PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to
Reality Asserts Itself. We're continuing our series of interviews with writer Chris Hedges.
And if you haven't seen the other parts, I suggest you go back and watch from part one
forward, 'cause then this will all make more sense. But if you don't want to, it will probably
still make some sense.
Now joining us again in the studio in Baltimore is Chris Hedges. He's a Pulitzer prize-winning
journalist, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, and he writes a regular column
at Truthdig.
Thanks again.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.
JAY: Millions of people unemployed, millions of people have lost their houses, and for
a long time the left was saying the crash is coming, the crash is coming, the people
will rise up. Well, the crash came, and some people rose up, but not in the kind of critical
numbers that would have shaken or, as in the previous episode you said, terrified the elites.
Why?
HEDGES: Because the traditional liberal elite divorced itself from the issue of justice
to embrace for the last few decades issues such as gender equality, multiculturalism,
identity politics, all of which I support. But while they busied themselves with these
activities, the working class was being destroyed through NAFTA and the outsourcing of jobs,
the stagnation, in essence reduction of the minimum wage.
The Democratic Party used to watch out for the interests of labor and even for the poor.
But that all changed under Bill Clinton. Although Clinton, like Obama, continues to speak in
that feel-your-pain language of traditional liberalism, they've completely betrayed the
very people that they purport to represent and defend.
JAY: And even the previous ones, I mean, Truman on, they had a chance many times, for example,
to undo Taft-Hartley, you know, terrible anti-labor legislation, and they never undid it.
HEDGES: They never did, although Truman did try to push through universal health care.
JAY: The union movement and union leadership, you know, at times during Democratic administrations
can get critical, but when push comes to the shove they never threaten the Democrats in
any way. And maybe the worst example of it has been with the Obama administration where
in the leadup to the election Obama promises them EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, which
was going to make it easier to organize unorganized workers. In the first two years, where they
control both houses, it doesn't come forward, and of course afterwards you never see it,
and now we don't even hear it again. And I interviewed John Sweeney at the time, head
of the AFL-CIO, and I said, what are you going to do if President Obama doesn't pass this?
He's going to pass it. He's going to pass it. He's never going to betray us. And, of
course, he did betray them, and the union movement was out again in the next election
just as if nothing had happened.
HEDGES: Right. Well, these people, I mean, the heads of these unions pull down salaries
that are five times what the rank and file pulls down. They negotiate deals, such as
they did with the auto bailout, where their most senior unionized workers have their wages
reduced and the auto companies are allowed to hire new workers at $14 an hour without
benefits. So they sell out the younger workers to protect, to an extent, older workers. They
have no kind of vision of what kind of a country they want to create, i.e. one that would actually
respond to the needs of the working class. And, you know, I think they're pretty bankrupt.
I mean, they have become part of the establishment. And rhetorically they can get up and say all
the right things in the same way that Barack Obama can get up and say all the right things,
but in the end, you know, it's Wall Street and the corporations that are pulling the
strings on the puppets.
JAY: I talked to a behind-the-scenes organizer for the unions. He advises them on policy
and things. And I asked him, why do you guys not contend for some kind of leadership of
the Democratic Party? And his answer was: well, Wall Street is the only one--pro-Democratic
Party Wall Street is the only one with enough cash to beat the Republicans, so we can't
take them on.
HEDGES: Right. And the unions don't--I mean, the Democrats will still take their money,
but, you know, it's a fraction of the money that fills the coffers of the Democratic Party.
Most of the money comes from, you know, these massive Wall Street firms and corporations
that can dwarf anything that the union can provide.
JAY: And perhaps it goes back to something you were saying before as well about how the
liberal elites, you said, kind of got disassociated from working-class issues. So the fight within
the unions for what kind of leadership, for what kind of union, it kind of was going on
somewhere over here, and the left was somewhere over there. And not that there weren't activists
in the unions fighting, but they were kind of on their own.
HEDGES: Well, and meanwhile the working class was being decimated, so that now our working
class is largely enveloped within the service sector, where, you know, couples will have
two or three different jobs with no kind of benefits, no kind of [incompr.] Walmart nation.
There is no force within either of the established political parties that are willing to stand
up and defend the interests, even on the issue of minimum wage. That's only going to, again,
come by stepping outside the formal mechanisms of power and beginning to build movements,
as we saw with the Chicago teachers strike. I mean, let's remember that the Chicago teachers
strike was fighting against a Democratic mayor, not just any mayor, but one of the pillars
of the Democratic establishment, Rahm Emanuel, that they had to essentially remove the traditional
leadership. And that's really going to be the future, that we're going to be fighting--we're
fighting both parties. We're not fighting one party.
JAY: And the teachers were willing to make the sacrifice to fight when they had a leadership
that wanted to go there.
HEDGES: That's right.
JAY: In the beginning of the interview, I asked you why the left hasn't been able to
take more advantage of this moment, and you talked a bit about the failure of the liberal
elite. But why should a people's movement, why should a working-class movement, why should
it matter what the liberal elite does or doesn't do? I mean, one would assume the liberal elite,
when push comes to shove, are a part of the elite.
HEDGES: Yes, they are. That is, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the role of the liberal establishment,
to act as a kind of safety valve, to ameliorate the suffering and respond to some of the grievances
of the underclass to right the system, which is again, going back to the New Deal, precisely
what happened. Roosevelt and Henry Wallace functioned as traditional liberal leaders
functioned. And they keep the system afloat.
Now, the problem is that the radical movements that were able to push the liberal elites
to respond have been destroyed. We don't have any anymore. In the long war against our internal
and external enemies in the name of anti-communism, they've been utterly decimated, culminating
in the 1950s with these huge purges. Ellen Schrecker has written two good books about
this. You know, thousands, thousands of high school teachers, social workers, artists,
directors, journalists like I. F. Stone were pushed out. I. F. Stone--.
JAY: And particularly trade unionists.
HEDGES: And trade unionists. So you end up with these distortions like, in the 1960s,
Meany and Kirkland, who support Nixon's war in Indochina, denounce the hippies in the
street. I mean, when Joe Sacco and I did our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,
one of the chapters is out of southern West Virginia. Now, pre-World War I, Mother Jones
was a hero to the miners, like John Lewis and all of these radical figures. Now it's
Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
Why is that? It's because there's been a divorce of radical movements from the working class
and radical ideologies from the working class. And the way that divorce came about is that
those who had these kind of broad social visions which challenged the primacy of corporate
capitalism got pushed out of the system. They're not there anymore. And so now at a moment
of crisis--and we are certainly in a moment of crisis--we lack the movements which can
give expression to the suffering of our underclass, and our liberal elites which once responded
to those movements have been eviscerated and essentially are corporate stooges.
JAY: And it kind of goes together. When the movement's so weak, a lot of the elite says,
well, we don't need to safety valve, 'cause the pressure's not building.
HEDGES: Well, that's precisely the problem. There is no pressure from the other side.
And the liberal elites, you know, while they can speak in a rhetoric that is reminiscent
of that rhetoric--and Obama does it, certainly--serves their paymasters, which are Wall Street and
defense contractors and the fossil fuel industry.
JAY: Are you seeing any positive signs? For example, people are enthused about Bernie
Sanders getting elected in Vermont. There's the--what do you make of some of the third-party
options? The Green Party didn't have a lot of electoral success, but they did run a lot
of candidates. What significance does this kind of stuff have?
HEDGES: Right. I voted for the Green Party as a kind of protest vote, just as I voted
for Nader before that. And I think the more of us who are willing to step outside the
system and in essence vote that way, the more we can begin to build pressure.
But electoral politics is a very minor part of what we have to do. What we really have
to do is build mass movements that muck up the system enough that we can begin to interfere
with the mechanisms of power. And what I'm talking about are strikes, disruption of public
transportation, which we would see in France, for instance, farmers driving their tractors
into the middle of Paris. It's that kind of stuff that we're going to have to build. And
we're not going to build that any other way than, you know, almost starting all over again.
JAY: So what's holding people back? I mean, we're in a very difficult situation for millions
of people, but we're not seeing that. And, you know, the liberal elite being weak in
some ways, you should--one could follow the logic--then there should be more reason for
this to be happening, not less.
HEDGES: Well, because the mechanisms of control, as any Walmart worker will tell you, are quite
severe. I mean, the moment there's a whisper of organizing in a Walmart store, there's--the
corporate jet flies in with all their strike union breakers.
JAY: Although there was some success recently with some of these strikes.
HEDGES: The forces arrayed against us, the security and surveillance state knows the
moment anything is going to be organized. They've essentially shut down all public space
for any kind of serious dissent because they don't want to see a resurrection of the Occupy
movement. We are the most surveilled, monitored, eavesdropped, controlled, watched population
in human history, and I speak as somebody who covered the Stasi state in East Germany.
We are kept in a state of perpetual fear that we could lose our jobs [incompr.] so many
people in this country now are living at subsistence level. To lose their job is catastrophic.
We are seeing the corporate state dismantle programs that once provided benefits like
unemployment payments or social programs to the poor, to the elderly, to students, to
make us even more frightened and more easily manipulated. I mean, there's a kind of awful
logic to what they're doing. And, you know, it is--those forms of repression are quite
effective. We have shifted, I think, from a democratic state to a species of corporate
totalitarianism.
Our media is, you know, largely drivel. Celebrity gossip will dominate even the nightly news
programs of the three major networks. MSNBC, you know, will spin the court gossip one way.
Fox spins it another, but it's the same stupid gossip. Neither of those cable companies covered
the National Defense Authorization Act, our challenge.
JAY: But you said in an earlier episode--and I agree with you--the moment will come.
HEDGES: Yes, it will come.
JAY: You know, right now they've been able to kind of mitigate, limit the effects of
this crisis, but a lot of it has to do with a lot of hokey-pokey going on by the Fed.
You know, the underlying wages either are stagnant or going down. The unemployment is
really not going down. I mean, the real economy is in as bad a shape as it was.
HEDGES: Right. But how, if it comes, will it be localized? And if it's localized, it
can be dealt with locally. Will it have a kind of broad national vision? Will it articulate
a new system of power to replace the old system?
JAY: But, see, that's what I'm concerned about as a citizen, I mean, whatever the journalist
hat is supposed to be here, which is--. I was at dinner the other night with some people
having somewhat similar conversation, why isn't there a mass movement and all of this,
and I was saying, be careful what you wish for. You know. If there was a big explosion
tomorrow, you know, would any progressive force actually be ready for it? Because it
could easily, as you said in an earlier episode, a segment of the interview, you know, the
right could grab hold of this as well.
HEDGES: Well, right-wing populism or fascism is a very real possibility. And I think that
we are particularly vulnerable to that because our progressive populist and radical movements
virtually don't exist, and because the liberal center is so discredited. If you go back and
read Dostoevsky Notes from Underground, Demons, Dostoevsky was obsessed--I mean, that's what
Notes from Underground is about--with a liberal class that is superfluous, that no longer
has any actual authority or power within the society and has become a joke.
I saw the same thing in the breakdown of Yugoslavia, which I covered as a correspondent, where
you had a liberal center that in essence is paralyzed. It can't respond. And that's what's
happened. We have a system of political paralysis that responds only to the dictates of the
corporate elite, not to the needs and the rights of the citizenry.
And so when you have the figures like Obama who continue to speak in that traditional
language of liberalism and yet cannot respond to chronic unemployment, underemployment,
you know, foreclosures, bank repossessions, and everything else, and in fact are running
a system where the assaults against the underclass are only getting worse, then what happens
is there becomes a deep disdain for not only liberal ideology but traditional liberal institutions--you
saw the same thing in Weimar--so that when there is an uprising, oftentimes people want
nothing to do with not only liberal elites, but the supposed liberal values, quote-unquote,
that these elites were purportedly espousing.
And that is a very real danger, because when you have figures like Obama that present themselves
as traditional liberals and yet are unable to be effective in terms of dealing with the
suffering and the misery of the underclass, that--and this is what happened in Yugoslavia--that
when things exploded, you vomited up these very frightening figures--Radovan Karadzic,
Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudman--in the same way that the breakdown in Weimar vomited
up the Nazi Party. And that's what frightens me, because we don't have the movements, the
populist movements on the left, and because we live in a system of political paralysis.
So Dostoevsky said that, you know, that system leads to what he calls an age of moral nihilism,
and ultimately violence, which is what at the end of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov's
dream is about. So--and Dostoyevsky was nothing if not deeply prescient about where that was
going.
So I'm frightened, I'm frightened, because without these movements, you know, we are
not immune to these kinds of forces should we suffer economic collapse coupled with environmental
catastrophe, which of course creates economic disruption--$70 billion of damage in the last
hurricane season. We had a lot of hurricanes in category two, tornadoes and hurricanes
the size of we've never seen in human history. These aren't going away. So, you know, we
could really see ourselves headed for a very disturbing kind of dystopia.
JAY: Okay. One more segment. I think it will be the second-to-final segment. We're going
to ask the question: so what should people watching this do next? And then the final
segment is going to be viewer questions, which we promised we would do. So please join us
for the continuation of our series of interviews with Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself
on The Real News Network.