Taking Power Amidst the Turbulence (w/ Dylan Saba) | The Chris Hedges Report

As American hegemony transforms into something that will be determined by “the forces of historical contingency,” how can regular people fight back against the increasingly violent Empire?

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

While Palestine has always represented a contradiction in the Western-established world order, the genocide in Gaza has brought the issue to the forefront of the world’s conscience — and moreover, may signal the end of an era marked by U.S. hegemony. As today’s guest Dylan Saba, host of the Turbulence podcast, puts it, the genocide is

“the capstone of the War on Terror, [with] Israel as the greatest representation of U.S. overextension…What’s happened is all of those forces, all of those colonial forces that had been amassing over over generations really exploded on October 7th, and catalyzed the most dramatic imperial overreaction that we’ve seen to date.”

Amidst the chaotic collapse of American hegemony — where do normal people, those who are ruled by the elite, fit in? And must they fall victim to the violence and psychological warfare that characterizes the policy doctrine of Western democracies, or can they seize the moment and build parallel systems of oppositional power?

“The cause of Palestine can be this tip of the spear, both in terms of repression but also potentially in terms of catalyzing a political response that’s adequate for the moment,” Saba tells host Chris Hedges.

In a post-October 7th world, one where the need to cloak brutal warfare in humanitarian rhetoric is disintegrating, what pressure points can the working class exploit? Though the masses are outgunned and militaristically vulnerable in the face of the American empire and its allies, “there are ways to think strategically about how to leverage a marginal position to have an outsized impact.”

The Houthis in Yemen, Saba suggests, have demonstrated this reality. With targeted, strategic planning that can kneecap critical parts of the machinery of state, we may stand a chance against the oligarchy dominating the globe.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Max Jones and Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Victor Castellanos

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Israel, following the attack of October 2023, has been engaged in not only a genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, but a regional war aimed at ensuring Israeli dominance throughout the Middle East. Funded and armed by western powers, especially the United States, Israel has occupied territory and carried out air strikes in Lebanon and Syria, as well as air strikes against Iran, Qatar and Yemen.

Gaza, it is clear, does not mark the end of the settler colonial project. It marks, perhaps, its final phase. Western states, enriched by their own occupations and genocides — in India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America — are returning to their roots as they face a global climate crisis and the obscene levels of social inequality that they engineer and sustain.

As the world breaks down, as the climate crisis drives millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people north, in a desperate search for survival, the genocide in Gaza, which Israel is slow walking until it can resume its usual murderous pace, will replay itself over and over and over until the fragile social and environmental networks that hold the global community together disintegrate.

The refusal to extract ourselves from fossil fuels, the steady saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), ensures soaring temperatures in which most life, including human life, will eventually be unsustainable. The global average concentration of CO2 surged by 3.5 parts per million, from June 2023 to June 2024, to reach an average of 422.8 parts per million, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. The following twelve months saw an even further increase of 2.6 parts per million of CO2. Violent conflicts, already exacerbated by extreme weather and water scarcity, are erupting across the globe with volcanic fury.

There is no mystery as to why the genocide is funded and sustained by Israel’s Western allies. There is no mystery as to why these states flout the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, the Arms Trade Treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and international humanitarian law. There is no mystery as to why the United States has given a staggering $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023 and has repeatedly blocked resolutions at the United Nations censoring Israel, in what the latest U.N report on Gaza calls an “internationally enabled crime.”

Genocide is coded in the DNA of imperial powers. In the face of this murderous onslaught, how do we resist? What are the mechanisms to fight back against a tide of rising authoritarianism? Can we topple global ruling elites whole policies ensure collective suicide?

Joining me to discuss the crisis before us is Dylan Saba, one of the hosts of the Turbulence podcast.

Your podcast deals with these global issues. I think the subtitle is “The End of Empire,” and I think that both you and I put the genocide in Gaza as just one piece of a much larger puzzle or one piece of an entire new and frightening apparatus that is being cemented into place by the global ruling elites. Why don’t you just begin by talking globally, what this genocide portends and why it’s not an isolated event.

Dylan Saba

Thanks Chris, and it’s a pleasure to be back on the show. So as you mentioned, our show Turbulence is about this moment of crisis and what the Gaza genocide represents and what it portends for the world in the wake of this catastrophe. And really our show is about the end of the American century.

And you can start the American century either towards the beginning of the 20th century and the kind of rise of liberal internationalism with [Woodrow] Wilson and the onset of the American empire with its conquest in the Philippines and elsewhere. But the U.S. really comes into power as the global hegemon after World War II. And what it does is it sets up an international order around certain key principles.

And these are codified in the Geneva Convention, are codified in the United Nations as a global institution. And really it’s premised on the idea that we’re going to create a world that is defined by multilateralism, by free trade, by human rights. But really it’s all built around American unipolar power.

And so the kind of contradiction of the liberal international order that really was the defining structure, has been the defining structure of our world from the end of World War II up until about now is that we have a set of norms, kind of euphemistically referred to as the rules-based international order, a set of norms that are all built around U.S. power and U.S. exceptionalism.

So what that means is there’s rules for everyone that they have to follow, and then there’s the reality of U.S. power. And so the U.S. itself in this system is exempted from these rules, these limitations, and gets to act as the global police force.

And that is what we’ve seen since the end of World War II, right? This system that is supposed to prevent another world war really makes the entire globe the stomping grounds for the United States. And we saw that throughout the Cold War. But ultimately, what this led to was U.S. overextension. And we saw that at its peak in the Vietnam War.

And really, what has characterized the world and U.S. power since then is the defeat in Vietnam led to an extended sequence in which the U.S. is trying to reconstitute its global hegemony, reconstitute its deterrent power, its power as a global policeman.

And that entered a period of steady decline with the September 11th attacks and the long War on Terror. And we saw, it’s no surprise that at the beginning of that era, right, the Bush administration came out and said, we need a project for a new American century. We want to revive that post-World War II U.S. power.

And what we’ve seen is increased overextension around the world. We’ve gotten involved in all of these wars in the Middle East that have rebounded back upon us in terms of imperial blowback have led to a state of both economic decline and political decline and really that’s how I understand the Gaza genocide as the capstone of the war on terror Israel as the greatest representation of U.S. overextension and what’s happened is all of those forces, all of those colonial forces that had been amassing over over generations really all exploded on October 7th and catalyzed the most dramatic imperial overreaction that we’ve seen to date.

And so in an effort to shore up its power as the center of the world system, the United States has engaged through its proxy in Israel in the very act of overreaction that is undermining its own hegemony, right. So we’ve seen the U.S. take actions that directly contravene the ICJ [International Court of Justice], the ICC [International Criminal Court], the norms, the laws of war and engage in what everyone agrees is a genocide, which is the foundational crime of crimes that the international, that the liberal international order was built around preventing.

So really with this show, what we’re trying to do is assess that world in the wake of this genocide. We’re seeing geopolitical chaos everywhere. As you’ve mentioned, right, Israel has initiated a regional war in the Middle East that shows no signs of abating.

It is, despite the kind of ceasefires that we see, the negotiations that are really just cover for different forms of expansionism, Israel still fighting on all of these fronts in the West Bank, in Gaza, it’s launching incursions into Syria, it’s beating the drum of war in anticipation of renewed conflict in Lebanon, also renewed conflict in Iran, it is doing the same with Yemen.

None of these, none of these conflicts are ending anytime soon, because essentially what we’re seeing is the U.S. and Israel have entered into this joint murder-suicide pact where they are continuing to chase their enemies over the cliff of their own waning hegemony. So with this show, this is something that I’ve started with my partner, Ceniza, who is a PhD student in political theory. She is the producer and creative director for the show and a co-host, Séamus Malekafzali, who’s another journalist.

We’re going issue by issue. And we’re trying to understand the post October 7th world and really make sense of it and our goal is to create something that exists as a resource for people, right? It’s not just creating content for content sake, but to really surface the questions of political strategy that this moment arises, right?

So we’re in a period of hegemonic transition that creates a lot of uncertainty. But it also creates a lot of political possibility and as people who are connected to movements, we really want to surface some of the strategic questions that this moment raises for us.

Chris Hedges

In the first round of this Israel has been quite successful. It decapitated Hezbollah. Its strikes on Iran. So Iran essentially capitulated, I mean, it offered very little resistance. It’s pushed up almost to Damascus occupying land even beyond the Golan Heights and 90% of Gaza is destroyed.

The Arab regimes in Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf have done little to nothing to prevent the genocide. The only country that has stood up in any meaningful way to try and halt the genocide is Yemen. I want you to respond to the fact that these are really, in essence, have to be counted as Israeli and U.S. imperial successes.

Dylan Saba

Yeah, I mean, I think in a sense you are right. These are battlefield successes, right? What Israel and the U.S. behind them have successfully done has been to split off all of these solidarity fronts, these attempts to rebuff Israeli colonial aggression and violence and genocide in Gaza.

And Israel has managed to do that successfully in part because this so-called axis of resistance really is a decentralized network of proxies or like state, sorry, state actors, quasi-state actors that have to deal with their own regional context, right. And their own position in the world system.

And what Israel has successfully done is been able to manage them independently. So as you named, right, they really launched a very successful war against Hezbollah in 2024 and managed to break their solidarity front with Gaza and to de-link the fronts. And as you mentioned, Yemen has maintained their solidarity with Gaza. They’re able to do that in part because of their distance from Israel and also in part because they’re just as a smaller power.

They had not been so much on the radar of the Americans and the Israelis who haven’t developed the full bank of targets and Israel has been prepping for a war with Hezbollah for years and years. But I think, broadly speaking, the main takeaway here is a lot of these actors in the region are not fully able to confront where things are at in terms of the world system, right?

So we started this conversation by talking about this terminal crisis of the American century of power where we’re seeing a return to, turn away from multilateralism and the rule of law, even in the kind of specious sense in which that actually governs things through the Cold War and a return to the kind of gunboat diplomacy that we saw in the 19th century, right?

Where force rules above all. And the question of hegemony is actually not as important as pure military dominance. And that’s what Israel is demonstrating, right? They are saying, we don’t need to abide by any kind of laws and rules and norms. We don’t need to respect sovereignty. Syria has no sovereignty. We act as if Lebanon has no sovereignty and we are asking the U.S. to destroy Iran’s sovereignty, right?

Because they are not operating in a world of diplomacy, they are operating in a world of pure force. And I think not everyone in the region has reckoned with that. I think ultimately Iran in its grand strategy is still ultimately seeking some form of normalization with the West, right? They want Israel to leave them alone. They want to be accepted into the community of states with the permission of the United States.

And so even the hardliners in Iran are trying to use force to extract that kind of a concession and the less hardliners are trying to do it more overtly through the realm of diplomacy. But I think what actors in the region need to realize is that normalization may not be possible. They may not accept it.

There may actually be no path to diplomatic normalization with a state that is intent on the destruction of everyone in their way. And ultimately, I think that is what the Yemenis have reckoned with and realize is that they are not up against a “rational actor” with respect to the norms that were established in the 20th century. And we’re looking at something far darker and different.

Chris Hedges

Well, Palestinians could have taught them that a long time ago. The problem, of course, is that the Arab regimes, including in the Gulf, are largely client states. I had dinner in Cairo not long ago with the former Minister of Information for [Gamal Abdel] Nasser, who [Anwar] Sadat had put in prison for 10 years, and he made a very prescient point. He said it’s not that Israel is strong, it’s that the Arab regimes are weak.

Dylan Saba

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly correct. And if you are in the region of Israel, there are tough choices to make, right? I speak from a position of privilege in the United States and I certainly, my family is Palestinian on my dad’s side from Gaza. I have not individually had to bear the brunt of Israeli aggression.

And so, I recognize that anyone in the region has tough choices to make, but I think what people need to realize is that there is no appeasing this kind of racist colonialism anyone who thinks they’re on the good side of empire has only to wait and only to wait for Israel to turn their attention to them because their sovereignty is not sacred, right?

And I think that this is what history teaches us about colonialism is that the strategy is divide and rule, divide and conquer to try and buy off certain alliances for particular geo strategic ends. But anyone who is not thinking critically about their own sovereignty and their own independence is going to suffer very tremendous defeats, whether it’s now or whether it’s later.

And Israel has been very successful in, again, that kind of divide and conquer strategy. There are Gulf states that it is convenient for Israel to ally with at present in the United States because of shared geopolitical interests, for example, in other countries in the region like Sudan. We have seen the UAE enter into strategic alliances with the US and Israel and leverage control over resources in order to do that.

But ultimately, as you know, the Israel strike on Qatar demonstrates that there are severe limitations to that strategy. And Israel, if it defeats Lebanon, if it defeats Hezbollah, if it defeats Iran, Israel will not stop fighting. It will not stop creating enemies in the region. That is its national identity. It is a Spartan state committed to permanent warfare and that is not an exaggeration, that’s in the rhetoric that you see from Israeli leadership today.

It’s also in the national identity of Israel going back to its founding, right? This is something that I write about, the myth of Samson Is core to Israeli national ethos. This is going back to the 50s and Moshe Dayan’s famous eulogy of an IDF soldier that is killed on a garrison at a settlement, is they keep saying over and over and over again through their national history. We are Samson, we are Samson, we are Samson.

Samson is committed to fighting to the death, even if it means his own destruction. So when I talk about the U.S.-Israel imperial death drive, the murder-suicide pact, that is something that is baked into the DNA of a settler colonial power.

Chris Hedges

Isn’t their nuclear program called the Samson Option? Is that correct?

Dylan Saba

Yes, that’s right. I mean, it’s their nuclear program, which they don’t admit exists, it has long been openly rumored to be called the Samson Option. And what that means is that if they face existential threat, they will bring down the world with them.

Chris Hedges

So why, given the short-term successes, over two years of genocide, which has just been slow-walked, it hasn’t stopped, of course, with the “ceasefire,” the arms are still flowing. You have rhetorical flourishes. [Keir] Starmer in the UK, for instance, has recognized a Palestinian state but only cut arms shipments by 10%.

Why do you count this as a kind of signal of decline? And since you do count it as presaging a kind of decline or maybe even collapse, spell that out. How is that going to work?

Dylan Saba

Yeah, so I mean, I think we need to be clear here. When we talk about decline and collapse, we’re talking about a set of relationships and norms that has characterized the world since the end of World War II. It does not mean that U.S. military power is going anywhere anytime soon.

It means that the language and culture and rhetoric of it is going to change, right? And that is going to change against the backdrop of the kind of secular shift in the center of the world economy that I think everyone recognizes is happening right the center of the world economy is shifting.

Whether it’s shifting very quickly or at a slower pace to the east and I think that’s something that U.S. political planners, military planners and everyone is extremely conscious of but what we’re seeing is the naked contradiction that had always been the center of the American century, which is the lie that what’s in the interests of the United States is in the interests of the world more broadly.

That lie is being exposed because yes, while you have a kind of consolidation of de facto political support for Israel, you have an upsurge in interest in the Palestinian cause and anger at the U.S. and Israel for what they’ve perpetrated in Gaza.

Realizing popular shifts at a global level and it’s something, I’ve been in the Palestine movement for decades now. It’s something like, I’ve never seen this kind of rapid erosion for support for Israel and that’s happening in the United States where Israel’s bedrock of support both in terms of political support, but also in terms of diplomatic military and economic support.

Like if Israel does not have the backing of the United States, it would itself have to turn into a garrison state. So where I see this going, right, I see that and I see this already happening. The U.S. is less interested in justifying its moves abroad in terms of the language of human rights, in terms of the language of international law.

We are seeing efforts in, for example, the Caribbean with the U.S. strikes on fishing vessels in the Caribbean and now the Pacific happening with a disregard for law that I think even would embarrass the Bush administration They have, you had JD Vance going on Twitter responding to someone calling these strikes a naked war crime just saying I don’t give a shit what you call it, right?

This kind of naked disregard for law will have consequences in the world. It will have diplomatic consequences in the world. These will be slow moving, right? And we have still seen an attempt of a consolidation of the Western powers to try and just throw Palestinians under the bus and preserve the order that way, right? So you had the UN Security Council pass a resolution, essentially rubber stamping the Trump plan for Gaza.

Now, this cannot be understated how egregious this is, right, this plan for Gaza essentially just installs Tony Blair as an imperial viceroy for Gaza, installs Trump as the head of the so-called board of peace in an act of just colonial aggression and annexation that is, I mean, you have to go back even before the mandate system, before the League of Nations, kind of proto ideas about liberal anti-colonialism to get an act of colonial force this naked.

To have the UN Security Council endorse this, right, just demonstrates how egregious this attempt to consolidate Western power behind this naked active aggression is. So ultimately, I think this cannot hold. I think that it will functionally break down these systems. It will take some time for that to happen, right, for those popular uprisings in these Western countries to actually consolidate in the form of policy change, but it is coming it is coming and this pains me to say as a Palestinian because I have watched my people face now an accelerated genocide for two years and most of the world has in terms of like the political classes have turned their backs, right?

And it is devastating to know that relief is not coming, that they are still being held hostage, they are still being subjected to a slow genocide or a slower genocide than what we seen for the past two years that may also just accelerate again right there’s no guarantee that this Trump plan is actually going to produce any kind of quiet but i do think that…

Chris Hedges

They’ve killed over 300 people since the “ceasefire” went into effect. I think on the second day they killed 150.

Dylan Saba

Yeah and when we talk about, our show is called Turbulence because the period of hegemonic transition is a chaotic one. And there is no guarantee that it will congeal into a new hegemony by someone else, right? The thing about China as a potential center of the world economy, it doesn’t seem that interested in engaging in the kind of global rule or hegemony that the U.S. has been interested in.

It seems to be mostly focused on its own self-interest as an economic power. And so what that means for the world is really an open question whether it’s gonna be the United States going down swinging essentially and bringing the world down with it as it as it attempts to reconstitute its power whether there is something like a hegemony that shifts to China, whether what emerges is something like a more multilateral world all of these are or we just have cascading crises that you named in in your intro, right?

I think that, in some respects, this is the most likely outcome, that all of these processes, these economic and geopolitical processes are accelerated by the reality of a world affected by climate crisis and ecological collapse, and that the migration flows actually encourage these states to move more in the direction of force, more in the direction of direct population management.

All of that remains to be seen and how it plays out. So when I say U.S. decline, I am not implying necessarily that there is some benevolent force that’s rising in its stead, but more just to identify that a lot of the world that liberals anticipated and counted on, like especially through the Obama era, doesn’t exist anymore. And we’re seeing that also domestically in the United States, right?

We’re seeing the purchase of that explanatory framework fade very dramatically. And what we’re seeing is a revanchist settler nationalism on the right that is looking to fill the void, looking to explain economic decline, looking to explain the world that the climate crisis is creating on their own revanchist racist terms. We’re not seeing as much from the left. I mean, we’re seeing critique from the left, but we’re not seeing so much of a comprehensive political vision for the world that adequately addresses what the U.S.’s role in it should be.

Part of the space that we’re looking to make an intervention in and to try and seed some of those conversations and some of that envisioning. I think ultimately what it requires is an honest assessment of the world as it is in these relationships as messy as they are.

Chris Hedges

Well, what we’re seeing is a rapidly consolidating authoritarianism, not just in the United States, but in Germany, in the UK, in France. Of course, we already have Hungary. And it came in three swift phases. First, you had the demonization of the student protesters over the genocide as being Hamas supporters and anti-Semites.

And this essentially shut down free speech on universities, then you had the demonization of immigrants that they were all criminals and rapists and to justify the creation of our own Brownshirts and ICE and the building of these huge detention centers, which if anyone thinks are going to be exclusively used for undocumented people, they’re very naive.

And then the assassination of Charlie Kirk, essentially pushing this false narrative of a violent radical left, the declaring antifa and most of these kids in antifa — I had to deal with them in the Occupy movement — are nerdy white kids who live in their mother’s basement in Eugene, as an existential threat to the United States.

All of these were false narratives, but all of these have been effectively used to rapidly consolidate authoritarian control. And we’re not the exception. So the ruling global elites appear quite aware of the discontent, the frustrations, of course, the economic stagnation, and they have responded, and they are responding.

Dylan Saba

Yeah, absolutely. And you’re pointing to something extremely important, right? Which demonstrates how the cause of Palestine can be this tip of the spear, both in terms of repression, but also potentially in terms of catalyzing a political response that’s adequate for the moment, right? So you named a couple of things.

One is the panic around political dissent on campuses, people opposing U.S. support for Israel’s war as a catalyzing force of repression that then expanded out more broadly. We’ve also seen the weaponization of immigration consequences for Palestine activists, right, pre-sage or not really even pre-sage because these crackdowns were happening the whole time, but used as a kind of rhetoric to justify these ICE crackdowns more broadly.

And we’re also seeing a kind of collapse in the narrative from the war on drugs come into the war on terror, right, with the US justifying its actions in the Caribbean and and in the Pacific by reference to this concept of like narco terrorism, right? So we’re just kind of we’re kind of folding in all of this. Can consent that we’ve manufactured around kind of just universal U.S. power to go after terrorists around the world to revitalize the Monroe Doctrine, right, to say that this is our hemisphere? We don’t need any permission to just kill who we want, to kill in this region. So what is that? What does that mean, right?

It shows that the issue of Palestine and Zionism is really core here. It’s really foundational to the project of U.S. Empire more broadly, but it also shows an opportunity for resistance, right? It is not the choice of activists on the ground, Palestine activists, that the government is conflating them or associating them with what they’re doing against migrants more broadly, but it is an opportunity.

One thing that we talk about on the show in our episode with Alexander Aviña is how to flip that script, right? How to say, okay, well, if the government is painting us with this broad brush, is making these associations, how can we as social movements build those bonds of solidarity in order to create a mass base of resistance that is not maybe not a mass politics in the sense that the electoral project in the U.S. left has long thought about, which is really to get a massive citizens to vote out change.

But how can we create bonds of solidarity across people who are targeted by the state, which includes a lot of non-citizens, a lot of migrants, anti-imperialists more broadly in order to defend ourselves against state repression for the coming years and start to build the kinds of institutions to advance in anti-imperialist politics across the longer term.

Chris Hedges

Well, I just came from Genoa, I was with Francesca Albanese and Greta Thunberg and Yanis Varoufakis and the courageous dock workers of Italy who have refused to load weapons onto Israeli ships or ships bound for Israel and, of course, are calling for a general strike. That does seem to be the only mechanism left by which we can halt this very frightening slide into global authoritarianism, doesn’t it?

Dylan Saba

Absolutely. I think that thinking about interventions at the point of circulation is really, really critical, it’s really critical politically now and moving forward. The world is a very interconnected space now. We live in an integrated world economy. The guns that are, the weapons that are used on Palestinian, many of them come from U.S. weapons manufacturers, right? Those move through ports across the world.

They involve workers across the world, workers in the United States. The oil that fuels that weaponry crosses many different international lines. And I think, yes, we’ve seen this in Italy. We’ve also seen it in the United States in actions with organized labor at shiploading sites, that’s been happening. The Block the Boat campaign has been happening for years but we’ve also seen it from Yemen, right?

Yemen has taken advantage of its place in the global flow of commodities to attempt to oppose a naval blockade. And it has punched far above its weight in doing so in the Red Sea and in fact has backed down the United States military, backed the U.S. military off. That shows the power of intervention at those strategic points within the kind of global supply chains and production networks.

And it shows that, we may be outgunned and they have far more power than us in terms of hard power, but there are ways to think strategically about how to leverage a marginal position to have an outsized impact. So I take great inspiration from those kinds of action and those kinds of solidarity. And I think that’s the exact type of example that we need to be thinking about in terms of how to intervene politically in this very terrifying moment.

Chris Hedges

I want to close by talking about the American left or I guess what I would see is the collapse of the American left retreat into a kind of boutique activism, the loss of class consciousness. At a moment when we desperately need a militant viable left, we don’t have it. And we’re being rapidly stripped of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms because of it. And I know this is an issue you deal with, but let’s talk about the left and perhaps reconstituting the left.

Dylan Saba

Yeah, so I mean my diagnosis of what the problem is here is that the left has seen itself in this relationship of negotiation with the Democratic Party for a long time now and really probably since ‘68 the Democratic Party in that time has successfully branded itself as the home of social movements and the kind of implied negotiation is, you street activists you go rabble rouse you make your demands, we will pick and choose which of those we decide make it into policy.

It’s usually some watered down, neutered version of them. You get to call that a victory and we all go back home, right. This has defined the American left more broadly for a long time. And ultimately what happens is that the Democratic Party has turned itself into a graveyard for social movements. So what the effect of it is that some versions of the grassroots get to claim a victory, but what actually gets into policy is something that fundamentally does not challenge U.S. class relations and certainly does not challenge US imperialism.

We’ve seen this across many different issues. We’ve seen it in the fight for gay marriage and how radical demands there were translated from demands around healthcare and access to… yet to needs that ameliorate ultimately class and race based discrimination and oppression get turned into a kind of a nominal victory that legal groups and big nonprofits get to claim.

Ultimately, I had hoped that the Gaza genocide would would break this relationship, right? And the reason I hope for that is because of the successes that the Palestine movement has had over the years, the demands that were put forward on the Biden and then ultimately the Kamala Harris campaign in the 2024 election were extremely concrete and extremely specific and everyone agreed upon them.

It’s that you all are funding a genocide. You have to stop doing that. You have to stop arming Israel. And the fact that they not only disregarded the movements and just said, they couldn’t even buy them off with anything nominal because the demand was so specific. They basically just told them to get lost and then they lost the election, right?

And you know, the election in exit polling, it’s not that the majority of people said, I voted because of Gaza, but I think it’s undeniable that that dramatically decreased enthusiasm among the base for them and profoundly impacted the environment that they lost in. And the fact that they just disregarded it and lost anyways gave me some amount of hope that more people in the left will realize that negotiating with the Democratic Party is not a successful path to change making.

And as you stated, we need something more militant, more built around not election cycles, but a long term plan for community self-defense and struggle. Now we’re seeing more energy in the electoral sphere. I have my significant doubts about that. I’m worried about candidates who tell people that they are intending to bring people back into the fold of the Democratic Party. I’m worried about what that will do across the left more broadly, but I’m more committed than ever to try and encourage and build and participate in the types of institutions that I think are necessary.

Chris Hedges

Well, we’re without movements. Max Weber’s point: if we don’t have movements, it doesn’t really matter who’s in power because we have no way to exert pressure at all. I can beg and plead. Why don’t you tell people how you can find your very thoughtful podcast, which I like very much.

Dylan Saba

That’s right. Exactly. Yep, thank you so much. Yes, so we are available on Substack at turbulencepod.substack.com.

You can find us on social media as well, Turbulence_pod. And we have a bunch of episodes. committed to public pedagogy. So our themed episodes with guests are all available for free. We have a number of them available that you can check out. And then behind the paywall, we do regular news roundup episodes where we give our more candid takes on the news of the week.

Chris Hedges

Great, thanks Dylan. And I want to thank Victor [Padilla], Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.