Democrats are anointing another amoral politician as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties.
Biden in a meeting at the White House in March 2022. (White House, Erin Scott)
Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career.
Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a TelePrompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug.
He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years – from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign.
The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic.
In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people.
The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness.
Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.
Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs.
As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift.
Those undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites.
This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans.
The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied.
The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism.
The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties.
The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.
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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Chris… I read your writings. You are often on point. In this regard…you have lost the plot. You blame Biden for de-industrialisation when his 3 signature achievements are currently building more ‘made in America’ giga-factories then at any time, in America, since WW11. You do not not comport, Sir. That is a ludicrous conjecture. Endless War..however, is what America projects. The Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Nobody is safe from American avarice. Neither is Ukraine where we pour Billions to recoup the losses US Corporations sustained after Nulands Ukraine coup and NED’s BigPrize saw massive US investment within 10 days of Maidan. Same old story. 60 Coups in 60 years, plus some. Between 900 US overseas bases it is not surprising that the US has failing education, infrastructure and Veteran care, the tax payer is fraught covering the share the wealthy and corporations do not contribute to.
My only question is “When was this ever not true” – the rich have ALWAYS controlled the government, and not just in the U.S. but everywhere. At the time of the Revolution, they ran the govt. directly – Washington, Jefferson, Madison – now they have hired lackeys to do it for them, in order to hide the truth from the populace. Well, given that power has to reside SOMEWHERE, where would you like to put it? In the Soviet Union, it resided in a circle of Party operatives – self-made men, who fought their way to the top, and terrorized the populace in order to stay there. Or do you like a “grass roots” approach, which leads to a mob of ignoramuses controlled by grievance mongers and conspiracy theorists? In Cuba, a revolutionary regime keeps everyone equally poor (helped, admittedly, by a U.S. embargo) while those who want to exercise free speech, or to rise economically, get out and go to Miami.
Lately, a newly-rich group of billionaires like Musk want to strut in front of the cameras, but they’ll learn in time that it’s safer to hide their power from enemies and would-be assassins.
So much for civilisation. We think we are civilised enough to manage our lives on this small world without screwing everything up, but we aren’t.
Biden is symptomatic of our civilisation – in cognitive decline, delusional, confused, and deranged enough to cause global havoc and destruction. Those in power are the worst affected (or should I say ‘infected’?), and cannot see where they are taking us, or how to changer course.
The Doomsday Clock gets closer and closer to midnight…. It’s still at 90 seconds, but clearly needs adjusting.
It’s interesting reading this after having recently re-read David Graeber’s “The Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”. The zeitgeist Chris speaks of is the work of the two major parties to, as Graeber put it:
“It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.”
Clueless liberals have yet to figure any of this out. They have no clue how badly we have all been screwed over by the ruling oligarchy who play both party cults to their advantage. I read their drivel on the opinion page of my local paper everyday and wonder how they avoid the obvious so completely. What a rude awakening awaits.
Move along folks, nothing to see here. It’s always been this way and always will be. The billionaires who support these politicans and put them in place, will always win over the ordinary citizen. But wait!!! Mother Nature is going to win in the end and all the money in the world will not stop Her.
…this CENSORED observer thanks Mr. Hedges truth telling, as U$uAl…
As needs repeating: no matter who wins Elections Inc., the Washington Consensus will prevail, the Genocide of Palestine will continue, the prospect for nuclear war with China and/or Russia will increase, the housing crisis will worsen, the health care crisis will worsen… and the oligarchy will profit more.
Chris Hedges has pointed out many times before, that the US has no functioning democracy, it is an oligarchy. The plebs are divided into two camps and the MassMediaCartel instruct them with narrow “talking points” while the oligarchy collect the profits. The plebs will fight among themselves over emotional issues, while the oligarchy laugh all the way to the bank.
So, which flavor of genocide, kleptocracy and tyranny will you “vote” for?
Is Hedges saying Trump is more terrifying than a democrat?
Now, after having a demented head of state for quite awhile, it is clear the president is window dressing, and the Deep State is who calls the shots.
Trump now knows not to trust the swamp and the security state, so maybe he’ll shake up the elite and make them sweat. That would be progress. Since they cheated Bernie (twice!) out of the ability to challenge the elite, the dems will never even do that.
Interesting take, though I am not sure how well founded it is. Trump’s entire history has been centered around enriching himself, almost exclusively at the expense of others. So how is he any different than the billionaires funding the two capitalist parties? Any ‘shake up’ he facilitates will be designed to, first and foremost, be of benefit to him.
Trump was a businessman, not a politician, and business under capitalism means personal enrichment. His business sense question of why are we spending more than our share for NATO is a good start.
As a Socialist I will never vote Republican, but reducing tensions with Russia and maybe ending NATO would be wonderful things.
Yes, I am probably naively optimistic. But I know it is not the lesser of 2 evils. It is the evil of 2 lessers.
Surely, his story is not simply an ah hah moment to the rest of us?
As I have said in the past, we are so screwed!
“The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris…”
It became hard for me to figure who “The Democrats” and “The Republicans” are. Sure, there are cliques of plutocrats and heavies from MIC that are involved, but are they involved seriously, or as a hobby or some vanity competition between plutocrats? After all, it became a bit hard to compete by displays of wealth, “everybody” can build himself a palace as opulent as the residence of Erdogan with 1000 rooms, then only few can engage in totally spectacular takeover (like Elon Musk), and having a bevy of beholden politicians could be like having a bunch of well-bred horses, except that it is a more universally recognized badge of success.
What I want to say is that I do not see any possible serious thinking in the manipulation that gave us Biden+Harris ticket. Limitations of both were clear, but they were most convenient, and once selected in 2020, hard to drop in 2024, even if future problems were all too easy to predict. But worrying about the future is not what plutocrats do when they run their own companies! Perhaps “unilateral moment” of 1990 removed all impediments to a natural human tendency for myopia and believing in fallacies. Once entrenched, almost impossible to get rid of, given that plutocrats themselves form a herd, or several herds, dependent on point of view.
A good, concise analysis. I will be reading Eric Voegelin based on Mr. Hedges’ recommendation. Because one of the disorienting factors in modern America is its contempt for history. Perhaps as a result of its ungrounded faith in progress.