America’s suicidal march began long before Donald Trump. He and the buffoons around him are the inevitable final chapter of the decaying empire.
Live or DIY – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.”
They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class.
Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.
Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.
There is a word for these people. Traitors.
These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery.
They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars.
That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.
Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted.
They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins.
They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work.
Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.
These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry.
German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.”
U.S. rulers, America’s enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.
Trump at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, during the ceremonial transfer on March 7 of the remains of six U.S. soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. (White House /Daniel Torok)
Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works.
He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service.
But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.
“Trump is not an anomaly,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour:
“He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites.
Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”
The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of America’s ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. President Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former President of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former C.I.A. Director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine Senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.
Anand Giridharadas, who wrote Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women, who surrounded Epstein are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy in the suffering and abuse of others, whether that is sexual abuse, including that of children, financial meltdowns they orchestrate, wars they back, addictions and overdoses they enable, the monopolies they defend, the inequality they turbocharge, the housing crisis they milk and the intrusive technologies they refuse to protect people against:
“People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media, that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.
They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.”
Giridharadas in 2025. (The Chris Hedges Report)
“The Epstein emails, in my view,” Giridharadas writes, “together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.”
“If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,” he continues, “it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.”
“These people are,” Giridharadas reminds us, “on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”
You can see my interview with Giridharadas here.
The entire system is rotten. It will not reform itself.
The Democratic Party has hit on the novel campaign issue of reducing taxes to win this year’s midterm elections. It will, no doubt, anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee.
Democratic donors pumped a staggering $1.5 billion into Kamala Harris’s abridged 15-week celebrity-fueled presidential campaign. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades and be defeated in every battleground state.
The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics.
The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.
In the final days of a civilization, a population wallows in self-delusional hubris and trumpets false virtues. It looks for scapegoats to explain its failures — Muslims, undocumented workers, Mexicans, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents.
Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis.
Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hyper-militarism.
Trump is perfectly tailored for these death throes. He is not a freak or an anomaly. He is the naked visage of our pathological sickness.
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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Every word was true until you dissolved into that Neo-liberal claptrap at the end. I don’t believe we need to have empathy and compassion—we simply need justice for all. Science and industrial medicine are poisoning us in the name of rationality and are NOT the way forward. And the population is not wallowing in self delusion, it is being denied information by the Tech Bros and the NYT. Look around you. A ground swell of democracy is happening. Support it. Share it. Stop hating on the people just because we’ve been mislead by talented traitors.
Thanks Chris great article. I blame Federick Heyak for his installation of Neoliberalism in 1960s which opened the flood gates to uncontrolled profits.
As for the Epstein romp, I see the series I Claudius, the brilliant BBC series and the collapse of Rome a good illustration of what you are saying.
“The reality of today” is that the U.S. deliberately destroys other people’s economies with illegal, unilateral sanctions. Scott Bessent, for example, brags about how thoroughly U.S. sanctions — and currency manipulation in the case of Iran, for example — demolish targets of U.S. aggression.
No one has ever destroyed the U.S. economy with economic sanctions, so “Americans” do not know what it is like to watch their children and elders die from lack of common medications that some psychopathic regime on the other side of the planet bars from entering the U.S.
A recent Lancet paper reported that illegal, unilateral U.S. economic sanctions killed 38 million people worldwide from 1970 to 2021.
People abandon countries, families, neighbours, communities they would never even think about leaving to escape deprivations like hunger, unemployment, no electricity, no fuel, and unsanitary conditions deliberately inflicted on them as a consequence of U.S. economic sanctions.
Then there are the wars. The U.S. destroys entire countries, like Libya which was the most prosperous country in Africa before the U.S. went to work on it, and Syria whose U.S.-anointed unelected so-called “president” today is a former ISIS fighter who founded al Qaeda in Syria.
The U.S. destroys economies and brags about it. The U.S. destroys entire countries with complete impunity, then plans how and when it will destroy the next.
What I hear the poster I am responding to say about this “reality of today” is that victims of murderous U.S. wars and economic sanctions better keep their dirty faces away from U.S. borders because we don’t want them here. This makes the poster complicit in throwing these people somewhere out of sight where they can die like they are supposed because, well, because the U.S. kills a lot of people.
Immigration is a problem. Six million people have left Venezuela since 2014, about a million of whom having come to the U.S. Capitalists like desperate people who will work for starvation wages. Workers at the bottom of the U.S. net worth pyramid suffer terribly because of this. Many more problems come with unwanted immigration.
To solve this problem end U.S. wars and end U.S. illegal, unilateral sanctions.
“How am I supposed to do that?” you ask. Well, that is a good question, and it deserves your effort to answer it. Beating up on victims of U.S. crimes, telling them to go back and die in the hellholes the U.S. made for them, is not a solution.
Harris was groomed to fail so the religious favorite could stay in place regardless of circumstances or party and those roots go back to all the European empires of religious war dating back to stealing the benefits on monotheistic preferential power that became it’s own empire.
We escaped in order to steal our own continent and are yearning for more based on full spectrum male dominance behavior in permanent rutting and super strutting empowerment..
Thanks to Chris Hedges for this comprehensive diagnosis of the moral, cultural, and political collapse of the United States, largely inherent in its failure to protect government and mass media from money power as it became concentrated. Even in 1873 Mark Twain pretended pride in noting that “We have some of the best legislatures money can buy.”
I have some optimism that civil institutions like the nascent Congress Of Debate (dotcom) can seed a recovery over generations by making balanced policy debates available, but that cannot succeed until Constitution amendments prohibit funding of elections and mass media by sources other than limited and registered individual donations, toward which we have no clear path other than broad defeat.
The implication of “No Kings”? If Trump were gone, a Dem paradise would return. Uh-huh. Notice it isn’t about “No Oligarchs and No Plutocrats.” We irrelevant nobodies are presented with choices based on the assumption the powerful have that right and our only role is acquiescence. They also tell us about the only parts of the U.S. Constitution and biblical New Testament we need to know.
Which edge of the dual aspect uniparty shall we pick? The D oligarchy representing the best and brightest administrative and professional 20% that doesn’t disguise their contempt for us very well? Or the R plutocrats representing the 1/10th of 1% exceptionally uber wealthy–the ones we’re to admire and want to become because that’s what America is all about?
The point of beginning of America’s Suicide March ….. Daley Plaza, Dallas TX.
The date of beginning, Nov. 22, 1963.
America was politically changed by violence in the assassinations of Kennedy, King and Kennedy. None of which were committed by the designated patsies.
Every word is true.
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from an Australian
… ???
It is too bad that Mr. Hedges has chosen the epitaph “traitors” to describe the international class of oligarchs and capitalists that are raping the environment while simultaneously destroying the lives of millions of people through war, unemployment and increased exploitation. One must ask, to what are they traitors? They are certainly not traitors to their class. They are certainly not traitors to the political system that serve their interests.
By using this term, Hedges sinks to the level of Democrats and Republicans who incessantly hurl the charge of “traitor” at each other in order to win points from an easily manipulated voting public. Mr. Hedges should be above that cheap trick.
In the lexicon of political husksters, the opposite of “traitor” is “patriot”. Both are terms that only have meaning to those that understand very little about the workings of American capitalism. They are however, very useful to political opportunists.
I do believe that the term traitors should be specifically used for those who turned monies appropriated for the defense of the nation into a source of personal wealth. Those are not the only traitors, but those who weaken the defense of the Republic to make themselves rich fit any definition of “traitors” that I can believe in.
Of course the meaning was that they are traitors to their country and its people.
The Constitution defines that as making war upon the United States.
The conduct described in the article certainly constitutes that.
Hedges is an author, a specialist in using words. Traitor is an English word. Dictionaries provide definitions of words.
hxxps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/traitor
They are traitors to the Republic. Keagan and PNAC is the declaration of war. Read it.
“The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of America’s ruling class, …, They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.” And, let’s recall that the Epstein files mentioned one name over 12,000 times.
A lot of the chaos, disunity and destruction of ‘western values’ can be traced back to the influence of zionism and its creation of apartheid Israel in 1948. Western nations don’t have sovereignty anymore, they are all dancing to external agendas put forward by fascist zionist groups. The Epstein Set.
Sanity cannot be restored when one’s nation is controlled by foriegn powers and their traitorous vassals.
One small nit: Wealth is not “created” by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.
It is **extracted** from whatever patsies are set up to pay the freight — “end-users” (who buy a house to live in not as an investment) and renters are a prime example — and concentrated in hands holding assets, in the case of my example housing.
When an asset bubble bursts, for example in a stock market crash, wealth is not redistributed. It vanishes.
Couple of things.
Chris fails to mention (knowingly?) the elephant in the room that’s completely dominating Washington’s Middle East policy. I don’t even have to name them, it’s the Irish Republicans, yeah, Irish Republicans, that’s who.
Moreover, in order to help our low wage citizens, African-American and Chicano working class citizens, we must get our arms around the out of control immigration problem we’re currently immersed in. There’s absolutely nothing “scapegoat” about wanting to address this crucial issue. It’s beyond laughable that many left liberals are now spouting Koch Bros and Cato libertarian bullcrap about open borders. Suffice to say, it’s extremely difficult to organize illegals into a nice strong labor union.
As a Marxist, I find your comment extremely pessimistic and antihistorical. Humans have wandered the earth for millennia, from the time before there were “countries” and “borders”. Whether the reason was searching for food, escaping from climate change that rendered their former homelands uninhabitable, or other reasons to maintain their survival. Borders are artificial constructs and arbitrarily created by humans who wanted to control other humans. This is why I and other Marxists are internationalists. I support open borders. Put it this way, if corporations can move their businesses at will to exploit low-wage workers in other countries, people should be able to move wherever they wish to improve their chances of survival. Period.
Capitalists support open borders for Capital. Capitalists support open borders for all goods and resources. The only place where capitalists do not support open borders is for living, breathing people. It is so inconvenient when the slaves do not stay in their assigned camps.
If Americans encountered a wall and border posts at every county line, they’d support more open borders as well. We know Elon Musk is in favor of open borders (for himself), as much as I’d prefer to see him restricted to South Africa. Of course, I’d guess almost everyone is in favor of Open Borders …. for themselves.
We have a Vice President who was born in Appalachia, migrated to Silicon Valley on the Pacific Coast to serve oligarchs, then represented Ohio in the Senate, before migrating to the Naval Observatory in DC. And strangely, he opposes the open borders that got him out of his shack in Appalachia.
I agree. Immigration laws are designed to control the movement of the international labor force.
We have to deal pragmatically with the reality of today.
Try passing Med4All or free college when the country is inundated with illegals! No chance.
Any sane nation understands that border integrity is a crucial step in assisting the vast majority of its working population.
Stop internalizing Koch Bros and Cato talking points.
Why should the original inhabitants of this land mass respect the borders that invading Europeans imposed on them without consent? Look how Europe carved up Africa for the convenience of profiteering colonialists. They had no respect for indigenous tribal lands. Imposed borders have caused untold suffering and immiseration for the global south for the profit of global north banking interests. It’s long past time to overthrow this insane unjust system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Borders are designed for control, not the benefit of life on earth.
“… our low wage citizens, African-American and Chicano working class citizens…”
Oh! It’s the out of control immigration problem causing the low wage problem rather than the elite oligarchic plutocrats?
What made the aristocratic elite of America rich beyond their wildest dreams, since its founding 250 years ago is that “Over 100 million immigrants have come to the United States since its founding, with estimates ranging from 86 million legally recorded arrivals between 1783 and 2019 to broader estimates exceeding 100 million in total, according to analysis by the Cato Institute. As of 2024, a record 50.2 million immigrants live in the U.S., making up 14.8% of the population.” (Cato Institute +2)
What! No mention of “the elephant in the room” horde of poor white working class and ‘other’ American citizens?
Avoiding bringing it up so as not to feel awkward or embarrassed for your class of people?
Are you perhaps not drowning in your own bigotry?