Rewind with Todd Boyle: Chris Hedges in Eugene (2018)

Presenter:  Rewind with Independent videographer Todd Boyle is a regular feature on Whole Community News. Today we’ll rewind to Oct. 3, 2018, when as the guest of Michelle Holman and Community Rights Lane County, Chris Hedges spoke in Eugene:

Chris Hedges (Oct. 3, 2018): The last few years I have written several books that have attempted to diagnose the deep malaise within American society: the failure of our democratic institutions; the bankruptcy of our political elites, including the Democratic Party; the collapse of our press into burlesque.

The shift away from a print-based culture, one rooted in truth and verifiable fact, into a culture where fact is interchanged with opinion, where we are skillfully manipulated by corporate forces to elicit emotional responses to everything around us, including manufactured political personalities. And we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge.

This book comes, like many of my books, out of a great text of the past: Emile Durkheim’s book On Suicide, published in 1897, where Durkheim—and there was that triumvirate of Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx, who were all roughly contemporaries, playing off of each other.

And Durkheim is a great intellectual figure for me, like W.E.B. Du Bois, arguably America’s greatest intellectual, because Durkheim, like Du Bois, married brilliance and profound scholarship with reporting.

Durkheim went out and listened like Du Bois. When Du Bois publishes his classic work, “The Philadelphia Negro,” the study of urban life of impoverished African Americans in an American city, by the time he’s done, he’s interviewed over 1,200 families.

And Durkheim asks the question, a question that I think is relevant now within American society: What is it that drives individuals and communities to commit acts of self-annihilation, self-destruction?

These diseases of despair, these pathologies that are rippling across the American landscape: the opioid crisis, gambling, hate groups (and as Durkheim noted correctly, those who center their lives around hate are driven at their core by a desire for self-annihilation); sexual sadism (we are a pornified society); suicide.

And Durkheim argued that those who are best protected from these diseases of despair, these pathologies of self-destruction, were those who had found a life-sustaining equilibrium, who were held together by social and communal bonds, and who were able to express themselves and achieve a place within the society, one that gave them dignity, a sense of meaning, purpose.

But when that was taken away, when those social bonds were broken and destroyed, it created a state that Durkheim called anomie, and the translation of anomie is rulelessness. It means that the social contract, the rules, as they are presented to us, no longer work.

So the message that ‘If you work hard, if you get a good education, if you obey the law, there will be a place for you within society’ is no longer true. And once those social bonds disintegrate, then people act out in various ways. They engage in behaviors that are deeply self-destructive.

And it was with Durkheim’s understanding of the importance of social bonds and the deadly effects of anomie that I spent the last two years traveling across the United States, embedding myself with groups and individuals, including heroin addicts, who were destroying and perhaps even articulating a yearning for their own self-annihilation.

The core of that book—of this book—is that the problem in American society has been orchestrated by corporate forces, by a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion, as John Ralston Saul points out, which has transformed American society into a version of the late Roman Republic: the facade of democratic process, electoral politics, civil liberties.

A court system that defends the rights of citizens remains. But internally, corporations have seized all of the levers of power.

And there’s a great—probably our greatest—political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin and I interviewed him (on YouTube, you can watch it) for three hours, a year before he died. He taught at Berkeley, later at Princeton, who writes in his classic work ‘Democracy Incorporated’ that there are no institutions left within American society that can authentically be called democratic, that we live in what he describes as a system of inverted totalitarianism.

And by that he means it’s not classical totalitarianism. We still have the iconography and language of the republic, of a democratic system. But the primacy of economics, the ideology of neoliberalism which calls on us to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, to structure our society around the primacy of profit, has essentially turned those institutions and the democratic system into a facade.

Any time a cabal seizes power, whether it’s monarchical, communist, fascist, or corporate, and it redirects the institutions that once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible towards accumulating a greater concentration of wealth among the elite and amassing ever-greater systems of power, it fosters, in essence, political paralysis.

The system works only for a tiny segment of the ruling oligarchic class and becomes increasingly oppressive to the majority of citizens.

I wrote a book called Death of the Liberal Class, which is a study of liberal institutions and what has happened to them within American society. And in the corruption and destruction of the liberal class, which in a capitalist democracy should function as a kind of safety valve to ameliorate the stresses and suffering within the society—we saw an example of this with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s.

And the response by the ruling oligarchic class under Roosevelt—and Roosevelt in his private correspondence, in the letters published after his death, writes that if we in the oligarchic elite do not respond, we will get ‘revolution.’ Those are Roosevelt’s words.

So we must, if the private sector cannot create jobs, then we as government must create jobs and Roosevelt creates 12 million jobs, Social Security. Many of the unionists who rose up in the 1930s had not been members of a union previously, especially after the assault against unions following WWI.

That’s how a functioning liberal class works. The liberal class was never designed to be the political left. It responded to populist movements the Progressive Party, the CIO, the Communist Party (who we have erased from our history).

But corporate forces, frightened by the uprisings in the 1960s, what the political scientist Samuel Huntington called the ‘excess of democracy,’ followed the 1971 Lewis Powell memo, the blueprint by which they used corporate power, corporate influence, and corporate money to corrupt and finally destroy those institutions within a society, including academia, that are tasked with providing a critique of the society and making sure that civil and political discourse remains rooted in verifiable fact.

And the poster child for the faux liberal class is Bill Clinton, who passes NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the American working class since the 1948 Taft-Hartley act, who signs into law the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, which explodes the system of mass incarceration from roughly 700,000 to over 2 million by the end of his presidency.

And it wasn’t just that he expanded the prison population. He and Joe Biden and the other Democratic leaders, intent on seizing back the ‘law and order’ issue, created these draconian laws where people could be imprisoned for life without parole for nonviolent offenses, primarily drug offenses.

Half of the people today within our prison system, 2.3 million citizens, were never charged with physically harming another person.

And of course, most of them are poor people of color who come from the deindustrialized pockets that were created or certainly accelerated by the flight of manufacturing overseas, courtesy of NAFTA. It was Clinton that passed the ‘welfare reform’ bill which obliterated our welfare system, and 70% of the original recipients under our old welfare system were children.

It was Clinton that deregulated the FCC and has allowed a handful of five or six corporations to control what 90% of Americans listen to or watch. And it was Clinton who ripped down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks by destroying Glass-Steagall, which precipitated the national and global financial meltdown…

Clinton certainly understood that if he did corporate bidding, he would get corporate money. And by the 1990s, the Democratic Party had fundraising parity with the Republicans. And when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he got more.

But at that point, you had a self-identified liberal class that continued to speak in that ‘Feel your pain’ language of liberalism, but betrayed working men and women. And that precipitated the nightmare that faces us now.

The Democratic Party is deeply culpable for the arrival of demagogues like Trump. The Democratic Party transformed itself into the Republican Party. I’ve lived in Europe. The Democratic Party would be a far-right party in France. They transformed themselves into the Republican Party and pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane.

Presenter: Field recordings by independent videographer Todd Boyle. You can hear the entire presentation by Chris Hedges and more at Todd Boyle’s YouTube channel.