An excellent article by Chris Hedges. Now that he covers the entire
landscape, we need to be talking and thinking about what we can do to
turn the tide.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/20/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
CHRIS HEDGES: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL DESPAIR
By Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.com.
October 19, 2020 | EDUCATE!
Above photo:
It Is Despair That Is Killing Us, Eating Into The Social Fabric, Rupturing
Social Bonds, And Manifesting In Self-Destructive Pathologies.
A Talk by Chris Hedges.
The physical and moral decay of the United States and the malaise it has
spawned have predictable results. We have seen in varying forms the
consequences of social and political collapse during the twilight of the
Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, Tsarist Russia,
Weimar Germany and the former Yugoslavia. Voices from the past, Aristotle,
Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Roth and Milovan Djilas, warned us. But
blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human
experience and human nature, we refuse to listen.
The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources in
futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as they
attempt to restore a lost hegemony by force. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq.
Syria. Libya. Tens of millions of lives wrecked. Failed states. Enraged
fanatics. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 24 percent of the
global population, and we have turned virtually all of them into our
enemies.
We are piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic infrastructure,
including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, to
spend more on our military that all the other major powers on Earth
combined. We are the world’s largest producer and exporter of arms and
munitions. The virtues we argue we have a right to impose by force on
others
— human rights, democracy, the free market, the rule of law and personal
freedoms — are mocked at home where grotesque levels of social inequality
and austerity programs have impoverished most of the public, destroyed
democratic institutions, including Congress, the courts and the press, and
created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale
surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in the world and
gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity.
The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald
Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep state
and Hollywood run a massive child sex trafficking ring, Christian fascists
that place their faith in magic Jesus and teach creationism as science in
our schools, ten hour long voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia
members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start
a civil war, is also ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating
ecocide.
All of our activism, protests, lobbying, petitions, appeals to the United
Nations, the work of NGOs and misguided trust in liberal politicians such
as
Barack Obama have been accompanied by a 60 percent rise in global carbon
emissions since 1990. Estimates predict another 40 percent rise in global
emissions in the next decade. We are less than a decade away from carbon
dioxide levels reaching 450 parts per million, the equivalent to a 2 degree
Celsius average temperature rise, a global catastrophe that will make parts
of the earth uninhabitable, flood coastal cities, dramatically reduce crop
yields and result in suffering and death for billions of people. This is
what is coming, and we can’t wish it away.
I speak to you in Troy, New York, once the second largest producer of iron
in the country after Pittsburgh. It was an industrial hub for the garment
industry, a center for the production of shirts, shirtwaists, collars, and
cuffs, and was once home to foundries that made bells to firms that crafted
precision instruments. All that is gone, of course, leaving behind the
post-industrial decay, the urban blight and the shattered lives and despair
that are sadly familiar in most cities in the United States.
It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social fabric,
rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in an array of
self-destructive
and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the anthropologist Roger
Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the communal intoxication forged
from
the negative energies of fear, suspicion, envy and the lust for vengeance
and violence. Nations in terminal decline embrace, as Sigmund Freud
understood, the death instinct. No longer sustained by the comforting
illusion of inevitable human progress, they lose the only antidote to
nihilism. No longer able to build, they confuse destruction with creation.
They descend into an atavistic savagery, something not only Freud but
Joseph
Conrad and Primo Levi knew lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilized
society. Reason does not guide our lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer puts it,
echoing Hume, is the hard-pressed servant of the will.
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can
defend themselves if they are attacked,” Freud wrote. “They are, on the
contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a
powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them
not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts
them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for
work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to
seize
his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to
kill
him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and
history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule, this
cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the
service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by
milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental
counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also
manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom
consideration towards his own kind is something alien.”
Freud, like Primo Levi, got it. The moral life is a matter of
circumstances.
Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered, largely disappears in
moments of extremity. It is the luxury of the privileged. “Ten percent of
any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no
matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either
direction,”
Susan Sontag said.
To survive, it was necessary, Levi wrote of life in the death camps, “to
throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena
as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those
unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in
cruel times. “It was, he wrote, “a Hobbesian life,” “a continuous war of
everyone against everyone.” Varlam Shalamov, imprisoned for 25 years in
Stalin’s gulags, was equally pessimistic: “All human emotions–of love,
friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellowman, compassion, a longing for
fame, honesty–had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies
during our long fasts. The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of
our everyday morality, and 99% of us failed it…Conditions in the camps do
not permit men to remain men; that is not what camps were created for.”
Social collapse will bring these latent pathologies to the surface.
But the fact that circumstances can reduce us to savagery does not negate
the moral life. As our empire implodes, and with it social cohesion, as the
earth increasingly punishes us for our refusal to honor and protect the
systems that give us life, triggering a scramble for diminishing natural
resources and huge climate migrations, we must face this darkness, not only
around us, but within us.
The dance macabre is already underway. Hundreds of thousands of Americans
die each year from opioid overdoes, alcoholism and suicide, what
sociologists calls deaths of despair. This despair fuels high rates of
morbid obesity, some 40 percent of the public, gambling addictions, the
pornification of the society with the ubiquitous of images of sexual sadism
along with the proliferation of armed right-wing militias and nihilistic
mass shootings. As despair mounts, so will these acts of self-immolation.
Those overwhelmed by despair seek magical salvations, whether in crisis
cults, such as the Christian Right, or demagogues such as Trump, or
rage-filled militias that see violence as a cleansing agent. As long as
these dark pathologies are allowed to fester and grow–and the Democratic
Party has made it clear it will not enact the kinds of radical social
reforms that will curb these pathologies–the United States will continue
its
march towards disintegration and social upheaval. Removing Trump will
neither halt nor slow the descent.
An estimated 300,000 American will be dead from the pandemic in December, a
figure that is expected to rise to 400,000 in January. Chronic
underemployment and unemployment, close to 20 percent when those who have
stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being
rehired
and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line, are
included in the official statistic instead of being magically erased from
the unemployment rolls. Our privatized health care system, which is making
record profits during the pandemic, is not designed to cope with a public
health emergency. It is designed to maximize profit for its owners. There
are fewer than 1 million hospital beds nationally, a result of the
decades-long trend of hospital mergers and closures that have reduced
access
to care in communities across the nation. Cities such as Milwaukee have
been
forced to erect field hospitals. In states such as Mississippi there are no
longer any ICU beds available. The for-profit health service did not
stockpile the ventilators, masks, tests or drugs to deal with COVID-19. Why
should it? That is not a route to increased revenue. And there is no
substantial difference between Trump and Biden’s response to the health
crisis, where 1,000 people a day are dying.
Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay.
Some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health
insurance. There are ten thousand bankruptcies a day, with perhaps
two-thirds of them tied to exorbitant medial costs. Food banks are overrun
with tens of thousands of desperate families. Roughly 10 to 14 million
renter households, or 23 to 34 million people, were behind on their rent in
September. That amounts to $12 to $17 billion in unpaid rent. And that
figure is expected to rise to $34 billion in past due rent in January. The
lifting of the moratorium on evictions and forecloses will mean that
millions of families, many destitute, will be tossed onto the street.
Hunger
in U.S. households almost tripled between 2019 and August of this year,
according to the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture. The
proportion of American children who do not have enough to eat, the study
found, is 14 times higher than it was last year. A study by Columbia
University, found that since May there are eight million more Americans who
can be classified as poor. Meanwhile, the 50 richest Americans hold as much
wealth as half of the United States. Millennials, some 72 million people,
have 4.6 percent of U.S. wealth.
Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is
not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income
inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is
not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate
power
— which has extinguished our democracy, taken from us our most basic civil
liberties and left most of the working class in misery — and the increase
and consolidation of its wealth and power.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with
cognitive
lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is
Trump
inepter and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open
society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.
Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same.
And
most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest
voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust
do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the
electorate is by design.
In America we are only permitted to vote against what we hate. Partisan
media outlets set one group against another, a consumer version of what
George Orwell in his novel 1984 called the “Two minutes of Hate.” Our
opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the
aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then
sold back to us. The result, as Matt Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just
for you.” The public is unable to speak across the manufactured divide.
Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show
centered on manufactured political personalities. Civic discourse has been
poisoned by invective and lies. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and
unchallenged.
Political coverage is modeled, as Taibbi points out, on sports coverage.
The
sets look like the sets on Sunday NFL Countdown. The anchor is on one side.
There are four commentators, two from each team. Graphics keep us updated
on
the score. Political identities are reduced to easily digestible
stereotypes. Tactics, strategy, image, the monthly tallies of campaign
contributions and polling are endlessly examined, while real political
issues are ignored. It is the language and imagery of war.
This coverage masks the fact that on nearly all the major issues the two
major political parties are in complete agreement. The deregulation of the
financial industry, trade agreements, the militarization of police — the
Pentagon has transferred more than $ 7.4 billion in excess military gear
and
hardware to nearly 8,000 federal and state law enforcement agencies since
1990 — the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization,
austerity, support for fracking and the fossil fuel industry, the endless
wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of
elections and mass media by corporations and the wholesale government
surveillance of the population–and when the government watches you 24 hours
a day you cannot use the word liberty, this is the relationship of a master
and a slave — all have bipartisan support. And for this reason, these
issues
are almost never discussed.
This goal is to set demographic against demographic. This stoking of
antagonism is not news. It is entertainment, driven not by journalism but
marketing strategies to increase viewership and corporate sponsors. News
divisions are corporate revenue streams competing against other corporate
revenue streams. The template for news, as Taibbi writes in his book Hate
Inc., the cover of which has Sean Hannity on one side and Rachel Maddow on
the other, is the simplified morality play used in professional wrestling.
There are only two real political positions in the United States. You love
Trump or you hate him, which comes from the playbook of professional
wrestling.
By voting for Biden and the Democratic Party you vote for something.
You vote to endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill
who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless
wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You
vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence
agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for
austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social
Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a
real
decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs
and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in
Mexico, China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on teachers and public
education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian
charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the
tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting
the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people
of color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and
immigration
reform. You vote for the fracking industry. You vote for limiting a woman’s
right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated
public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities
and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels
of student debt and the inability to free yourself of those debt
obligations
even if file for bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry
and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance
and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote
for defense budgets that consume more than half of all discretionary
spending. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money
to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the
Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent
credit
card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son
Hunter.
Biden was one of the principle architects of the wars in the Middle East,
where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or
extinguished the lives of millions of people. He is responsible for far
more
suffering and death at home and abroad than Trump. If we had a functioning
judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of
our disastrous imperial wars, corporate plundering of the country and
betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered
up as a solution to our political and economic debacle.
The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on
issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual
identity and pretend this is politics. These issues are societal or ethical
issues. They are important. But they are not social or political issues.
The
seizure of control of the economy by a class of global speculators and
corporations has ruined the lives of the very groups the Democrats pretend
to lift up. When Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, for example,
destroyed the old welfare system, 70 percent of the recipients were
children. Those on the right of the political spectrum — and we must never
forget that the positions of the Democratic Party would make it a far-right
party in Europe — demonize those on the margins of society as scapegoats.
The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are full partners in the
destruction of our democratic institutions. Both parties have reconfigured
American society into a mafia state. It only depends on how you want it
dressed up.
The power of politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or Mitch
McConnell comes from being able funnel corporate money to anointed
candidates. In a functioning political system, one not saturated with
corporate cash, they would not hold power. They have transformed what the
Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public
thing” or the “property of a people,” into an instrument of pillage and
repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by
the obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay
little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the
legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give
them the freedom to engage in tax boycotts, financial fraud and theft.
In the midst of the pandemic crisis what did our ruling kleptocratic rulers
do?
They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen
by
Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense,
while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts,
penthouses and palatial estates to the suffering and despised masses.
The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the
airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise
ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry. It
handed subsidies to private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political
action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to
politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations
that
have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest
corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to keep small businesses
solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus
package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks
that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for
the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund
doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1,
can
be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized
the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects
will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion
richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose
corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added nearly $72
billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started. During this same
time period 55 million Americans lost their jobs.
The molding of the public into warring factions works commercially. It
works
politically. It destroys, as it is designed to do, class solidarity. But it
is a recipe for social disintegration. It propels us towards the kind of
Hobbesian world Primo Levi and Sigmund Freud warned us about. I watched
competing ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia retreat into antagonistic
tribes. They seized rival mass media outlets and used them to spew lies,
mythological narratives exalting themselves, along with vitriol and hate
against the ethnicities they demonized. This poisoned solidarity, which we
are replicating, pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia, destroyed the
capacity for empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil, and led to a
savage fratricide.
The United States, awash in military-grade weaponry, is already plagued by
an epidemic of mass shootings. There are death threats against critics of
Trump, including Rep. Ilhan Omar. There was an aborted plot by 13 members
of
a right-wing militia group to kidnap and perhaps assassinate the governors
of Michigan and Virginian and start a civil war. A Trump supporter mailed
pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and CNN, an effort to decapitate the
hierarchy of the Democratic Party, as well as terrorize the media outlet
that is the party’s principal propaganda platform.
The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron “Jay”
Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was wearing
a
loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an expandable metal
baton when he was shot dead on August 29, allegedly by Michael Forest
Reinoehl, a supporter of antifa, in the streets of Portland. A woman in the
crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting: “I am not sad that a
fucking
fascist died tonight.” Reinoehl was ambushed and killed by federal agents
in
Washington state in what appears to be an act of extra-judicial murder.
Once
people start being sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for demagogues
to insist that self-preservation necessitates violence.
Political stagnation and corruption, along with economic and social misery,
spawn what anthropologists call crisis cults–movements led by demagogues
that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress and
champion
violence as a form of moral purification. These crisis cults, already well
established among followers of the Christian Right, right-wing militia
groups and many followers of Donald Trump, who look at him not a politician
but as a cult leader, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that
promises–if you surrender all autonomy–prosperity, restored national glory,
a return to a mythical past, order and security. Trump is a symptom. He is
not the disease. And if he leaves office far more competent and dangerous
demagogues will rise, if the social conditions are not radically improved,
to take his place.
I fear we are headed towards a Christianized fascism.
The greatest moral failing of the liberal Christian church was its refusal,
justified in the name of tolerance and dialogue, to denounce the followers
of the Christian right as heretics. By tolerating the intolerant, it ceded
religious legitimacy to an array of con artists, charlatans and demagogues
and their cultish supporters. It stood by as the core Gospel
message–concern
for the poor and the oppressed–was perverted into a magical world where God
and Jesus showered believers with material wealth and power. The white race
became God’s chosen agent. Imperialism and war became divine instruments
for
purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism,
because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the
immoral to poverty and suffering, became shorn of its inherent cruelty and
exploitation. The iconography and symbols of American nationalism became
intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith.
The mega-pastors, narcissists who rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms, make
millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the
despair and desperation of their congregations, victims of neoliberalism
and
deindustrialization. These believers find in Trump, who preyed on this
despair in his casinos and through his sham university, and these
mega-pastors, champions of the unfettered greed, cult of masculinity, lust
for violence, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious
intolerance, anger, racism and conspiracy theories that are the core
beliefs
of the Christian Right.
When I wrote American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
I
was quite serious about the term “fascists.”
Tens of millions of Americans live hermetically sealed inside the vast
media
and educational edifice erected by the Christian Right. In this world,
miracles are real, Satan, allied with liberal secular humanists and the
deep
state, along with Muslims, immigrants, feminists, intellectuals, artists
and
a host of other internal enemies, is seeking to destroy America. Trump is
God’s anointed vessel to build the Christian nation and cement into place a
government that instills “biblical values.” These “biblical values” include
banning abortion, protecting the traditional family, turning the Ten
Commandments into secular law, crushing “infidels,” especially Muslims,
indoctrinating children in schools with “biblical” teachings and thwarting
sexual license, which includes any sexual relationship other than marriage
between a man and a woman. Trump is routinely compared by evangelical
leaders to the biblical king Cyrus, who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and
restored the Jews to the city.
Trump has filled his ideological void with Christian fascism. He has
elevated members of the Christian right to prominent positions, including
Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy
DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and
urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Neil Gorsuch and Brett
Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the televangelist Paula White to his
Faith and Opportunities Initiative. More importantly, Trump has handed the
Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in
government,
especially in the federal courts. He has installed 133 district court
judges
out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S.
Supreme Court justices, and with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination most likely
three, out of nine. This is nineteen percent of the federal trial judges
currently in service. Nearly all of the extremists who make up the judicial
appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association,
the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.
Trump has adopted the Islamophobia of the Christian fascists. He has banned
Muslim immigrants and rolled back civil rights legislation. He has made war
on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned
Parenthood. He has stripped away LGBTQ rights. He has ripped down the
firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which
prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political
candidates. His appointees, including Pence, Pompeo and DeVos, throughout
the government routinely use biblical strictures to justify an array of
policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and
the
replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits
the transfer of federal education funds to private “Christian” schools. At
the same time, they are building paramilitary organizations, not only
through ad hoc militias but through mercenary groups of private contractors
controlled by figures such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos and
the former CEO of Blackwater now called Xe.
I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School with James Luther Adams who had
been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams witnessed the rise there of the
so-called German Christian Church which was pro-Nazi. He warned us about
the
disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church and the Christian
right. Adolf Hitler was in the eyes of the German Christian Church a volk
messiah and an instrument of God—a view similar to the one held today about
Trump by many of his white evangelical supporters. Those demonized for
Germany’s economic collapse, especially Jews and communists, were agents of
Satan. Fascism, Adams told us, always cloaked itself in a nation’s most
cherished symbols and rhetoric. Fascism would come to America not in the
guise of stiff-armed, marching brownshirts and Nazi swastikas but in mass
recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the
state and the sacralization of American militarism. Adams was the first
person I heard label the extremists of the Christian right as fascists.
Liberals, he warned, as in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension
of history and radical evil. They would not react until it was too late.
Trump’s legacy will, I fear, be the empowerment of the Christian fascists.
They are what comes next. Noam Chomsky, for this reason, is right when he
warns that Pence is more dangerous than Trump. For decades the Christian
fascists have been organizing to take power. They have built
infrastructures
and organizations, including lobbying groups, schools, colleges and law
schools as well as media platforms, to prepare. They have seeded their
cadre
into positions of power. We on the left, meanwhile, have seen our
institutions and organizations destroyed or corrupted by corporate power
and
been seduced by the boutique activism of identity politics. FRC Action, the
legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, already gives 245
members of Congress a 100 percent approval rating for supporting
legislation
that is backed by the Christian Right.
Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for tens of millions of
Americans. It is impervious to science and verifiable fact. The Christian
fascists, by choice, have severed themselves from rational thought and the
secular society that almost destroyed them and their families and thrust
them into deep despair. We will not placate or disarm this movement, bent
on
our destruction, by attempting to claim that we, too, have Christian
“values.” This appeal only strengthens the legitimacy of the Christian
fascists and weakens our own. These dispossessed people will either be
reintegrated into the economy and the society and their shattered social
bonds mended, or the movement will grow more virulent and more powerful.
The Christian Right is determined to keep the public focus on societal or
ethical as opposed to economic issues. The corporate media, whether it
supports or opposes the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme
Court, almost exclusively discusses her opposition to abortion and
membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic sect that practices
“speaking in tongues.” What our corporate masters, along with the Christian
fascists, do not want examined is Barrett’s subservience to corporate
power,
her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental
regulations. Since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class
as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the
culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat posed by Barrett and the
Christian Right is ignored.
The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness.
All fascist movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the
veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right
and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism and
tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and
persecution of those who dissent. The Christian Right, awash in money from
corporations that understand their political intent, will use any tool, no
matter how devious, from right-wing armed militias to the invalidation of
ballots, to block Biden and Democratic candidates from assuming office.
Capitalism, driven by the obsession to maximizing profit and reduce the
cost
of production by slashing worker’s rights and wages, is antithetical to the
Christian Gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic of Immanuel Kant. But
capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized
in
the form of the Prosperity Gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister
to
our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The
Prosperity
Gospel is an ideological cover for the slow-motion corporate coup d’état.
This is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian
Right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Wal-Mart, and Sam’s Warehouse, along
with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its
institutions such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This
is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial
Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett’s
appointment to the court. Barrett has ruled to cheat gig workers out of
overtime, green light fossil fuel extraction and pollution, gut Obamacare
and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. Barrett, as a
circuit court judge, heard at least 55 cases in which citizens challenged
corporate abuse and fraud. She ruled in favor of corporations 76 percent of
the time.
Our corporate masters do not care about abortion, gun rights or the
sanctity
of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German industrialists
who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian Right will give an
ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny. These oligarchs view the
Christian fascists the same way the German industrialists viewed the Nazis,
as buffoons. They are aware that the Christian fascists will trash what is
left of our anemic democracy and the natural ecosystem. But they also know
they will make huge profits in the process and the rights of workers and
citizens will be ruthlessly suppressed.
If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid
substandard wages, if you are trapped in the lower class, if you are a
victim of police violence, this is because, according to the Prosperity
Gospel, you are not a good Christian. In this belief system you deserve
what
you get. There is nothing wrong, these homegrown fascists preach, with the
structures or systems of power. Like all totalitarian movements, followers
are seduced into calling for their own enslavement.
As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood: “The best propaganda
is
that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life
without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.”
The tinder that could ignite violent conflagrations lies ominously stacked
around us. It may be triggered by Trump’s defeat in the election. Millions
of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic
and
social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage
against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that betrayed
them. They are tired of the political stagnation, grotesque, mounting
social
inequality and the punishing fallout from the pandemic. Millions more
alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with no
realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the same
emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the
governing structures and anti-fascism. These polarized extremes are inching
closer and closer to violence.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American
body
politic, is impossible, revolution, or tyranny.
If the corporate state is not overthrown, then America will soon become a
naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be silenced
with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country
have
already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the
protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and
pepper spray. This will become normalized. The huge social divides, often
built around race, will be used by the Christian fascists to set neighbor
against neighbor. Armed Christian patriots will attack those groups blamed
for social collapse. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
Peter Drucker observed that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in
its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed
out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile
cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed
out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their
promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted,
“would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a
prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst
Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the
Nazis took power in 1933, wrote in his autobiography: “The people are tired
of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done
in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.”
After
Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of
Ernst
Toller” wrote:
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
Once the internal enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised,
America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is
obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady
escalation of conflict and a steady stream of victims. Every new crisis
becomes more urgent and more extreme than the last. This is what made the
war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches
a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal
and deadly confrontations. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of
death.”
These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and
schizophrenic.
They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal
exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and spectacle become politics. Depravity
becomes morality. Atrocities and murder, as the federal marshals who
wantonly gunned down the antifia activist Michael Forest Reinoehl in
Washington State illustrated, becomes heroism. Crime and fraud become
justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues.
What these crisis cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. There is no
ideological consistency. There is only emotional consistency. At the height
of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the French Revolution,
Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now
recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical
atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property,
murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile,
instantly
reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged
religion.
In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions,
these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.
The ruling elites will no more restore these ruptured social bonds and
address the deep despair that grips America than they will respond to the
climate emergency. As the country unravels, they will reach for the
familiar
tools of state repression and the ideological prop provided by Christian
fascism.
It is up to us to carry out sustained acts of nonviolent, mass resistance.
If we mobilize in large and small ways to fight for an open society, to
create communities that, as Vaclav Havel wrote “live in truth,” we hold out
the possibility of pushing back against these crisis cults, holding at bay
the brutality that accompanies social upheaval, as well as slowing and
disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge that
our systems of governance are incapable of being reformed. No one in power
will save us. No one but us will stand up for the vulnerable, the demonized
and the earth itself. All we do must have the single aim of crippling the
power of the ruling elites in the hopes of new systems of governance that
can implement the radical reforms to save us and our world.
The most difficult existential dilemma we face is to at once acknowledge
the
bleakness before us and act, to refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair.
And we will only do this through faith, the faith that the good draws to it
the good, that all acts that nurture and protect life have an intrinsic
power, even if the empirical evidence shows that things are getting worse.
We will find our freedom, our autonomy, our meaning and our social bonds
among those who also resist, and this will allow us to endure, and maybe
even triumph.
