Chris Hedges embarrassed himself during the fall 2016 presidential campaign by positing there was no qualitative and substantive difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In the essay I linked to, Hedges wrote:
While there is a difference in the temperament of the two major presidential candidates, that difference will play out only in how our poison will be delivered. Political personalities serve global corporate centers of power. (Underlining added)
Later in the essay, Hedges wrote:
Voting for Hillary Clinton will not halt this slide into the apocalypse. It will only accelerate it. Donald Trump may vanish from the political landscape, but someone even more venal, and probably more intelligent, will take his place. Our job is to dismantle the machinery that is pushing toward the cliff. And this means sustained and massive civil disobedience.... (Underlining added)
I recall being appalled at the time how Hedges could believe Hillary Clinton, as president, would have accelerated the slide into a dystopian society compared to Donald Trump. So often, people who focused on the presidential race ignored the fact the Republicans fully controlled Congress at the time, and that Trump's choosing Pence--who we forget was a failed governor in Indiana likely to lose re-election--was Trump fully and irrevocably deciding to throw his carnival barking on behalf of right wing politics, complete with racism, sexism, xenophobia, fascist tendencies, and undermining of what was good about the federal government. Trump, as president, has accelerated the slide into an apocalypse far more than Hillary Clinton would have done, something I saw as likely, and Hedges refused to believe at all. As with most commentators at the time, Hedges appears to have thought Hillary Clinton would prevail over Trump, as one watches this debate he had in September 2016 with Robert Reich; hence, his hyperbolic rhetoric, one supposes. Hedges obviously wasn't heeding Michael Moore, who I was heeding by that point.
In the Trump Era, Hedges has continued to refuse to recognize what has substantively changed under Trump: withdrawal from the Paris climate accords; withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement; reversal of Obama's executive orders, starting with the DACA, environmental protections, and protection of abortion and LGBTQ rights in the military, more favorable loan forgiveness and other related policies at the Department of Education; and the promotion of the worst judges who will haunt our nation for decades, assuming our nation can survive--and the mass of humanity survives. And, from a societal standpoint, I find it disgusting for Hedges to not recognize a simple fact: Hillary Clinton would not have given permission for racists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes to come out from the shadows, or given them succor.
In the Trump Era, Hedges has continued to refuse to recognize what has substantively changed under Trump: withdrawal from the Paris climate accords; withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement; reversal of Obama's executive orders, starting with the DACA, environmental protections, and protection of abortion and LGBTQ rights in the military, more favorable loan forgiveness and other related policies at the Department of Education; and the promotion of the worst judges who will haunt our nation for decades, assuming our nation can survive--and the mass of humanity survives. And, from a societal standpoint, I find it disgusting for Hedges to not recognize a simple fact: Hillary Clinton would not have given permission for racists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes to come out from the shadows, or given them succor.
Hedges writes in a manner that leads me to believe he almost roots for violent, armed revolution and anarchy, as he believe the US government and our society are so corrupt and so beyond redemption, there is nothing left to reform. Worse, Hedges seems to think a global economy--and the military power which goes with it--dominated by Chinese dictators and Russian oligarchs is somehow better than Pax Americana. And yet, Hedges continues to call Bernie Sanders naive.
Now we have Hedges making a cynically-based case that, because the US government and society is morally and economically bankrupt, nothing Trump can do, particularly Trump's bribery/extortion of a foreign government for his own purposes, his continued cavorting with Russians, his undermining of any pretense to democratic/republican norms, and undermining our nation's relationships with Western Europe and South Korea, is impeachable.
Sadly, I find I continue to agree with almost everything Hedges says in this recent interview at Salon.com, less than a week before he wrote his essay. However, what I believe Hedges misses, in his overall conclusions, is how dangerous it is to just allow everything to fall apart and how dangerous it is for Americans and our nation's Senate to give Trump a pass. It is already upsetting to me how Pence is getting a pass, when Trump has implicated Pence in the months-long scheming against Ukraine. I have been careful to say Trump has undermined what remains of the republic, which is very different than saying what one breathlessly hears on MSNBC, for example. But, to the larger point in response to Hedges, there is no glorious socialist revolution coming by letting Trump continue to violate electoral and political norms. Worse for Hedges' rhetoric, it is not as if most of us live in a society where we are on farms where we can grow our own food, sew our own clothes, use an outhouse, and have horses and buggies to transport our muskets to fight against governmental tyranny. Hedges lives in a world more akin to 1819 than to 2019. It is Hedges' revolutionary romanticism I find troublesome, especially as I recognize the romantic impulse in myself, as I often think it is 1939 instead of 2019. I get it, Chris, I really do. However, let's not go too far back for our historical analogies and let's not let our hopes minimize or ignore the realities of the challenges we face at present.
For all my sadness, I have hopes for strong showings for Sanders in the early primary states, and momentum toward a presidential nomination. For all my frustration at my own generation and the addled Oldsters of a lighter skin complexion, I have hope that younger Americans will work with us aging Boomers who empathize with them, to more successfully achieve positive and important structural changes in our society. As a warning to those who do not understand the import of Hedges' criticisms, however, I also believe young people will be far more willing to desert the Democratic Party after 2020 if the party nominates a corporate Democrat for president, just as I believe such a candidate will lose to Trump through the Electoral College, even if Trump loses the popular vote by 5 million votes, and not 2.9 million votes, as he did in 2016. I share Hedges' disdain with the Democratic Party and the corporate media, though, unlike Hedges, I root for the demise of the latter even more than I root for the demise of the Democratic Party. Hedges remains an iconic voice, but one I have been very disappointed with since the Democratic Party's nomination of Hillary Clinton in August 2016. Hedge's descent into anti-anti-Trumpism is complete, though I believe Hedges can step back at some point in the future. For now, Chris Hedges' judgment remains very much clouded in romanticism posing as cynicism.
