Chris Hedges: Trump’s Greatest Ally is the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party and its liberal allies refuse to call for mass mobilization and strikes — the only tools that can thwart Trump’s emergent authoritarianism — fearing they too will be swept aside.

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost

The only hope to save ourselves from Trump’s authoritarianism is mass movements. We must build alternative centers of power — including political parties, media, labor unions and universities — to give a voice and agency to those who have been disempowered by our two ruling parties, especially the working class and working poor. 

We must carry out strikes to cripple and thwart the abuses carried out by the emerging police state. We must champion a radical socialism, which includes slashing the $1 trillion spent on the war industry and ending our suicidal addiction to fossil fuels, and lift up the lives of Americans cast aside in the wreckage of industrialization, declining wages, a decaying infrastructure and crippling austerity programs.

The Democratic Party and its liberal allies decry the consolidation of absolute power by the Trump White House, the repeated constitutional violations, the flagrant corruption and the deformation of federal agencies — including the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — into attack dogs to persecute Trump’s opponents and dissidents. It warns that time is running out. 

But at the same time, it steadfastly refuses to call for mass mobilizations that can disrupt the machinery of commerce and state. It treats the handful of Democratic Party politicians who address social inequality and abuses by the billionaire class — including Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani — as lepers. It blithely ignores the concerns and demands of ordinary Democratic Party voters reducing them to disposable props at rallies, town halls and conventions.

The Democratic Party and the liberal class are terrified of mass movements, fearing, correctly, that they too will be swept aside. They delude themselves that they can save us from despotism as they cling to a dead political formula — mounting vapid, corporate indentured candidates such as Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party candidate and formal naval officer running for governor in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill. 

They cling to the vain hope that being against Trump fills the void left by their lack of a vision and abject subservience to the billionaire class.

A Washington Post-ABC News/Ipsos poll, summarized by The Washington Post under the headline, “Voters broadly disapprove of Trump but remain divided on midterms, poll finds” — found that 68 percent of those polled believe the Democrats are out of touch with the aspirations of voters, with 63 percent saying that about Trump.

A “year out from the 2026 midterm elections, there is little evidence that negative impressions of Trump’s performance have accrued to the benefit of the Democratic Party, with voters split almost evenly in their support for Democrats and Republicans,” the Washington Post summary reads.

The liberal class in a capitalist democracy is designed to function as a safety valve. It makes possible incremental reform. But, at the same time, it does not challenge or question the foundations of power. The quid-pro-quo sees the liberal class serve as an attack dog to discredit radical social movements. 

The liberal class, for this reason, is a useful tool. It gives the system legitimacy. It keeps alive the belief that reform is possible.

The oligarchs and corporations, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s and 1970s — what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy” — set out to build counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two ruling political parties. They imposed obedience to neoliberalism within academia, government agencies and the press. They neutered the liberal class and crushed popular movements. 

They unleashed the F.B.I. on anti-war protestors, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords and other groups that empowered the disempowered. They broke labor unions, leaving 90 percent of the American workforce without union protections. Critics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, were blacklisted. 

The campaign, laid out by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” set into motion the creeping corporate coup d’etat, which five decades later, is complete.

The differences between the two ruling parties on substantive issues — such as war, tax cuts, trade deals and austerity — became indistinguishable. 

Politics was reduced to burlesque, popularity contests between manufactured personalities and acrimonious battles over culture wars. Workers lost protections. Wages stagnated. Debt peonage soared. Constitutional rights were revoked by judicial fiat. The Pentagon consumed half of all discretionary spending.

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The liberal class, rather than stand up against the onslaught, retreated into the boutique activism of political correctness. It ignored the vicious class war that would see, under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, around one million workers lose their jobs in mass layoffs linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), on top of the estimated 32 million jobs lost due to deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. 

It ignored blanket government surveillance set up in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. It ignored the kidnapping and torture — “extraordinary rendition” — and imprisoning of terrorism suspects into black sites, along with assassinations, even of U.S. citizens. It ignored the austerity programs that saw social services slashed. It ignored the social inequality that has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the robber barons.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within four years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year.

But they were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton also slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $14 billion in Medicaid funding. The overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as the abandoned mentally ill.

The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, assured the public it was prudent to entrust life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. In the meltdown of 2008, life savings were gutted. And then these media organizations, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, rendered invisible those whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

Barack Obama, who raised more than $745 million — much of it corporate money — to run for president, facilitated the looting of the U.S. Treasury by corporations and big banks following the 2008 crash. He turned his back on millions of Americans who lost their homes because of bank repossessions or foreclosures. He expanded the wars begun by his predecessor George W. Bush. He killed the public option — universal health care — and forced the public to buy his defective for-profit ObamaCare — the Affordable Care Act — a bonanza for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

If the Democratic Party was fighting to defend universal health care during the government shutdown, rather than the half measure of preventing premiums from rising for ObamaCare, millions would take to the streets.

The Democratic Party throws scraps to the serfs. It congratulates itself for allowing unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on for-profit health care policies.

It passes a jobs bill that gives tax credits to corporations as a response to an unemployment rate that — if one includes all those who are stuck in part-time or lower skilled jobs but are capable and want to do more — is arguably, closer to 20 percent. It forces taxpayers, one in eight of whom depend on food stamps to eat, to fork over trillions to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and endless war, including the genocide in Gaza.

The defenestration of the liberal class reduced it to courtiers mouthing empty platitudes. The safety valve shut down. The assault on the working class and working poor accelerated. So too did very legitimate rage.

This rage gave us Trump.

The historian Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote that fascism is the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism. He saw in our spiritual and political alienation — given expression through cultural hatreds, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, a demonization of immigrants, misogyny and despair — the seeds of an American fascism.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern wrote of the supporters of German fascists in his book The Politics of Cultural Despair, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

Richard Rorty in his last book in 1999, Achieving Our Country, also knew where we were headed. He writes:

“[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly over optimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

The democratic tools for change — running for office, campaigning, voting, lobbying and petitions — no longer work. Corporate forces and oligarchs have seized control of our political, educational, media and economic systems. They cannot be removed from within.

The Democratic Party is a hollow appendage.

Our captured institutions, subservient to the rich and the powerful, are capitulating to Trump’s authoritarianism. All we have left is sustained non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience. Mass movements. Radical politics. Rebellion. A socialist vision that counters the poison of unfettered capitalism. This alone can thwart Trump’s police state and rid us of the feckless liberal class that sustains it.

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.”

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