Challenges for American Democracy Ahead

With Donald Trump back in the White House, many are questioning whether the age of liberal democracy is coming to an end. So what does a second Trump term mean for the United States over the next four years? And what impact will his foreign policy have on the Middle East? This week on Upfront, I ask those questions to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former war correspondent Chris Hedges. Chris Hedges, thanks so much for joining me up front. Yeah, Mark, thanks. Good to see you. We are now officially at the beginning of the Trump administration part two. This is a president who has previously threatened to deploy the military against what he described as radical left. lunatics. He's told supporters that they might not ever need to vote again after his victory. This is somebody who called for mainstream media outlets to be investigated for treason. What do you see as some of the most significant challenges that the United States is going to face over the next four years? Well, you just named them, except everything was put in place by the Democrats to begin with. The party of censorship is the Democratic Party. The party of war is the Democratic Party. The party of mass surveillance is the Democratic Party. The party that turbocharged neoliberalism, whether it was NAFTA, the destruction of the welfare system, the deregulation of the FCC, the tearing down the firewalls between investment and commercial banks. Glass-Segal is the Democratic Party. All he has to do is flip a switch, and he has an authoritarian state. including, of course, all the executive orders, those pre-day orders. This is interesting because there are a lot of people watching who would see the policies you've laid out as the product of Republican administrations. They'd say, you know, the shrinking of the government, the expansion of the military. That's Reagan's stuff. They'd say, you know, mass criminalization. You know, it happens because of Republican efforts to change the status quo. They would look at all these policies and say, hey, Democrats were complicit, but this is rooted in Republicanism. No, it's rooted in Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter began it. Reagan picked it up. But the most seismic damage was done under Clinton, perpetuated by Bush, Obama, and everyone else. And what you had was essentially the merger of two parties into one party. And that's why with the rise of what my friend Glenn Ford used to call Trump's white man's party, you had a transformation which was, the Clinton administration was pivotal, where the Democratic Party transformed itself into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party was pushed so far to the right it became insane and cultish. And you have to think of... Trump is a cult figure, not as a political figure. And so, no, the Democratic Party is as or more complicit. And then with the breakdown of the Republican Party and its transfer of its allegiance to Trump, you saw the establishment wing of the Republican Party merge with the Democratic Party, Liz Cheney. I mean, Harris's vapid, celebrity-filled, issueless campaign. was promoting her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13% approval rating. I mean, it shows you how utterly out of touch the Democratic Party has become. But let's say the ruling class. I mean, they live in an echo chamber which is perpetuated by the media. So they actually don't have a clue about, number one, the damage that they've inflicted. Their whole— I mean, 30 million mass layoffs since 1996. And I know half of my family comes from rural Maine. I've seen what NAFTA does. Their reaction is not one I embrace, but I understand the desperation, the anger, the legitimate anger. The towns that, like where my grandparents are from in Mechanic Falls, Maine, the bank is boarded up. I mean, I remember as a boy, they were never made a lot of money, but my grandfather worked in the post office. We're deconstructing all of these institutions that once he had a pension, he had a stable income. That's vanished. It's gone. And the Democratic Party is as complicit. Let me pause you for a second because I want to drill down on some of these things. You said a lot of really important things. One of the things you just talked about was an out-of-touch elite. We're certainly seeing a growing concentration of wealth and political power. among a very small group of people. I think most notably of the fact that Trump has assembled the richest set of advisors and cabinet members in American history. They're worth a collective $450 billion. And of course, there's increased corporate influence and billionaire influence over the Democrats, the Republicans, over the whole political scene. Much of that context is important for understanding the future of American democracy. Is American democracy under threat because of this stuff? Under threat? Does it exist, Mark? I don't think it exists. It's a veneer. It's the end of the Roman Empire. You have the symbols, the iconography, and the language of a democracy, but internally corporations and oligarchs have seized all the levers of power. I looked at this election as a battle between corporatists and oligarchs. Corporatists... The Democrats, they want something very different from oligarchs. Corporatists want stability. They want decorum, the kind of decorum that Obama had or Bush had. Bush was an idiot, but at least he had some, you know, they could clean him up a little bit. And Biden, you know, whatever his cognitive failings were, because they want stability, especially in terms of trade agreements, because they make investments overseas. It takes... a while for a return on a profit. Corporatists want something different from oligarchs. Oligarchs are about chaos. They're about, as Steve Bannon said, deconstructing the administrative state. Why? Because it is a pure form of rentier capitalism. And by that, I mean that they make their money by setting up tollbooths, Amazon, all of these digital media platforms. It's not about producing goods. the more that the state is deconstructed, that's why they want to abolish the Department of Education, everything that we need as a civil society becomes privatized. And you see it in, I wrote a book called America, the Farewell Tour begins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where everything, the sewer systems privatized, the parking authority is privatized, the electricity is privatized. And of course, they've jacked up the rates. And the services are not very good. And they want to privatize the post office, so we can have a dysfunctional post office like the UK, which is privatized. And so that's what oligarchs want. And the oligarchs have won. They won. But that's what this battle was about, in terms of if we strip away the kind of trivia or the cultural differences between the two parties. That, at its core, was what it's about. And so we have, as you point out, I mean, we have now an oligarchic system. But as Aristotle wrote, Once you create an oligarchic system with those kinds of inequities, then your only two choices are tyranny or revolution. You talk about people choosing fascism, people or the conditions being set for people to almost have no alternative choice. And you've written about this idea. You wrote an article, in fact, that I thought was super interesting, how fascism came. Now, that term itself has its roots in Mussolini's authoritarian rule. during World War I, I think of brutal oppression. I think of the crushing of dissent. Is it not hyperbolic at this moment in history to say that that's what we're facing here? Well, every fascist system has its own peculiar characteristics. So you mentioned Mussolini, that was rooted in ancient Rome and the glory of Augustus and all this, whereas German fascism was rooted in Teutonic myths, and Spanish fascism under Franco was something different. Robert Paxton, when he writes his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, he calls the Klan the most authentic fascist movement in American history. And again, Paxton, in the book, says that it won't come with jackboots and the swastika. It will become with the Christian cross and mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. And I certainly came away, after spending two years with the Christian right, with a belief that these people, that they had... politicized and used Christianity to build a native fascistic movement, of course, grounded in white supremacy. And you've seen Trump has no ideology. He's just a grifter. But he has filled that ideological void with these figures like Mike Huckabee, who calls the West Bank Judean Samaria or his UN ambassador who said, you know, suddenly U.S. foreign policy is rooted in biblical myth. That's where we're headed. And so, yes, I see it as, especially as the system disintegrates. And in terms of voting for, well, I mean, any totalitarian movement is grounded in magical thinking. And when the real world becomes so onerous, so oppressive, so exploitive, and you engender that kind of despair, and all the writers of totalitarianism ground the rise of totalitarian movements, Hannah Arendt, Fritz Starr, all of them, in despair, which is what's happened to a significant part of the country, then you reach out for magical thinking. That's what Trump did. offers. He, you know, none of it is coherent, but fascism's not really a coherent ideology. Thessal Wade, in his book, Male Fantasy, talks about how it's really at its core about hyper masculinity. If you look at Trump as a cult figure in Margaret Singer's book, Cults and Our Miss, it's about endowing your cultish leader with omnipotent power to do anything. Let me push back a little bit because I hear this a lot, and I don't disagree that there's a cultish tenor to much of what we see in the Trump rhetoric and the rhetoric of his followers. But sometimes I worry that using the language of cult makes it seem as if his followers are misled, that they have the world wrong, and that they're always operating against their interests. What do you say to the person who says, well, look, yeah, that might be true in part, but Trump is also advancing policy initiatives that actually— are in line with their ideology, whether it's the anti-LGBTQ stuff, whether it's the anti-DEI stuff. There are people who fundamentally believe in what Trump is selling, and they're not being misled. They simply believe things that are in line with his movement. Well, those are the cultural kind of targets that have been picked out to, I think, mendaciously explain the despair and the economic immiseration that these people live in. The problem is Walmart. The problem is Goldman Sachs. The problem is Citibank. The problem is—but those people are not mentioned. You're mentioning undocumented workers. You're mentioning GBT, LQ, you know, people. But let's be clear. Let's go back to the Democratic Party, that they abandoned the working class and they spoke in this kind of, you know, scolding, virtue-signaling wokeness rather than being rooted in— The class war that has now largely been finished, but the class war against the working poor and the working class, which they were part of. So you have a reaction to this political correctness because it was used to demonize a working class that was being pounded to death. And so, yes, there's a there's a reaction, but none of it's dealing with the actual structures of power. None of it's dealing with the reality of why they are. where they are. So yeah, they all hate immigrants the way in Nazi Germany, they hated Jews or the way in when I was in Bosnia, the Serbs hated the Muslims and the Croats hated everybody. And so, yeah, but that's that is about transference. It's about the demonization of the other. So in that sense, Trump is a complete grifter, like all demagogues. Is that what you mean when you talk about the failure of liberalism? You said recently, fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism. Is that bankruptcy about abandoning the working class? Yeah, it's more than that, but it is largely about that. I mean, I wrote a book called Death of the Liberal Class and it takes 250 pages to go through it. Why has liberalism failed? I would go back to the Cold War. So what you did is you created the Cold War liberal. The Cold War liberal was used to eviscerate the left. And remember, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, you had... powerful, especially union movements, the old CIO, the Wobblies, the Communist Party, which we've written out of our history. We were just talking about the great W.E.B. Du Bois, and he was persecuted and stripped of his passport and arguably America's greatest intellectual, I would say. So the distortion of liberalism, and when Chomsky writes about liberalism correctly, he says liberalism is allowed to exist within a capitalist order because it's a safety valve. It ameliorates the suffering enough to allow capitalism to go forward, which is what FDR did. FDR was pressured into the New Deal reforms by the left, and that's not conjecture because I've read his private letters to his brother where he says if we don't push through these kinds of reforms, including providing employment for 12 million Americans, public works, all this Social Security, eight-hour workday. All of that was being pushed by sit-down strikes, radical unions. And he said, if we don't carry out these reforms, we will get revolution. Those are his words. That was the fear, the specter of the 1917 revolution loomed large, even in the 1930s, over the Western world. And that liberal class has been destroyed. It was used to eviscerate the left, the Cold War liberal, and eviscerate and destroy those liberals, especially with McCarthyism in the 50s. Ellen Schrecker has written some very good books on this. And so that creation of the faux, I would call it the faux liberal, the Clintons are kind of classic figures like this, where on the one hand they are the The engine, the political engine behind corporate oppression. And on the other hand, they're holding up, you know, their kind of, you know, pronoun uses and all their woke garbage. You said woke garbage. There are people who are going to hear that. You know, that language of woke has been appropriated by the right in very particular ways to deny the legitimacy of LGBTQ humanity, to deny the legitimacy of affirmative action efforts or integration efforts. Or, you know, the language of woke itself has been sort of, I mean, you hear Elon Musk using that word. Does it worry you to use that kind of language? No, because what was wokeness? Wokeness was the corporations love it. They love it. You know, so, you know, what is wokeness? A woman CEO? No, it's about empowering working class women. It's a complete inversion. Do you see wokeness as a kind of superficial approach to dealing with identity politics? Or do you see identity politics itself as a problem? See, identity politics is furthering the goals and the rapaciousness of the corporate state. They've embraced it. I mean, you had years ago when AIDS, you had, what was it, Bennington, or I don't know which one, one of these big... Abercrombie, I don't know, Calvin Klein, you know, they had HIV positive models. I mean, they obviously, obviously, I'm all for inclusion and respect and all that kind of stuff. But wokeness in the hands of the ruling class has been used as a cudgel to essentially punish and scold the working class and also about elevating their own. But is it just the working class? I mean, it seems like it's also an attempt to hold the powerful accountable, to hold corporations accountable for not being diverse. Well, yeah. Come on, Mark. We saw that ad for the CIA. You know, what am I? I'm a trans, binary, and I can torture people in Guantanamo, too. I mean, you know, who cares whether, you know, the people bombing, the Israeli Air Force pilots bombing Gaza in the genocide are... gay or trans or women, who cares? I mean, it's superficial in a sense that it doesn't deal with the mechanisms of repression. Which for you are always economic. They're primarily economic. Yeah. I mean, the distortions within American society, you can't maintain a democracy if you destroy your middle and working class. You can't. It's impossible. And that's what we've done. And so now we are facing the specter of this, you know, rolling kind of fascism. And you're right. People vote for it. People vote for it out of rage, out of anger, out of desperation. I don't I don't forgive some of the, you know, views of my relatives in Maine. But at the same time, I don't demonize them. It's mostly based on ignorance. But I don't I but but the people I can't forgive are the people like Elon Musk or Trump. I mean, let's be clear. I mean, these people are racist to the core. I mean, you know, they they don't even try and hide it that much. And they're also misogynists and everything else. So it's decoupling of ourselves from economic injustice. And look, this is what all the great, even Martin Luther King at the end, you know, there will be no civil rights until there are economic rights. And he's killed marching with the garbage workers in Memphis. I mean, so, and of course, everybody, the liberals all walked away from him. I mean, it's fine if you want to integrate Georgia. Because nobody can afford to eat where we eat in Manhattan, so we don't care. But as soon as you talk about economic justice, they went for the door. And King was, as you know, of course, a very lonely figure at the end, and a very courageous and amazing figure, but very lonely. Because of that, economic component is key. And it's key to overcoming everything you and I care about, and building a system of justice. But if you extract that drive for economic justice, Then it becomes a kind of boutique activism. Let me ask you something. I want you to put your Christian hat on for a minute. You're actually ordained as a Presbyterian minister. I don't make that public too much, but that's all right. Your father was a minister? Yes, he was. That's right. I got deep roots in it. So Trump's victory rally, there was a prayer said, and it struck me. And I immediately thought, what would Chris Hedges say? The person reading the prayer said, President Trump, we set the name of the Lord upon you, and we declare that no weapon formed against you will prosper, that every tongue that rises up against you in judgment will be condemned, and if God be for you, who can be against you? And I said, wow. I've heard that prayer lots of times. I've heard that scripture from Isaiah a lot of times in a black church and other churches. Didn't expect to hear it said over Donald Trump. When you hear it, what do you make of it? Idolatry. Moloch. We're Stripping the feet of Malak. It's idolatry. It's heresy. It's the sacralization of human and political power, which is probably the greatest sin any religious institution can make. Look, the megachurches work like this, and I learned this from Hannah Arendt. You have the, and they have much better seats than we do in the press. Presbyterian church. They're comfortable. They kind of recline. They got nice music. I mean, nice. It's all cheesy. And lights, and they make you feel good. But that is the form of what she calls indoctrination. And all fascist movements do that. They bring you into the warm embrace. I mean, that's the propaganda. Sorry. Then they move you to the back room for indoctrination. I went to both. So I went to these. prayer meetings. And one of the things I saw in these prayer meetings was the pain on the part of family members who had, quote unquote, been saved, and their family members who weren't. And they occupy, these megachurches occupy all your educational time, your religious time, your social time, your leisure time, whatever it is. They are the, and they demonize the children who aren't, quote unquote, especially if they're gay. So my friend Mel White, who founded Soulforce, he would go down, ordained minister, he would go down to the steps of these megachurches and hold memorial services for the young gay people in that church who had committed suicide. And he accused them of murder. And it is murder. So, you know, it's their propaganda. I mean, I dug deep inside to this Leviathan called the Christian right that I call American fascists. And they're Christian nationalists, right? Yeah, they're complete nationalists. And, you know, what they are is they are essentially equivalent of the so-called German Christian church established under the fascists in Germany where on one side you had the Christian cross and the other the Nazi flag. And let's be clear, Mark, this church is bankrolled by the very billionaire class that we talked about. Why? Because with Magic Jesus, you don't need labor unions. With Magic Jesus, you don't need health care. Because Magic Jesus... is going to give you a Cadillac and make all your dreams come true. And that is that shift from a reality-based world into the world of magical thinking. And once people shift into that world of magical thinking, you can't reach them through rational argument. Is that going to come through the Trump administration 2.0 even more? Yeah. These are the people who won. They just won. They won the first time, too. Yeah, but Trump was totally unprepared, unfocused. Now he's got Heritage 2025. I mean, you've seen from, you know, now they're organized. I mean, Trump is a very limited, intellectually very limited figure. He's a carnival barker. And he, you know, his first administration was. dogged by one crisis and resignation. I mean, it was just chaos. That's different this time. Church and state. The First Amendment ostensibly protects us from the mixing of the two. There's a separation of church and state. At a moment where you're saying the Christian right is overtaking the executive branch, is the separation of church and state under threat? I don't, I just, I kind of balk at calling them a church. They're a political movement. I mean, when I wrote my book, I was very upfront about who I was, where I came from. I graduated from divinity school. And what was fascinating is none of these people ever wanted to talk about the Bible with me because they don't know it. They know those, it's a kind of selective literalism where they know those passages that buttress the ideology, but they don't know the Bible. Will those ideologies that are shrouded in religious language, will those things overtake other people's freedom this time around? Yeah, of course. Because that's the fear is that suddenly people's feelings about. I mean, the first week we see executive orders that define gender and sex in very particular ways that align with their thou shalt nots. How much of that are we going to see? I mean, as much as they can get away with. I mean, they want to create a quote-unquote Christian nation. They want to go back to, you know, it's this kind of, it's a fake fundamentalism, but, you know, the foundational ethics of the quote-unquote founding fathers. I mean, when you said that this was the greatest concentration of wealth in billionaire groups, I'd love to look back. at the first, the George Washington administration, all the slaveholders, and count up how much money they were worth because it was a pretty significant part of the economy. That's an interesting point. Let me pivot because I have to talk to you about Gaza for all the reasons. It's something you pay careful attention to. You spent a lot of time, obviously, in Gaza during the seven years that you reported for the Middle East. And this past summer, you were in the West Bank. Yes. Writing your forthcoming book, which is called A Genocide Foretold, reporting on survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. First, I guess, what do you make of this ceasefire, and particularly the idea that President Trump played a pivotal role in making it happen? Optics. He wanted a pause. I mean, I think the ceasefire— It'll probably extend a little bit beyond that, but it's really a pause in bombing for the presidential inauguration. It will last. I mean, look, you know the history of the Middle East pretty well, too. But every agreement Israel has ever made with the Palestinians is done in phases, whether that's Camp David, whether that's Oslo, whether it's all the ceasefire agreements. And Israel gets what it wants in the first phase and then violates every other phase. That's a pattern. They've never broken it. So. they want two things. They want the hostages, as many as they can get back, and they want to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and the so-called Abraham Accords. Once they get that, I mean, Netanyahu has already said it. And Trump's special envoy, the Middle East, has already said it, that if they, quote unquote, violate the Palestinians, the agreement, then the mass slaughter will begin. And of course, as soon as the mass slaughter was paused in Gaza, they turned on the West Bank. especially Janine. So yeah, they're not done. I mean, you know, anybody who thinks that their campaign of erasure and dispossession of the Palestinians is, it's, we've, and we've seen these kinds of pauses before. So I think that I was, you know, I've been, I worked a lot in Gaza, I have a lot of friends in Gaza, some of whom are dead, some of whom got out, and some of them we hadn't heard from for weeks, they're probably buried under the rubble. I mean, I think for a lot of us who spent time there, it's been really difficult emotionally. to watch this live stream genocide and not just the indifference of the United States, but complete complicity. The fact that people could vote for Harris or Biden. I mean, that's, you know, genocide is not normal governance. I mean, do we have any moral line left? I mean, and I get your thoughts on the end of the occupation, the end of apartheid and whether those things can actually be achieved. Not too long ago, we spoke to Rashid Khalidi, who is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. And he stated that Israel's connection to the U.S. and Western Europe is fraying every day, and that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated on the global stage. He said sooner or later, public opinion is going to have an impact, and it's going to cause support for Israel to stop. Do you agree with that position? Yes, but it might take a generation. a generation. Sure, because this old, older generation still has a fealty to Israel that the younger generation, including Jews, do not. I mean, I was in a lot of Students for Justice in Palestine meetings and campuses across the country, and what, 30, 40 percent of them are Jewish. So, yeah, it's terminal, but I know Ilan Pape, the great Israeli historian, has talked about, I think, at one point, three years. I don't think it's that quick. I think that these— I think that's why I was surprised. Some people were saying we're a few years away from the turnaround. Yeah, I don't think so. You're like a generation away. Yeah, because that next generation isn't going to have that kind of loyalty. Now, that's why Israel is investing so much of its capital in the Christian Zionists, in the Christian fascists, because they have this warped, perverted, biblical— view of Christ returning and the rapture, which isn't even in the Bible. I mean, at its core, if you really examine it, it's pretty anti-Semitic. But I think even Israel has realized that the younger generation of Jews are a lost cause. And so they have wedded themselves to the Christian Zionists, people like Mike Hucklebee, who's about to become the ambassador or the UN ambassador. I mean, they're not alone. I mean, they're so... But that's a naked kind of fascism. We didn't get into Israel's distortions itself. It is a proto-fascist system. Yesh Yashu Leibowitz, you know, the great Israeli philosopher, kind of saw it coming. They're all the heirs of Meir Kahane. When I worked in, I lived in Israel. When I worked in Israel, the Koch party was outlawed. These are this radical racist rabbi. These people, I mean, Ben-Gavir, I think, was at Kahane's grave on the anniversary of his death not long ago. So there's a, and you know, Netanyahu's not stupid, Netanyahu. He's pretty evil, but he's not stupid. He said everybody thinks the world is moving towards a kind of enlightenment. No, that's why he builds relationships with Orban and others. He said, no, it's moving towards this kind of authoritarianism. We're what's coming next, and he may not be wrong. So Israel's becoming, I'm talking even for Israelis, a very despotic place. People who have the courage to decry the genocide and the occupation are pariahs, Gideon Levy and Amir Haas and these amazing journalists from Otis. I mean, they have become total outliers within their own society. You talk about journalism. You were the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times for several years, and of course you quit. because they reprimanded you. Well, no, I didn't quit. They keep reminding me when I see them. What they do is suddenly you're the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. It's like the old Soviet party where you get to stand up, you know, with all the other old people and look at the May Day parade or whatever, and then you suddenly find yourself in Tajikistan, so you're on night rewrite. I mean, they put you in a dead end, and they knew I'd leave. But I ran into the executive editor a couple years ago. Dean McKinney ran across the room and said, we did not fire you. We didn't. Okay. So you were not fired. I want to clear that up for your New York Times viewers. Fair enough. Fair enough. But whatever experience you had there, it was in direct response to your opposition to the Iraq War. Yeah, yeah. But also Palestine, you know. And Palestine, for sure. Because I had taken vacation time and written a magazine piece in Harper's called The Gaza Diary. And the Times went apoplectic. And when that was published, I was told you will never report from the Middle East again. So I'd already been banned from the Middle East. I opposed the Iraq War, and that was it. From that moment until now, do you see any different tenor in newsrooms? Do you hear any different sensibilities from the journalism world? Has coverage changed on the Middle East since that time? Yeah, it's worse. Far worse. Worse? Yeah. How so? Well, look at the reporting on Gaza. Look at the reporting on the student protests. You know, they go up to Columbia and race off to the Hillel House and talk about how you know, Jewish students, quote Jewish students saying they feel uncomfortable. Well, you know what? It's a genocide, you know, perpetrated by the Zionist project that you support. So maybe you should feel uncomfortable. And you see that as worse than, say, 1982 during the invasion of Lebanon or in the early 2000s? Yeah. Yeah. The whole, I mean, you know, we don't have time to critique the New York Times, which was always an elitist publication, beholden to centers of power, never good on Israel. But the space has shrunk. because that's commercial because the you know they've lost so much advertising uh their digital subscriptions don't they they bring in significant revenue but digital subscribers are very fickle about canceling so uh yeah there's less i mean there was space i worked for them for 15 years i mean i was a management headache but but that space has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and they cater for commercial not for journalistic reasons to you They've siloed themselves and they cater to a particular demographic. They're far more obsequious to that demographic than they were when I worked there. I've got to ask you one more question. Given what we're facing, are traditional forms of protest or dissent Enough. Or does the scale of the crisis, the intensity of the suffering people are experiencing right now, does it demand a more radical response than what we've traditionally done? Yeah, it demands a more radical response because we have to destroy. the system. We have to destroy the ruling class. And the only mechanism we have to destroy the ruling class is by disrupting economic, social, and political life that comes through mass mobilization, primarily through labor, and especially through the strike. We have to rebuild militant labor movements that shut the country down. That's the only way out of this. And the oligarchs have understood this for a long time. It's why they have made war. against organized labor for a long time. Only 11% of the U.S. workforce is unionized. But we have to regain that militancy. We have to understand who our enemy is and that if we don't break the back of that enemy, things are going to get worse and worse and worse. And we have to understand the only power we have is collective, and it will require sacrifice. And, I mean, we had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized country. Hundreds of American workers were killed. Thousands, probably tens of thousands were blacklisted. You know, Joe Hill, you know all this. You know, we've got to look back because the capitalist class, you know, they're going to use every vicious mechanism they have because it's all, and you saw the way, you know, they essentially made it impossible for Bernie. Without that corporate money, Bernie Sanders would have run against Trump the first time around, and I believe he would have won. But they destroyed it. They destroyed that possibility. Are you hopeful that we're close to that moment? Are we on the precipice of a radical moment of resistance? Are we at the verge of toppling power? No, because the left has been so decimated. So we don't have the left we have in the 30s. Europe went one way, fascist. We went another way, which was quasi-socialist. But our left has been so decimated and destroyed, I fear, that we don't have the forces of resistance that can... You know, create the kind of space and social equality and liberty that should be fundamental to an open society. So no, I'm actually very pessimistic. However, you know, that's where I fall back on my religious tradition where it doesn't matter. I mean, you come out of the black prophetic tradition. You know, boy, if anybody understood the world around them and the forces against them, it was the... you know, black America and the black prophetic tradition, but they fought anyway. And they fought anyway because it wasn't finally what they achieved empirically. It was who they were. It was their own dignity. And we have to protect our own dignity. The soul is real. And if we don't stand up against these rapacious forces of radical evil, our soul will die. And we may not win, but we must save our soul. Christopher Hedges, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks.

This week on Upfront, I ask those questions to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former war correspondent Chris Hedges. Chris Hedges, thanks so much for joining me up front. Yeah, Mark, thanks. Good to see you.

We are now officially at the beginning of the Trump administration part two. This is a president who has previously threatened to deploy the military against what he described as radical left. lunatics. He's told supporters that they might not ever need to vote again after his victory. This is somebody who called for mainstream media outlets to be investigated for treason.

What do you see as some of the most significant challenges that the United States is going to face over the next four years? Well, you just named them, except everything was put in place by the Democrats to begin with. The party of censorship is the Democratic Party. The party of war is the Democratic Party. The party of mass surveillance is the Democratic Party.

The party that turbocharged neoliberalism, whether it was NAFTA, the destruction of the welfare system, the deregulation of the FCC, the tearing down the firewalls between investment and commercial banks. Glass-Segal is the Democratic Party. All he has to do is flip a switch, and he has an authoritarian state.

including, of course, all the executive orders, those pre-day orders. This is interesting because there are a lot of people watching who would see the policies you've laid out as the product of Republican administrations. They'd say, you know, the shrinking of the government, the expansion of the military.

That's Reagan's stuff. They'd say, you know, mass criminalization. You know, it happens because of Republican efforts to change the status quo. They would look at all these policies and say, hey, Democrats were complicit, but this is rooted in Republicanism. No, it's rooted in Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter began it. Reagan picked it up. But the most seismic damage was done under Clinton, perpetuated by Bush, Obama, and everyone else.

And what you had was essentially the merger of two parties into one party. And that's why with the rise of what my friend Glenn Ford used to call Trump's white man's party, you had a transformation which was, the Clinton administration was pivotal, where the Democratic Party transformed itself into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party was pushed so far to the right it became insane and cultish. And you have to think of... Trump is a cult figure, not as a political figure. And so, no, the Democratic Party is as or more complicit.

And then with the breakdown of the Republican Party and its transfer of its allegiance to Trump, you saw the establishment wing of the Republican Party merge with the Democratic Party, Liz Cheney. I mean, Harris's vapid, celebrity-filled, issueless campaign. was promoting her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13% approval rating. I mean, it shows you how utterly out of touch the Democratic Party has become. But let's say the ruling class.

I mean, they live in an echo chamber which is perpetuated by the media. So they actually don't have a clue about, number one, the damage that they've inflicted. Their whole— I mean, 30 million mass layoffs since 1996. And I know half of my family comes from rural Maine.

I've seen what NAFTA does. Their reaction is not one I embrace, but I understand the desperation, the anger, the legitimate anger. The towns that, like where my grandparents are from in Mechanic Falls, Maine, the bank is boarded up.

I mean, I remember as a boy, they were never made a lot of money, but my grandfather worked in the post office. We're deconstructing all of these institutions that once he had a pension, he had a stable income. That's vanished.

It's gone. And the Democratic Party is as complicit. Let me pause you for a second because I want to drill down on some of these things.

You said a lot of really important things. One of the things you just talked about was an out-of-touch elite. We're certainly seeing a growing concentration of wealth and political power. among a very small group of people. I think most notably of the fact that Trump has assembled the richest set of advisors and cabinet members in American history.

They're worth a collective $450 billion. And of course, there's increased corporate influence and billionaire influence over the Democrats, the Republicans, over the whole political scene. Much of that context is important for understanding the future of American democracy. Is American democracy under threat because of this stuff? Under threat?

Does it exist, Mark? I don't think it exists. It's a veneer.

It's the end of the Roman Empire. You have the symbols, the iconography, and the language of a democracy, but internally corporations and oligarchs have seized all the levers of power. I looked at this election as a battle between corporatists and oligarchs.

Corporatists... The Democrats, they want something very different from oligarchs. Corporatists want stability.

They want decorum, the kind of decorum that Obama had or Bush had. Bush was an idiot, but at least he had some, you know, they could clean him up a little bit. And Biden, you know, whatever his cognitive failings were, because they want stability, especially in terms of trade agreements, because they make investments overseas.

It takes... a while for a return on a profit. Corporatists want something different from oligarchs.

Oligarchs are about chaos. They're about, as Steve Bannon said, deconstructing the administrative state. Why? Because it is a pure form of rentier capitalism.

And by that, I mean that they make their money by setting up tollbooths, Amazon, all of these digital media platforms. It's not about producing goods. the more that the state is deconstructed, that's why they want to abolish the Department of Education, everything that we need as a civil society becomes privatized.

And you see it in, I wrote a book called America, the Farewell Tour begins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where everything, the sewer systems privatized, the parking authority is privatized, the electricity is privatized. And of course, they've jacked up the rates. And the services are not very good. And they want to privatize the post office, so we can have a dysfunctional post office like the UK, which is privatized.

And so that's what oligarchs want. And the oligarchs have won. They won.

But that's what this battle was about, in terms of if we strip away the kind of trivia or the cultural differences between the two parties. That, at its core, was what it's about. And so we have, as you point out, I mean, we have now an oligarchic system. But as Aristotle wrote, Once you create an oligarchic system with those kinds of inequities, then your only two choices are tyranny or revolution. You talk about people choosing fascism, people or the conditions being set for people to almost have no alternative choice.

And you've written about this idea. You wrote an article, in fact, that I thought was super interesting, how fascism came. Now, that term itself has its roots in Mussolini's authoritarian rule. during World War I, I think of brutal oppression. I think of the crushing of dissent.

Is it not hyperbolic at this moment in history to say that that's what we're facing here? Well, every fascist system has its own peculiar characteristics. So you mentioned Mussolini, that was rooted in ancient Rome and the glory of Augustus and all this, whereas German fascism was rooted in Teutonic myths, and Spanish fascism under Franco was something different.

Robert Paxton, when he writes his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, he calls the Klan the most authentic fascist movement in American history. And again, Paxton, in the book, says that it won't come with jackboots and the swastika. It will become with the Christian cross and mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. And I certainly came away, after spending two years with the Christian right, with a belief that these people, that they had... politicized and used Christianity to build a native fascistic movement, of course, grounded in white supremacy.

And you've seen Trump has no ideology. He's just a grifter. But he has filled that ideological void with these figures like Mike Huckabee, who calls the West Bank Judean Samaria or his UN ambassador who said, you know, suddenly U.S. foreign policy is rooted in biblical myth.

That's where we're headed. And so, yes, I see it as, especially as the system disintegrates. And in terms of voting for, well, I mean, any totalitarian movement is grounded in magical thinking. And when the real world becomes so onerous, so oppressive, so exploitive, and you engender that kind of despair, and all the writers of totalitarianism ground the rise of totalitarian movements, Hannah Arendt, Fritz Starr, all of them, in despair, which is what's happened to a significant part of the country, then you reach out for magical thinking. That's what Trump did.

offers. He, you know, none of it is coherent, but fascism's not really a coherent ideology. Thessal Wade, in his book, Male Fantasy, talks about how it's really at its core about hyper masculinity.

If you look at Trump as a cult figure in Margaret Singer's book, Cults and Our Miss, it's about endowing your cultish leader with omnipotent power to do anything. Let me push back a little bit because I hear this a lot, and I don't disagree that there's a cultish tenor to much of what we see in the Trump rhetoric and the rhetoric of his followers. But sometimes I worry that using the language of cult makes it seem as if his followers are misled, that they have the world wrong, and that they're always operating against their interests.

What do you say to the person who says, well, look, yeah, that might be true in part, but Trump is also advancing policy initiatives that actually— are in line with their ideology, whether it's the anti-LGBTQ stuff, whether it's the anti-DEI stuff. There are people who fundamentally believe in what Trump is selling, and they're not being misled. They simply believe things that are in line with his movement. Well, those are the cultural kind of targets that have been picked out to, I think, mendaciously explain the despair and the economic immiseration that these people live in. The problem is Walmart.

The problem is Goldman Sachs. The problem is Citibank. The problem is—but those people are not mentioned. You're mentioning undocumented workers. You're mentioning GBT, LQ, you know, people.

But let's be clear. Let's go back to the Democratic Party, that they abandoned the working class and they spoke in this kind of, you know, scolding, virtue-signaling wokeness rather than being rooted in— The class war that has now largely been finished, but the class war against the working poor and the working class, which they were part of. So you have a reaction to this political correctness because it was used to demonize a working class that was being pounded to death.

And so, yes, there's a there's a reaction, but none of it's dealing with the actual structures of power. None of it's dealing with the reality of why they are. where they are.

So yeah, they all hate immigrants the way in Nazi Germany, they hated Jews or the way in when I was in Bosnia, the Serbs hated the Muslims and the Croats hated everybody. And so, yeah, but that's that is about transference. It's about the demonization of the other. So in that sense, Trump is a complete grifter, like all demagogues. Is that what you mean when you talk about the failure of liberalism?

You said recently, fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism. Is that bankruptcy about abandoning the working class? Yeah, it's more than that, but it is largely about that. I mean, I wrote a book called Death of the Liberal Class and it takes 250 pages to go through it. Why has liberalism failed?

I would go back to the Cold War. So what you did is you created the Cold War liberal. The Cold War liberal was used to eviscerate the left.

And remember, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, you had... powerful, especially union movements, the old CIO, the Wobblies, the Communist Party, which we've written out of our history. We were just talking about the great W.E.B. Du Bois, and he was persecuted and stripped of his passport and arguably America's greatest intellectual, I would say. So the distortion of liberalism, and when Chomsky writes about liberalism correctly, he says liberalism is allowed to exist within a capitalist order because it's a safety valve. It ameliorates the suffering enough to allow capitalism to go forward, which is what FDR did.

FDR was pressured into the New Deal reforms by the left, and that's not conjecture because I've read his private letters to his brother where he says if we don't push through these kinds of reforms, including providing employment for 12 million Americans, public works, all this Social Security, eight-hour workday. All of that was being pushed by sit-down strikes, radical unions. And he said, if we don't carry out these reforms, we will get revolution.

Those are his words. That was the fear, the specter of the 1917 revolution loomed large, even in the 1930s, over the Western world. And that liberal class has been destroyed. It was used to eviscerate the left, the Cold War liberal, and eviscerate and destroy those liberals, especially with McCarthyism in the 50s. Ellen Schrecker has written some very good books on this.

And so that creation of the faux, I would call it the faux liberal, the Clintons are kind of classic figures like this, where on the one hand they are the The engine, the political engine behind corporate oppression. And on the other hand, they're holding up, you know, their kind of, you know, pronoun uses and all their woke garbage. You said woke garbage.

There are people who are going to hear that. You know, that language of woke has been appropriated by the right in very particular ways to deny the legitimacy of LGBTQ humanity, to deny the legitimacy of affirmative action efforts or integration efforts. Or, you know, the language of woke itself has been sort of, I mean, you hear Elon Musk using that word. Does it worry you to use that kind of language?

No, because what was wokeness? Wokeness was the corporations love it. They love it.

You know, so, you know, what is wokeness? A woman CEO? No, it's about empowering working class women.

It's a complete inversion. Do you see wokeness as a kind of superficial approach to dealing with identity politics? Or do you see identity politics itself as a problem?

See, identity politics is furthering the goals and the rapaciousness of the corporate state. They've embraced it. I mean, you had years ago when AIDS, you had, what was it, Bennington, or I don't know which one, one of these big...

Abercrombie, I don't know, Calvin Klein, you know, they had HIV positive models. I mean, they obviously, obviously, I'm all for inclusion and respect and all that kind of stuff. But wokeness in the hands of the ruling class has been used as a cudgel to essentially punish and scold the working class and also about elevating their own. But is it just the working class?

I mean, it seems like it's also an attempt to hold the powerful accountable, to hold corporations accountable for not being diverse. Well, yeah. Come on, Mark. We saw that ad for the CIA.

You know, what am I? I'm a trans, binary, and I can torture people in Guantanamo, too. I mean, you know, who cares whether, you know, the people bombing, the Israeli Air Force pilots bombing Gaza in the genocide are...

gay or trans or women, who cares? I mean, it's superficial in a sense that it doesn't deal with the mechanisms of repression. Which for you are always economic.

They're primarily economic. Yeah. I mean, the distortions within American society, you can't maintain a democracy if you destroy your middle and working class.

You can't. It's impossible. And that's what we've done.

And so now we are facing the specter of this, you know, rolling kind of fascism. And you're right. People vote for it.

People vote for it out of rage, out of anger, out of desperation. I don't I don't forgive some of the, you know, views of my relatives in Maine. But at the same time, I don't demonize them.

It's mostly based on ignorance. But I don't I but but the people I can't forgive are the people like Elon Musk or Trump. I mean, let's be clear. I mean, these people are racist to the core. I mean, you know, they they don't even try and hide it that much.

And they're also misogynists and everything else. So it's decoupling of ourselves from economic injustice. And look, this is what all the great, even Martin Luther King at the end, you know, there will be no civil rights until there are economic rights. And he's killed marching with the garbage workers in Memphis. I mean, so, and of course, everybody, the liberals all walked away from him.

I mean, it's fine if you want to integrate Georgia. Because nobody can afford to eat where we eat in Manhattan, so we don't care. But as soon as you talk about economic justice, they went for the door. And King was, as you know, of course, a very lonely figure at the end, and a very courageous and amazing figure, but very lonely.

Because of that, economic component is key. And it's key to overcoming everything you and I care about, and building a system of justice. But if you extract that drive for economic justice, Then it becomes a kind of boutique activism. Let me ask you something. I want you to put your Christian hat on for a minute.

You're actually ordained as a Presbyterian minister. I don't make that public too much, but that's all right. Your father was a minister?

Yes, he was. That's right. I got deep roots in it.

So Trump's victory rally, there was a prayer said, and it struck me. And I immediately thought, what would Chris Hedges say? The person reading the prayer said, President Trump, we set the name of the Lord upon you, and we declare that no weapon formed against you will prosper, that every tongue that rises up against you in judgment will be condemned, and if God be for you, who can be against you?

And I said, wow. I've heard that prayer lots of times. I've heard that scripture from Isaiah a lot of times in a black church and other churches. Didn't expect to hear it said over Donald Trump.

When you hear it, what do you make of it? Idolatry. Moloch.

We're Stripping the feet of Malak. It's idolatry. It's heresy.

It's the sacralization of human and political power, which is probably the greatest sin any religious institution can make. Look, the megachurches work like this, and I learned this from Hannah Arendt. You have the, and they have much better seats than we do in the press. Presbyterian church.

They're comfortable. They kind of recline. They got nice music.

I mean, nice. It's all cheesy. And lights, and they make you feel good.

But that is the form of what she calls indoctrination. And all fascist movements do that. They bring you into the warm embrace. I mean, that's the propaganda.

Sorry. Then they move you to the back room for indoctrination. I went to both.

So I went to these. prayer meetings. And one of the things I saw in these prayer meetings was the pain on the part of family members who had, quote unquote, been saved, and their family members who weren't.

And they occupy, these megachurches occupy all your educational time, your religious time, your social time, your leisure time, whatever it is. They are the, and they demonize the children who aren't, quote unquote, especially if they're gay. So my friend Mel White, who founded Soulforce, he would go down, ordained minister, he would go down to the steps of these megachurches and hold memorial services for the young gay people in that church who had committed suicide.

And he accused them of murder. And it is murder. So, you know, it's their propaganda. I mean, I dug deep inside to this Leviathan called the Christian right that I call American fascists. And they're Christian nationalists, right?

Yeah, they're complete nationalists. And, you know, what they are is they are essentially equivalent of the so-called German Christian church established under the fascists in Germany where on one side you had the Christian cross and the other the Nazi flag. And let's be clear, Mark, this church is bankrolled by the very billionaire class that we talked about.

Why? Because with Magic Jesus, you don't need labor unions. With Magic Jesus, you don't need health care.

Because Magic Jesus... is going to give you a Cadillac and make all your dreams come true. And that is that shift from a reality-based world into the world of magical thinking.

And once people shift into that world of magical thinking, you can't reach them through rational argument. Is that going to come through the Trump administration 2.0 even more? Yeah.

These are the people who won. They just won. They won the first time, too. Yeah, but Trump was totally unprepared, unfocused.

Now he's got Heritage 2025. I mean, you've seen from, you know, now they're organized. I mean, Trump is a very limited, intellectually very limited figure. He's a carnival barker. And he, you know, his first administration was. dogged by one crisis and resignation.

I mean, it was just chaos. That's different this time. Church and state.

The First Amendment ostensibly protects us from the mixing of the two. There's a separation of church and state. At a moment where you're saying the Christian right is overtaking the executive branch, is the separation of church and state under threat?

I don't, I just, I kind of balk at calling them a church. They're a political movement. I mean, when I wrote my book, I was very upfront about who I was, where I came from. I graduated from divinity school.

And what was fascinating is none of these people ever wanted to talk about the Bible with me because they don't know it. They know those, it's a kind of selective literalism where they know those passages that buttress the ideology, but they don't know the Bible. Will those ideologies that are shrouded in religious language, will those things overtake other people's freedom this time around? Yeah, of course. Because that's the fear is that suddenly people's feelings about.

I mean, the first week we see executive orders that define gender and sex in very particular ways that align with their thou shalt nots. How much of that are we going to see? I mean, as much as they can get away with.

I mean, they want to create a quote-unquote Christian nation. They want to go back to, you know, it's this kind of, it's a fake fundamentalism, but, you know, the foundational ethics of the quote-unquote founding fathers. I mean, when you said that this was the greatest concentration of wealth in billionaire groups, I'd love to look back. at the first, the George Washington administration, all the slaveholders, and count up how much money they were worth because it was a pretty significant part of the economy. That's an interesting point.

Let me pivot because I have to talk to you about Gaza for all the reasons. It's something you pay careful attention to. You spent a lot of time, obviously, in Gaza during the seven years that you reported for the Middle East.

And this past summer, you were in the West Bank. Yes. Writing your forthcoming book, which is called A Genocide Foretold, reporting on survival and resistance in occupied Palestine.

First, I guess, what do you make of this ceasefire, and particularly the idea that President Trump played a pivotal role in making it happen? Optics. He wanted a pause.

I mean, I think the ceasefire— It'll probably extend a little bit beyond that, but it's really a pause in bombing for the presidential inauguration. It will last. I mean, look, you know the history of the Middle East pretty well, too. But every agreement Israel has ever made with the Palestinians is done in phases, whether that's Camp David, whether that's Oslo, whether it's all the ceasefire agreements.

And Israel gets what it wants in the first phase and then violates every other phase. That's a pattern. They've never broken it. So. they want two things.

They want the hostages, as many as they can get back, and they want to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and the so-called Abraham Accords. Once they get that, I mean, Netanyahu has already said it. And Trump's special envoy, the Middle East, has already said it, that if they, quote unquote, violate the Palestinians, the agreement, then the mass slaughter will begin. And of course, as soon as the mass slaughter was paused in Gaza, they turned on the West Bank. especially Janine.

So yeah, they're not done. I mean, you know, anybody who thinks that their campaign of erasure and dispossession of the Palestinians is, it's, we've, and we've seen these kinds of pauses before. So I think that I was, you know, I've been, I worked a lot in Gaza, I have a lot of friends in Gaza, some of whom are dead, some of whom got out, and some of them we hadn't heard from for weeks, they're probably buried under the rubble. I mean, I think for a lot of us who spent time there, it's been really difficult emotionally.

to watch this live stream genocide and not just the indifference of the United States, but complete complicity. The fact that people could vote for Harris or Biden. I mean, that's, you know, genocide is not normal governance.

I mean, do we have any moral line left? I mean, and I get your thoughts on the end of the occupation, the end of apartheid and whether those things can actually be achieved. Not too long ago, we spoke to Rashid Khalidi, who is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. And he stated that Israel's connection to the U.S. and Western Europe is fraying every day, and that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated on the global stage.

He said sooner or later, public opinion is going to have an impact, and it's going to cause support for Israel to stop. Do you agree with that position? Yes, but it might take a generation. a generation.

Sure, because this old, older generation still has a fealty to Israel that the younger generation, including Jews, do not. I mean, I was in a lot of Students for Justice in Palestine meetings and campuses across the country, and what, 30, 40 percent of them are Jewish. So, yeah, it's terminal, but I know Ilan Pape, the great Israeli historian, has talked about, I think, at one point, three years.

I don't think it's that quick. I think that these— I think that's why I was surprised. Some people were saying we're a few years away from the turnaround. Yeah, I don't think so.

You're like a generation away. Yeah, because that next generation isn't going to have that kind of loyalty. Now, that's why Israel is investing so much of its capital in the Christian Zionists, in the Christian fascists, because they have this warped, perverted, biblical— view of Christ returning and the rapture, which isn't even in the Bible. I mean, at its core, if you really examine it, it's pretty anti-Semitic. But I think even Israel has realized that the younger generation of Jews are a lost cause.

And so they have wedded themselves to the Christian Zionists, people like Mike Hucklebee, who's about to become the ambassador or the UN ambassador. I mean, they're not alone. I mean, they're so... But that's a naked kind of fascism. We didn't get into Israel's distortions itself.

It is a proto-fascist system. Yesh Yashu Leibowitz, you know, the great Israeli philosopher, kind of saw it coming. They're all the heirs of Meir Kahane.

When I worked in, I lived in Israel. When I worked in Israel, the Koch party was outlawed. These are this radical racist rabbi. These people, I mean, Ben-Gavir, I think, was at Kahane's grave on the anniversary of his death not long ago.

So there's a, and you know, Netanyahu's not stupid, Netanyahu. He's pretty evil, but he's not stupid. He said everybody thinks the world is moving towards a kind of enlightenment.

No, that's why he builds relationships with Orban and others. He said, no, it's moving towards this kind of authoritarianism. We're what's coming next, and he may not be wrong. So Israel's becoming, I'm talking even for Israelis, a very despotic place.

People who have the courage to decry the genocide and the occupation are pariahs, Gideon Levy and Amir Haas and these amazing journalists from Otis. I mean, they have become total outliers within their own society. You talk about journalism. You were the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times for several years, and of course you quit.

because they reprimanded you. Well, no, I didn't quit. They keep reminding me when I see them. What they do is suddenly you're the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.

It's like the old Soviet party where you get to stand up, you know, with all the other old people and look at the May Day parade or whatever, and then you suddenly find yourself in Tajikistan, so you're on night rewrite. I mean, they put you in a dead end, and they knew I'd leave. But I ran into the executive editor a couple years ago. Dean McKinney ran across the room and said, we did not fire you. We didn't.

Okay. So you were not fired. I want to clear that up for your New York Times viewers.

Fair enough. Fair enough. But whatever experience you had there, it was in direct response to your opposition to the Iraq War.

Yeah, yeah. But also Palestine, you know. And Palestine, for sure. Because I had taken vacation time and written a magazine piece in Harper's called The Gaza Diary. And the Times went apoplectic.

And when that was published, I was told you will never report from the Middle East again. So I'd already been banned from the Middle East. I opposed the Iraq War, and that was it. From that moment until now, do you see any different tenor in newsrooms?

Do you hear any different sensibilities from the journalism world? Has coverage changed on the Middle East since that time? Yeah, it's worse. Far worse.

Worse? Yeah. How so? Well, look at the reporting on Gaza. Look at the reporting on the student protests.

You know, they go up to Columbia and race off to the Hillel House and talk about how you know, Jewish students, quote Jewish students saying they feel uncomfortable. Well, you know what? It's a genocide, you know, perpetrated by the Zionist project that you support.

So maybe you should feel uncomfortable. And you see that as worse than, say, 1982 during the invasion of Lebanon or in the early 2000s? Yeah. Yeah. The whole, I mean, you know, we don't have time to critique the New York Times, which was always an elitist publication, beholden to centers of power, never good on Israel.

But the space has shrunk. because that's commercial because the you know they've lost so much advertising uh their digital subscriptions don't they they bring in significant revenue but digital subscribers are very fickle about canceling so uh yeah there's less i mean there was space i worked for them for 15 years i mean i was a management headache but but that space has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and they cater for commercial not for journalistic reasons to you They've siloed themselves and they cater to a particular demographic. They're far more obsequious to that demographic than they were when I worked there. I've got to ask you one more question.

Given what we're facing, are traditional forms of protest or dissent Enough. Or does the scale of the crisis, the intensity of the suffering people are experiencing right now, does it demand a more radical response than what we've traditionally done? Yeah, it demands a more radical response because we have to destroy.

the system. We have to destroy the ruling class. And the only mechanism we have to destroy the ruling class is by disrupting economic, social, and political life that comes through mass mobilization, primarily through labor, and especially through the strike. We have to rebuild militant labor movements that shut the country down.

That's the only way out of this. And the oligarchs have understood this for a long time. It's why they have made war. against organized labor for a long time.

Only 11% of the U.S. workforce is unionized. But we have to regain that militancy. We have to understand who our enemy is and that if we don't break the back of that enemy, things are going to get worse and worse and worse.

And we have to understand the only power we have is collective, and it will require sacrifice. And, I mean, we had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized country. Hundreds of American workers were killed.

Thousands, probably tens of thousands were blacklisted. You know, Joe Hill, you know all this. You know, we've got to look back because the capitalist class, you know, they're going to use every vicious mechanism they have because it's all, and you saw the way, you know, they essentially made it impossible for Bernie. Without that corporate money, Bernie Sanders would have run against Trump the first time around, and I believe he would have won. But they destroyed it.

They destroyed that possibility. Are you hopeful that we're close to that moment? Are we on the precipice of a radical moment of resistance?

Are we at the verge of toppling power? No, because the left has been so decimated. So we don't have the left we have in the 30s.

Europe went one way, fascist. We went another way, which was quasi-socialist. But our left has been so decimated and destroyed, I fear, that we don't have the forces of resistance that can... You know, create the kind of space and social equality and liberty that should be fundamental to an open society.

So no, I'm actually very pessimistic. However, you know, that's where I fall back on my religious tradition where it doesn't matter. I mean, you come out of the black prophetic tradition.

You know, boy, if anybody understood the world around them and the forces against them, it was the... you know, black America and the black prophetic tradition, but they fought anyway. And they fought anyway because it wasn't finally what they achieved empirically.

It was who they were. It was their own dignity. And we have to protect our own dignity. The soul is real.

And if we don't stand up against these rapacious forces of radical evil, our soul will die. And we may not win, but we must save our soul. Christopher Hedges, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks.

Transcript for:Challenges for American Democracy Ahead

Transcript for:
Challenges for American Democracy Ahead