It is despair that is killing us. It fosters what Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, envy, hatred and a lust for violence.
The Mourning After – by Mr. Fish.
In the end, the election was about despair.
Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs.
Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable.
Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires.
These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse.
But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system.
Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating.
The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy.
It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base — 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel.
The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement.
The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
American Nightmare
Oswald Spengler. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites.
Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation.
It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.
“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote.
“There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Cult Leaders
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery.
The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism.
They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.
All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party.
Trump at a rally in Phoenix in June. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death.
They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.
Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor.
Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity.
It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.
The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves.
He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.
We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess — the strike.
By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated.
We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism.
We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from ScheerPost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I think America is going through the 5 Stages of Grief. The good news is when you hit Depression, you’re almost through it. That’s when productive solutions can come.
Love the Mr. Fish cartoon at the top — the archetypal group of DC with-it post-modern urban hipsters. Pretty much sums up what happened. The Dem elites have become tone-deaf.
Voting in this dysfunctional state is based upon FEAR, not aspiration. Senator Sanders was poised to change all that by getting people to think about the possibility of changing the status quo, to convert our aspirations into improved lives for all our citizens. Thus he had to be eliminated. Aspirations and possibilities and different ways of seeing are dangerous things for elites who are doing quite well under the current system and its paradigms. When one is given unsavory choices in candidates by the two dominant war parties, voting becomes an act of desperation, and it is a fertile field for a fake populist like Mr. Trump. If the Democratic Party elites actually believed in anything or cared for those being left behind this populist mantle would be a cinch to assume, a no-brainer as they say. This election was lost to the fake populist by default, and precisely because the Dems are in thrall to their wealthy donors and corporate sponsors. They have no intention of encouraging aspirations among the workaday masses. Real change would threaten their campaign donations and their own personal aggrandizement in the corporate world that they aspire to even as they pretend to represent the disenfranchised, the struggling middle class and those left behind.
The pundits will blame the real populists and progressives who aspire to a “more perfect union” and a true representational democracy. You can bet the farm that they will observe that the Democratic Party has gone too far “left,” whatever that means. I registered as a Democrat 55 years ago. Trust me: “left” ain’t where this sorry bunch has gone or is likely to go.
The first order of business is to get money out of politics. A tall order to be sure, but absolutely necessary if we are to restore any meaning to this republican (small r) project that at this moment appears to be in inexorable decline.
The Democratic Party long ago sold out. Working men and women took a leap of faith. Perhaps that is all we have anymore, but inside every voter now is the lingering doubt that anything we do can rescue our republic from the wealthy and powerful interests that actually control the people they elect and who affect to “govern” for their hapless constituents.
Essentially nothing will change for the better under President Trump, but when we reflect that very little, if any, good would have come from a Harris presidency, there is room for little but despair and blind hope. That’s not the way “We the People” was supposed to turn out. Government was supposed to be our agent for needful change. When money is speech, most Americans are mute in the way their country is run. They can vote in the pathetic, periodical and delusional theater of electoral politics, but they will never build a better republic through the ballot box. It is out of their hands. And that’s just the way both major parties want it.
It’s just not our government anymore. Or maybe it never was.
This: “When money is speech, most Americans are mute in the way their country is run.”
When the neolibs did an unfriendly takeover of the D party, they dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. As people who were leftist union organizers in the ’30s told me in the ’60s: “liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts.” They sure did.
The D elite has no problem with race, gender, or sexual orientation. As long as you are Ivy League or equivalent; whatever distinguishes you from the masses of lessers. You know, that “basket of deplorables.”
The tired old doctrinaire leftist trope of class fine, but not identity isn’t relevant, either. Usually posted by some armchair theorist who has never had to struggle to be recognized as human nor ever even held a tool in his life.
Delores Huerta and Fannie Lou Hamer sure knew better. It’s possible in a world not limited to the ancient Aristotelian either/or to be both/and. I know. I’m working class; a blue collar worker for close to 30 years, as well as BIPOC and LGBTQ.
While we appreciate actual expertise, we don’t need some remote top down centralized elite certain they have the right to tell us lessers what to do. Like corporate capitalist plutocrats, liberal administrators, or Marxist vanguard wanna-bes. Like my logger grandfather and my 98 year old mom, I’m a Wobbly, I.W.W. For the local ownership and management by workers of the means of production–the people who actually know best how to do their jobs.
I find myself wanting to criticize many parts of Chris Hedges article. However instead I will suggest another thought.
This note is from someone far from the USA who can relax in the comfort of knowing his country does not have D Trump as president.
The most harmonious way to live your life is to accept that other people are allowed to be wrong.
I think this diagnosis is on the mark. It is where we have arrived, without even the plausible excuse that the fault lies with the electoral college. I’m sending it to all my friends and contacts. Thank you Chris. I’ve been watching this gestate over decades of corporate consolidation and increasing inequality.
Me too, Kenneth. Hedges always finds a way to eloquently yet directly state what I believe but can never find the words to say. I love him. I’ve also sent this to friends. I hope they get it.
PS (to earlier comment)
… of course, the question of the coming months is whether the Republicans can listen.
The last three elections have all seen the American people rejecting ‘four more years’ of a government that they now constantly say is going in the wrong direction. Thus, first Trump, then Biden, had the opportunity to provide ‘good government’ that actually provides ‘safety and happiness’ to the people. Now its Trump, and a Republican party that pretends now to be ‘populists’, who get another chance
Trump failed, and was rejected. Biden failed, and was rejected. Now Trump gets another chance. My prognostication …. its Three Strikes and you are Out!
Another great analysis by Mr C.H. Hell yes: strike! boycott! Using the www we should be able to coordinate targeted actions. But, as Chris says, magical thinking affects so many that a critical mass of participants may be difficult to achieve. Perhaps a site, “Mavericks United”, or some such could be a hub for groups to form.
As always with the esteemed Mr. Hedges, there are so many thoughts in reply. But lets try this one… “Politics” is about talking to people. In this modern age, we seem to have re-defined that to believing that politics is about shouting at people. We forget that ‘talking’ is a two way street that involves listening and responding with kindness and concern to what you are being told.
The Democrats think that they can take the big power of the big money that backs them and ride it to victory. To me, who first heard politics in the 1970’s, its striking that these days the Dems always have the most money and are the big spenders. That was not true in the 1970s, in fact it was strongly the opposite.
But, the party of Big Money can never be simultaneously the party of the People. The Dem strategists in their perpetually double-thinking minds may believe that they can at least pretend to be both, but they can not. And its the part about listening to the people where the Dems fail. They try to use the power of their big money to take their big speakers and amplify their shouts so loudly that nobody else can be heard, but that only means that it is impossible to listen. The line from “Hunt for Red October” comes to mind where the naval officer says ‘they could run over my daughters stereo and not hear a thing.’
Of course, if they began listening, they’d have to stop being the party of Big Money. And they all drive nice cars and drink fancy wines and I don’t think any of them would know how to work for a living when this pyramid scheme falls down on their heads.
Always wonderful to hear from Hedges.
Despair enough, surely. And there is a large element of confusion in that.
But let’s face it: third-party and primary challenges aside, Trump ran unopposed.
It’s sort of ridiculous that Hedges doesn’t mention one word about immigration in this article. Like it or not, many Americans who cast a vote for Trump were deeply concerned over out of control unfettered immigration. This is arguably primarily what Tuesday was mostly about.
The USA is based upon the premise of immigration. Tuesday was either about folks staying home to not vote for more Democratic same old or in sheer disenfranchised frustration voting for a Trump fake future.
No.
There is nothing morally wrong with controlling our borders.
It’s low wage American citizen workers and renters of all colors, African-American, Chicanos, whites, etc. who pay the price.
See the new excellent book “Second Class” by liberal Batya Ungar-Sargon.
I don’t think that is the problem. Trump and the Republicans essentially ran on a eugenics platform. Demonizing immigrants was part of this (polluting the blood of the real America …). So was their preoccupation with childless (white) cat ladies, who refuse to breed. It was an underlying message in the attack on Haitians (stand-ins for blacks in general). And Chris is right: cultural despair requires scapegoats.
Apparently Dick Cheney was irresistibly infatuated and drawn by the joyous genocide plank.
please! delete the 1st comment – i was unable to edit it before it timed out!
ever since that right winger bill clinton infiltrated the democratic party, the smell of money infected it, the same way the republican party has been infected ever since i was knee-high to a grasshopper. (quite a few decades ago.) the republican party, its traditional turf being encroached upon, turned further to the right on social issues, because it could no longer use pseudo-economic disinformation alone, like “trickle-down economics” to woo the working class voters. the working class quickly understood that, since the democratic party no longer catered to their needs, they turned to the republican party’s anti-immigrant, racist, pro-christianity propaganda that it started to dish out as the reason for their ills, in ever-increasing amounts. this turned into a flood when a black man had the audacity to get elected president.
the democratic party had a chance, in 2016 & 2020, to rejuvenate itself with bernie sanders, who, although old, brought back ideas that the democratic party had long abandoned: healthcare, education, increased taxes on the wealthy who could easily afford it, and which, until ronnie in 1980, supported america and its infrastructure in half-way-decent, if not perfect fashion.
but no, the smell of money was too great, the greed too great. so the democratic party threw bernie under the bus not once but twice. even after the disaster of the 1st trump presidency, it risked it a 2nd time, ultimately deciding that the risk of trump winning again would be preferable to having bernie in the white-house. so, several “moderate democrats” withdrew from the primaries right before super tuesday, assuring biden the win, instead of what would have otherwise been a big tuesday win for bernie. the groundswell of support that would have occurred in the younger voters, and the non-voters who would now vote would have been enormous, not only would bernie have easily won the 2020 election, but likely the house would have been democratically controlled, and the senate would have had a larger majority.
then there’s the issue of israel – even tho the overwhelming majority of the population supports an end to arming israel w/o a complete cessation of its genocidal campaign, the democrats were too afraid of offending the wealthy donors who are a wee bit less supportive.
i’d hoped the democratic party learned its lesson after the 2016 debacle, but no such luck. it will be a long road back to sanity in this country, and it will never happen until the “old guard” wakes up and supports bernie, “the squad”, and people who can see a future that is not totally consumed by greed.
In my opinion, government is supposed to operate for the benefit of the people. In a democracy, certainly, that is its purpose and reason for being. It has no inherent powers of its own under the US Constitution. All power derives from the consent of the people themselves, and government acts to improve the quality of life of all its citizens. Thus elected representatives and officials are “public servants.”
It’s the public that supervises the actions of its government, both directly and through its elected representatives. This is the responsibility of the public. For this, transparency in governance is an integral part and rule of democracy.
The rich and powerful will always try to do as they wish. It’s up to the public and the public’s government to rein them in. But ultimately, it is the responsibility of the public. When the public shuns this responsibility, there is despair and the manifest outcomes of despair. The past four years have certainly demonstrated this. And the future..?
Were it not for the “obligatory” distortive attacks on Donald Trump, someone I neither support nor like, this article would have been meaningful. Unfortunately, those unnecessary deviations negatively impacted the credibility of all too accurate verities.
Bravo. Glad you said. I, too, find the gratuitous attacks on Trump uncalled for. When I read such, I’m baffled that this article was written by one trained for the ministry.
ever since that right winger bill clinton infiltrated the democratic party, the smell of money infected it, the same way the republican party has been infected ever since i was knee-high to a grasshopper. (quite a few decades ago.) the republican party, its traditional turf being encroached upon, turned further to the right on social issues, because it could no longer use pseudo-economic disinformation alone, like “trickle-down economics” to woo the working class voters. the working class quickly understood that, since the democratic party no longer catered to their needs, they turned to the republican party’s anti-immigrant, racist, pro-christianity propaganda that it started to dish out as the reason for their ills, in ever-increasing amounts. this turned into a flood when a black man had the audacity to get elected president.
the democratic party had a chance, in 2016 & 2020, to rejuvenate itself with bernie sanders, who, although old, brought back ideas that the democratic party had long abandoned: healthcare, education, increased taxes on the wealthy who could easily afford it, and which, until ronnie in 1980, supported america and its infrastructure in half-way-decent, if not perfect fashion.
but no, the smell of money was too great, the greed too great. so the democratic party threw bernie under the bus not once but twice. even after the disaster of the 1st trump presidency, it risked it a 2nd time, ultimately deciding that the risk of trump winning again would be preferable to having bernie in the white-house. so, several “moderate democrats” withdrew from the primaries right before super tuesday, assuring biden the win, instead of what would have otherwise been a big tuesday win for bernie. the groundswell of support that would have occurred in the younger voters, and the non-voters who would now vote would have been enormous, not only would bernie have easily won the 2020 election, but likely the house would have been democratically controlled, and the senate would have had a larger majority.
then there’s the issue of israel – even tho the overwhelming majority of the population supports a stop to arming israel w/o a comnplete cessation of its genocidal campaign, thje democrats were to afaraid of
i’d hoped the democratic party learned its lesson after the 2016 debacle, but no such luck. it will be a long road back to sanity in this country, and it will never happen until the “old guard” wakes up and supports bernie, “the squad”, and people who can see a future that is not totally consumed by greed.
The beneficiaries (managers) of Corporate Totalitarianism (see Sheldon Wolin’s “DEMOCRACY INCORPORTATED”) will never fight against it.
We The People have to do that.
Towards the middle of my life, due mostly to changes in technology, I had relearned the way I went about my job many times. All the technology in the world couldn’t help you if you didn’t understand the job itself. After awhile, it became apparent that the changes in technology itself was a profit making scheme.
Managers certainly didn’t understand the job, or have to keep up with technology.
All a manager had to do was kiss the a$$ of the person just above them on the org chart. And never concede a millimeter to someone just below.
A$$kissing hasn’t changed since Machiavelli.
I sure appreciate this! One of my mentors was Dr. Ed Wenk, who set up the Office of Tech Assessment for the US Congress. He had a program at the U of WA that was an amalgam of engineering and sociology because societies should ask who gets to make decisions about what kinds of tech for what reasons.
Also relates to my main comment. I object to any form of remote, top down elite. Whether corporate capitalist, liberal administrator, or Marxist vanguard wanna-be. While we welcome actual expertise, decisions should be by us on-site workers, we who know best how to do our jobs.
I am not sure this will be posted and accepted by moderators, but I feel that the despair Hedges describes is partly caused by liberal leftists like himself who are ultimately idealistic and deeply anti-communist and anti-Marxist. Quoting Spengler for a start, is not going to instill hope. Christian thinkers such as Hedges are too taken with apocalyptic thinking. It is their bread and butter. They are convinced that the experiments of the 20th century to build socialism and resist imperialism all utterly failed and lead only to horror and authoritarianism; thus, only a revolutionary spiritual awakening will lead to a slight improvement in society, but ultimately we are all doomed without God/Christ because the world is inherently flawed and only in paradise can we know peace. Hedges and his ilk need to put down the book of Revelation and pick up Marx, and recognize that for all of their anti-imperialism, they completely buy into the imperialist version of history, with its Spenglers and Solzhenitsyns. That being said, I respect Hedges as a journalist, and I totally oppose his censorship by cyber fascism to borrow a term from Maduro.
Your comment appears in large to be an off-topic tirade against God, which is perfectly okay, but totally beside the points that Hedges makes. The problems are here and now, and involve the lives of millions, if not billions of human beings. Please leave the anti-deist hobby horse in the playroom, and make remarks more germane to solving the many issues confronting us in real time.
Hank’s post appeared very germane to me.
“Hope will come with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of working class enslavement, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater number of human lives until it finally consumes itself.”
-Chris Hedges
DEATH of the LIBERAL CLASS
Well, that’s a good enough Marxist for me.
And everybody comes to a comfortable mythology, for them, life’s trials guarantees it.