What does it mean to love something—a place, a school, a people—enough to defend it? Not merely through rhetoric, but through action, sacrifice, courage. In this age of curated compassion and algorithmic activism, we appear to have forgotten that love, in its political form, is never passive. An indifferent society is not an accidental one; it is the formal outcome of neoliberal strategy, cloaked in the gentleness of managerial vocabulary. What we face is not a crisis of resources, but one of affiliation: do we still see ourselves as part of something worth committing to together?
Education systems hollowed into credential mills, environmental care reduced to market offsets, and democratic institutions bent into spectator sport—these are not failures of execution, but consequences of ethos. The exit of the public from the public is the triumph of a moral retreat. We have learned to mask disinvestment with innovation, and to describe systemic erosion as efficiency. But beneath this vocabulary, there is the quiet cynicism of a society that no longer believes in itself collectively. Asking ourselves ‘what kind of politics do we deserve?’ requires confronting the uncomfortable possibility that we might be receiving exactly what we’ve come to accept.
The contemporary form of neoliberalism no longer brags of profit—it whispers of care. It brands itself as inclusive, mindful, intersectional, and kind. Yet underneath this soft face remains a machinery of abandonment: cities privatized, schools marketized, workers individualized to exhaustion. Bureaucracies now speak the language of therapy while continuing to dismantle the very infrastructures of solidarity. This dissonance is not a bug; it is the design. And the seduction is complete when the ethics of care are deployed to distract us from the politics of power.
If we are to reclaim meaning, it will require more than outrage. It needs what has almost become unfashionable: the revaluation of the public realm in all its inconvenient, collective, imperfect hope. To love our communities enough to defend them is to invest once again in institutions—not merely as technocratic utilities, but as democratic expressions of our shared fate. The library, the civic hall, the public clinic, the local school—these are not relics of a past era, but the fragile scaffolds of any future worth imagining.
Mobilizing is not just strategy; it is a poetic act. It restores dignity to the very idea that something can be shared in common. Even as the infrastructure crumbles, there is symbolic power in gathering; it gestures toward a refusal to let the narrative of inevitability stand unchallenged. Our response to systemic fragility cannot be withdrawal—it must be re-inhabiting the space of the collective, with all the mess and beauty this implies. The politics we deserve is the one we choose to rebuild—with love, not as sentiment, but as the most radical practice of belonging.
