Afterword: The Travails of Criticality: Understanding Peter McLaren’s Revolutionary Vocation

In 2004, when I first set foot on New York City as an immigrant academic, I strongly felt that my immediate duty was to understand and engage with a city and a whole nation that were at their most delicate: three years after 9/11 and at a time when George W Bush was preparing to face off a challenge from the Democrat Senator John Kerry, a Catholic, decorated Vietnam veteran who famously turned against the war, and whose American credentials were too impeccable not to be taken seriously as an “obvious winner.”

Being quite naive about the electoral machine that moves and determines Presidential elections in the United States, like many others I joined in the liberal snobbery—perceived or otherwise—that predicted a Kerry walkover. After all, we all thought, President Bush’s often-incomprehensible way with words and his much-contested politics were enough to gain Kerry strong support from those who were hoping for a different kind of politics, including those who (to my puzzled reaction) were referred to as “Reagan Democrats,” a term which to my European political sensibility made no sense whatsoever.