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The Politics of Cultural Despair Chris Hedges

Published

1 month ago

November 6, 2024

The Morning After – by Mr. Fish

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In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

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December 8, 2024 Garamond

Published

1 hour ago

December 9, 2024

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Ukrainians Are Sick of the War. But We’re Not Allowed to Say It. Dmytro Filimonov

Published

3 hours ago

December 9, 2024

Dmytro Filimonov in 2015. (Courtesy of the author)

Dmytro Filimonov, 41, is a Ukrainian journalist based in Kyiv. He was one of the first reporters to travel to the separatist-controlled territories of Donbas in 2014–2015 at the very onset of the conflict that would trigger Russia’s full-scale invasion eight years later. Now, having observed the war up close for the last three years, talking to both soldiers and civilians, Russians and Ukrainians, he has found that many of his compatriots just want the conflict to end, but avoid saying so out of fear of being labeled a traitor. Here, he tells his story to our Tanya Lukyanova.

KYIV, Ukraine — On February 24, 2022, I woke up to a phone call from a friend. “It’s started,” he said.

“What started?” I asked. “The war,” he replied. Only then did I hear the sound of the sirens in Kyiv signaling that yes, Russia had begun an invasion, announcing itself with bombs and shellings.

Every hour of that first day brought fresh news of air strikes—in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Kramatorsk, Odessa. By evening, president Volodymyr Zelensky reported that 137 Ukrainians had died. He also imposed martial law that day.

My younger brother, Anton, enlisted on that first day of the war. I’ve always thought that if war ever came, I would be a conscientious objector. But when the bombs began falling on my hometown, I found myself consumed with an animalistic rage and nearly enlisted, too. Instead, however, I instinctively began helping people escape from Ukraine—organizing transportation for women, children, and the elderly. Leaving wasn’t an option for me. Kyiv is my home. I wasn’t afraid to die. I just wanted to help as much as I can. Within a week, I had four drivers who traveled all over Kyiv, evacuating civilians. Soon, we were helping organize escape routes in other cities, too.

That sense of unity in Ukraine, in those early days of the invasion, was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I was amazed by my compatriots—by their courage, their humor, the strength of their spirit. During the first week of the war, I saw women handing flowers to soldiers as they marched off to war. When a man who had used his truck to block approaching Russian tanks was given a medal, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know why I did it. I was just drinking.”

At the same time, Ukrainian men from all over the world were rushing home. People had a clear idea what they were fighting for. Hundreds of thousands were standing up as one to defend their land against the Russians who had invaded our country.

And in just over a month, Ukraine managed to achieve the impossible—we drove the mighty Russian army out of the Kyiv region. It was hailed as “the defeat of the ages.” Russian soldiers fled in disarray, abandoning equipment and supplies as our forces pushed them out. In dozens of villages all over Ukraine, citizens emerged from their shelters and hugged soldiers in the streets. Despite the devastation, there was a profound sense of triumph. It felt like a moment of victory. To me, it was victory.

But instead of seizing that moment to negotiate from a position of strength, a political decision was made to push forward. As a former actor, our president, Zelensky, is highly attuned to public perception—and perhaps that’s his biggest weakness. His image is of paramount importance to him. His heroic actions in the early days of the invasion rightly earned him a place in history, but by April 2022, his focus appeared to shift. Optics took priority over human lives. And now, nearly three years later, that sense of unity feels like a distant memory.

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Kash-ing in: The money-making schemes of Trump’s pick for FBI Director Judd Legum

Published

10 hours ago

December 9, 2024

The current FBI Director, Christopher Wray, was appointed by Donald Trump during his first term. The FBI Director serves a 10-year term, so Wray is not scheduled to depart until 2027. The purpose of having a 10-year term is to insulate the position from political pressures.

Trump, however, is unhappy with Wray for a variety of reasons. At the top of the list is Wray’s oversight of the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, which revealed that Trump was storing highly classified documents in a bathroom. Trump was later indicted based, in part, on evidence collected in the raid. (A federal judge appointed by Trump later dismissed the case.)

On November 30, Trump announced his intention to replace Wray with Kash Patel. Trump considered appointing Patel as Deputy FBI Director at the end of his first term. But the move was blocked by former Attorney General Bill Barr. “I categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director. I told [Trump Chief of Staff] Mark Meadows it would happen ‘over my dead body,'” Barr wrote in his book. Barr said that Patel lacked any qualifications for the job.

What Patel lacks in experience, he makes up for in subservience and loyalty to Trump. He validates Trump’s conspiratorial view of the FBI. In his book, “Government Gangsters,” Patel called the FBI “so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken.” Trump endorsed the book on Truth Social, calling it “the roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign.”

In a podcast appearance promoting the book, Patel vowed to “find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media.” He said that “[w]e’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” The appendix of the book includes 60 members of the “deep state” that Patel would target, including President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Barr, and Wray. Trump called the book a “blueprint to take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government.”

Patel has little experience in law enforcement other than a brief tenure as a federal prosecutor. But he has spent many years monetizing his cartoonish loyalty to Trump.

A $37 “Trumpamania” T-shirt

Patel has translated his devotion to Trump into a massive following on Truth Social, with nearly 1.4 million followers. He uses that following to sell pro-Trump clothing through his apparel brand, Based Apparel. You can buy a “Trumpamania” t-shirt for $37, a hoodie featuring a glamour shot of Trump’s attorney Alina Habba for $59.99, or a Trump “Comeback” t-shirt for $40.

Patel often wears his own gear during podcast and TV appearances.

Patel’s pro-Trump children’s book trilogy

Patel published a children’s book trilogy portraying himself as a wizard and Trump as king. His first children’s book, entitled “The Plot Against the King,” follows “Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight” who “spread lies that King Donald had cheated to become King,” by “claim[ing] he was working with the Russionians!” Patel is depicted as a “Distinguished Discoverer” seen wearing blue wizard robes. On the cover, Trump is shown wearing a crown.

Trump said the “amazing book” should be “in every school in America.”

Patel’s second children’s book, “The Plot Against the King 2,000 Mules” follows “Dinesh and Debbie” as they “search for the truth and uncover evidence of a terrible scheme to elect Sleepy Joe instead of King Donald on Choosing Day.” The book also includes a “special message from Dinesh D’Souza,” a far-right polemicist behind the documentary 2000 Mules which contains baseless allegations about election fraud. The movie was pulled by its distributor and D’Souza recently issued an apology for misrepresenting key video footage.

The third book in Patel’s trilogy is “The Plot Against the King 3: The Return of the King.” The book “continues the silly yet important journey of the MAGA King as he returns to take down Comma-la-la-la and reclaim his throne.” It is described as a “fun story” and “great way to start a conversation with your kids about the election.” You can buy a special signed copy of the book for $99.99.

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“Rid your body of the harms of the vax”

Patel has also sought to exploit health conspiracy theories popular with Trump supporters. Earlier this year, Patel pushed “Nocovidium” and other dietary supplements produced by Warrior Essentials. Patel marketed the supplements as a “mRNA vaccine detoxification system,” which Patel claimed would “rid your body of the harms of the vax.”

COVID vaccines are life-saving, not toxic. NBC News reported that “there is no evidence that Warrior Essentials’ supplements are effective at reducing vaccine side effects — which are mostly mild or moderate and tend to resolve quickly.” A month of the “treatment” costs $150 and the company recommends taking the supplements for “3 to 12 months.”

K$H cabernet

Patel has used his fealty to Trump to develop his own brand, K$H. Through “Great American Craft Spirits” Patel sells cases of “K$H Cabernet Sauvignon,” which has “hints of blackberry, dark chocolate, plum and a touch of French oak.” A case of 6 bottles sells for $243.99.

$10 of every sale benefits an unnamed charity.

An alternative to “credit cards for libs”

Patel has promoted Coign, “the conservative credit card.” On Truth Social, he said Coign was perfect for people sick of “Harris credit cards for libs.” A video posted by Patel says, “every transaction supports conservative causes” and advances a “conservative future.” The company donates 0.25% of each transaction to “non-profits or charitable organizations that have been pre-vetted by Coign.”

Among the charitable beneficiaries is The Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025.

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Payment processing “tailored for American patriots”

Patel has “joined forces with Revere Payments,” which he describes as payment processing that is “designed for those who hold the values of this great nation close to their heart.” In a Truth Social post promoting the service, Patel said the choice was to work with Revere Payment or be “in zuckerbucks mafia.” (It is unclear what Mark Zuckerberg has to do with payment processing.)

Pro-Trump “consulting”

In addition to hawking pro-Trump merchandise and services, Patel has also been paid handsomely for offering consulting services to entities connected to Trump and his allies. According to an SEC filing, Trump Media & Technology Group paid Patel at least $130,000 in consulting fees. (The consulting contract ended in March 2024.) Patel was also paid “$325,000 over two years for ‘strategy consulting’ for the pro-Trump Save America PAC.” Former Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who Trump nominated for Attorney General but was forced to withdraw, paid Patel $145,000 for “fundraising consulting.”