There are no answers, only ad hoc expedients which at best prove temporary. After some 5,000 years of recorded human history, we can find examples of every type of human society that proves successful for a time, and ultimately all of them fail, whether as a result of external enemies who are stronger and more ruthless, or internal corruption and contradiction.
This is because power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats, and sociopaths will corrupt any system, because sociopaths are precisely the humans who will do whatever it takes to get power. However, humans who see every interaction as a zero-sum no-holds-barred winner-take-all game rarely build anything that lasts for long, because the sociopath is loyal to nothing other than himself, he will either betray or be betrayed by another sociopath. Note how european dynasties rarely lasted for long.
Even turning one's back on power doesn't work. That power is still there, and even if you do not use it, others will. And you may not like what they do with that power.
At the same time, power continually increases with humans' technical knowledge. Feats that would have been too loopy for science fiction are now unremarkable. This is why, with all due respect to MLK, the arc of history does not bend towards justice. It bends towards power.
Well, as challenging a time as this is, I think that's up to us. There are a lot of people working to shift how our economy functions, and if enough of us learn and participate in that transformation, we might just find extraordinary results. We can learn from the past, but we shouldn't let it determine our future. In this 21st century, that is still up to us, imo.
I keep coming back to the word uttered by Major Clipton, as he watched the Kwai bridge explode - ‘Madness.’
We are in a dark place; hard to find reason for any optimism at this point. Will take a complete awareness overhaul of our history to begin the necessary course correction.
Well, we can parse madness and rational self-interest like Clinton did with sexual relations, but I think we end up in the same dystopian conclusion, logical or fallacious.
Justice is a mirage. Powers create mirages to further their ends, and the vast majority of the people gobble them up to make sense of the world. Certainly, this goes all the way back to the establishment of monarchies and revealed religions, among many other human creations.
Well-written summary, thanks. As you may recall, you and I are in basic alignment on this. I have one quibble, though: I think the Iron Law of Oligarchy can, and has, accumulated *either* (or both) the psycho/sociopaths and the "normal" people, but in any case always the more capable of either, by nature and/or nurture. That said, naturally the psycho/sociopaths eventually take over, until a revolution churns things up again. No matter what, the greater portion of "powerless" never actually win. (And especially as technology reaches its soon-coming watershed, we can probably soon kiss all revolutions goodbye.) IOW, The Iron Law of Oligarchy happens even without control by psycho/sociopaths. Were the US founding fathers -- who held sway not just for a war, but for a half-century (c.1775-c.1825) -- really overloaded with psycho/sociopaths? How about mid-20th-century US? Or, for what reasons are one or both of those cases not representative?
To make any kind of "steady state" of the full range of peoples, much less the powerless, is nearly an oxymoron. Though I'm a pre-Marx Leftist (i.e. prioritize specifically flattening of hierarchy, accepting the unavoidable devils in details), I am convinced Marx and his true-religion descendants *leadership* ("vanguards") generally fall into one of two categories: conmen/women (psycho/sociopaths) looking for, well... marks, to create intra-national army fodder for holy wars; and those (normal people) in rose-colored-glasses denial of critical faults in human nature on the nation/state level.
Well, I do think it would be a stretch to pick Jefferson to represent the sociopaths of his time. For example, in his draft of the 1776 declaration, he wrote of George III that "he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither", before it was rejected by his Southern brethren.
It looks to me that he seized a chance to help steer the direction of humanity, but when he realized (as a 33 year old?) that he was likely in over his head (for his 1776 American 'radicals'), he went quiet. It gives me pause about what was really in his head throughout the remainder of his life as a slaveholder, but I'm suspecting it's more sophisticated than my, or all our, thoughts.
Just the enormous differences between today's and the 60s prevalent attitudes, both I experienced directly, toward, say, free speech, sexual freedom, and war, shows me how radically but invisibly the zeitgeist regularly changes.
Jefferson also was horrified by proposals for abolition.
Don't take his statements about slavery seriously, as they simply served his interests at the moment. "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from among the drivers of negroes?"- Samuel Johnson
We need to remember that the vast majority of the founders regarded Blacks and First Nations people as subhuman. That -- and only that (since there is no evidence propaganda had yet acquired its Josef-Goebbels omnipotence) -- is the one genuinely rational explanation for why slavers claimed to speak for "the rights of man." But of course the USian cults of prideful ignorance and mandatory optimism -- for which the parroting of Goebbels-caliber propaganda is daily routine -- will never allow that damning fact to become public knowledge.
"the vast majority of the founders regarded Blacks and First Nations people as subhuman"
It is difficult for most people to see through eyes and minds from other contexts. Somehow, people think explanation always means justification in the here-and-now.
I haven't seen evidence that Jefferson was a fraud, an actor, on this. Are there smoking guns? Otherwise, I'll remain skeptical that the available "dots" allow one to draw a singular and compelling picture.
I agree with you, FF, that the arc of history does not bend toward justice. It’s a constant struggle. Nevertheless, we don’t quite end up back where we started, and we can build on what others created before us. For example, people who lived in the “estates” that preceded the creation of Germany worked for the end of serfdom, something that was accomplished after Germany became a nation. Russia ended serfdom sometime later. One could argue that serfdom survives in other forms, but still, we’re not back to where we started. The same with slavery and women’s rights in the U.S. Yes, ground has been lost, but we’re not back to where we started. Social Security and Medicare — a lot more people would have died prematurely without them. Those wins were worth the struggle, and they have not yet been proven temporary, despite the backsliding.
Feral Finster...Very well said. Please note my comment in the 25 January 2022 edition of my blog, “Outside Agitator’s Notebook”:
THE MORE ASTUTE amongst us -- at least those reasonably familiar with our species' history since the advent of patriarchy -- are at last beginning to realize the extent to which we've all been conned by the Christian notion the universe displays a "moral arc" toward "justice." This is indeed one of the most destructive Big Lies ever. The historical truth is the diametrical opposite; under patriarchy, any "moral arc" is determined solely by our Masters, who constantly refine their technology to compel ever-more zero-tolerance compliance. Thus "progress" inevitably leads toward ever more inescapable subjugation. The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's enforced; while the homeless camp may have replaced the death camp as the most obvious symbol of our Masters' intent, the Nazi ideology that sustains their underlying greed remains as impregnable as ever. No matter what we do, in the end it seems we cannot escape the down-pressing burden of our Masters' ever-more-crushing tyranny, the cause of its terrible permanence pointedly revealed by Audre Lorde: "The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." https://lorenbliss-outsideagitatorsnotebook.blogspot.com/2022/01/21-january-2022-duke-us-capitalists.html
In recognizing the true dynamic of our plight, we should remember that patriarchy -- despite our Masters' massive global effort to hide it by relentlessly suppressing the compelling evidence of its mysterious origins, its violent intrusion and how it functions culturally like toxic smallpox-contaminated-blankets -- is at the most about six thousand years old. Don’t overlook the persistent evidence that during the first approximately 294,000 years of our species’ existence, we were governed by matriarchy, which by definition is a progressive extension of the instinctive quest for collective well-being that is the primary organizing principle of motherhood. Contrast this with patriarchy’s brief but utterly overwhelming demonstration of its diametrically opposite purpose of regressively generating ever more inescapable mechanisms of male self-aggrandizement. But there is not only the age of our species to consider in making this comparison. There is also the approximate age of our planet. Thus we see that an invasive, newcomer ideology fostered by talking serpents, loquacious brush-fires, fiery wheels in the sky and the emergence of alleged gods from thunderous clouds of smoke and flame has ecogenocidally reversed 4.5 billion years of evolution in a fraction of that time so infinitesimal, there is no way to adequately express it.
"The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's enforced;"
Agreed. Ultimately, everything that matters is mental, however the mental pain occurs.
"the instinctive quest for collective well-being that is the primary organizing principle of motherhood"
I can't wrap my head around the idea that only one of the (hundreds of millions of years of) sexes can emerge as dominant. Either for an asserted matriarchy pre-3000 BCE, or an asserted patriarchy since. How does persistent dominance of one side occur biologically?
Didn't have time to respond, but went through the dialogue and no mention of AIPAC and it's influence on our politicians, and our 21st century wars? No mention they have our elected officials in their pocket and are dictating policy. They try to provide an overall perspective, and it seems Trump is the one who will put an end to us. Hedges apocalyptic perspective on things is no help at all.
Well, it is Israel who influenced our Middle Eastern war agenda in this 21st century, and Iran was always on Netanyahu's hit list, always. Israel recognized it's power in the region and it's potential power which is on display in this latest fiasco. Our Middle Eastern wars have also diverted people's attention away from significant issues, like giving corporations a bigger say in government, and too often significantly increasing their influence. Gee, if we got along with Russia during the Trump years, and if Obama didn't implement a coup in Ukraine during his Reign things could have been a whole lot better, especially for the hundreds of thousands now dead. Not to mention our actions that helped bring China and Russia closer, and not under Trump. Hedges always sound like a minister when he puts forth our end times, and with little hope. It's a turn off.
Let us do more, much more than "hope...these acts of resistance...prevail." We need to join them, support them. Free Palestine! (And thus, free ourselves and each other)
The answer is to take all money out of our political system. Make ALL campaign contributions illegal, including money from the candidate. Provide equal debates and campaign messages to the people equally for all candidates using government funded space in both video media and print. Change the driver of our democracy from money to ideas from the people, as our founding fathers intended. Zionists now control our government and elections using money. Getting rid of the money in politics gets rid of Zionist control.
Netanyahu's government does have an outsized level of influence over Congress and the Presidency (both Democrats and Republicans), but even more insidious is powerful industry lobbyists like The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. We live in a time of taxation without representation--we vote, but our votes are increasingly controlled by gerrymandering, and after we elect, we're ignored in favor of big corporate donors. Our Congress represents their donors, not us. So what is their incentive to pass laws preventing all money from being used in political campaigns? I agree--this would work. Maybe start on the local level--I think that's the only way to effect any change in these times. Push for town and state offices to entirely eliminate money-funded campaigns. All candidates would have the same amount of public funds to spend (a small amount); no private money or personal wealth could be used at all.
"The answer is to take all money out of our political system."
Ha ha. Just as hope is not a strategy for social change, proposing a solution such as the above statement is an equally futile pipe dream for political change.
JFK, for all that he was just another Capitalist tool, said it: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable". Of course, there is no "peaceful revolution". Capitalism is fascism in its last stage. Even meliorist efforts are denied. There can never be reform. It must be overthrown. Whatever comes of the violence is justified by the tyranny of Capitalism. Will there be chaos? Certainly. Would you rather have eternal slavery and the wholesale destruction of all life?
What do you think the data centers are for? Why do you think that the administration has taken such pains to cozy up to the Palantirs and Oracles of the world?
Found on internet:
"The bet is that whoever gets to a certain level of AI and with the infrastructure to run it will lock in global dominance in perpetuity, by being able to do absolute surveillance and immediate suppression of all dissent and resistance. And whoever gets there first will be the master of the world forever, because there will be no way to break the chains.
This is also why they are seriously going for deep underground data centers and data centers in space. The only way to get rid of the data centers in space is with ASAT weapons, but ASAT weapons pretty much require a state actor to put together. But once Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have been destroyed and subjugated (which is part of the plan, obviously), there will be no such independent actor. No rag-tag rebels will be able to amass the resources to deorbit the data centers in space, which will lock in the perpetual dominance of whoever controls them. Putting them deep underground is also a level of protection above that provided by the current practices of having them on the surface. I am not quite sure how cooling will work in either case though, but the intent is clear."
This is Musk's wet dream. I think and hope it won't be quite this easy to subjugate all of us. They dream of developing bots that can do everything us prols do--plant & harvest crops, feed and milk the cows . . .or grow food in labs--so they can just let all us seditious insects die of starvation. Unfortunately in this process of bot development they are only accelerating the death of the Earth.
This is a great sci fi plot, but I'm hoping it's less real than it feels right now. The reason I think you're more on target than others are giving you credit for is that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg et al. are ignorant & power-corrupted humans who believe they are gods, and they seem to share the same crazy megalomaniacal dreams. No one is stopping Musk from shooting satellite after satellite into space, creating a giant garbage heap to orbit the dying Earth.
Intent is one thing; performance is another. The Empire will never subjugate Russia, China, and Iran, which are far ahead of it in tech development. The Empire is a sorry, sclerotic, used up Capitalist relic that has run its ugly course. It will crash and die, in financial meltdown or war, and soon.
The ecogenocidal symbiosis of the histories of Nazism and Christianity with the lynch-mob sociology of the USian Moronic Majority convinces me our only (rational) hope for Liberation is creation of an overseas shadow government; mobilization of a domestic partisan Resistance as determined as that which hamstrung the Original Nazis in France, the Netherlands, Poland, Yugoslavia and especially the Soviet Union; and a massive, four-pronged D-Day-II invasion by an international humanitarian alliance -- preferably a quadruple envelopment: simultaneous offensives from Canada and all three coastlines.
I say this with profound woe because I am a Regular Army veteran, (active duty 1959-1962 including 16 months in Korea). But when the sociological data about the ChristoNazi rabble is compared to the data about NSDAP membership revealed by the following links, the result is entirely supportive of my frankly horrifying conclusion:
Even so, the apocalyptic fly that contaminates this ointment of potential rescue is that Trump, like every USian president after Kennedy, is credibly reported to be pledged to follow the "Better Dead than Red" recommendation of Adolf Hitler to destroy the world if threatened by the prospect of defeat. As I have said before, the only possible counter-measure to this policy is a scientific impossibility: the alleged ability of UFOs to paralyze the entire USian war machine.
Meanwhile, as our attackers' ecogenocidal hatred skyrockets to ever-more-obscenely sadistic fanaticism*, I would not be a bit surprised were the "Republican" (sic) ChristoNazi/Neoconfederate Party to officially change its name to something more factually descriptive.
The extinction of the human race will be a positive outcome for the earth since humans through various means such as war, the release of carbon and other substances are destroying the earth and its innocent creatures. When the human race disappears not only will the earth and its creatures be able to better prosper, but in the universe it will not even be noticed, everything will go on with no disruption. The human race has a case of hubris it really believes it is special, when in fact it is practically nothing in terms of the entire universe. If we understood this we would better take care of our home and the innocent creatures that live with us.
As much as I agree with much of this article, and am very concerned about the direction our country has taken, I'm not going to share it because it is too hopeless. We need people who have a vision for the future and who can share innovative ways to get there. These people exist and they are all across the U.S. and around the world. As challenging a time as this is, I believe that the future is still up to us. There are a lot of people working to shift how our economy functions, and if enough of us learn and participate in that transformation, we might just find extraordinary results. The energy we bring to this challenge is important. We can learn from the past, but we shouldn't let it determine our future. In this 21st century, that is still up to us, imo.
As much as I would prefer to lean into your position, the record and apparent course of history are obviously more as Hedges describes. Every time some progress is achieved, the oligarchs manipulate a reaction; consider Jim Crow, McCarthyism, Reagan and now Trump II. Power exists, corrupts, and will not go gently. Those good visionary people you praise surely exist, but power doesn't care about them, dismisses them, and will crush them unless they organize and defend themselves assiduously. Power only bows to power.
If there is to be any hope, we need to think differently than we have in the past. We need to think with both mind and heart, and connect with others more effectively than we have in the past. It's easy to lie down and accept our 'fate' based on the past. Doing things in a way that hasn't been done before is not easy, but is necessary if we are going to survive as a species. I chose not to have children because I didn't like the way the world worked. But I know many young people who give me hope.
It's not so much about resistance as about transformation. Pete Seeger said that, if there's a human race 100 years from now, it will be because of all the little things done by millions of people every day. We have been stuck in an extractive economy and mindset for a few hundred years. Not that it is easy to change that, but people are only just starting to learn about different ways our economy might function that would actually value people and the natural systems that support our lives.
We are, broadly speaking, a very pathetic species. We seem born to find ways to war with one another, covet material things, and destroy what gives us life. Chris is right not to be optimistic. I find it harder and harder to be. Especially when I encounter those who mimic the sociopathic and blindly ignorant actions of Felon Trump and so many others. We are also a very gullible species, so easily led by con men and shysters of all types; smooth-talking preachers to charming used car salesman-types. Organized religions have only helped fan the flames of righteous intent and holy wars, in the name of our unique "Gods". How very sad. We slaughtered the natives who dared resist our "Christianizing them". Manifest Destiny itself was a crime on humanity by humanity, so to speak. I don't know what to feel minimally hopeful about. Our political parties have disintegrated into two parts of the same corrupt system, well beyond any salvaging. Revolution is indeed, in some forms, our only hope. Meanwhile, let us do what each of us can to resist. Go down fighting is better than being mowed down while running away. Thank you Chris for always speaking in the raw, bold colors of truth which always tells us what's really going on.
Big Capital was running scared when COVID-19 shut it all down.
The shutdown had the powerful effect of a general strike, but there were no workers to blame or cudgel to death, only a natural force. They bought us off with unemployment benefits (which my state, at least, is trying to claw back by claiming 'fraud' and threatening prosecution).
For this reason--having experienced out very frightening the shutdown was to corporations--I think our only hope is a massive union movement, powerful enough to declare a general strike. That is why Amazon, Starbucks, Hachette's and so many other big corporations fight worker organizing tooth and nail. Labor organizing in this country has a long history of bloodshed required for any gains, which we are NOT taught in public or private schools, for a reason. If we all knew what it had taken our grandparents and great-grandparents & great-greats to get a living wage, an eight-hour day [where has THAT gone], some semblance of safety in the workplace, we might be more prepared to fight tooth and nail ourselves and to stand together instead of nurturing racist hate. We would grow up knowing what it would take. The U.S. labor force was bought off, got comfortable, and let our most powerful weapon--mutual aid embodied in the unions--wither away and be replaced by the myth of the American Dream instead.
The Smith Act--which made attempting to overthrow the U.S. Government by use of force or violence, should have been used to prosecute Donald Trump for January 6. It was only ever used successfully against Lefties. To this day both Democrats and Republicans see nothing wrong with imposing crippling sanctions on Socialist governments or assassinating Socialist leaders, while sending billions in aid to repressive authoritarian genocidal leaders, many of whom were installed via the efforts of the CIA and/or Southern Command or some other arm of the U.S. military. If Socialism is so doomed to failure because it is an inferior system, why is there a need to try to cripple nations like Cuba and Venezuela? Why try to foment rebellion by making it impossible to buy fuel, food, and medicine? The media--including NPR--just buy into this worldview without questioning it. We are fed this worldview with mother's milk. And this is another reason we don't have widespread rebellion in the U.S.; why it takes the form of demagoguery and white supremacy instead of worker solidarity--because our cultural institutions allowed not just labor history & Marxist thought to be expunged from our educations, but actively promoted a worldview that these truths are a given:
--The United States is the Land of the Free, and a force for Good in the world (like Pinochet),
--Socialist governments are evil and of course we should do everything we can to topple them
--Never mind about genocide when it's happening in a capitalist nation--all the little children and grandparents and journalists and emergency medical personnel they killed were terrorists.
Running scared? Hardly. IMO Big Capital orchestrated the Plandemic. The only natural forces at play are the people that continue to die from a pharmaceutical solution(s) far too many were either coerced into taking--or too gullible to accept as necessary and legal.
We aren’t on the cusp of fascism. We have arrived.
“They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.”
We have seen this on full display in the UK, Germany, and the US already.
The human brain has been engaged with an internal cerebral civil war by natural selection for millenia. We have the intelligence to probe nature from the subatomic to the cosmos. We have torn the physical world apart and then fashion things to our suiting. Within short order we promptly disgard the remains.
We do not appear to be remotely close to restraining ourselves from our plundering inclinations that we find so intoxicating. Regardless of the consequences, economic growth is the engine of industrial civilization.
What could possibly go wrong?
Human exceptionalism.. .the fairy tale that we can ignore limits. Natural laws are dismissed in economics. By some miracle we can assume the universe will understand.
It doesn't.
We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Overshoot is our Zietgeist.
Technology keeps the reality out of view.
Ecologist William Rees was interviewed by Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification which is but one of numerous conversations available.
What “we” is that? I take no responsibility for the behavior of our Kings and Tyrants. That has about as much sense as blaming the Tudor peasants for removing Ann Boleyn’s head.
Despite all forms of resistance, it may be that addiction to power and luxury ultimately ends the human experiment. Then what? Maybe our "specialness" turns out not to be so special, while other species we now look down on prevail. Even so, to quote Chris: I fight fascism not because I think I can win, but because it's fascism.
What struck me reading both the essay and the comments is how much our view of the future depends on which slice of history we choose to emphasize.
The pessimists point to empire, oligarchy, corruption, and recurring cycles of domination. The optimists point to abolition, labor victories, expanded rights, and moments where ordinary people forced institutions to change. Both are using history as evidence.
Perhaps that is why I find history so useful and so dangerous at the same time.
History rarely tells us what will happen next. More often, it reveals which patterns we have chosen to notice.
Hedges sees the world through the eyes of someone who has spent decades reporting from places where institutions failed and violence became the language of politics. That perspective deserves respect. But so does the perspective of those who study the slow, imperfect gains won through organizing, reform, and cultural change.
The question I came away with is not whether the future holds tyranny or revolution.
It is whether we are living through one of those moments when the old stories no longer explain reality and people begin searching for new ones.
History is full of such moments. The outcome is usually obvious only in hindsight.
Citizens United did not turn elections over to the billionaire class. That was done in 1976, when the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech in Buckley v. Valeo. Buckley enabled unlimited expenditures by billionaires in elections. Citizens United expanded Buckley’s ruling to corporations. Today, corporations play a relatively minor role as compared to billionaires in buying elections. Thus, if CU were overturned, billionaires would still be able to buy elections under Buckley. Even the NYT got this right in a May 6 article by Danny Hakim captioned, “A Look Inside the Case that Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires.” The case is Buckley, not Citizens United. (John Bolton was instrumental in getting the issue before the Court. That should tell us something). Nonetheless, most of the comments on the NYT article focused on Citizens United, as if those posters had not even read the article. That’s evidence of how successful Democratic Party affiliated political activists have been in propagandizing CU for fundraising purposes. Recent pieces, including one in Ralph Nader’s Radio Hour, have revealed that the results of this fundraising have gone into the pockets of the operatives — and stayed there. That campaign could do little else because, again, CU does not allow billionaires to buy elections — Buckley does. See also, for example, “Money, Politics, and the First Amendment: Fifty Years of Supreme Court Decisions and Campaign Finance Reforms (2026), edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone. The relative influence of billionaires and corporations in today’s elections can also be researched, as can the beneficiaries of the cynical CU campaign. Is CU a bad decision? Of course. But it would not exist without Buckley. If Buckley were overturned, Citizens United would go with it. Again, the reverse is not true.
Why is this important? Because any overthrow of the current system is going to have to include the courts. And the legalized bribery of politicians by way of Buckley, as extended by CU and other Buckley progeny, has done incalculable damage to the power of the people. To have a proper prescription, you need to do a proper diagnosis. Seeing journalists, including independent journalists, invoke Citizens United without mentioning Buckley is irresponsible, at best. I have a lot of respect for Hedges, but this issue is not in his lane. The CU propaganda just keeps getting circulated. It’s an obstacle to formulating a real remedy.
I strongly disagree with the binary choice. Historically, movements such as the Nonpartisan league have succeeded and took over the election machinery to throw out all the capitalist tools and install actual Laborist representatives who made a huge difference. True, the response to the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota was that the parasitic financiers freaked out and poured infinite nationwide money and agents into little North Dakota to sow internal division and fake issues that finally broke the movement, the same playbook that they have used to keep working people's movements down ever since. But the fact is that if you can assemble enough focused energy to do a revolution, then you can instead use the tools our founders gave us to peacefully install a true Laborist government and fundamentally transform our economy. I have written about this strategy at length https://laboristmovement.substack.com/p/laborismhttps://laboristmovement.substack.com/p/getting-there-laborist-organizinghttps://github.com/Laborism/Manifesto/blob/9b72683a2e8232c9e83682069848a8ffe6f336b1/Laborist%20manifesto.pdf , but here suffice it to say that that the strategy for seizing power is pretty simple. The hard part is getting people to get off their behinds, talk to each other, and organize.
I do have faith that America will return to the New Deal era. The capitalist system we had at the time of the robber barons was about the same than we have today. Yes, today the capitalists have more technology to supress dissent and they are well organized and live in a broader connected network of capitalists. But, still they would not be able to survive if there were nobody to exploit nor to sell their products. Hey, the people through their socialist, communist and labor unions were able to unite and bring about the New Deal, so we today can do the same.
There are no answers, only ad hoc expedients which at best prove temporary. After some 5,000 years of recorded human history, we can find examples of every type of human society that proves successful for a time, and ultimately all of them fail, whether as a result of external enemies who are stronger and more ruthless, or internal corruption and contradiction.
This is because power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats, and sociopaths will corrupt any system, because sociopaths are precisely the humans who will do whatever it takes to get power. However, humans who see every interaction as a zero-sum no-holds-barred winner-take-all game rarely build anything that lasts for long, because the sociopath is loyal to nothing other than himself, he will either betray or be betrayed by another sociopath. Note how european dynasties rarely lasted for long.
Even turning one's back on power doesn't work. That power is still there, and even if you do not use it, others will. And you may not like what they do with that power.
At the same time, power continually increases with humans' technical knowledge. Feats that would have been too loopy for science fiction are now unremarkable. This is why, with all due respect to MLK, the arc of history does not bend towards justice. It bends towards power.
Learn well The Iron Law Of Oligarchy.
Well, as challenging a time as this is, I think that's up to us. There are a lot of people working to shift how our economy functions, and if enough of us learn and participate in that transformation, we might just find extraordinary results. We can learn from the past, but we shouldn't let it determine our future. In this 21st century, that is still up to us, imo.
Yeah, because the interchange I heard was nothing but a downer.
I keep coming back to the word uttered by Major Clipton, as he watched the Kwai bridge explode - ‘Madness.’
We are in a dark place; hard to find reason for any optimism at this point. Will take a complete awareness overhaul of our history to begin the necessary course correction.
To that end, Aaron and Bryce weigh in here: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab69TVss16I&t=4466s
Not madness at all, just rational hedonistic self-interest taken to its logical conclusion.
Well, we can parse madness and rational self-interest like Clinton did with sexual relations, but I think we end up in the same dystopian conclusion, logical or fallacious.
No argument from me.
It's the conclusion you came to and Hedges, but it doesn't mean you might be mistaken.
Great piece, and you are right, the arc of the universe does not bend towards justice, it bends to towards whom ever is wielding power!
Justice is a mirage. Powers create mirages to further their ends, and the vast majority of the people gobble them up to make sense of the world. Certainly, this goes all the way back to the establishment of monarchies and revealed religions, among many other human creations.
Well-written summary, thanks. As you may recall, you and I are in basic alignment on this. I have one quibble, though: I think the Iron Law of Oligarchy can, and has, accumulated *either* (or both) the psycho/sociopaths and the "normal" people, but in any case always the more capable of either, by nature and/or nurture. That said, naturally the psycho/sociopaths eventually take over, until a revolution churns things up again. No matter what, the greater portion of "powerless" never actually win. (And especially as technology reaches its soon-coming watershed, we can probably soon kiss all revolutions goodbye.) IOW, The Iron Law of Oligarchy happens even without control by psycho/sociopaths. Were the US founding fathers -- who held sway not just for a war, but for a half-century (c.1775-c.1825) -- really overloaded with psycho/sociopaths? How about mid-20th-century US? Or, for what reasons are one or both of those cases not representative?
To make any kind of "steady state" of the full range of peoples, much less the powerless, is nearly an oxymoron. Though I'm a pre-Marx Leftist (i.e. prioritize specifically flattening of hierarchy, accepting the unavoidable devils in details), I am convinced Marx and his true-religion descendants *leadership* ("vanguards") generally fall into one of two categories: conmen/women (psycho/sociopaths) looking for, well... marks, to create intra-national army fodder for holy wars; and those (normal people) in rose-colored-glasses denial of critical faults in human nature on the nation/state level.
I am not sure that Thomas Jefferson's slaves testify to the fact that he was anything other than a shit.
Well, I do think it would be a stretch to pick Jefferson to represent the sociopaths of his time. For example, in his draft of the 1776 declaration, he wrote of George III that "he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither", before it was rejected by his Southern brethren.
It looks to me that he seized a chance to help steer the direction of humanity, but when he realized (as a 33 year old?) that he was likely in over his head (for his 1776 American 'radicals'), he went quiet. It gives me pause about what was really in his head throughout the remainder of his life as a slaveholder, but I'm suspecting it's more sophisticated than my, or all our, thoughts.
Just the enormous differences between today's and the 60s prevalent attitudes, both I experienced directly, toward, say, free speech, sexual freedom, and war, shows me how radically but invisibly the zeitgeist regularly changes.
Jefferson also was horrified by proposals for abolition.
Don't take his statements about slavery seriously, as they simply served his interests at the moment. "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from among the drivers of negroes?"- Samuel Johnson
We need to remember that the vast majority of the founders regarded Blacks and First Nations people as subhuman. That -- and only that (since there is no evidence propaganda had yet acquired its Josef-Goebbels omnipotence) -- is the one genuinely rational explanation for why slavers claimed to speak for "the rights of man." But of course the USian cults of prideful ignorance and mandatory optimism -- for which the parroting of Goebbels-caliber propaganda is daily routine -- will never allow that damning fact to become public knowledge.
"the vast majority of the founders regarded Blacks and First Nations people as subhuman"
It is difficult for most people to see through eyes and minds from other contexts. Somehow, people think explanation always means justification in the here-and-now.
"they simply served his interests at the moment"
I haven't seen evidence that Jefferson was a fraud, an actor, on this. Are there smoking guns? Otherwise, I'll remain skeptical that the available "dots" allow one to draw a singular and compelling picture.
The man talked piouslynof liberty while driving slaves.
I agree with you, FF, that the arc of history does not bend toward justice. It’s a constant struggle. Nevertheless, we don’t quite end up back where we started, and we can build on what others created before us. For example, people who lived in the “estates” that preceded the creation of Germany worked for the end of serfdom, something that was accomplished after Germany became a nation. Russia ended serfdom sometime later. One could argue that serfdom survives in other forms, but still, we’re not back to where we started. The same with slavery and women’s rights in the U.S. Yes, ground has been lost, but we’re not back to where we started. Social Security and Medicare — a lot more people would have died prematurely without them. Those wins were worth the struggle, and they have not yet been proven temporary, despite the backsliding.
Not arguing that. As I said, every solution is but a temporary expedient, like fighting gravity or old age.
Feral Finster...Very well said. Please note my comment in the 25 January 2022 edition of my blog, “Outside Agitator’s Notebook”:
THE MORE ASTUTE amongst us -- at least those reasonably familiar with our species' history since the advent of patriarchy -- are at last beginning to realize the extent to which we've all been conned by the Christian notion the universe displays a "moral arc" toward "justice." This is indeed one of the most destructive Big Lies ever. The historical truth is the diametrical opposite; under patriarchy, any "moral arc" is determined solely by our Masters, who constantly refine their technology to compel ever-more zero-tolerance compliance. Thus "progress" inevitably leads toward ever more inescapable subjugation. The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's enforced; while the homeless camp may have replaced the death camp as the most obvious symbol of our Masters' intent, the Nazi ideology that sustains their underlying greed remains as impregnable as ever. No matter what we do, in the end it seems we cannot escape the down-pressing burden of our Masters' ever-more-crushing tyranny, the cause of its terrible permanence pointedly revealed by Audre Lorde: "The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." https://lorenbliss-outsideagitatorsnotebook.blogspot.com/2022/01/21-january-2022-duke-us-capitalists.html
In recognizing the true dynamic of our plight, we should remember that patriarchy -- despite our Masters' massive global effort to hide it by relentlessly suppressing the compelling evidence of its mysterious origins, its violent intrusion and how it functions culturally like toxic smallpox-contaminated-blankets -- is at the most about six thousand years old. Don’t overlook the persistent evidence that during the first approximately 294,000 years of our species’ existence, we were governed by matriarchy, which by definition is a progressive extension of the instinctive quest for collective well-being that is the primary organizing principle of motherhood. Contrast this with patriarchy’s brief but utterly overwhelming demonstration of its diametrically opposite purpose of regressively generating ever more inescapable mechanisms of male self-aggrandizement. But there is not only the age of our species to consider in making this comparison. There is also the approximate age of our planet. Thus we see that an invasive, newcomer ideology fostered by talking serpents, loquacious brush-fires, fiery wheels in the sky and the emergence of alleged gods from thunderous clouds of smoke and flame has ecogenocidally reversed 4.5 billion years of evolution in a fraction of that time so infinitesimal, there is no way to adequately express it.
"The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's enforced;"
Agreed. Ultimately, everything that matters is mental, however the mental pain occurs.
"the instinctive quest for collective well-being that is the primary organizing principle of motherhood"
I can't wrap my head around the idea that only one of the (hundreds of millions of years of) sexes can emerge as dominant. Either for an asserted matriarchy pre-3000 BCE, or an asserted patriarchy since. How does persistent dominance of one side occur biologically?
Didn't have time to respond, but went through the dialogue and no mention of AIPAC and it's influence on our politicians, and our 21st century wars? No mention they have our elected officials in their pocket and are dictating policy. They try to provide an overall perspective, and it seems Trump is the one who will put an end to us. Hedges apocalyptic perspective on things is no help at all.
Lord knows I have no use for AIPAC, but it's not as if Israel were disappear then all our troubles would vanish.
Well, it is Israel who influenced our Middle Eastern war agenda in this 21st century, and Iran was always on Netanyahu's hit list, always. Israel recognized it's power in the region and it's potential power which is on display in this latest fiasco. Our Middle Eastern wars have also diverted people's attention away from significant issues, like giving corporations a bigger say in government, and too often significantly increasing their influence. Gee, if we got along with Russia during the Trump years, and if Obama didn't implement a coup in Ukraine during his Reign things could have been a whole lot better, especially for the hundreds of thousands now dead. Not to mention our actions that helped bring China and Russia closer, and not under Trump. Hedges always sound like a minister when he puts forth our end times, and with little hope. It's a turn off.
Not arguing Israel's baleful influence. But if Israel were to disappear today, human nature would still be what it is.
"Hedges always sound like a minister when he puts forth our end times, and with little hope. It's a turn off."
Sounds like you want a happy ending. Nowhere is it written that we are entitled to one.
I didn't say we were entitled, but the decisions we have made and the influence of Israel through it's lobby have our politicians in their pockets, and they have dragged us into wars with a neocon agenda altering alliances. So what do you think of this? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/30/us-congress-advances-american-israeli-military-integration-plan
You appear to be arguing with points I wasn't making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns7777oBj4U
Let us do more, much more than "hope...these acts of resistance...prevail." We need to join them, support them. Free Palestine! (And thus, free ourselves and each other)
The answer is to take all money out of our political system. Make ALL campaign contributions illegal, including money from the candidate. Provide equal debates and campaign messages to the people equally for all candidates using government funded space in both video media and print. Change the driver of our democracy from money to ideas from the people, as our founding fathers intended. Zionists now control our government and elections using money. Getting rid of the money in politics gets rid of Zionist control.
Alayna
Netanyahu's government does have an outsized level of influence over Congress and the Presidency (both Democrats and Republicans), but even more insidious is powerful industry lobbyists like The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. We live in a time of taxation without representation--we vote, but our votes are increasingly controlled by gerrymandering, and after we elect, we're ignored in favor of big corporate donors. Our Congress represents their donors, not us. So what is their incentive to pass laws preventing all money from being used in political campaigns? I agree--this would work. Maybe start on the local level--I think that's the only way to effect any change in these times. Push for town and state offices to entirely eliminate money-funded campaigns. All candidates would have the same amount of public funds to spend (a small amount); no private money or personal wealth could be used at all.
"The answer is to take all money out of our political system."
Ha ha. Just as hope is not a strategy for social change, proposing a solution such as the above statement is an equally futile pipe dream for political change.
So what do you suggest WWII?
JFK, for all that he was just another Capitalist tool, said it: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable". Of course, there is no "peaceful revolution". Capitalism is fascism in its last stage. Even meliorist efforts are denied. There can never be reform. It must be overthrown. Whatever comes of the violence is justified by the tyranny of Capitalism. Will there be chaos? Certainly. Would you rather have eternal slavery and the wholesale destruction of all life?
What do you think the data centers are for? Why do you think that the administration has taken such pains to cozy up to the Palantirs and Oracles of the world?
Found on internet:
"The bet is that whoever gets to a certain level of AI and with the infrastructure to run it will lock in global dominance in perpetuity, by being able to do absolute surveillance and immediate suppression of all dissent and resistance. And whoever gets there first will be the master of the world forever, because there will be no way to break the chains.
This is also why they are seriously going for deep underground data centers and data centers in space. The only way to get rid of the data centers in space is with ASAT weapons, but ASAT weapons pretty much require a state actor to put together. But once Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have been destroyed and subjugated (which is part of the plan, obviously), there will be no such independent actor. No rag-tag rebels will be able to amass the resources to deorbit the data centers in space, which will lock in the perpetual dominance of whoever controls them. Putting them deep underground is also a level of protection above that provided by the current practices of having them on the surface. I am not quite sure how cooling will work in either case though, but the intent is clear."
This is Musk's wet dream. I think and hope it won't be quite this easy to subjugate all of us. They dream of developing bots that can do everything us prols do--plant & harvest crops, feed and milk the cows . . .or grow food in labs--so they can just let all us seditious insects die of starvation. Unfortunately in this process of bot development they are only accelerating the death of the Earth.
This is a great sci fi plot, but I'm hoping it's less real than it feels right now. The reason I think you're more on target than others are giving you credit for is that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg et al. are ignorant & power-corrupted humans who believe they are gods, and they seem to share the same crazy megalomaniacal dreams. No one is stopping Musk from shooting satellite after satellite into space, creating a giant garbage heap to orbit the dying Earth.
Intent is one thing; performance is another. The Empire will never subjugate Russia, China, and Iran, which are far ahead of it in tech development. The Empire is a sorry, sclerotic, used up Capitalist relic that has run its ugly course. It will crash and die, in financial meltdown or war, and soon.
Wishful thinking. Russia is in a sorry state and simply seeks to be allowed to joint he West, not to make war on it.
China simply wants to sell things and make money.
You've had far too much Empire Koolaid, Feral One. Try to get some sense of what's real before selling the old dead raps.
You give an answer so vague as to be unfalsifiable.
The ecogenocidal symbiosis of the histories of Nazism and Christianity with the lynch-mob sociology of the USian Moronic Majority convinces me our only (rational) hope for Liberation is creation of an overseas shadow government; mobilization of a domestic partisan Resistance as determined as that which hamstrung the Original Nazis in France, the Netherlands, Poland, Yugoslavia and especially the Soviet Union; and a massive, four-pronged D-Day-II invasion by an international humanitarian alliance -- preferably a quadruple envelopment: simultaneous offensives from Canada and all three coastlines.
I say this with profound woe because I am a Regular Army veteran, (active duty 1959-1962 including 16 months in Korea). But when the sociological data about the ChristoNazi rabble is compared to the data about NSDAP membership revealed by the following links, the result is entirely supportive of my frankly horrifying conclusion:
https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-1945/nsdap-membership-1929-1945
https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/NaziGermany443/410NSDAPMembers.html
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/05/who-joined-the-nazi-party/
Even so, the apocalyptic fly that contaminates this ointment of potential rescue is that Trump, like every USian president after Kennedy, is credibly reported to be pledged to follow the "Better Dead than Red" recommendation of Adolf Hitler to destroy the world if threatened by the prospect of defeat. As I have said before, the only possible counter-measure to this policy is a scientific impossibility: the alleged ability of UFOs to paralyze the entire USian war machine.
Meanwhile, as our attackers' ecogenocidal hatred skyrockets to ever-more-obscenely sadistic fanaticism*, I would not be a bit surprised were the "Republican" (sic) ChristoNazi/Neoconfederate Party to officially change its name to something more factually descriptive.
__________________
*See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/28/ice-protesters-conspiracy-charges (with a salute of gratitude to Margaret Reis for daring defy the ever-more-tyrannical USian censorship); see also https://jessica.substack.com/p/north-carolina-bill-would-legalize?r=cb67r and this non-paywalled portrait of the ChristoNazi approach to K-12 "education" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/27/us/texas-schools-police-force-students-uvalde.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mVA.lRbe.dXDdhpnm7xtO&smid=url-share
The extinction of the human race will be a positive outcome for the earth since humans through various means such as war, the release of carbon and other substances are destroying the earth and its innocent creatures. When the human race disappears not only will the earth and its creatures be able to better prosper, but in the universe it will not even be noticed, everything will go on with no disruption. The human race has a case of hubris it really believes it is special, when in fact it is practically nothing in terms of the entire universe. If we understood this we would better take care of our home and the innocent creatures that live with us.
I have also been looking, but haven’t been successful in finding God.
As much as I agree with much of this article, and am very concerned about the direction our country has taken, I'm not going to share it because it is too hopeless. We need people who have a vision for the future and who can share innovative ways to get there. These people exist and they are all across the U.S. and around the world. As challenging a time as this is, I believe that the future is still up to us. There are a lot of people working to shift how our economy functions, and if enough of us learn and participate in that transformation, we might just find extraordinary results. The energy we bring to this challenge is important. We can learn from the past, but we shouldn't let it determine our future. In this 21st century, that is still up to us, imo.
As much as I would prefer to lean into your position, the record and apparent course of history are obviously more as Hedges describes. Every time some progress is achieved, the oligarchs manipulate a reaction; consider Jim Crow, McCarthyism, Reagan and now Trump II. Power exists, corrupts, and will not go gently. Those good visionary people you praise surely exist, but power doesn't care about them, dismisses them, and will crush them unless they organize and defend themselves assiduously. Power only bows to power.
If there is to be any hope, we need to think differently than we have in the past. We need to think with both mind and heart, and connect with others more effectively than we have in the past. It's easy to lie down and accept our 'fate' based on the past. Doing things in a way that hasn't been done before is not easy, but is necessary if we are going to survive as a species. I chose not to have children because I didn't like the way the world worked. But I know many young people who give me hope.
And what is your plan for an effective peaceful resistance?
It's not so much about resistance as about transformation. Pete Seeger said that, if there's a human race 100 years from now, it will be because of all the little things done by millions of people every day. We have been stuck in an extractive economy and mindset for a few hundred years. Not that it is easy to change that, but people are only just starting to learn about different ways our economy might function that would actually value people and the natural systems that support our lives.
Who constitutes your “we”?
I can see the writing on the wall.
Why kid ourselves?
We are, broadly speaking, a very pathetic species. We seem born to find ways to war with one another, covet material things, and destroy what gives us life. Chris is right not to be optimistic. I find it harder and harder to be. Especially when I encounter those who mimic the sociopathic and blindly ignorant actions of Felon Trump and so many others. We are also a very gullible species, so easily led by con men and shysters of all types; smooth-talking preachers to charming used car salesman-types. Organized religions have only helped fan the flames of righteous intent and holy wars, in the name of our unique "Gods". How very sad. We slaughtered the natives who dared resist our "Christianizing them". Manifest Destiny itself was a crime on humanity by humanity, so to speak. I don't know what to feel minimally hopeful about. Our political parties have disintegrated into two parts of the same corrupt system, well beyond any salvaging. Revolution is indeed, in some forms, our only hope. Meanwhile, let us do what each of us can to resist. Go down fighting is better than being mowed down while running away. Thank you Chris for always speaking in the raw, bold colors of truth which always tells us what's really going on.
Big Capital was running scared when COVID-19 shut it all down.
The shutdown had the powerful effect of a general strike, but there were no workers to blame or cudgel to death, only a natural force. They bought us off with unemployment benefits (which my state, at least, is trying to claw back by claiming 'fraud' and threatening prosecution).
For this reason--having experienced out very frightening the shutdown was to corporations--I think our only hope is a massive union movement, powerful enough to declare a general strike. That is why Amazon, Starbucks, Hachette's and so many other big corporations fight worker organizing tooth and nail. Labor organizing in this country has a long history of bloodshed required for any gains, which we are NOT taught in public or private schools, for a reason. If we all knew what it had taken our grandparents and great-grandparents & great-greats to get a living wage, an eight-hour day [where has THAT gone], some semblance of safety in the workplace, we might be more prepared to fight tooth and nail ourselves and to stand together instead of nurturing racist hate. We would grow up knowing what it would take. The U.S. labor force was bought off, got comfortable, and let our most powerful weapon--mutual aid embodied in the unions--wither away and be replaced by the myth of the American Dream instead.
The Smith Act--which made attempting to overthrow the U.S. Government by use of force or violence, should have been used to prosecute Donald Trump for January 6. It was only ever used successfully against Lefties. To this day both Democrats and Republicans see nothing wrong with imposing crippling sanctions on Socialist governments or assassinating Socialist leaders, while sending billions in aid to repressive authoritarian genocidal leaders, many of whom were installed via the efforts of the CIA and/or Southern Command or some other arm of the U.S. military. If Socialism is so doomed to failure because it is an inferior system, why is there a need to try to cripple nations like Cuba and Venezuela? Why try to foment rebellion by making it impossible to buy fuel, food, and medicine? The media--including NPR--just buy into this worldview without questioning it. We are fed this worldview with mother's milk. And this is another reason we don't have widespread rebellion in the U.S.; why it takes the form of demagoguery and white supremacy instead of worker solidarity--because our cultural institutions allowed not just labor history & Marxist thought to be expunged from our educations, but actively promoted a worldview that these truths are a given:
--The United States is the Land of the Free, and a force for Good in the world (like Pinochet),
--Socialist governments are evil and of course we should do everything we can to topple them
--Never mind about genocide when it's happening in a capitalist nation--all the little children and grandparents and journalists and emergency medical personnel they killed were terrorists.
Oops--"The Smith Act--which made attempting to overthrow the U.S. Government by use of force or violence ILLEGAL, ..."
Running scared? Hardly. IMO Big Capital orchestrated the Plandemic. The only natural forces at play are the people that continue to die from a pharmaceutical solution(s) far too many were either coerced into taking--or too gullible to accept as necessary and legal.
We aren’t on the cusp of fascism. We have arrived.
“They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.”
We have seen this on full display in the UK, Germany, and the US already.
Agreed - Fascism is here - on fool display.
The human brain has been engaged with an internal cerebral civil war by natural selection for millenia. We have the intelligence to probe nature from the subatomic to the cosmos. We have torn the physical world apart and then fashion things to our suiting. Within short order we promptly disgard the remains.
We do not appear to be remotely close to restraining ourselves from our plundering inclinations that we find so intoxicating. Regardless of the consequences, economic growth is the engine of industrial civilization.
What could possibly go wrong?
Human exceptionalism.. .the fairy tale that we can ignore limits. Natural laws are dismissed in economics. By some miracle we can assume the universe will understand.
It doesn't.
We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Overshoot is our Zietgeist.
Technology keeps the reality out of view.
Ecologist William Rees was interviewed by Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification which is but one of numerous conversations available.
What “we” is that? I take no responsibility for the behavior of our Kings and Tyrants. That has about as much sense as blaming the Tudor peasants for removing Ann Boleyn’s head.
"We", is the human species as a net result.
Chris is at his inspiring and perspicacious best in this excellent article.
The contribution that Chris Hedges makes to the causes of decency, fairness and humanity are incalculable.
"Inspiring" is not an adjective I would ascribe to this blog. It's a contorted rehash of Chris hedging his position between activism and journalism.
Despite all forms of resistance, it may be that addiction to power and luxury ultimately ends the human experiment. Then what? Maybe our "specialness" turns out not to be so special, while other species we now look down on prevail. Even so, to quote Chris: I fight fascism not because I think I can win, but because it's fascism.
What struck me reading both the essay and the comments is how much our view of the future depends on which slice of history we choose to emphasize.
The pessimists point to empire, oligarchy, corruption, and recurring cycles of domination. The optimists point to abolition, labor victories, expanded rights, and moments where ordinary people forced institutions to change. Both are using history as evidence.
Perhaps that is why I find history so useful and so dangerous at the same time.
History rarely tells us what will happen next. More often, it reveals which patterns we have chosen to notice.
Hedges sees the world through the eyes of someone who has spent decades reporting from places where institutions failed and violence became the language of politics. That perspective deserves respect. But so does the perspective of those who study the slow, imperfect gains won through organizing, reform, and cultural change.
The question I came away with is not whether the future holds tyranny or revolution.
It is whether we are living through one of those moments when the old stories no longer explain reality and people begin searching for new ones.
History is full of such moments. The outcome is usually obvious only in hindsight.
Citizens United did not turn elections over to the billionaire class. That was done in 1976, when the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech in Buckley v. Valeo. Buckley enabled unlimited expenditures by billionaires in elections. Citizens United expanded Buckley’s ruling to corporations. Today, corporations play a relatively minor role as compared to billionaires in buying elections. Thus, if CU were overturned, billionaires would still be able to buy elections under Buckley. Even the NYT got this right in a May 6 article by Danny Hakim captioned, “A Look Inside the Case that Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires.” The case is Buckley, not Citizens United. (John Bolton was instrumental in getting the issue before the Court. That should tell us something). Nonetheless, most of the comments on the NYT article focused on Citizens United, as if those posters had not even read the article. That’s evidence of how successful Democratic Party affiliated political activists have been in propagandizing CU for fundraising purposes. Recent pieces, including one in Ralph Nader’s Radio Hour, have revealed that the results of this fundraising have gone into the pockets of the operatives — and stayed there. That campaign could do little else because, again, CU does not allow billionaires to buy elections — Buckley does. See also, for example, “Money, Politics, and the First Amendment: Fifty Years of Supreme Court Decisions and Campaign Finance Reforms (2026), edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone. The relative influence of billionaires and corporations in today’s elections can also be researched, as can the beneficiaries of the cynical CU campaign. Is CU a bad decision? Of course. But it would not exist without Buckley. If Buckley were overturned, Citizens United would go with it. Again, the reverse is not true.
Why is this important? Because any overthrow of the current system is going to have to include the courts. And the legalized bribery of politicians by way of Buckley, as extended by CU and other Buckley progeny, has done incalculable damage to the power of the people. To have a proper prescription, you need to do a proper diagnosis. Seeing journalists, including independent journalists, invoke Citizens United without mentioning Buckley is irresponsible, at best. I have a lot of respect for Hedges, but this issue is not in his lane. The CU propaganda just keeps getting circulated. It’s an obstacle to formulating a real remedy.
I strongly disagree with the binary choice. Historically, movements such as the Nonpartisan league have succeeded and took over the election machinery to throw out all the capitalist tools and install actual Laborist representatives who made a huge difference. True, the response to the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota was that the parasitic financiers freaked out and poured infinite nationwide money and agents into little North Dakota to sow internal division and fake issues that finally broke the movement, the same playbook that they have used to keep working people's movements down ever since. But the fact is that if you can assemble enough focused energy to do a revolution, then you can instead use the tools our founders gave us to peacefully install a true Laborist government and fundamentally transform our economy. I have written about this strategy at length https://laboristmovement.substack.com/p/laborismhttps://laboristmovement.substack.com/p/getting-there-laborist-organizinghttps://github.com/Laborism/Manifesto/blob/9b72683a2e8232c9e83682069848a8ffe6f336b1/Laborist%20manifesto.pdf , but here suffice it to say that that the strategy for seizing power is pretty simple. The hard part is getting people to get off their behinds, talk to each other, and organize.
I do have faith that America will return to the New Deal era. The capitalist system we had at the time of the robber barons was about the same than we have today. Yes, today the capitalists have more technology to supress dissent and they are well organized and live in a broader connected network of capitalists. But, still they would not be able to survive if there were nobody to exploit nor to sell their products. Hey, the people through their socialist, communist and labor unions were able to unite and bring about the New Deal, so we today can do the same.