Put the other way around, a liberal arts education available to the many is essential to any modern democracy we could value, but is not indigenous to it. Democracy can defund, degrade, or abandon the education it requires, undermining its resources for sustaining or renewing itself, even for valuing or desiring itself. Indeed, one crucial effect of neoliberal rationality is to reduce the desire for democracy, along with its discursive intelligibility when it does appear.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 398