NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Dear readers:
The following article, written by American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, professor at Princeton University, and author of several New York Times best-sellers, Chris Hedges, is one of those pieces that extracts real juice from the things the mainstream media almost never get to touch – because they are mostly submitted and controlled by the power to be, private interests and corporate greed. Because of lack of space, it will be published in two parts. THIS IS PART ONE OF TWO. – Marvin Ramírez.
The elites won’t save us
by Chris Hedges
The four-decade-long assault on our democratic institutions by corporations has left them weak and largely dysfunctional. These institutions, which surrendered their efficacy and credibility to serve corporate interests, should have been our firewall. Instead, they are tottering under the onslaught.
Labor unions are a spent force. The press is corporatized and distrusted. Universities have been purged of dissidents and independent scholars who criticize neoliberalism and decry the decay of democratic institutions and political parties. Public broadcasting and the arts have been defunded and left on life support. The courts have been stacked with judges whose legal careers were spent serving corporate power, a trend in appointments that continued under Barack Obama. Money has replaced the vote, which is how someone as unqualified as Betsy DeVos can buy herself a Cabinet seat. And the Democratic Party, rather than sever its ties to Wall Street and corporations, is naively waiting in the wings to profit from a Trump debacle.
“The biggest asset Trump has is the decadent, clueless, narcissistic, corporate-indentured, war-mongering Democratic Party,” Ralph Nader said when I reached him by phone in Washington. “If the Democratic strategy is waiting for Godot, waiting for Trump to implode, we are in trouble. And just about everything you say about the Democrats you can say about the AFL-CIO. They don’t control the train.”
The loss of credibility by democratic institutions has thrust the country into an existential as well as economic crisis. The courts, universities and press are no longer trusted by tens of millions of Americans who correctly see them as organs of the corporate elites. These institutions are traditionally the mechanisms by which a society is able to unmask the lies of the powerful, critique ruling ideologies and promote justice. Because Americans have been bitterly betrayed by their institutions, the Trump regime can attack the press as the “opposition party,” threaten to cut off university funding, taunt a federal jurist as a “so-called judge” and denounce a court order as “outrageous.”
The decay of democratic institutions is the prerequisite for the rise of authoritarian or fascist regimes. This decay has given credibility to a pathological liar. The Trump administration, according to an Emerson College poll, is considered by 49 percent of registered voters to be truthful while the media are considered truthful by only 39 percent of registered voters. Once American democratic institutions no longer function, reality becomes whatever absurdity the White House issues.
Most of the rules of democracy are unwritten. These rules determine public comportment and ensure respect for democratic norms, procedures and institutions. President Trump has, to the delight of his supporters, rejected this political and cultural etiquette.
Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, noted that when democratic institutions collapse it is “easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which have become pious banalities.” The chatter of the liberal ruling elites about our democracy is itself an absurdity. “Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories,” she wrote, infects political discourse. This vulgarity is “mistaken for courage and a new style of life.”
“He is destroying one code of behavior after another,” Nader said of Trump. “He is so far getting away with it and not paying a price. He is breaking standards of behavior—what he says about women, commercializing the White House, I am the law.”
Nader said he does not think the Republican Party will turn against Trump or consider impeachment unless his presidency appears to threaten its chances of retaining power in the 2018 elections. Nader sees the Democratic Party as too “decadent and incompetent” to mount a serious challenge to Trump. Hope, he said, comes from the numerous protests that have been mounted in the streets, at town halls held by members of Congress and at flash points such as Standing Rock. It may also come from the 2.5 million civil servants within the federal government if a significant number refuse to cooperate with Trump’s authoritarianism.
“The new president is clearly aware of the power wielded by civil servants, who swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, not to any president or administration,” Maria J. Stephan, the co-author of “Why Civil Resistance Works,” writes in The Washington Post. “One of Trump’s first acts as president was a sweeping federal hiring freeze affecting all new and existing positions except those related to the military, national security and public safety. Even before Trump’s inauguration, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives reinstated an obscure 1876 rule that would allow Congress to slash the salaries of individual federal workers. This was a clear warning to those serving in government to keep their heads down. Trump’s high-profile firing of acting attorney general Sally Yates, who refused to follow the president’s immigration ban, sent shock waves through the bureaucracy.”
A sustained, nationwide popular uprising of nonviolent obstruction and noncooperation is the only weapon left to save the republic. The elites will respond once they become afraid. If we do not make them afraid we will fail.
