Chris Hedges Full Speech at Workers Strike Back Conference

This was a talk I gave at the Workers Strike Back conference in Seattle earlier this week.

Transcript of my talk:

For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ralph Nader and of course Jill Stein and Kshama Sawant — warned that the expanding social inequality and the capture of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts by corporations and oligarchs would lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state.

My books — American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Death of the Liberal Class (2010), Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), written with Joe Sacco, Wages of Rebellion (2015) and America: The Farewell Tour (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.

“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in American Fascists in 2007.

“If these dispossessed are not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lose all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism will beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, leads the desperate into the arms of those who promise miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”

Donald Trump does not herald the collapse of democracy. He heralds the ripping away of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease.

The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump.

Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is defined by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate and justified hatred of the ruling class.

The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.

“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour.

“The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not s ufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote.

“They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism,” one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had handed the internal levers of power to corporations and the rich.

Now we are shifting to totalitarianism’s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue.

“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour.

The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism is a vast con, a mechanism to funnel wealth upwards to the billionaire class.

The working poor, whose unions and rights have been stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been disempowered and impoverished. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in Nickel and Dimed, are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. The destruction of trade barriers is a ruse corporations and the billionaire class use to stash $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.

The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who turned to Wall Street bankers to formulate her economic policies and bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating.

Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism.

The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade. Trump lies like he breathes, but the lies told by the two establishment parties caused far more pain and did far more damage than the lies told by Trump. Trump is the apotheosis of this culture of mendacity, deception and exploitation.

We are a culture awash in lies.

It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is correct. The correct ideology of neoliberalism is as delusional as the correct ideology of the Christian fascists. Neither are reality-based belief systems.

Totalitarianism elevates the brutal and the stupid, those with no genuine political philosophy, other than a lust for wealth and power. Empty, mind-numbing clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, replace political discourse. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for those that preach free market economics and globalization.

The illusions peddled on our screens — including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice — have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris’ vapid, celebrity-filled, issueless campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television new personalities. Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites designed to give a veneer of legitimacy to oligarchic and corporate power.

The political malaise is mirrored in a cultural malaise, what Søren Kierkegaard calls “a sickness unto death,” the numbing of the soul by despair and moral nihilism.

“The cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,” I wrote in Empire of Illusion:

“This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.

This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality.

In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire.

We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.”

My book Empire of Illusion begins in Madison Square Garden at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour. I understood that professional wrestling was the template for our social and political life, but I did not know that it would produce a president and soon a Secretary of Education, who has vowed to shut the department down.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” I wrote, in what could have been a description of a Trump rally:

“They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy.

These ritualized battles give those packed in the arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives. The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime.”

It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent, the abuses of an imperial presidency, have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.

“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,” I wrote at the conclusion of Empire of Illusion, “and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.”

The system is not reformable. Either we obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is mass mobilization, acts of sustained civil disobedience, especially the strike, or we are frog-marched into serfdom. Either we are rebels or slaves.

To be innocent in the eyes of the state is to be guilty. It is to be complicit in this radical evil. It is to bear the mark of Cain. It is to do nothing to defend the weak, the oppressed, the poor and those who suffer, to protect the planet. Choose. But choose fast. Time is running out. The sick, unable to afford care, are dying. The poor, especially children, are going hungry. Families, along with the mentally ill, are thrown into our streets. The unemployed and underemployed are desperate. Schools are being defunded and privatized. Our prisons are packed. The undocumented, their families ripped apart, are being hunted down, imprisoned and deported. Our roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries are crumbling. The ecosystem is disintegrating as temperatures rise and freak weather patterns – wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, flooding, tornadoes, melting polar ice caps and glaciers – drive desperate migrants northwards from the Global South.

This is the dystopia the ruling class is shoving down our throats.

No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. In other words, militants. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They refuse to sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressed—those in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBTQ community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians—or you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed.

Liberals plead with us to believe in the ultimate goodness of the ruling class, the fantasy that justice and social equality can be achieved through their bankrupt institutions, especially the Democratic Party, even though, like Herod of old, they repeatedly sell us out. We are castigated for our anger, our alienation from the centers of power, our bleakness. We are told to adopt a positive attitude, to trust the system, that we can awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Amazon, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and the two ruling parties. I cannot count how many times I have been told this.

But this is the road to despair, not hope. Hope comes when we physically defy those in power. Those who succumb to apathy or complicity are enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is absurd. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power. It is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our neighbor, even our enemy, our own face.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and profits. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the rich and the poor. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Gaza or a child in the blighted pockets of Washington, D.C., diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, consumed by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing.

I cannot promise you it will be easy. I cannot assure you that tens of thousands will join us. I cannot pretend that going to jail is pleasant. I cannot say that anyone in Congress, anyone in the boardrooms of the corporations that cannibalize our nation, anyone in the press, will be moved by pity to act for the common good. I cannot tell you these wars will end or the hungry will be fed. I cannot say that justice will roll down like a mighty wave and restore our nation to sanity. But I can say this: If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. Hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

I saw the power of mass movements, of hope, in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania that brought down those regimes. These uprisings were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark. That this tinder exists in America is undeniable, although to date its primary expression has been fascistic.

These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel, who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance. No matter how tempting it was to give up, to make compromises with power, they did not.

Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those who serve are privilege and power the more we diminish our strength.

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have “rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it.” The question is how do we build mass organizations to hold the powerful to account, even when those in power come from our own ranks.

There is a moment in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs—do not buy the book—when Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us, we will fail. This is our calling.

Our failure to immediately build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake. This mistake was compounded by allowing liberals to herd us back into the embrace of the Democratic Party, promising it could be changed from within, that its corporate-indentured leadership would permit Bernie Sanders to be the nominee or the stated goals of his platform to be enacted.

Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called “democratic despotism.”

Only 11.3 percent of workers in this country belong to unions. This is the lowest percentage in 80 years. And nearly all these unions, and especially the AFL-CIO, have been emasculated by corporate power.

We are not going to be assisted in our revolt by established unions. Union leaders, such as Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien, are bought off. They are comfortable. They are pulling down at least five times what rank-and-file workers make. They have sold out to the Democratic Party, or in the case of O’Brien to Trump.

We forgot, as Alexander Herzen said, that we are not the doctors, we are the disease.

We have to mount protests not only outside the doors of Walmart and Amazon, not only outside congressional offices, but outside the doors of union headquarters. There is no established institution we can trust. They are broken. But there are the 30 million working poor who, victims of mass layoffs, trapped in debt peonage, manipulated and used by the political elite, willing to rise up if we stop our virtue signaling and woke purity tests and speak to them in the language of class warfare. This is why I support Worker’s Strike Back.

But let us be cleared eyed about what lies ahead. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have always convinced segments of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule and serve as goons and vigilantes in the name of patriotism.

Those who create a mafia economy make inevitable a mafia state. We must organize, and organize fast, to break our chains, one-by-one, to use the power of the strike to cripple the state machinery. We must embrace a militant radicalism, one that offers a new vision and a new social structure. We must hold fast to moral imperatives. We must forgive mortgage and student debt, institute universal health care and break up monopolies. We must raise the minimum wage and end the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain the empire and the war industry. We must establish a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s collapsing infrastructure. We must take into public ownership the banks, pharmaceutical corporations, military contractors and transportation and end the extraction of fossil fuels. We must end the genocide in Gaza and that means the boycott, divestment and sanctioning of the apartheid state of Israel.

None of this will happen until we organize and refuse to dilute our commitment to justice and to socialism, until we build a society that sgtops investing in forms of control and invests in people.

As the country disintegrates, as feelings of betrayal and abandonment mount, the ruling class will use their organs of propaganda, including the media, to blame us, those in open defiance of authority, for the chaos.

The mafia state will be brutal. Capitalists, as Eduardo Galeano writes, view communal cultures as “enemy cultures.” The billionaire class will do to us what it did to the radicals who rose up to form militant unions in the past. We had the bloodiest labor wars in the industrialized world. Hundreds of American workers were killed, tens of thousands were beaten, wounded, jailed and blacklisted. Unions were infiltrated, shut down and outlawed. We cannot be naïve. It will be difficult, costly and painful. But this confrontation is our only hope. Otherwise, we, and the planet that sustains us, are doomed.

I concede we may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans.

This is a battle, quite literally, between freedom and slavery, life and death. It is that grave. It is a battle that no matter the odds must be fought.

In the end, I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

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