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.
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, a statewide coalition of labor and 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 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”: 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 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 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 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.
