The Age of the Demagogues
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_age_of_the_demagogues_20151129/
Posted on Nov 29, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at FreedomFest on
July 11 in Las Vegas. (John Locher / AP)
The increase in nihilistic violence such as school shootings and Fridays
lethal assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic, the frequent executions of
poor people of color by police, and the rise of thuggish demagogues such as
Donald Trump are symptoms of the collapse of our political and cultural
institutions.
These institutions, which once made possible piecemeal and incremental
reform, which sought to protect the weak from the tyranny of the majority
and give them a voice, acted as a safety valve to ameliorate the excesses of
capitalism and address the grievances of the underclass. They did not defy
the system of capitalism. They colluded with the structures of privilege and
white supremacy. But they provided some restraints on the worst abuse and
exploitation. The capturing of major institutions by corporate power and the
moral bankruptcy of our elites, especially members of our self-identified
liberal class, have shattered this equilibrium.
A faux liberal class, epitomized by amoral politicians such as the Clintons
and Barack Obama, has led many disenfranchised people, especially the white
underclass, to direct a legitimate rage toward liberals and the supposed
liberal values they represent. Racism, bigotry, religious intolerance,
homophobia, sexism and vigilante violence, condemned by liberal,
college-educated elites, are embraced by those who have been betrayed, those
who now speak back to liberal elites in words, gestures and acts, sometimes
violent, designed to denigrate the core values of a liberal democracy. The
hatred is the product of a liberal class that did nothing to halt
corporations from driving tens of millions of families into poverty and
desperation as it mouthed empty platitudes about rights and economic
advancement.
The Republican business elites, which declared war on the liberal class
call for cultural diversity, allied themselves with an array of
protofascists in the Christian right, the tea party, groups such as the
National Rifle Association and The Heritage Foundation, the neo-Confederate
movement, the right-to-life movement and right-wing militias. The elites in
the Republican Party, who needed an ideological veneer to mask their
complicity in the corporate assault, saw these protofascists as useful
idiots. They thought, naively, that by demonizing liberals, feminists,
African-Americans, Muslims, abortion providers, undocumented workers,
intellectuals and homosexuals they could redirect the growing rage of the
masses, sending it against the vulnerable, as well as against the only
institution that could curb corporate power, the government, while they
greedily disemboweled the nation.
But what the Republican elites have done, as they now realize to their
horror, is empower a huge swath of the publiclargely whitethat is gripped
by magical thinking and fetishizes violence. It was only a matter of time
before a demagogue whom these elites could not control would ride the wave
of alienation and rage. If Trump fails in his bid to become the GOP
presidential nominee, another demagogue will emerge to take his place. Trump
is not making a political revolution. He is responding to one.
The corporate state was never threatened by the liberal class myopic
preoccupation with cultural diversity or the right wings championing of
supposedly Christian values. This was anti-politics masquerading as
politics. The culture wars did not challenge imperialism, neoliberalism and
globalization. The dictates of the market, the primacy of corporate profit
and the military-industrial complex remained sacrosanct. The mounting
distress of the underclass was ignored or manipulated during the culture
wars. Liberals who embraced cultural diversity did so within a neoliberal
framework. Feminism, for example, became about placing individual women in
positions of powerthis is Hillary Clintons mantranot about empowering
poor, marginalized and oppressed women. Post-racial America became about a
black president who, as Cornel West says, serves as a black mascot for Wall
Street.
The preoccupation with cultural diversity, as Russell Jacoby writes in The
End of Utopia, was nothing more than a call to include a broader spectrum
of people within neoliberal elites. It was, as he says, about patronage,
not revolution.
The radical multiculturalists, postcolonialists and other cutting edge
theorists gush about marginality with the implicit, and sometimes explicit,
goal of joining the mainstream, he writes. They specialize in
marginalization to up their market value. Again, this is understandable; the
poor and the excluded want to be wealthy and included, but why is this
multicultural or subversive?
Jacoby argues that cultural diversity among the liberal class represents
power devoid of a vision or program. He goes on to say that the call by
multiculturalists for inclusion within the power structure does nothing to
challenge the deadly monoculturalism of corporatism.
Jacobys point is important. The liberal class failed for decades to decry
neoliberalisms assault on the poor and on workingmen and -women. It busied
itself with a boutique activism. It is not that cultural diversity is bad.
It isnt. It is that cultural diversity when divorced from economic and
political justice, from the empowerment of the oppressed, is elitist. And
this is why these liberal values are being rejected by a disenfranchised
white underclass. They are seen as serving the elites, and marginalized
groups, at the expense of that underclass.
The academy, the press, the entertainment industry, the arts and religious
institutions have been purged of those who do not sing to the tune of
neoliberalism and bow before the glories of corporate capitalism. The
destruction of the liberal class, something I explore in my book Death of
the Liberal Class, has created a closed political system crippled by
polarization, political gridlock, crushing austerity, unchecked pillage by
financial elites and a carnival of meaningless political theater. It has
shut out genuine voices of dissent. The failure by liberals to confront or
even name what Sheldon Wolin called our system of inverted totalitarianism
made them complicit in the destruction of our capitalist democracy.
The gains made by minorities and the oppressed within the society, whether
on college campuses or in the workplace, are being rolled back. The culture
wars, used by the political and economic elites to divert attention from the
ascendancy of corporate power, have escaped from the hands of their
manipulators. A destitute working class knows the feel-your-pain language of
the liberal class and the Democratic Party is a lie. And it knows the
compassionate conservatism epitomized by the Bush dynasty and the
Republican establishment is a lie.
Republicans, like Democrats, did not prevent wages from declining,
unemployment and chronic underemployment from mounting, foreclosures from
ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. treasury, or jobs
from being exported. The two major parties colluded to pass trade
agreements, ranging from NAFTA and the WTO to the now-pending TPP, that
impoverish workers and weaken the power of government to intervene to
protect the citizenry and the environment. They worked together to strip
citizens of constitutional rights and install the most pervasive security
and surveillance state in human history. They collaborated with Wall Street
to trash the global economy and seize trillions in taxpayer money in
bailouts. The two parties funded disastrous and futile imperial wars that
enrich the arms manufacturers and defense contractors while bankrupting the
nation. They militarized police, rewrote the laws to explode our prison
population and destroyed social service programs such as our welfare system,
which was dismantled by the Clinton administration. The two parties
orchestrated the corporate coup détat while diverting citizens with the
battles over gay rights, abortion, Christian values, gun laws and
affirmative action.
The country realizes it has been sold out. Most citizens are apathetic and
do not vote consistently. Some, especially in the white underclass, are
willing to follow anyone, no matter how buffoonish, who promises that the
parasites and courtiers will be driven from power. This mixture of rage and
apathy is a recipe for totalitarianism.
The hypermasculine values of the military are embraced across the political
spectrum as an antidote to paralysis and decay. Toughness and violence are
venerated. The obsequious hero worship, the celebration of American power,
the sanctification of the military and military values, inflect all
political discourse. Hero worship of the military has unwittingly laid the
ideological groundwork for demagogues who promise glory, strength, order and
discipline. It justifies the emergence of an authoritarian police state.
Half of all Americans live in poverty. They have watched helplessly as their
communities have been plunged into distress by the flight of manufacturing
jobs and as their infrastructure, both moral and physical, has been ripped
out from under them. America resembles the developing world. A tiny,
oligarchic elite amasses obscene amounts of wealth while most of the
population lives amid boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses,
pothole-riddled streets, abandoned factories and warehouses and crumbling
schools. They see no future. They have abandoned hope. Their despair now
infects a shrinking and desperate middle class. Americans feel isolated,
vulnerable and frightened. They yearn for moral and economic renewal,
revived greatness, and vengeance. And many are desperately hunting for a
savior outside the established political order.
The disgust directed at an ineffectual liberalismas was true in late
imperial Russia and the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the
Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslaviahas given rise to a rejection of
liberalism. Liberals and secularists, along with groups such as feminists,
African-Americans and homosexuals that were supposedly championed in the
quest for cultural diversity, are viewed not as political competitors but as
contaminants. This is giving rise to a homegrown fascisma subject I
examined in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
Americabuttressed by the gun culture, a resurgence of racism and sexism
and the fusion of the symbols of the Christian cross and the American flag.
This American fascism will expand unless there is a radical restructuring to
reintegrate dispossessed Americans into the economy. The failure to reverse
the corporate assault, the continued expansion of poverty and despair, will
accelerate the countrys breakdown. It will ensure the emergence of
demagogues who, channeling this rage, will stoke white vigilante violence
and call for the state repression of all groups including Black Lives
Matter, abortion providers, environmentalists and anti-capitalists that are
blamed for the countrys decline.
The perfidious game of the Democrats and the Republicans has backfired.
Playing the Democrats mantra of cultural diversity against the Republicans
mantra of cultural diversity weakening the fabric of American society no
longer works as a mechanism of control. We have entered a new and dangerous
phase in American political life. The ruling political elites have been
exposed as charlatans. The rage of the underclass, especially the white
underclass, has broken its bonds. The age of the demagogues has arrived.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Age of the Demagogues
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_age_of_the_demagogues_20151129/
Posted on Nov 29, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at FreedomFest on July
11 in Las Vegas. (John Locher / AP)
The increase in nihilistic violence such as school shootings and Fridays
lethal assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic, the frequent executions of
poor people of color by police, and the rise of thuggish demagogues such as
Donald Trump are symptoms of the collapse of our political and cultural
institutions.
These institutions, which once made possible piecemeal and incremental
reform, which sought to protect the weak from the tyranny of the majority
and give them a voice, acted as a safety valve to ameliorate the excesses of
capitalism and address the grievances of the underclass. They did not defy
the system of capitalism. They colluded with the structures of privilege and
white supremacy. But they provided some restraints on the worst abuse and
exploitation. The capturing of major institutions by corporate power and the
moral bankruptcy of our elites, especially members of our self-identified
liberal class, have shattered this equilibrium.
A faux liberal class, epitomized by amoral politicians such as the Clintons
and Barack Obama, has led many disenfranchised people, especially the white
underclass, to direct a legitimate rage toward liberals and the supposed
liberal values they represent. Racism, bigotry, religious intolerance,
homophobia, sexism and vigilante violence, condemned by liberal,
college-educated elites, are embraced by those who have been betrayed, those
who now speak back to liberal elites in words, gestures and acts, sometimes
violent, designed to denigrate the core values of a liberal democracy. The
hatred is the product of a liberal class that did nothing to halt
corporations from driving tens of millions of families into poverty and
desperation as it mouthed empty platitudes about rights and economic
advancement.
The Republican business elites, which declared war on the liberal class
call for cultural diversity, allied themselves with an array of
protofascists in the Christian right, the tea party, groups such as the
National Rifle Association and The Heritage Foundation, the neo-Confederate
movement, the right-to-life movement and right-wing militias. The elites in
the Republican Party, who needed an ideological veneer to mask their
complicity in the corporate assault, saw these protofascists as useful
idiots. They thought, naively, that by demonizing liberals, feminists,
African-Americans, Muslims, abortion providers, undocumented workers,
intellectuals and homosexuals they could redirect the growing rage of the
masses, sending it against the vulnerable, as well as against the only
institution that could curb corporate power, the government, while they
greedily disemboweled the nation.
But what the Republican elites have done, as they now realize to their
horror, is empower a huge swath of the publiclargely whitethat is gripped
by magical thinking and fetishizes violence. It was only a matter of time
before a demagogue whom these elites could not control would ride the wave
of alienation and rage. If Trump fails in his bid to become the GOP
presidential nominee, another demagogue will emerge to take his place. Trump
is not making a political revolution. He is responding to one.
The corporate state was never threatened by the liberal class myopic
preoccupation with cultural diversity or the right wings championing of
supposedly Christian values. This was anti-politics masquerading as
politics. The culture wars did not challenge imperialism, neoliberalism and
globalization. The dictates of the market, the primacy of corporate profit
and the military-industrial complex remained sacrosanct. The mounting
distress of the underclass was ignored or manipulated during the culture
wars. Liberals who embraced cultural diversity did so within a neoliberal
framework. Feminism, for example, became about placing individual women in
positions of powerthis is Hillary Clintons mantranot about empowering
poor, marginalized and oppressed women. Post-racial America became about a
black president who, as Cornel West says, serves as a black mascot for Wall
Street.
The preoccupation with cultural diversity, as Russell Jacoby writes in The
End of Utopia, was nothing more than a call to include a broader spectrum
of people within neoliberal elites. It was, as he says, about patronage,
not revolution.
The radical multiculturalists, postcolonialists and other cutting edge
theorists gush about marginality with the implicit, and sometimes explicit,
goal of joining the mainstream, he writes. They specialize in
marginalization to up their market value. Again, this is understandable; the
poor and the excluded want to be wealthy and included, but why is this
multicultural or subversive?
Jacoby argues that cultural diversity among the liberal class represents
power devoid of a vision or program. He goes on to say that the call by
multiculturalists for inclusion within the power structure does nothing to
challenge the deadly monoculturalism of corporatism.
Jacobys point is important. The liberal class failed for decades to decry
neoliberalisms assault on the poor and on workingmen and -women. It busied
itself with a boutique activism. It is not that cultural diversity is bad.
It isnt. It is that cultural diversity when divorced from economic and
political justice, from the empowerment of the oppressed, is elitist. And
this is why these liberal values are being rejected by a disenfranchised
white underclass. They are seen as serving the elites, and marginalized
groups, at the expense of that underclass.
The academy, the press, the entertainment industry, the arts and religious
institutions have been purged of those who do not sing to the tune of
neoliberalism and bow before the glories of corporate capitalism. The
destruction of the liberal class, something I explore in my book Death of
the Liberal Class, has created a closed political system crippled by
polarization, political gridlock, crushing austerity, unchecked pillage by
financial elites and a carnival of meaningless political theater. It has
shut out genuine voices of dissent. The failure by liberals to confront or
even name what Sheldon Wolin called our system of inverted totalitarianism
made them complicit in the destruction of our capitalist democracy.
The gains made by minorities and the oppressed within the society, whether
on college campuses or in the workplace, are being rolled back. The culture
wars, used by the political and economic elites to divert attention from the
ascendancy of corporate power, have escaped from the hands of their
manipulators. A destitute working class knows the feel-your-pain language of
the liberal class and the Democratic Party is a lie. And it knows the
compassionate conservatism epitomized by the Bush dynasty and the
Republican establishment is a lie.
Republicans, like Democrats, did not prevent wages from declining,
unemployment and chronic underemployment from mounting, foreclosures from
ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. treasury, or jobs
from being exported. The two major parties colluded to pass trade
agreements, ranging from NAFTA and the WTO to the now-pending TPP, that
impoverish workers and weaken the power of government to intervene to
protect the citizenry and the environment. They worked together to strip
citizens of constitutional rights and install the most pervasive security
and surveillance state in human history. They collaborated with Wall Street
to trash the global economy and seize trillions in taxpayer money in
bailouts. The two parties funded disastrous and futile imperial wars that
enrich the arms manufacturers and defense contractors while bankrupting the
nation. They militarized police, rewrote the laws to explode our prison
population and destroyed social service programs such as our welfare system,
which was dismantled by the Clinton administration. The two parties
orchestrated the corporate coup détat while diverting citizens with the
battles over gay rights, abortion, Christian values, gun laws and
affirmative action.
The country realizes it has been sold out. Most citizens are apathetic and
do not vote consistently. Some, especially in the white underclass, are
willing to follow anyone, no matter how buffoonish, who promises that the
parasites and courtiers will be driven from power. This mixture of rage and
apathy is a recipe for totalitarianism.
The hypermasculine values of the military are embraced across the political
spectrum as an antidote to paralysis and decay. Toughness and violence are
venerated. The obsequious hero worship, the celebration of American power,
the sanctification of the military and military values, inflect all
political discourse. Hero worship of the military has unwittingly laid the
ideological groundwork for demagogues who promise glory, strength, order and
discipline. It justifies the emergence of an authoritarian police state.
Half of all Americans live in poverty. They have watched helplessly as their
communities have been plunged into distress by the flight of manufacturing
jobs and as their infrastructure, both moral and physical, has been ripped
out from under them. America resembles the developing world. A tiny,
oligarchic elite amasses obscene amounts of wealth while most of the
population lives amid boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses,
pothole-riddled streets, abandoned factories and warehouses and crumbling
schools. They see no future. They have abandoned hope. Their despair now
infects a shrinking and desperate middle class. Americans feel isolated,
vulnerable and frightened. They yearn for moral and economic renewal,
revived greatness, and vengeance. And many are desperately hunting for a
savior outside the established political order.
The disgust directed at an ineffectual liberalismas was true in late
imperial Russia and the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the
Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslaviahas given rise to a rejection of
liberalism. Liberals and secularists, along with groups such as feminists,
African-Americans and homosexuals that were supposedly championed in the
quest for cultural diversity, are viewed not as political competitors but as
contaminants. This is giving rise to a homegrown fascisma subject I
examined in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
Americabuttressed by the gun culture, a resurgence of racism and sexism
and the fusion of the symbols of the Christian cross and the American flag.
This American fascism will expand unless there is a radical restructuring to
reintegrate dispossessed Americans into the economy. The failure to reverse
the corporate assault, the continued expansion of poverty and despair, will
accelerate the countrys breakdown. It will ensure the emergence of
demagogues who, channeling this rage, will stoke white vigilante violence
and call for the state repression of all groups including Black Lives
Matter, abortion providers, environmentalists and anti-capitalists that are
blamed for the countrys decline.
The perfidious game of the Democrats and the Republicans has backfired.
Playing the Democrats mantra of cultural diversity against the Republicans
mantra of cultural diversity weakening the fabric of American society no
longer works as a mechanism of control. We have entered a new and dangerous
phase in American political life. The ruling political elites have been
exposed as charlatans. The rage of the underclass, especially the white
underclass, has broken its bonds. The age of the demagogues has arrived.
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