Chris Hedges: It’s Worse Than You Think - Truthdig
Few want to hear what Chris Hedges has been telling us for many years.
The only thing we should expect from a Trump presidency is a rapid
acceleration and intensification of the disastrous policies of global
rape and pillage that were already well advanced under Obama and the
Bush and Clinton dynasties. He will remove the liberal veneer to reveal
the fascist beast lurking inside.
Hedges warns that the problem
until now has been what he terms "magical thinking": a refusal to see
the desperate reality around us to allow us instead to take solace in
comforting illusions. Liberals did that under Obama, and many are doing
it now faced with a Trump White House.
Hedges:
There
were some, such as Ralph Nader, who saw this dystopia coming. They
desperately tried to build a viable third party and empower citizen
movements to give the dispossessed working class a vision and hope. They
knew that the longer corporate power had a stranglehold on the economic
and political system, the more we seeded the ground for an American
fascism.
The elites put up numerous obstacles—refusing to let
Nader or later, Jill Stein, into the debates, making ballot access
difficult or impossible, turning campaigns into long, money-drenched
spectacles that cost billions of dollars, and skillfully using the
politics of fear to intimidate voters. But the elites were aided by a
bankrupt liberal class. In presidential election after presidential
election, especially after Nader’s success in 2000, so-called
progressives succumbed to the idiotic mantra of the least worst. Those
who should have been the natural allies of third parties and dissident
movements abjectly surrendered to the Democratic Party that, like the
Republican Party, serves the beast of imperialism and makes war on the
poor, the working class and the middle class. The cowardice of the
liberal class meant it lost all credibility, much as Bernie Sanders did
when he sold his soul to the Clinton campaign. The liberal class proved
it would stand and fight for nothing. It mouthed words and ideas it did
not truly believe. It bears significant responsibility for the phenomena
that created Trump. It should have had the foresight to abandon the
Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton passed the 1994 North
American Free Trade Agreement, to build parties and institutions that
defended the interests of the working class. If it had stood up for
working men and women, it might have prevented them being seduced by
protofascists. ...
Trump is emblematic of what anthropologists
call “crisis cults.” A society in terminal decline often retreats into
magical thinking. Reality is too much to bear. It places its faith in
the fantastic and impossible promises of a demagogue or charlatan who
promises the return of a lost golden age. The good jobs will come back.
The nation will again be prosperous. The decrepit cities will be
rebuilt. America will be great again. These promises, impossible to
achieve, are no different from those peddled to Native Americans in the
1880s by the self-styled religious prophet Wovoka. He called on
followers to carry out five-day dance ceremonies called the Ghost Dance.
Native Americans donned shirts they were told protected them from
bullets. They were assured that the buffalo herds would return, the dead
warriors and chiefs would rise from the earth and the white men would
disappear. None of his promises was realized. Many of his followers were
gunned down like sheep by the U.S. army.
We face the most
profound crisis in human history. Our response is to elect a man to the
presidency who does not believe in climate change. Once societies unplug
themselves from reality, those who speak truth become pariahs and
enemies of the state. They are subject to severe state repression. Those
lost in the reverie of the crisis cult applaud the elimination of these
Cassandras. The appealing myths of magical thinking are pleasant
opiates. But this narcotic, like all narcotics, leads to squalor and
death.
New York City police officers guard Trump Tower, President-elect Donald Trump’s Manhattan home. (Richard Drew / AP)
