Chris Hedges: How Republicans, Democrats, and the Media Have Weakened US Democracy

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Transcript:

Rob Johnson:

I’m here today with my friend Chris Hedges, he writes at Bob Scheer’s Scheerpost and he has many, many, many wonderful books about the political economy of this world, the most recent is, America: The Farewell Tour. I understand next year he’s got a book coming out on mass incarceration and I look forward to that. Historically, Chris was a reporter and worked primarily with the New York Times for about 20 years in the middle East and in the Balkan region.

Rob Johnson:

Lastly, and on a personal note, Chris and I shared great admiration for a mutual friend, James Cone, who passed away a couple of years ago but I remember enjoying many conversations with you and he and a couple of dinners together. I just wanted to remember him as you and I get together. Anyway Chris, thanks for joining. Thanks for being here. Tell me as you look, we’re in the middle of this tumultuous year presidential election, a pandemic that seems to have intensified and I’m just curious, what are you seeing and what are you seeing that gives you alarm? What are you not seeing you wish you were seeing and what are you seeing that gives you some basis for hope?

Chris Hedges:

Well, the structures of democratic capitalism have been severely weakened. That’s a decades long process, probably begun if you want to start date around 1971 with the Powell memo, that’s the memo by Lewis Powell, who was the Chief Attorney for the Chamber of Commerce that laid out a kind of blueprint by which corporate America could respond to what the political scientist Samuel Hunting and called the rise [inaudible 00:02:44], America’s excess of democracy. Those were the rise of popular grassroots movements, not just the any war movement but the feminist movement, the ecological movement, earth day where Ralph Nader, by the way, was the original organizer of earth day. Citizens action committees led by Nader. Nader was actually named in that memo as a target.

Chris Hedges:

What we’ve seen since is a frontal assault against all popular movements that gave not only a voice, but power to the citizenry especially our labor unions. If we all remember Reagan going after the Air Traffic Controllers Union but this has culminated with right to work laws. At this point about 6% of the labor force is unionized and then of course we’ve seen all of the policies deindustrialization turbocharged by NAFTA, the destruction of social programs such as welfare. Again, that was the Clinton administration, that was a Democratic administration. Welfare is in essence eradicated and 70% of the original recipients so a welfare were children.

Chris Hedges:

You saw the repeal of the 1933 law Glass-Steagall, which had put a firewall between commercial and investment banks that was destroyed with precipitated, the global meltdown. It’s interesting that Canada which did under current [inaudible 00:04:29], did not tear down those firewalls and thus did not have a banking crisis with the global meltdown. You saw constant deregulation including of the FCC, which as a journalist was important because that allowed the consolidation of improper especially electronic media but not exclusively into the hands of about a half dozen corporations that control what about 90% of Americans listen to and watch. You saw a defunding of public television and public radio, which then became dependent on corporate money. If you went back and looked at public television in the 1970s, you could see critics, corporate critics, critics of imperialism like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, even earlier before he was assassinated, Malcolm X.

Chris Hedges:

But all of that’s been eradicated and we configured the capitalist democracy into a system of oligarchy, a globe… It’s been seized by global speculators who have in… Carried out because their lobbyists write the legislation, virtual tax boycotts, Amazon didn’t pay taxes at least last year. In fact, it got money back. You’ve seen a massive consolidation of personal wealth in terms of the hands of the billionaire class and I think most egregiously that money corrupted the Democratic party and that was a conscious decision by Tony Coelho, a Congressman in California, who along with Clinton realized that they could get corporate money if they did corporate bidding. David Cay Johnston wrote a good book, No Free Lunch, where he talks about how that effort to attract corporate dollars just began this massive rewriting of tax laws.

Chris Hedges:

If you go back under Eisenhower, the wealthiest segment of the population, the wealthiest corporations paid 91% income tax. What you saw, and I learned much of this from Ralph Nader who was turned into a pariah consciously, is that they pushed out the real liberal wing of the Democratic party. Ralph himself wrote I think 24 pieces of legislation, consumer protection, the mine and safety act, the clean water act. This was all Nader. But it was pushed through by liberal senators, Proxmire, Fulbright and others, Wellstone, maybe being one of the last. All of these people were pushed out of the Democratic party and replaced with these full liberal, I would call them full liberals figures like Obama, figures like Clinton, who spoke in that traditional feel, you’re paying language of the Democratic party but serve the interest of Wall Street. Cornel West called Barack Obama black mascot for Wall Street which was correct.

Chris Hedges:

What you really got was the transformation of the Democratic party into the Republican party. The Republican party was pushed so far to the right that it just became insane and we’re watching its insanity at the moment. But this left the working class absolutely bereft. The democratic establishment essentially justifies this savage assault by being tolerant on issues of sexual identity and race. This, you see Biden attempting to put women and [inaudible 00:08:26], choose gay and people of color on the cabinet.

Chris Hedges:

But this is just corporate colonialism. They certainly serve like Obama, those centers of power, and that has completely disenfranchised and enraged and I think that their feeling of rage is legitimate, the white working class and I have a particular sensitivity to the dispossession of the white working class because I come out of it, in Maine and I have watched the destruction of these people where my relatives were working or lower working class and NAFTA and trade deals have just destroyed their lives and destroyed their communities.

Chris Hedges:

If you, for instance, go to the town that my grandparents are from Mechanic Falls, Maine, it’s a wreck, it’s a ruin, that everything is boarded up. Even the bank in the center of town, is small town, has boarded up the church in front of the house where my grandparents lived burned down and the town doesn’t have the money to raise it. It’s just black and charred embers. The desperation has fueled the opioid crisis that is true throughout the country.

Chris Hedges:

I wrote a book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with Joe Sacco, out of West Virginia these were sacrifice zones and we went to the poorest parts of the United States, Pine Ridge South Dakota, Camden, New Jersey, which per capita is the poorest city in America to say, look, this is what unfettered capitalism has done to these sacrifice zones and now we’ve just become one vast sacrifice zone.

Chris Hedges:

Then accompanying this dispossession of the white working class, which does express much of its rage in racist, even homophobic, Islamophobic terms, I’m not defending any of this, but I think we have to just write these people off as racist is not to understand what happened. You saw a radical transformation in the media and I think Matt Taibbi has probably done the best work on this, read his book Hate Inc. It’s a very good analysis of what’s happened to the media landscape. One half of the cover of the book shows Sean Hannity, the other Rachel Maddow, because they do the same thing.

Chris Hedges:

If you go back and look at manufacturing consent, Chomsky and Ed Herman’s great work on the press, you see that the old paradigm no longer functions, that in the digital age where there are a multiplicity of sources, the media has essentially siloed itself. It doesn’t seek with the old monopolies. Remember we used to have just one major network that the power of the New York Times and I know because I worked for The Times for 15 years, was not the readership, the readership wasn’t ever that big, the subscription base was rarely much over a million, but it was the power to set the agenda so that when I was overseas, all of the networks, now these were the big kind of media stars that appeared on CBS or NBC, would actually come and knock on my hotel room at night and ask me what it was I was filing the next morning because they knew their editors would then send them out to do a story based on what I had reported.

Chris Hedges:

That was the power of the New York Times. All of that’s gone and it’s been replaced by partisan divides and it has transformed publications like The New York Times into partisan outlets. The Pew Research Center did a poll last summer where they polled readers and viewers so 91% of the people who read The New York Times identify as supporters of the Democratic party, that’s 87% for national public radio, 94, 95%, I can’t remember, for MSNBC. Then you have the other side of the divide where 95% of the people who watch Fox news, I hate combining Fox with the word news, identify as supporters of the Republican party. That has been commercially successful and even politically successful because on all of the major issues, trade deals, endless war, wholesale surveillance, austerity programs.

Chris Hedges:

There’s really almost no difference between the Republican and the Democratic party where their difference revolves around what I would call societal or ethical issues, which are not unimportant but they’re not social or political issues. You have this kind of, well, Freud called fratricide, centered around the narcissism of minor difference. That’s essentially what we’re seeing. It’s essentially sweeping up because we’re all… All of our profiles are available, our own proclivities and habits and prejudices and then feeding it back to us.

Chris Hedges:

The danger of this is that you’re creating a wider, wider divide where people can no longer communicate, where nothing is based on verifiable fact or truth and I fault the left as much as the right for this. The whole obsession with Russia [gate 00:14:04], the whole attempt to blame the election of Trump on Moscow was really a deflection away from the complicity that the Democratic party had in the dispossession of the working class and that’s very frightening.

Chris Hedges:

Of course, we’re watching now the Biden, people around Biden ratchet up a new cold war. If you go back and remember when Biden’s campaign was faltering he blamed… Right after the Nevada caucus where Bernie Sanders shellacked him, I mean, got more than double the votes that he did. I think he got about 20%, Bernie got almost 50%. He blamed it… He said, well, that’s of course because the Russians want Bernie Sanders. This goes back to Clinton during the 2016 blasting Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate as a Russian asset, a line she repeated during the democratic primaries this year trying to tar representative Tulsi Gabbard again as a Russian asset.

Chris Hedges:

I think that it’s clear from the Biden appointments and we can go through them if you want, but it’s clear from the Biden appointments that we’re going to get more of the same. The fact is most Americans on both sides of the political spectrum do not want more of the same. I worry that what they will do is what ruling parties always do and that is essentially create an enemy. They can’t go after China because Silicon Valley will never let them and because China frankly is too powerful so they’ll go after Russia, which is much weaker. You’ve already seen it with this kind of cyber attack or when Hunter Biden’s laptop was discovered with all sorts of damaging emails and apparently pictures of him smoking crack and having sex or whatever. Again, that was an attempt to tar this as Russian disinformation.

Chris Hedges:

Again, if you look at even the New York Times when they talk about the John Podesta emails, these were the, he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair which were published by WikiLeaks, it’s described as disinformation. Well, as a journalist, this is very frightening. It’s not disinformation. Those emails were true. Nobody has ever challenged the veracity of those emails. On the one hand, we’ve seen a kind of savaging of the country by rapacious global corporate entities which are supranational and have no loyalty to the nation state at all. Ralph Nader correctly calls them traders. Coupled with a breakdown of a media system, which sets one demographic against another.

Chris Hedges:

I’ll just close by saying that we must never forget that Donald Trump received the second highest vote count in any presidential race in American history, 74 million voters and Biden got about 80. Now, this is after one of the most disastrous presidencies in American history, flagrant corruption, inaptitude, racism, appointing conspiracy theorists, et cetera. He increased his vote count by… And not being able to handle the pandemic, although it’s not completely his fault. The for-profit healthcare system is not designed to handle a national health crisis, it’s designed to make money which and that is going to be a problem under Biden.

Chris Hedges:

But so he increases vote count by 11 million votes and that has to be a huge flashing red light. Watching the Biden administration go back to more of the same, it has apparently rebuffed Bernie Sanders’ desire to be Secretary of Labor or they just refuse to allow Ocasio-Cortez to be on the Energy Committee because of the Green New Deal, the Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support of the Green New Deal, it’s clear and also because most, I mean, [inaudible 00:18:15] all of the nominees including Neera Tanden, this former Clinton aide who has been picked to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget and who spent the last nine years running the Democratic party’s think tank the Center for American Progress has just been as openly ridiculed, Sanders and Sanders supporters.

Chris Hedges:

That’s where we are and it’s a decades long march. It’s not something that was caused by a particular election cycle. These are structural, major structural dilemmas that I see no party addressing in a real way. You’re watching Giuliani and Trump attempt to use the same kind of conspiracy theories, the Venezuelan software designed by Hugo Chavez who died in 2013 for corrupting the election. I mean, just it’s as ludicrous as blaming the Kremlin for Trump’s rise. But this is a characteristic of two parties that refuse to confront their own responsibility for where we are and a media that no longer informs, but essentially caters to a particular demographic and demonizes the other demographics. Then we didn’t talk about the climate crisis, which is of course, a emergency is the right word. All of these things come together and I think that the lesson from both this election and the pandemic is that we are losing control both as a nation and as a species.

Rob Johnson:

So control in part… How would I say, because as you and Matt Taibbi discussed in your show on contact that the journalists have now been intimidated, they’re afraid to share with the American people what’s the crux of the issue and as a result, all of these kind of false explanations become the bloodstream of conversation and people can intuitively sense that people aren’t addressing what fuels their despair. How do you explain that? I mean, I understand what you’re talking about, these will be corporate structure and the media, et cetera, but the outrage particularly white working class felt, Donald Trump seemed to speak to that when he’d say the system is rigged or he’d show videos of Hillary Clinton before giving a speech, before Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs or what have you, but what’s going on now that’s, which I might call kept Trump’s votes so high. What did the Democrats not do in the campaign that inhibited them from winning in a landslide?

Chris Hedges:

Well, they could have won in a landslide if they address the real issues in poll after poll, everybody, what Republican, Democrat feels that Wall Street is out of control, that they should be more heavily regulated and taxed. These endless wars have no support. This insane pillaging of resources by the defense industry. I mean, in a normal society the architects of failed wars and failed policies should be at best dismissed and probably even put on trial. There certainly should be the kinds of investigations that a functioning democracy engages in.

Chris Hedges:

We saw that with Watergate, we saw that with a church committee, all of that’s gone. It was Feinstein actually, I’m not fan of Feinstein, but it was Feinstein who attempted to investigate the CIA torture program and the CIA hacked her own computers, the Senate computers and there was this moment where she just came out, kind of white as a ghost and realized that there was going to be no control over the kind of dark intelligence agencies whose budgets are dark. We don’t even know how much, we have to guess how much these intelligence agencies are being allotted.

Chris Hedges:

The system is rigged in this sense, if corporate money was removed from the election and political process then figures like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or even Mitch McConnell wouldn’t exist. They are products of this money. They are the servants to this billionaire class, to these corporate entities and their power comes from being able to anoint and fund the candidates that they choose that will do the bidding of corporate power and without that money they vanish, without that money Bernie Sanders clearly would have been the nominee in 2016.

Chris Hedges:

Remember Bernie did not take corporate money. This was a true grassroots effort and I have criticism of Sanders, but this was a true grassroots effort. But the oligarchic elite was quite open that Bernie Sanders would never be the nominee. There was all sorts of dirty tricks in both 2016 and 2020 using the DNC as a vehicle to support the Clinton campaign quite openly. In 2016, they openly stole the Nevada caucus. They denied independence in many States, the right to vote in Democratic primaries, although we should remember the taxpayer pays for the primaries. They erased all sorts of people from the roles they use super delegates and these tactics were all in place again.

Chris Hedges:

The Democratic party, I think, committed kind of suicide. I think that the Biden administration will see the ground for a competent fascist and the only thing that saved us from a coup d’etat, which the Trump administration clearly it was and is trying to orchestrate is just their disorganization and their ineptitude, but putting a competent fascist like Mike Pompei or Tom Cotton linked to the Christian right. I am a seminary graduate and I’m glad you mentioned James Cone, my close friend and the greatest theologian in America since Reinhold Niebuhr, these people are… This Christian right, this prosperity gospel is heretical and I don’t say that lightly. I have a deep church background. My father was a minister. My mother was a seminary graduate, although she was a professor, I at one point could read the Bible in Greek. I mean, I know it.

Chris Hedges:

The failure of the liberal church to denounce these people for who they were in the name of tolerance and dialogue has been disastrous. The Christian right, 81%, the last figure I read support Trump. They have acculturated the Christian message to the worst aspects of American capitalism and American imperialism. This kind of heretical belief that the white race is blessed to kind of bring the Christian society and of [inaudible 00:26:19] remember that Jesus wasn’t white, the Romans were white, Jesus was a person of color. That’s the first of many lies. That Islam and I spent seven years in the Middle East, I’m an Arabic speaker and have a deep, deep respect for Islam, is kind of satanic religion.

Chris Hedges:

That’s where both the etiology and the infrastructure, the patina, will come from. That Christian fascism will be the veneer and Trump brought these people really into the epicenter of power, Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, Bill Barr, Carson, they all come out of this and then of course we’ve got six of nine Supreme Court justices who have all been anointed, are products of the Federalist society including this cultist Amy Coney Barrett. We’ve got 20% of federal judgeships were appointed during the Trump administration, but Trump just turned it all over to the Federalist society and most of these appointees were rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association.

Chris Hedges:

I think in the kind of meltdown that’s happening, we are laying the groundwork for kind of Christianized fascism and I think that if the Democratic party attempts to go back to what they call normal and I think at this point it’s very clear from the Biden appointments which are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic party and the corporate elite and these are the people that created the… Orchestrated the social inequality, the trade deals, the militarized police, Biden was one of the prime movers behind that along with the doubling of our prison population, now the largest in the world, he repeatedly called for cuts to social security, so wholesale surveillance, all of this came out of Biden and the Democrats and the appointees that he has brought forward for his new administration are rooted completely in that corporate elite and in that ideology and that’s what I find very dangerous and very frightening.

Rob Johnson:

The… how would I say, I remember where you were talking about Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or whatever that, or Mitch McConnell they’re depending on the money, without the money, they wouldn’t be there. My sense is that the system is so designed to favor money over votes as a currency for decision-making that almost every elected official faces that pressure. Is it and when we talk about different policies, not working on climate change, excessive financial deregulation, pharmaceutical monopolies, stock buybacks, aren’t all of these symptoms of that malfunctioning system where money and concentrated wealth and the non-enforcement of antitrust which further concentrate as wealth. Aren’t these the contributing factors that render each politician vulnerable to defeat if they don’t cope with this. That’s what needs to be reformed at the core-

Chris Hedges:

They’re not going to reform it because if they reform it, they’re going to lose power and Pelosi and Schumer they’re quite aware of this. On the one hand, the Democratic party… Look, imagine if the Democratic party campaigned on a universal healthcare, a guaranteed minimum wage for all, forgiveness of student debt, complete moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a government jobs program. I mean, they would sweep the elections, but of course they wouldn’t have their corporate backers like Lloyd Blankfein. I mean, Blankfein, which comes out of the criminal organization of Goldman Sachs, Blankfein made it very clear, he was the former CEO during the elections that if… And this was, he was quoted the New York Times, along with other high profile Democratic donors, that if Sanders was the nominee, he would vote for Trump.

Chris Hedges:

What does that say? It says that the billionaire class, of course they prefer Biden and Silicon Valley and Wall Street. At the end of the campaign pumped we don’t know how much, because it was through super PACS, but significant sums of money into anti Trump ads on behalf of Biden because Biden restores the kind of gravitas and decorum and civility that was lacking in the Trump administration. But the fact is they can live with either, they prefer Biden and they got Biden over Trump. But what they weren’t ever going to accept was Sanders.

Chris Hedges:

Even though I find Sanders political platform quite moderate, Sanders did not go after the defense industry. Sanders was very hesitant to call out the Democratic party in any real way and I was outside the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center in 2016 when Sanders got up to endorse the nomination of Hillary Clinton, I was there with Cornel West. We were with a group of several thousand homeless people demanding housing as a human right. A few hundred Sanders’ delegates, mostly young walked out of the hall chanting, “This is what democracy… What does democracy look? This is what democracy looks like.” Cornel who’s amazingly prescient as always said to me, “Bernie missed his historical moment.”

Chris Hedges:

I think that’s right. I think that… And I spoke to Bernie Sanders about it. I did an event with the night before the climate march with Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and Seattle City Council woman Kshama Sawant who Amazon is determined to remove from the city council in Seattle. Bernie… Kshama and I were pushing particularly Kshama was pushing Bernie to run as an independent arguing correctly that the Democratic party was never going to allow him to get the nomination and Bernie said, well, I don’t want to end up like Nader.

Chris Hedges:

I thought that was a very revealing comment because Bernie went wrong. He understood that if he defied the Democratic party establishment, of course he would no longer be able to caucus with the Democratic party and get seniority through the Democratic party. But the Democratic party would also go after him in Vermont and make sure that he was not reelected to the Senate. If you defy those corporate interests, they’re pretty ruthless. George McGovern was one of the last to do it when he took on the animal Ag industry and they made sure that his Senate seat was taken from him in South Dakota after of course the oligarchic class, Democratic and Republican conspiring in 1972 when he got the nomination with the Republican and Democrats conspiring to destroy the McGovern campaign, which they did.

Chris Hedges:

Bernie wasn’t wrong but we’re never going to build a significant resistance movement in an election cycle and I know because I’ve worked with Ralph, I was Ralph speech writer. I know all of the impediments, the two parties, both parties, but in particular the Democratic party throw up to third-party candidates, locking them out of the debates, constantly challenging voter lists, not because they think they’re fraudulent but because it runs up legal bills, at one point Ralph’s legal bills were over a million dollars, Patty Smith and I were going around trying to raise money for him to pay it.

Chris Hedges:

I think that was and that Sanders, I think chose his career over and I don’t… I think unlike most politicians I sense that Bernie is honest and I think that his commitment to the working class is real, I don’t think it’s fake like John Edwards and all these other people. But I think in the end, he just did not want to confront the monolith because he knew how destructive that monolith would be to him and to his career and he’s not wrong but I think that also makes him kind of morally and temperamentally unfit to lead this fight.

Rob Johnson:

I’m reminded of a quote from our friend James H. Cone in his book, God of the Oppressed, where he says the only meaningful Christian response is to resist unjust suffering and to accept the painful consequence of that resistance. Now, in Bernie’s case, he’s not necessarily a Christian, but the point is that in such a misaligned system, as you’re describing, if you don’t accept the painful consequences of the resistance, then the resistance is not formidable and then things continue to [carine 00:36:04] further and further off course deepening despair and produce the kind of authoritarian lurches that we’ve seen periodically throughout history.

Rob Johnson:

The question is and I can see from your title of your book, America: The Farewell Tour, or some of your recent articles that I guess I would conjecture that you probably don’t believe that the energy, the will of resistance can overcome the tools or the power of the other side and that we are headed towards that danger zone again. Actually, we’ve kind of been in it. Trump was a symptom of that in the minds of many people, but it feels to me like we’re… How would I say?

Rob Johnson:

Cornel West and I were texting on the day when it was announced that Biden won in Pennsylvania which looked like would clinch sufficient electoral votes to win. In our interaction, we kind of said this is an eerie day because what we’re doing is celebrating the return to power, the thing that caused what we are celebrating is leaving and that… As you’ve underscored, I think the real danger here is with systemic malfunction of this depth and degree and resilience, how are we going to get back to the structures of what you call democratic capitalism?

Chris Hedges:

Well, that’s exactly right. But it also has a very negative effect in terms of the promotion of the kind of liberal, with a small L, the liberal democratic values that you and I and Cornel care so deeply about. When you have a liberal class and I think at this point to define the liberal class we would call them the professional managerial class that is predominant on the two, on the East Coast and the West Coast, that is tolerant in terms of its attitudes towards different sexual orientations and race and that kind of stuff. But that has largely profited from the ravages of neo-liberalism. I think that they want to endow it with this kind of patina of civility.

Chris Hedges:

The problem is that all of the issues they claim to care about and to fight for, they surrender every election cycle to support figures like Clinton or Biden or Obama who in power have essentially betrayed all of those issues. That is eviscerating the credibility of the liberal elite. That’s a fundamental component to the rise of any totalitarian movement. That was true in Yugoslavia. You had an ineffectual self-identified democratic liberal elite after the death of Tito in 1980, in that kind of decade long period before the war began but it was just ineffectual. It wasn’t able to actually carry out or respond in a meaningful way. There was economic devastation in Yugoslavia, it’s a longer story, but Tito had gotten a lot of loans. Mostly they knew he could never pay them back because he was a buffer state and then they wanted… The Western banks wanted the loans paid, they couldn’t pay them, widespread factory closures, the economy went into a tailspin hyperinflation, et cetera.

Chris Hedges:

I think that Ralph’s understanding when he decided to run for president and that was one I agreed with was that the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt part of these kind of progressive agendas and save ourselves from this slow motion corporate coup d’etat was to defect. That if five, 10, 15 million people unquoting Ralph left the Democratic party behind a third-party candidate, a progressive third-party candidate, this would be the only chance we would have for effective political change. That didn’t happen for many reasons and here of course is where we are. I would recommend, I don’t know if you know it, Richard Rorty’s last book, Achieving Our Country. I think it was written in 1998.

Rob Johnson:

I’ve read it.

Chris Hedges:

1998 and he nailed it. I’m just going to read this paragraph. He’s talking precisely about this process. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period. One in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book, The Endangered American Dream, is that members 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. Let’s just as a caveat, remember that wages in real terms have declined since the 70s, production has risen by 77%. If wages had kept pace with production, the minimum wage would be $20 an hour. Then I’m going back to Rorty.

Chris Hedges:

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 non suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strong man to vote for, someone willing to assure them that once he is elected the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesman, 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 may then be played out. For once such a strong man 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 overoptimistic.

Chris Hedges:

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by Black and Brown Americans and by homosexuals will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The N word 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.

Chris Hedges:

I recommend that book and Sheldon Wolin’s Classic Democracy Incooperated to political profits, contemporary where they both died recently. Well, Rorty not so recently. Wolin a couple years ago. If you go on YouTube, I have the last interview Wolin gave, it’s a three hour interview he gave to me the year before he died. These political philosophers astutely saw the danger in what was coming and the consequences and here we are.

Rob Johnson:

Oh, Wendy Brown who’s been a guest on this podcast was a student of Sheldon Wolin’s and-

Chris Hedges:

That’s right. Do you know who else was a student of Sheldon Wolin? Cornel West.

Rob Johnson:

That’s right.

Chris Hedges:

Cornel dedicated his second book to Sheldon Wolin. When Sheldon-

Rob Johnson:

I’m sorry to interrupt. But my own research director Tom Ferguson was also at Princeton and did some work with Sheldon Wolin.

Chris Hedges:

Wolin told me there came point when no member of the Princeton Political Science Department was even speaking to him because he called neo-liberalism out in the 80s and immediately [inaudible 00:44:38]. Interestingly about Wolin is that he’s quite lyrical writer, he’s quite a fine writer. He’s a brilliant philosopher, but he’s also a very good writer. He was writing for publications like The New York Review of Books and others, but he saw what was coming and he said he just got blanked out, he couldn’t get published.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. Now, I remember talking with Chalmers Johnson a little bit about knowing Wolin and in his admiration.

Chris Hedges:

Well, Johnson is another one. Johnson’s trilogy is another one, [inaudible 00:45:12] empire, also very, very smart books. We had our… There were members of our intellectual class who didn’t sell out and were honest enough to warn us but we didn’t listen and now we’re in really deep trouble.

Rob Johnson:

Well, in your most recent article, the great delusion, you referred to a European scholar, [Stephens Shwaig 00:45:38] and I thought it was very interesting, the mindset that he portrayed in… What was it called? The world of yesterday.

Chris Hedges:

[inaudible 00:45:48] memoir. Well, [Shwaig 00:45:52], so there was a handful of great intellectuals, many of them Jewish like Shwaig, Joseph Roth was another one, they were close friends, who certainly saw number one, the folly of world war one, a suicidal folly of world war one, for which they immediately became pariahs. Shwaig wrote this great play, Jeremiah, this anti-war play that could only be performed in Switzerland that issued these kinds of warnings and how you turn on the prophet.

Chris Hedges:

The biblical prophet Jeremiah who’s warning Jerusalem about the eventual when it happens, the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians is just ignored and ridiculed and persecuted and there are plots against his life. I’m talking about the biblical story, he’s attacked for demoralizing the people and then by the time the Babylonian army swarms into Jerusalem and the Jews go into exile, Jeremiah like Julian Assange is in prison so they’re there and another great figure like that would be Jane Addams in the United States go back and look at her, Randolph Bourne, that when things become difficult it’s the intellectual class, the majority of the intellectual class either remain silent or becomes complicit.

Chris Hedges:

Because you mentioned earlier, much earlier, in the talk about journalists. Well, what they are is careerists. I worked at The New York Times, there were never rules written on the walls of The New York Times, but you learn very quickly those stories which would get you promoted that the hierarchy of The Times wanted in the newspaper and those stories that didn’t. If you persisted with stories they didn’t want, you became a management problem and then you got pushed out.

Chris Hedges:

I was friends with Sydney Schanberg who of course won the Pulitzer in Cambodia and also friends with [Deff Braun 00:47:46] who was eventually after being in a concentration camps run by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge worked for The New York Times. But Sydney, when he came back went after the developers who were destroying Manhattan, Manhattan’s been destroyed. I used to go to the village as a boy with all the bookstores and the artists, it’s all gone replaced by, I don’t know, blue navy or gap or whatever these… It’s just been sucked dry, the cultural life of the city and Schanberg saw it and he went after it and these developers were friends of the publisher and he was fired and he ended up the rest of his career was writing columns for The Village Voice and News Tech.

Chris Hedges:

The journalists, I think that are left are largely, are very cynical that they are careerist, [George Parker 00:48:43], all these kinds of figures and they are the ones whose voices you hear, Jeffrey Toobin who’s been removed from the airwaves for exposing himself on a zoom video for watching porn, but Toobin and I debated at the Oxford Union over Snowden and he was calling for Snowden’s extradition and imprisonment along with Julian. But if you stand up for… I mean, I have a huge admiration for Snowden and Julian. I know Julian, I visited him several times at the embassy. If you stand up for them, then you’re just locked out. Your voice is not going to be heard. I think careerism has really been quite insidious.

Chris Hedges:

Also I would also say about the media [inaudible 00:49:31]. What is balance? Balance becomes inviting a Republican operative, Giuliani on one side and a Democratic operative Van Jones on the other or I don’t know who, George Stephanopoulos, I don’t know who these people are, I don’t own a television, but on the other and they both lie but you just give them equal time to lie. I think it certain… I mean, I don’t have a much respect for the intellectual wattage power of most of the people on television, but some of them have to know that they’re lying.

Chris Hedges:

But if you give four minutes to Republican lies and four minutes to Democratic lies, you’ve done nothing to actually inform. In fact, you’ve misinformed the American public but that becomes what is defined as objective or neutral journalism. But it’s really, at this point, all a burlesque, it’s all vaudeville as Taibbi points out, political coverage is quite consciously modeled after ESPN with the graphics and the scores and the polls and the numbers and the tactics and the strategies and the good looking host and two people from one team and two people from another team, but there’s nothing to do with politics or civic life.

Rob Johnson:

I remember talking with Gillian Tett who wrote for the Financial Times and I was asking her about this Institute for New Economic Thinking then what kind of guidance she would give me. She said at the time, “Rob, what you need to do is study the silences because the map of the silences and what’s not said will tell you where power resides.” I remember H.L. Mencken wrote a piece in the 1920s called The Dismal Science and he said, and you and I can laugh a little bit, the only people he trusted less than theologians were economists because they could see in the future what the consequences would be if they espoused a view that took on power or affected the material conditions of trustees and members of the board, et cetera, at the major universities.

Rob Johnson:

He said, these people are not free and it sounds a little bit like what you say about the journalists, but it also reminds me of the [inaudible 00:51:52] quote that you use in your most recent article where he says one of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds it’s partial and universal values most convincingly and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. In my senses, when things are unsustainable and in part because of concentrations in power, people become afraid and they go silent or they compose false consciousness to which you might call, avoid confrontation with what looks like it could become inevitable.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, I would defer to you in terms of economists, but the whole ideology of neo-liberalism as a layman never made any economic sense to me at all. I look at neo-liberalism in Marxian terms, I’m not a Marxist, although I think Marx’s analysis of capitalism is important. I don’t… This whole Hegelian idea of the proletariat, I think it’s kind of utopian, but the whole idea of neo-liberalism which reaches back to these real outliers, like Hayek and Milton Friedman and this third rate novelist [Anne Rin 00:53:15], it was really… As Marx would argue it’s, it was just the ideology that perpetuated the interests of the ruling elites. It’s not that it ever made economic sense nor was it really designed to and this of course is David Harvey’s argument in his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which I think is correct. If you wanted to advance within the university, in an economics department, then you better subscribe to that mantra whether it makes economic sense or not is irrelevant, but you know more about this than I do.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. That whole kind of libertarian energy certainly has played a big role in the ideology of Silicon Valley which is in some ways kind of ironic given the extent to which Silicon Valley’s prosperity was spawned by government direction and government grants through DARPA and the NSA and places like that and so, yes, well, it’s become quite severe. Then the inability of enforcement as you talked about has facilitated a concentration because there is no any trust and now more and more outlets, including the New York Post, as you and Matt Taibbi discussed can get barred just by decisions from a handful of people.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah. Well, that’s very [inaudible 00:54:43]. I’ve been hit with these algorithms which began a couple of years ago supposedly going after Left Wing sites because of this was… There was this anonymous website called PropOrNot, Propaganda or Not, then Washington Post put it on the front page and they just listed every Left Wing site. All of which either runs my stuff or I write for as being part of the Russian propaganda campaign, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Truthdig, on and on and on. Then that gave them the ability to use algorithms to shut us out which they have used and that’s not conjecture. We all went on strike at Truthdig when the publisher tried to fire Bob Scheer who now runs his own little side Scheerpost which we all defected to, we were all fired.

Chris Hedges:

But the year before they ran… They got the data to put together a graph which showed referrals through impressions. You type in… Let’s say you went into Google and type imperialism and I had written an article about imperialism recently, then that should have come up along with anything else about imperialism but that becomes erased. Referrals to the articles that I had written on the site by impressions in that graph over a 12 month period declined from over 700,000 to below 200,000 and I’m sure it’s below that now. Taibbi of course is I think been the best on this, but yes, on the Hunter Biden laptop issue which they tried to dismiss again as Russian disinformation, nobody’s challenged. Nobody in the Biden campaign challenged the authenticity of what was on that laptop. When The New York post reported it, which is what a journalist should do, they… Well, Twitter locked them out of their own account. There was a concerted effort by the digital platforms and the traditional mainstream media to bury the story.

Chris Hedges:

Now, why is there collusion between Google, Facebook and organizations like The New York times? Because they lock out the dissonance and the alternative voices like mine and they redirect people to the mainstream outlets like MSNBC or the Washington Post or the one owned by Jeff Bezos or The New York Times. There is a kind of commercial interest on the part of these outlets in embracing this kind of open censorship and you have seen it articles by Rouse and others in The New York Times that laud this uncontrolled, unexamined effort on the part of these digital platforms, unaccountable to essentially impose censorship and as Matt says it used to be that if you committed libel you had to go to court and you had to pay, that’s all gone.

Chris Hedges:

These digital platforms know everything about us. We know nothing about them and they have the power to essentially reshape the narrative. As I think the Democratic party under Biden becomes more and more beleaguer because the policies they’re clearly going to implement don’t have populous support, this censorship will become more pronounced. That’s my fear. I know that is Matt Taibbi’s fear, that we just saw Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept because the editors attempted to censor… Well, they did censor his story on what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop and that’s not conjecture because Glenn released all of the traffic back and forth and what did Naomi Klein and Betsy Reed and all these people at The Intercept do, they didn’t respond to the textual evidence that Glenn released and they went after… It was character assassination. They accused him of wanting to make more money on Substack and being a man child, I don’t know if that’s the exact phrase Betsy Reed used.

Chris Hedges:

I found that utterly appalling as someone who walked out of The New York Times over because they were trying to muzzle me over my criticisms of the invasion of Iraq. I can tell you it’s extremely difficult without independent money and neither Glen nor I have it to leave a stable well-paid staff position for the unknown. What he did was quite courageous so yeah, I think that there are people with integrity, Matt and Glen being two, Robert Scheer, they’re out there. But let’s not be naive. They’re not only very marginalized, but in increasingly targeted and [inaudible 00:59:36].

Rob Johnson:

In the realm of climate change, I know the books like, [inaudible 00:59:49] [Rescues 00:59:49], Merchants of Doubt, and others like it have talked about the difficulty of creating the call to action for this terrific challenge that could end life on earth in the not too distant future. I’ve seen books like Naomi Klein’s older brother Seth’s recent book called The Good War about the analogy between war preparation by the Canadians for world war II and what is on the horizon now. But I’ve also seen a lot of people anxious about such a scenario because of the fear of what you might call corporatism and oligarchic domination of governance and, how would I say, making money for the corporations, not taking care of the the challenge to all of our wellbeing. What’s your vision of how we should address the climate challenge at this juncture and what kind of reforms are needed to bring that to life?

Chris Hedges:

Well, the war analogy doesn’t work and I speak as someone who spent pretty much 20 years covering war. War has all sorts of elements that environmental catastrophe lacks. War requires you to dehumanize the enemy. It’s nationalism. It plays on nationalism which is really a form of self exaltation. It creates an existential threat that allows people to feel a kind of sense of bonding or comradery. It just all of these elements of war don’t work because the climate crisis is kind of a slow motion tsunami and that’s of course what is making it so difficult to deal with. It’s incremental. It takes step-by-step although of course at the end it will be non-linear. I mean, things will begin to break down. You’ll have feedback loops where one high temperatures then cause fires, then cause a reduction in crop yields, then cause methane leaks. I mean, you eventually… I mean, those feedback loops are probably already starting.

Chris Hedges:

I mean I’m a strong supporter of Extinction Rebellion and I’ve engaged in civil disobedience run by Extinction Rebellion which shut down the street in front of the New York Stock Exchange because I think that mass sustained civil disobedience is the only weapon. I think appealing to the ruling elites isn’t going to work. I think history has kind of laid out that all of the petitions and appeals to the UN and lobbying efforts by the NGOs just haven’t worked. The temperature rises, carbon emissions have risen I think since, I [inaudible 01:03:01], 1990 they’ve risen by 40% of it. But anyway, they are unstoppable. The methods we have embraced to deal with the climate crisis haven’t worked, that is essentially the bedrock position of groups like Extinction Rebellion and I think they’re right so I think mass civil disruption to save ourselves is all we have left.

Rob Johnson:

Any other final thoughts. We’ve been covering a lot of different bases, a lot of different concern, a lot of different dysfunctioning and underscored some really wonderful people in the middle and some beautiful writings. But I’m curious if you have final thoughts you’d like to share with our listeners.

Chris Hedges:

My only final thought and I speak as a member of The Left is that we must build real relationships with the oppressed. I think the dangers of the oppressed become an abstraction. One of the things I’ve liked about the George Floyd protests, number one, of course it skews young, but also it’s been led by people of color and that I find that very hard named by people who actually come out of the experience of urban oppression and police terror and know what they’re talking about. I think there’s been a political sophistication on the part of many of the people in the streets. They’re not being gas lighted by Nancy Pelosi’s kente-scarf or [Muriel Bowser 01:04:27] painting 35 foot tall letters saying Black Lives Matter in front of the White House and she’s African-American while she also calls for a $50 million increase in the police budget and wants a bond issue to build a $500 million new jail.

Chris Hedges:

I think they get it. I find that very encouraging but I think that one of the things that… Because I worked in Gaza, because I worked in Central America, because I teach in a prison and have taught in a prison for 10 years through [Rutgers 01:04:58] and the college degree program, I have close relationships with people who suffer the brunt of this oppression and I think that keeps you honest. I can’t walk out of that prison knowing that, but for Clinton and Biden, half of my students wouldn’t be in prison and then vote for Biden. I can’t spend as I did months of my life in Gaza and then as I did in 2016 listen to Barack Obama give a speech to APAC which might as well have been written and probably was written by APAC and then betray the Palestinians.

Chris Hedges:

I think going back to the quote that you read from James Cone, the only thing that will save us is standing unequivocally with the people who have been crushed and demonized and oppressed by this system and that in the short term, it may seem counterproductive but in the longterm it gives us a kind of credibility which I see slipping away by essentially selling ourselves out. That’s what worries me. That’s what’s dangerous because eventually as Rorty in the passage that I read made clear that if you don’t stand up for those values, then this happened in Weimar, it happened in Yugoslavia, you have a population or a significant portion of that population that not only turns on that feckless, spineless, liberal class, but essentially turns on the very purported values they claim to support which I do support and which I think are important

Rob Johnson:

[inaudible 01:06:27] underscore as we sign off, you mentioned your work in the prisons and I was fortunate enough to be able to join you for the showing of a play, I believe it was called Caged, that was created with you and I think Cornel and largely a number of people who had been incarcerated. I thought that was a very, very powerful piece of testimony or art or whatever you want to refer to it, but it was an enormously powerful contribution. I thank you for that.

Chris Hedges:

Thanks. That was published by Haymarket and it was eventually performed in 2018 by the Passage Theater in Trenton and the COVID has thrown a monkey wrench into this but we’re trying to do an audio version of it which is important because I still have a lot of students who are in the prison and some of them are probably going to die in that prison who wrote the play and can only hear it through WBAI so my goal is to get an audio out there and so they… Then hopefully, I don’t know… You never know through prison administrations what they censor and what they don’t but I want them to be able to hear it one day.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. I agree. Well, thank you Chris. It’s always a very powerful and very inspiring to talk with you and I hope you and your family are safe. I look forward perhaps if, as we get to the middle of next year, inviting you back to be in conversation once again. My pleasure. Thank you. Bye bye. Check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.