[Marxism] Chris Hedges ruminates

[Louis Proyect]

It’s Not Going to Be OK
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090202_its_not_going_to_be_ok/
Posted on Feb 2, 2009

By Chris Hedges

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic 
crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots 
that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, 
Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter 
of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack 
Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United 
States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or 
has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is 
over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never 
have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep 
across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is 
nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the 
making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in 
bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of 
a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our 
stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, 
those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the 
demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of 
crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our 
system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common 
good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality 
and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to 
crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political 
philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as 
well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and 
Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, 
rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our 
corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them 
most, intellectually and morally useless.

Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California 
in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book “Democracy Incorporated” uses 
the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. 
Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not 
revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its 
expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to 
cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically 
manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic 
institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by 
citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to 
compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in 
Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate 
media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a 
bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity 
gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or 
Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted 
totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates 
politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

I reached Wolin, 86, by phone at his home about 25 miles north of San 
Francisco. He was a bombardier in the South Pacific during World War II 
and went to Harvard after the war to get his doctorate. Wolin has 
written classics such as “Politics and Vision” and “Tocqueville Between 
Two Worlds.” His newest book is one of the most important and prescient 
critiques to date of the American political system. He is also the 
author of a series of remarkable essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard 
Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich 
Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from 
public awareness because, as he told me, “it is harder and harder for 
people like me to get a public hearing.” He said that publications, such 
as The New York Review of Books, which often published his work a couple 
of decades ago, lost interest in his critiques of American capitalism, 
his warnings about the subversion of democratic institutions and the 
emergence of the corporate state. He does not hold out much hope for Obama.

“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to 
be challenged,” Wolin told me when I asked him about the new Obama 
administration. “This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not 
bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the 
kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say 
that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president 
we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a 
system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major 
power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any 
ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be 
challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an 
attempt to rethink the American imperium.”

Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended 
imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to 
result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that without “radical and 
drastic remedies” the response to mounting discontent and social unrest 
will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will 
be, he warned, a huge “expansion of government power.”

“Our political culture has remained unhelpful in fostering a democratic 
consciousness,” he said. “The political system and its operatives will 
not be constrained by popular discontent or uprisings.”

Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a 
comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry 
that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically 
passive. I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in our 
standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical 
totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty lead the 
working and middle classes to place their faith in demagogues, 
especially those from the Christian right?

“I think that’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “That was the 
experience of the 1930s. There wasn’t just FDR. There was Huey Long and 
Father Coughlin. There were even more extreme movements including the 
Klan. The extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and 
bleakness is a very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism.”

He said the widespread political passivity is dangerous. It is often 
exploited by demagogues who pose as saviors and offer dreams of glory 
and salvation. He warned that “the apoliticalness, even 
anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements in taking us towards 
a radically dictatorial direction. It testifies to how thin the 
commitment to democracy is in the present circumstances. Democracy is 
not ascendant. It is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The extent to 
which young people have been drawn away from public concerns and given 
this extraordinary range of diversions makes it very likely they could 
then rally to a demagogue.”

Wolin lamented that the corporate state has successfully blocked any 
real debate about alternative forms of power. Corporations determine who 
gets heard and who does not, he said. And those who critique corporate 
power are given no place in the national dialogue.

“In the 1930s there were all kinds of alternative understandings, from 
socialism to more extensive governmental involvement,” he said. “There 
was a range of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is the 
narrow range within which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed 
to work with the financial system. So the people who helped create this 
system are put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major 
effort to think outside the box.”

“The puzzle to me is the lack of social unrest,” Wolin said when I asked 
why we have not yet seen rioting or protests. He said he worried that 
popular protests will be dismissed and ignored by the corporate media. 
This, he said, is what happened when tens of thousands protested the war 
in Iraq. This will permit the state to ruthlessly suppress local 
protests, as happened during the Democratic and Republic conventions. 
Anti-war protests in the 1960s gained momentum from their ability to 
spread across the country, he noted. This, he said, may not happen this 
time. “The ways they can isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] 
a contagion are formidable,” he said.

“My greatest fear is that the Obama administration will achieve 
relatively little in terms of structural change,” he added. “They may at 
best keep the system going. But there is a growing pessimism. Every day 
we hear how much longer the recession will continue. They are already 
talking about beyond next year. The economic difficulties are more 
profound than we had guessed and because of globalization more difficult 
to deal with. I wish the political establishment, the parties and 
leadership, would become more aware of the depths of the problem. They 
can’t keep throwing money at this. They have to begin structural changes 
that involve a very different approach from a market economy. I don’t 
think this will happen.”

“I keep asking why and how and when this country became so 
conservative,” he went on. “This country once prided itself on its 
experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It is probably the 
most conservative of all the advanced countries.”

The American left, he said, has crumbled. It sold out to a bankrupt 
Democratic Party, abandoned the working class and has no ability to 
organize. Unions are a spent force. The universities are mills for 
corporate employees. The press churns out info-entertainment or fatuous 
pundits. The left, he said, no longer has the capacity to be a 
counterweight to the corporate state. He said that if an extreme right 
gains momentum there will probably be very little organized resistance.

“The left is amorphous,” he said. “I despair over the left. Left parties 
may be small in number in Europe but they are a coherent organization 
that keeps going. Here, except for Nader’s efforts, we don’t have that. 
We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It 
goes nowhere.”