasis on critical thinking, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and knowledge, and using the resources of history to extend democratic rights and identities-- is not only the foundation for expanding and enabling political agency, but also takes place across a wide variety of public spheres through the growing power of a mass mediated culture.⁷¹  

For many educational reformers, education and schooling are synonymous. In actuality, schooling is only one site where education takes place. As a performative practice, pedagogy is at work in a variety of educational sites-- including popular culture, television and cable networks, magazines, the Internet, Churches, and the press-- where culture works to secure identities; it does the bridging work for negotiating the relationship between knowledge, pleasure, and values, and renders authority both crucial and problematic in legitimating particular social practices, communities, and forms of power. As a moral and political practice, the concept of public pedagogy points to the enormous ways in which popular and media culture construct the meanings, desires, and investments that play such an influential role in how students view themselves, others, and the larger world. Unfortunately, the political, ethical, and social significance of the role that popular culture plays as the primary pedagogical medium for young people remains largely unexamined by many educators and seems almost exclusively removed from any policy debates about educational reform.  Educators also must challenge the assumption that education is limited to schooling and that popular cultural texts cannot be as profoundly important as traditional sources of learning in teaching about important issues framed through, for example, the social lens of poverty, racial conflict, and gender discrimination. This suggest not only expanding the curricula so as to allow students to become critically literate in those visual, electronic, and digital cultures that have such an important influence on their lives, but it also suggest teaching students the skills to be cultural producers as well. For instance, learning how to read films differently is no less important than learning how to produce films. At the same time, critical literacy is not about making kids simply savvy about the media so they can be better consumers, it means offering them the knowledge, skills, and tools to recognize when the new technologies and media serve as either a force for enlarging democratic relations or when it shuts down such relations. Becoming media literate is largely meaningless unless students take up this form of literacy within the larger issue of what it means to be a critical citizen and engaged political agent willing to expand and deepen democratic public spheres.  Within this expanded approach to pedagogy, both the notion of what constitutes meaningful knowledge as well as what the conditions of critical agency might point to a more expansive and democratic notion of civic education and political agency. 

Educators at all levels of schooling need to challenge the assumption that either politics is dead or that any viable notion of politics will be determined exclusively by government leaders and experts in the heat of moral frenzy to impose vengeance on those who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Educators  need to take a more critical position, arguing that critical knowledge, debate, and dialogue grounded in pressing social problems offers individuals and groups some hope in shaping the conditions that bear down on their lives. Public engagement born of citizen engagement is urgent if the concepts of the social and public can be used  to revitalize the language of civic education and democratization as part of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in a global world. Linking a notion of the social to democratic public values represents an attempt, however incomplete, to link democracy to public action, and to ground such support in defense of militant utopian thinking (as opposed to unadorned militancy) as part of a comprehensive attempt to revitalize the conditions for individual and social agency, civic activism, and citizen access to decision making while simultaneously addressing the most basic problems facing the prospects for social justice and  global democracy.  

Educators within both public schools and higher education  need to continue finding  ways of entering the world of politics by both making social problems visible  and contesting their manifestation in the polity. We need to build on those important critical, educational theories of the past in order to resurrect the emancipatory elements of democratic thought while also recognizing and engaging their damaged and burdened historical traditions.⁷² We need to reject both neoliberal and orthodox leftist positions, which dismiss the state as merely a tool of repression in order to find ways to use the state to challenge, block, and regulate the devastating effects of capitalism. On the contrary, educators need to be at the forefront of defending the most progressive historical advances and gains of the state. French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, is right when he calls for collective work by educators to prevent the right and other reactionaries from destroying the most precious democratic conquests in the areas of labor legislation, health, social protection, and education.⁷³ At the very least, this would suggest that educators defend schools as democratic public spheres, struggle against the deskilling of teachers and students, and argue for a notion of pedagogy that is grounded in democratic values rather than those corporate driven ideologies and  testing schemes that severely limit the creative and liberatory potential of teachers and students. At the same time, such educators must resist the reduction of the state to its policing functions, while linking such a struggle to the fight against neoliberalism and the struggle for expanding and deepening the freedoms, rights, and relations of a vibrant democracy. Post colonial theorist, Samir Amin, echoes this call by arguing that educators should consider addressing the project of a more realized democracy as part of an ongoing process of democratization.  According to Amin,  democratization “stresses the dynamic aspect of a still-unfinished process” while rejecting notions of democracy that are given a definitive formula.⁷⁴ Educators have an important role to play here in the struggle to link social justice and economic democracy with the equality of human rights,  the right to education, health, research, art, and  work. On the cultural front, teachers as public intellectuals can work to make the pedagogical more political by engaging in a permanent critique of their own scholasticism and  promoting what a critical awareness to end oppression and forms of social life that disfigure contemporary life and pose a threat to any viable notion of democracy.  Educators need to provide spaces of resistance within the public schools and the university that take seriously what it means to educate students to question and interrupt authority, recall what is forgotten or ignored, make connections that are otherwise hidden, while simultaneously providing the knowledge and skills that enlarge their sense of the social and their possibilities as viable political agents capable of expanding and deepening democratic public life. At the very least, such educators can challenge the correlation between the impoverishment of society and the impoverishment of intellectuals by offering possibilities other than what we are told is possible. Or as Alain Badiou observes “showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one assigned–that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible.”⁷⁵   In times of increased domination of public K-12 education and higher education it becomes important, as George Lipsitz reminds us,  that educators–as well as  artists and other cultural workers--not become isolated  “in their own abstract desires for social change and actual social movements. Taking a position is not the same as waging a war of position; changing your mind is not the same as changing society.”⁷⁶  Resistance must become part of a public pedagogy that works to position rigorous theoretical work and public bodies against corporate power and the militarization of visual and public space, connect classrooms to the challenges faced by social movements in the streets, and provide spaces within classrooms and other sites for personal injury and private terrors to be transformed into public considerations and struggles. This suggests that  educators should work to form alliances with parents, community organizers, labor organizations, and civil rights groups at the local, national and international levels to better understand how to translate private troubles  into pubic actions, arouse public interests over pressing social problems, and use collective means to more fully democratize the commanding  institutional economic, cultural, and social structures of the United States and the larger global order. 

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, it is time to remind ourselves that collective problems deserve collective solutions, and that what is at risk is not only a generation of minority youth and adults  now considered to be a threat to national security,  but also the very promise of democracy itself. As militarism works to intensify patriarchal  attitudes and anti-democratic assaults on dissent, it is crucial for educators to join with those groups now making a common cause against those forces that would sacrifice basic constitutional freedoms to the imperatives of war abroad  and militarism at home.
 

Towards a Politics of Hope 

Rather than define the social through the raw emotions of collective rage and the call for retribution, it is crucial at this momentous time in our history that educators set an example for creating the conditions for reasoned debate and dialogue by drawing upon scholarly and popular sources as a critical resource to engage in a national conversation about the place and role of the United States in the world, the conditions necessary to invigorate the political and shape public policy, and  to break what Homi Bhabha has called “the continuity and the consensus of common sense.”⁷⁷  Against the often uncomplicated  and ideologically charged discourses of the dominant,  national media, educators must use whatever relevant resources and theories they can as an  important tool for  critically engaging and mapping the important  relations among language, texts, everyday life, and structures of power as part of a wider effort to understand the conditions, contexts, and strategies of struggle that will enable Americans to be more self conscious about their role in the world, how they affect other cultures and countries, and what it might mean to assume world leadership without reducing it to the arrogance of power.   The tools of theory emerge out of the intersection of the past and present; they respond to and are shaped by the conditions at hand. Americans  need new theoretical tools--a new language-- for linking hope, democracy, education, and the demands of a more fully realized democracy. While I believe that educators need a new vocabulary for connecting how we read critically to how we engage in movements for social change, I also believe that simply invoking the relationship between theory and practice, critique and social action will not do. Any attempt to give new life to a substantive democratic politics by educators  must also address how people learn to be political agents. This suggests taking up the important question of what kind of educational work is necessary within diverse public spaces to enable people to use their full intellectual resources to both  provide a profound critique of existing institutions and struggle to create, as Stuart Hall puts it,  “what would be a good life or a better kind of life for the majority of people.”⁷⁸   As committed educators, we are required to understand more fully why the tools we used in the past often feel awkward in the present, why they fail  to respond to problems now facing the United States and other parts of the globe. More specifically,  we need to understand the failure of existing critical discourses to bridge the gap between how the society represents itself, particularly through the media,  and how and why individuals fail in order to understand and critically engage such representations to intervene in the oppressive social relationships and distorted truths they often legitimize.  

Educators, scholars, and policy makers can make an important contribution politically and pedagogically in the current crisis in revitalizing a  language of resistance and possibility, a language that embraces a militant utopianism while constantly challenging to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or punish and dismiss those who dare look beyond the horizon of the given. Hope, in this instance, is the precondition for individual and social struggle, the ongoing practice of critical education in a wide variety of sites, the mark of courage on the part of intellectuals in and out of the academy who use the resources of theory to address pressing social problems. But hope is also a referent for civic courage and its ability to mediate the memory of loss and the experience of injustice as part of  a broader attempt  to open up new locations of struggle, contest the workings of oppressive power, and undermine various forms of domination. At its best, civic courage as a political practice begins when one’s life can no longer be taken for granted. In doing so, it makes concrete the possibility for transforming hope and politics into an ethical space and public act that confronts the flow of everyday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance and the unending project of democratic social transformation.  

Within the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism and militarism that dominate public space, there is little leeway  for a vocabulary of political or social transformation, collective vision, or social agency to challenge the ruthless downsizing of jobs, resist  the ongoing liquidation  of job security, the inadequacy of health care, many public schools and public institutions, and the disappearance of sites from which to struggle against the elimination of benefits for people now hired on a strictly part-time basis. Moreover, against the reality of low wage jobs, the erosion of social provisions for a growing  number of people, and the expanding war against young people of color, the market driven consumer juggernaut continues to mobilize desires in the interest of producing market identities and market relationships that ultimately appear as,  Theodor Adorno once put it, nothing less than  “a prohibition on thinking itself.”⁷⁹ 

It is against this ongoing  assault on the public, and the growing preponderance of a free market economy and corporate culture that turns everything it touches into an object of consumption that educators and others  must  offer a critique of American society and the misfortunes it generates out of its obsessive concern with profits, consumption, and the commercial  values that underline its market driven ethos.  As part of this challenge, educators should  help their students  bridge the  gap between  private and the public discourses, while simultaneously putting into play particular ideologies and values that resonate with broader public conversations regarding how a society views itself and the world of power, events, and politics. Moreover, as Robert Jensen points out, it is crucial for educators and others to recognize free speech as crucial to democratic public life. At issue here is not only a reaffirmation of the formal freedoms that such speech guarantees, but also the economic, political, and social contexts that enable “how effectively citizens can exercise those freedoms in the world in which we live.”⁸⁰ 

Educators cannot completely eliminate the vagaries of a crude patriotism, but we can work against a politics of certainty, a pedagogy of terrorism, and  institutional formations that close down rather than open up democratic relations.  This requires, in part,  that we work diligently to construct a politics without guarantees–one that perpetually questions itself as well as all those forms of knowledge, values, and practices that appear beyond the process of interrogation, debate, and deliberation.  Democracy should not  become synonymous with the language of the marketplace, oppression, control, surveillance, and privatization.  The challenge to redefine the social within those democratic values that deepen and expand democratic relations is crucial not only to the forms of citizenship we offer students and the larger public, but also to how we engage the media, politicians, and others who would argue for less democracy and freedom in the name of domestic security. This is not meant to suggest that national security is not important. In fact, no country can allow its populations to live in fear, subject to arbitrary and cowardly terrorist acts. But there has to be a balance and a national conversation among the people of this country about the extent of such a threat and what privileges have to be conceded and at what point  democracy itself becomes compromised. Security means more than safeguarding a country from the dangers of terrorists. Security also means protecting democratic freedoms and providing every citizens with basic constitutional rights and freedoms, otherwise the United States begins to develop powers akin to a police state in which people simply “disappear” without due process of a court hearing and any legal protections. When an American citizen such as Jose Padilla is accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive ‘dirty bomb in Washington, D.C., he should be presumed innocent before guilty and under no circumstances should the  Bush administration be allowed to  arbitrarily decide to refuse him access to a court hearing while detaining him  in secret for an indefinite period of time. All the more insidious since it was later revealed that the Bush Administration really had no real evidence that Padilla was involved in a terrorist plot or that he was a member of a terrorist organization. The Padilla case is an example of what civil rights lawyer, Patricia Williams, calls the insidious application of  “new martial law” in which American citizens can now be imprisoned without the right to a court hearing.⁸¹  Educators need to raise their voices against such threats to American democracy and its basic constitutional freedoms. Cases such as Padilla’s should be discussed as part of a wider analysis of the fundamental tension between the war against terrorism and basic democratic freedoms and rights. Educators have an important role to play making their voices heard both in and outside of the classroom as part of an  effort to articulate a vibrant and democratic notion of the social in a time of national crisis. Acting as public intellectuals, they can help create the conditions for debate and dialogue over the meaning of September 11 and what it might mean to rethink our nation’s role in the world, address the dilemmas posed by the need to balance  genuine security with democratic freedoms, and expand and deepen the possibilities of democracy itself.