Chris Hedges
The ruling elites are
painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The
outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half
the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The
self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on
the efficiency of the administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and
public transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult.
The soaring government
deficit, now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration’s
massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial
system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another
financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up
con artists such as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept,
corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is
cementing into place a new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars
of the state, including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves
the blunt force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and
fuels endless and futile foreign wars.
Just as ominous as the visible
rot is the internal decay. Among all social classes there is a loss of faith in
the government, widespread frustration, a sense of stagnation and entrapment,
bitterness over unfulfilled expectations and promises, and a merging of fact
and fiction so that civil and political discourse is no longer rooted in
reality. The nation’s isolation by its traditional allies and its inability,
especially in the face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate rational and
visionary policies have shattered the mystique that is vital to power. “A
society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,”
George Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but
succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have exhausted
fraud. Force is all they have left.
The United States is a wounded
beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death throes. It can inflict tremendous
damage, but it cannot recover. These are the last, agonizing days of the
American Empire. The death blow will come when the dollar is dropped as the
world’s reserve
currency, a process already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet,
setting off a severe depression and demanding instant
contraction of the military overseas.
Seth A. Klarman, who runs
the Baupost Group hedge
fund, which manages about $27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page
letter to his investors. He pointed out that the nation’s ratio of
government debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100
percent and is close to that in France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt
crisis, he warned, could be the “seeds” of the next financial crisis. He
decried the global unraveling of “social cohesion,” adding, “It can’t be
business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating
social tensions.”
“There is no way to know how
much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point
whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend
to us at rates we can afford,” he said in the letter. “By the time such a
crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order.”
The ruling elites, worried
about impending financial collapse, are scrambling to cement into place harsh
legal and physical forms of control to stymie what they fear could be
widespread popular unrest, nascent forms of which can be seen in the strikes
carried out by American teachers and the protests by the “yellow vests” in
France.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism, the
ruling elites recognize, has been discredited across the political spectrum.
This is forcing the elites to make unsavory alliances with neofascists, who in
the United States are represented by the Christian right. This Christianized
fascism is swiftly filling Trump’s ideological void. It is embodied in figures
such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.
In its most virulent form, one
that will be expressed once the economy goes into crisis, this Christian
fascism will seek to purge the society of those branded as social deviants,
including immigrants, Muslims, “secular humanist” artists and intellectuals,
feminists, gays and lesbians, Native Americans and criminals—largely poor
people of color—based on a perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible.
Abortion will be illegal. The death penalty will be mandated for a variety of
crimes. Education will be dominated by white supremacist views of history,
indoctrination and the teaching of creationism or “intelligent design.” The
pantheon of new America heroes will include Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and
Richard Nixon. The state will portray the white majority as victims.
This Christian fascism, like
all forms of totalitarianism, wraps itself in a cloying piety, promising moral
as well as physical renewal. The degradation of mass culture with its
celebration of sexual sadism, graphic violence and personal dysfunction, its
plagues of opioid addiction, suicide, gambling and alcoholism, along with
social chaos and government dysfunction, will lend credibility to the Christian
fascists’ promise of a return to a “Christian” purity. The cloak of this piety
will be used to snuff out all civil liberties.
Central to any totalitarian
ideology is a constant inquisition against supposedly clandestine and sinister
groups held responsible for the country’s demise. Conspiracy theories, which
already color Trump’s worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will
whipsaw the population, swinging from championing individualism and personal
freedom to calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the
nation and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death penalty,
unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and compassion to the
fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A grotesque hypermasculinity will
be celebrated. Violence will be held up as the mechanism to cleanse the society
and the world of evil. Facts will be erased or altered. Lies will become true.
Political language will be cognitive dissonance. The more the country declines,
the more the paranoia and collective insanity will grow. All of these elements
are present in varying forms within the culture and our failed democracy. They
will become pronounced as the country unravels and the disease of
totalitarianism spreads.
The ruling oligarchs, as in
all failed states, will retreat into fortified compounds, many of which they
are already preparing, where they will have access to basic services, health
care, education, water, electricity and security largely denied to the wider
population. The central government will be reduced to its most basic
functions—internal and external security and collecting taxes. Severe poverty
will cripple the lives of most citizens. Any essential service once provided by
the state, from utilities to basic policing, will be privatized, expensive and
inaccessible to those without resources. Trash will pile up in the streets.
Crime will explode. The electrical grid and water systems—decrepit, poorly
maintained and run by corporations—will repeatedly turn on and off.
The mass media will become nakedly
Orwellian, chatting endlessly about a bright future and pretending America
remains a great superpower. It will substitute political gossip for news—a
corruption already far advanced—while insisting that the country is in an
economic recovery or about to enter one. It will refuse to address
ever-worsening social inequality, political and environmental deterioration and
military debacles. Its primary role will be to peddle illusions so that an
atomized public, fixated on its electronic screens, will be diverted from the
collapse and see its plight as personal rather than collective. Dissent will
become more difficult as critics are censored and attacked as responsible for
the decline. Hate groups and hate crimes will proliferate and be tacitly empowered
and condoned by the state. Mass shootings will be commonplace. The
weak—especially children, women, the disabled, the sick and the elderly—will be
exploited, abandoned or abused. The strong will be omnipotent.
There will still be money to
be made. Corporations will sell anything for a profit—security, dwindling food
supplies, fossil fuel, water, electricity, education, medical care,
transportation—forcing citizens into debt peonage that will see their meager
assets seized when they can’t make payments. The prison population, already the
largest in the world, will expand along with the number of citizens forced to
wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day. Big corporations will pay no income
tax or at best a symbolic tax. They will be above the law, able to abuse and
underpay workers and poison the environment without oversight or regulation.
As income inequality becomes
more massive, financial titans such as Jeff Bezos, worth some $140 billion,
will increasingly function as modern-day slaveholders. They will preside over
financial empires where impoverished employees will live in run-down campers
and trailer parks while toiling 12 hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated
warehouses. These employees, paid subsistence wages, will be constantly
recorded, tracked and monitored by digital devices. They will be fired when the
punishing work conditions cripple their health. For many Amazon employees the
future is now.
Work will be a form of serfdom
for all but the upper elites and managers. Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book “Dying
for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company
Performance—and What We Can Do About It” quotes a survey in which 61 percent of
employees said workplace stress had made them ill and 7 percent said they
required hospitalization as a result. The stress of overwork, he writes, may
cause 120,000 deaths annually in the United States. In China there are an
estimated 1 million deaths a year from overwork.
This is the world the elites
are preparing for by setting in place legal mechanisms and internal security
forces to strip us of liberty.
We, too, must begin to prepare
for this dystopia, not only to ensure our survival but to build mechanisms to
blunt and attempt to overthrow the totalitarian power the elites expect to
wield. Alexander Herzen, speaking to a group of anarchists a century ago about
how to overthrow the Russian czar, reminded his listeners that it was their job
not to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We
are the disease.” All efforts to reform the American system is capitulation. No
progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise up, take control of the
party and save us. There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may
engage in petty, internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government
shutdown. It may squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come
wrapped in more tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity
of people of color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and
corporate domination there is no divergence.
We must carry out organized
civil disobedience and forms of non-cooperation to weaken corporate power. We
must use, as in France, widespread and sustained social unrest to push back
against the designs of our corporate masters. We must sever ourselves from
reliance on corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities
and alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we will
become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including food
production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work. Life will have
to be communal. No one, unless he or she is part of the ruling elite, will have
the resources to survive alone.
The longer we pretend this
dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will
be. The ruling elite’s goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive
while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark
reality. It is up to us to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even
if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining
enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers
of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given
what lies in front of us, will be a victory.
