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LOCATING OURSELVES IN THE WRECKAGE OF NEOLIBERALISM  
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Daniel Martinez HoSang; Colena Sesanker
June 13, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Democracy Schools and other community listening sessions can bring
together people of different experiences around common themes. _

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_SPONSORED: This article is part of a series that seeks to elevate and
define a progressive vision of “the good life,” developed by the
Roosevelt Institute in collaboration with _The American Prospect_. You
can read the whole series here [[link removed]]._

This past March, as an unusually warm winter in Connecticut prepared
to give way to spring, a morning crowd at the West Indian Social Club
in Hartford milled about over blueberry muffins from Costco and
cartons of Dunkin’ coffee.

“Democracy School” was about to begin. At round banquet tables,
nursing home workers nodded intently, listening to community college
students describe the budget cuts they were fighting in order to keep
their libraries open in the evening, so working students could find
time to study. Child care advocates broke bread with Uber drivers, and
learned about their efforts to win dignified wage and safety
standards. College faculty like ourselves heard stories from renters
facing eviction, and from undocumented parents struggling to win
health care coverage for their families.

These bimonthly Democracy Schools, held at various K-12 school
buildings, public universities, and community centers across the
state, are organized by Connecticut for All
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community partners. Since their launch in 2021, the group has
organized issue campaigns to win the policy changes that are
fundamental to the progressive good life, including a long-term effort
to transform
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the state’s regressive tax structure to fund a broad range of public
goods.

Their most groundbreaking efforts, however, have brought together
dozens of labor unions and community groups and their members through
these community-based efforts, and also direct actions, legislative
hearings, and other activities that have drawn thousands of members.

Connecticut for All Organizing Director Constanza Segovia told us,
“We hold Democracy Schools every few months to educate ourselves
about systems of power, organizing, and the legislative process. But
we hear again and again that the reason union and community members
keep coming back is that they get to listen to one another, learn
about the struggles of other people they don’t yet know but whose
experiences and struggles matter deeply to them.”

Indeed, the stories we heard that morning in Hartford expressed many
of the longings described in “The Cultural Contradictions of
Neoliberalism
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a yearning for community, safety, and belonging, for a sense of
empowerment, for agency and control over our lives, for understanding
and simple explanations, and to feel good.

As the authors of that report explain, the flotsam and jetsam produced
by the neoliberal storm is evident not only in the wreckage of
right-wing policies and the shorn remnants of democracy itself. It is
also viewable within each of us: in our isolation from one another, in
the despair that suffocates our sense that a public good is even
possible, and in the ceaseless counsel from every corner that
self-care and individuated solutions are all that remains.

To escape the wreckage of neoliberalism requires us to identify our
relationship to a collective struggle, to find _our people_.

The tabletop conversations at Democracy School, which also exist in
many kinds of social movements and collective struggles, exemplify an
antidote to this pain, and also an indispensable element of the
progressive good life: the opportunity and imperative to _locate
ourselves _in relation to those around us and recognize ourselves in a
network of care and value that are incommensurate with neoliberal
frameworks.

To escape the wreckage of neoliberalism requires us to identify our
relationship to a collective struggle, to find _our people_, and to
understand the shape of the problems with which we contend. We must
purposefully cultivate spaces that put working people in proximity to
one another, to help us understand what the market-driven value system
has made of us, the levers of power we have available, and with whom
we can align to push back. It is only through opportunities to listen
to one another’s experiences and stories, and to be valued for our
presence, that we can learn we are not alone in our feelings of
failure, exhaustion, and shame, which can energize us to fight for
better solutions.

This year, Connecticut for All and its Democracy Schools placed a
particular emphasis on organizing against devastating cuts to public
higher education at a time when the state enjoyed billions
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in budget reserves.

Their attention to our field of higher education is critical. As
faculty, we have observed many of the symptoms of neoliberal disorder
described by Shams, Bhargava, and Hanbury—“mounting despair,
mental health problems, overwork, addiction, loneliness and social
isolation, and internalized shame”—transforming our conditions of
working, teaching, and learning.

To address these conditions requires us to organize against the
relentless cuts in public funding for higher education, soaring
student debt, and right-wing attacks on our institutions. But these
transformations will be impossible if we do not simultaneously address
the alienation and estrangement that is built into our campuses and
our broader communities.

We live in one of the most segregated states
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in the nation by race and class—conditions that are replicated in
our colleges and universities. Those who work in higher education come
from a wide range of backgrounds and perform diverse kinds of labor.
Our colleagues are not only professors who teach and do research, but
also dining hall workers and custodial staff, security guards and
clerical workers, graduate workers and undergraduate employees,
program administrators, and many others. All of us work closely
together, yet rarely do we have opportunities to listen to each
other’s stories and recognize a common struggle that extends both
inside and outside of the institution.

This isolation and alienation from one another is not accidental and
is not unique to higher education. It is organized, structural, and
intentional, and it undermines us all. As faculty, we often fail to
comprehend that our working conditions are directly tied to the
perceived social value of our students and institutions.

For example, the conditions of austerity facing many public colleges
and universities are tied to the social devaluation of working-class
and undocumented students that attend these institutions. The struggle
for better pay and more dignified conditions for faculty is tied
directly to the status and social locations of their students.

Faculty at private colleges and universities, including those with
large endowments, also suffer from this estrangement and segregation.
As those institutions face a barrage of political attacks from the far
right, workers there cannot afford to be isolated from their
colleagues in other colleges and universities, as well as other
workers, students, and communities more broadly.

At Democracy School, this imperative to locate ourselves within higher
education and beyond was expressed most clearly by a young organizer
named Xander Tyler, a recent graduate from Central Connecticut State
University. Tyler summoned a vision of higher education rooted in the
cultivation of agency and social relevance, rejecting a vision of
education that in Tyler’s words
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is turning “colleges and universities into assembly lines
manufacturing dutiful, compliant workers.”

This dream for a better and more socially active education experience,
Tyler explained, connected student organizing work to everyone in the
room. Not only those of us in higher education, but the mental health
workers and child care advocates and town librarians and kindergarten
teachers, and everyone else. All of us must locate ourselves in
relation to one another.

To prepare for the progressive good life, and the forms of
interdependence, reciprocity, collective problem solving, and
collective power it will require, we all need spaces like those found
at Democracy School that allow us to break through the barriers
imposed upon us and recognize our own struggle in others. Only then
can we restore what the poisonous cynicism of neoliberal culture
threatens to take from us all.

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Daniel Martinez HoSang is a professor of American studies at Yale
University and holds secondary appointments in the Department of
Political Science and in the Yale School of Medicine Section of the
History of Medicine.

Colena Sesanker is a professor of philosophy based in Connecticut.

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Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
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Read the original article at Prospect.org.

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* Democracy School; Connecticut; Working class students;
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