{"id":4965,"date":"2021-01-16T09:48:57","date_gmt":"2021-01-16T14:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/?p=4965"},"modified":"2021-01-16T10:03:11","modified_gmt":"2021-01-16T15:03:11","slug":"chris-hedges-on-the-roots-of-rage-and-tinderbox-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/?p=4965","title":{"rendered":"Chris Hedges on the Roots of Rage in Tinderbox America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Former New York Times<\/em> reporter Chris Hedges went on the Jimmy Dore Show this week <\/a>to discuss the roots of rage in Tinderbox America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe reaction by CNN and the mainstream media was quite frightening,\u201d Hedges told Dore. \u201cAll they did was demonize the people in the crowd, which isn\u2019t in any way to condone what they did. But unless we investigate the roots of this rage, the rupture of these social bonds, the deep betrayal, then these divisions and the rage that comes with it, is only going to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe should not have deleted Trump from Twitter and other social media platforms,\u201d Hedges said.  \u201cGiving these tech companies that kind of ability to censor is very dangerous. And of course, we have to remember that the first organization they went after was WikiLeaks, blocking their ability to accept donations, using algorithms to essentially drive them off the internet. That\u2019s the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese tech companies are utterly opaque. We know nothing about them. They know everything about us. And they are bonded at the hip to the Democratic Party estalishment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI find the response of the Democratic Party frightening. Since 2006, they have refused to look at what the sociologist Emile Durkheim (in Suicide: A Study in Sociology<\/em>) calls anomie, this malaise \u2013 the rupturing of social bonds that resulted from neoliberalism and austerity and offshoring.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInstead it is the demonstration. If you turned on CNN, that\u2019s all you saw \u2013 it was thugs and this and that. That is widening the divide, exacerbating the anger and the rage and essentially renting the social fabric.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m certainly no friend of the Christian fascists. I wrote a book in 2006 \u2013 American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.<\/em> I find them frightening and they are dangerous. But until the ruling elites look at and grapple with the actual root causes of what it is that propels this kind of violence, it is only going to get worse. Everything they are doing is pouring gasoline on the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c(President-elect Joe) Biden used the events last week to talk about ratcheting up internal security laws,\u201d Hedges said.  \u201cThis is a recipe for social disintegration. It has many echoes of Yugoslavia, which I covered for the New York Times<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is a self-identified boutique left \u2013 which is all about identity politics and multiculturalism,\u201d Hedges said. \u201cThese are ethical or societal issues, but they are not political issues. They are not rooted in the class struggle or economic justice or anything else. The self-identified left has a real anger towards people like you, towards people like Matt Taibbi, people like Glenn Greenwald. They have already used algorithms to marginalize us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Democratic Party has a particular anger towards the real left, because the real left calls them out for who they are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are just not examining what is happening within the country and why this rage is there. And it is a legitimate rage. It may be expressed in vulgar and horrible ways, but the rage is legitimate.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd if we don\u2019t go back and rebuild those social bonds \u2013 and that is not in the vocabulary of the ruling elite, nor is it in the vocabulary of the press, which has essentially stopped doing it\u2019s job — we are finished.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe white working class was legitimately betrayed. There is real anger toward the media outlets that rendered them invisible and never told their story and when they speak about them, they demean them and insult them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have a political establishment that essentially wrote them off and assign them to immense misery. The chattering class of the self-identified liberal elites on each coast who largely profited from neoliberalism has no real understanding of the suffering that has taken place in these post-industrial towns. And that suffering is real and awful. You go to town after town with boarded up churches, closed supermarkets, people have retreated into the opioid epidemic, these self-destructive pathologies which you always see with societal breakdown.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBiden has always served corporate interests, going back to when he was Senator Credit Card in Delaware.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn Biden\u2019s cabinet, you will have a certain number of women, a certain number of \u2013 that\u2019s just colonialism. I worked in the Congo. Finally when the Belgians and the French couldn\u2019t put white faces up there, they put up Mobutu, and they killed Patrice Lumumba, who actually stood for social justice.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just another species of corporate colonialism, which Biden is going to do. So there will be more women and more people of color, but they will serve the machine. And if they don\u2019t serve the machine, they are out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs Richard Rorty says correctly \u2013 there is a wholesale revulsion toward these self-identified liberals, but more dangerously to the liberal democratic values that they supposedly promote. And that is what feeds these proto-fascist movements, which we saw last week.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 after NAFTA and stood by the working class. And they know it. Much of my family comes out of that lower working class in Maine. And I have seen their communities and lives \u2013 where my grandparents house was in Maine, the bank is boarded up, there was a Methodist church that caught on fire and burned, the town doesn\u2019t have enough money to raze it, so it\u2019s charred embers. There are methamphetamine labs all over the place. That is what the Democratic Party and the self-identified liberal class has done. And that is why they hate (liberals).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI totally get that hatred. They continue to speak out of both sides of their mouth. They continue to speak that traditional feel your pain language of liberalism while putting the knife in the back of these people. So the hatred for the Democratic Party is far fiercer because there was a time when organized labor mattered. It doesn\u2019t matter anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI live in Princeton. They are all mostly liberal Democrats. They have no relationships with people who have been victimized by this system. For them, it\u2019s all an abstraction.\u201d
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges went on the Jimmy Dore Show this week to discuss the roots of rage in Tinderbox America. \u201cThe reaction by CNN and the mainstream media was quite frightening,\u201d Hedges told Dore. \u201cAll they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4965"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4980,"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4965\/revisions\/4980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgancountyusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}