Chris Hedges: America's Death March
BY EDITOR
August 10, 2020
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Regardless of the outcome, the election will not stop the rise of
hypernationalism, crisis cults and other signs of an empire's terminal
decline.
By Chris Hedges / Original to Scheerpost
The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections.
The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the
nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults - movements led by
demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress.
These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the
Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism
that promises - in exchange for all autonomy - prosperity, a return to a
mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white
working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the
unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires
who manage our failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale
government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the
twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards
oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the
communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I
have smelled this stench before.
The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for racist
violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white nationalism. The
ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state,
will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W.
Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The
militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor
neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget
will not be reduced. The world's largest prison population will remain a
stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not
return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care
system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care
system. The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary
form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and
dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that
compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct its
venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male stereotypes,
especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals. Lies, conspiracy
theories, trivia and fake news - what Hannah Arendt called "nihilistic
relativism" - will still dominate the airwaves and social media, mocking
verifiable fact and truth. The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the
human species and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its
apocalyptic conclusion.
"We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to
stop us seeing it," Pascal wrote.
[Art by Mr. Fish/Original to Scheerpost]
The worse it gets - and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in wave
after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead by December and
possibly 400,000 by January - the more desperate the nation will become.
Tens of millions of people will be thrown into destitution, evicted from
their homes and abandoned. Social collapse, as Peter Drucker observed in
Weimar Germany in the 1930s, brings with it a loss of faith in ruling
institutions and ruling ideologies. With no apparent answers or solutions to
mounting chaos and catastrophe - and Biden and the Democratic Party have
already precluded the kind of New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic
power that saved us during the Great Depression - demagogues and charlatans
need only denounce all institutions, all politicians, and all political and
social conventions while conjuring up hosts of phantom enemies. Drucker saw
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 much the same 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.
The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian, those
who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted
Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a crisis to the god of death, a
familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick societies. Once these
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. 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. The intoxication and addiction to greater
and greater levels of violence to purge the society of evil led to genocide
in Germany and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. 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 celebrity culture become politics.
Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder become heroism. Crime and
fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these
cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. 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 French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book "On Suicide" found
that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no longer feels it
has a place or meaning in a society, personal and collective acts of
self-destruction proliferate. Societies are held together by a web of social
bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and
engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself
through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal
to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a
sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection
from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being
isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into
deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and
despair anomie, which he defined as "ruleless-ness."
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of
organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we
work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable
employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes
a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color,
nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered
some Americans - especially those from the white working and middle class -
modest social and economic advancement. The disintegration of these bonds
has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized. The
self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States - opioid
addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings
- are products of this anomie. So is our political dysfunction. My book,
"America: The Farewell Tour," is an examination of these pathologies and the
widespread anomie that defines American society.
The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were reconfigured to mock
faith in a meritocracy and the belief that hard work leads to a productive
and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times
pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown
only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity,
the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some
41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour,
and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance.
A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average
middle class family's net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in
2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino
families the figure has dropped 46 percent. Some four million evictions are
filed each year. One in four tenant households spends about half its pretax
income on rent. Each night some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on
streets or under bridges. And these stark figures represent the good times
Biden and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore. Now, with real
unemployment probably close to 20 percent - the official figure of 10
percent excludes those furloughed or those who have stopped looking for work
- some 40 million people are at risk of being evicted by the end of the
year. An estimated 27 million people are expected to lose their health
insurance. Banks are stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected
wave of bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans,
personal loans and credit card debt. The ruleless-ness and anomie that
defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the
two ruling parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy. If we do not
address this anomie, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by
predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will accelerate.
This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated in
varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the finale of the
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary France, the Weimar
Republic and the former Yugoslavia.
The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations seized
by a tiny and corrupt cabal - in our case corporate - leads to an inchoate
desire by huge segments of the population to destroy. The ethnic
nationalists Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman, Radovan Karadžić and Alija
Izetbegović in the former Yugoslavia assumed power in a similar period of
economic chaos and political stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering
from widespread unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half
from what they had been a generation before. These nationalist demagogues
sanctified their followers as righteous victims stalked by an array of
elusive enemies. They spoke in the language of vengeance and violence,
leading, as it always does, to actual violence. They trafficked in
historical myth, deifying the past exploits of their race or ethnicity in a
perverse kind of ancestor worship, a mechanism to give to those who suffered
from anomie, who had lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new,
glorious identity as part of a master race. When I walked through
Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half of the population is
African-American, with the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson a few years
ago, he pointed out the numerous Confederate memorials, noting that most had
been put up in the last decade. "This," I told him, "is exactly what
happened in Yugoslavia."
A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds the
collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates the supposedly
unique virtues of the race or the national group. It strips all who are
outside the closed circle of worth and humanity. The world instantly becomes
understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. These tragic
moments in history see people fall into collective insanity. They suspend
thought, especially self-critical thought. None of this is going away in
November, in fact it will get worse.
Joe Biden, a shallow, political hack devoid of fixed beliefs or intellectual
depth, is an expression of the nostalgia of a ruling class that yearns to
return to the pantomime of democracy. They want to restore the decorum and
civic religion that makes the presidency a form of monarchy and sacralizes
the organs of state power. Donald Trump's vulgarity and ineptitude is an
embarrassment to the architects of empire. He has ripped back the veil that
covered our failed democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try this
veil cannot be restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden cannot
bring it back.
Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our
staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects over 5
million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the
pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as bankrupt.
It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades, to
look at other social and political systems that serve the common good rather
than corporate greed. The diminished stature of the United States, even
among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms of
government and new forms of power.
It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy. It is up to us to mount
sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the empire. It
poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build an open society,
we hold out the possibility of beating back these crisis cults as well as
slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to
acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets of Beirut, that our
kleptocracy, like Lebanon's, is incapable of being salvaged. The American
system of inverted totalitarianism, as the political philosopher Sheldon
Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we are to wrest back our democracy
and save ourselves from mass extinction. We need to echo the chants by the
crowds in Lebanon calling for the wholesale removal of its ruling class -
kulyan-yani-kulyan - everyone means everyone.