Chris Hedges - The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism
College-educated
elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on
the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in
politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for
decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the
language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and
bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back
of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.
There are tens of
millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at
what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have
risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on
them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites
are embracing an American fascism.
These Americans want a
kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like
“nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom
to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have
enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers,
African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their
cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and
figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan
and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss
intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence
those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to
revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the
core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the
liberal state.
The Democrats are
playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their
presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the
college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of
ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness, while
selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.
The Republicans,
energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce, Donald
Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the Democrats
are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting Tuesday, 5.6 million
votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the Republicans.
Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for the Democrats and
about 5 million for the Republicans.
Richard Rorty in his
last book, “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998, presciently saw where our
postindustrial nation was headed.
Many writers on
socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are
heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely
to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has
suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The
Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and
unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their
government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs
from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban
white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not
going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point,
something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system
has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing
to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers,
overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling
the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t
Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office,
nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made
about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly
overoptimistic.
One thing that is very
likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and
brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for
women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once
again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has
tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the
resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners
dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Fascist movements
build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive,
the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in
the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the
disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced
a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral
guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy
prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt,
echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not
brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”
In fascism the
politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled by the
establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.
As Arendt noted, the
fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930s “… recruited their members
from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had
given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was
that the majority of their membership consisted of people who had never before
appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely
new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of
political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and
against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never
been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not
need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which
ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.
They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social,
or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore
beyond the control of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they
had sincerely entered into competition with either parties; it was not if they
were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all
parties.”
Fascism is aided and
advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a
bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or
support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters,
is the best Clinton can offer.
Fascism expresses
itself in familiar and comforting national and religious symbols, which is why
it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian fascism, which looked back to
the glory of the Roman Empire, for example, never shared the Nazis’ love of
Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism too will reach back to traditional
patriotic symbols, narratives and beliefs.
Robert Paxton wrote in
“The Anatomy of Fascism”:
The language and
symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do
with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and
reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original
fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as [George]
Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic
to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and
Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass
recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of
fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them
into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.
Fascism is about an
inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral renewal, new glory and
revenge. It is about the replacement of rational debate with sensual
experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and fabrications by Trump have no
impact on his followers. Fascists transform politics, as philosopher and
cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate
aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said, is war.
Paxton singles out the
amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist movements.
Fascism rested not
upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the
historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of
national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius,
though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal
creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm
of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a
race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the
excitement of participating in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing
one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination.
There is only one way
left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around Trump. It is to build,
as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power,
engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the
disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the
country. This movement will never come out of the Democratic Party. If Clinton
prevails in the general election Trump may disappear, but the fascist
sentiments will expand. Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up
from the bowels of the decayed political system. We are fighting for our
political life. Tremendous damage has been done by corporate power and the college-educated
elites to our capitalist democracy. The longer the elites, who oversaw this
disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does CBS
Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be for
America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in charge, the
worse it is going to get.
