In 2018, progressives had an especially dim view of the American project.
The Trump administration — from the “Muslim travel ban” to unfunded tax cuts to the more general corrosion of norms — was considered a destructive symptom of “the toxic brew of American exceptionalism.” The remarkable “special century” of American-led peace, growth and economic prosperity had ended. A subtler decline was made public.
Or as prolific writer and critic Matt Taibbi famously put it back then: “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
That’s from the 2018 book America: A Farewell Tour, written by journalist Chris Hedges. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Hedges self-identifies as a socialist and has had an outspoken career — leaving the New York Times after his criticism of the Iraq War featured getting booed for a commencement speech. He later contributed to and ran Green Party campaigns.
The book thoughtfully features many in-depth character studies from far-flung corners of American life, from BDSM culture to white supremacy, from sex work to gambling.
“This is the new American capitalism,” he wrote. “It is not about producing products, but escapist fantasies.”
Regardless of whether my politics overlap with his, I respect how Hedges has pursued his sense of truth. He’s at least an independent thinker. This book came in the heat of progressive reaction to the Trump administration. With his second administration starting next month, It felt fitting to return to see how much of Hedges’s 2018 take held up, and what fell flat.
Back then, like as now, he wrote that we were in Gramsci’s interregnum — which the Marxist writer used to describe when an old order has fallen but the new one has not yet come.
“The American empire is coming to an end,” Hedges writes confidently (p. 294). “It will limp along, losing influence and electing diminished leaders. It will lose reserve currency status [Editor’s note: but to whom!?] and falter.” All “within a decade or two”, he writes. This is by no means an optimistic book, and what hope it has is in working people building something better, it is outstripped by Hedge’s antipathy to the established order. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to others — I especially appreciated his thoughtful argument against reactionary violence, as a distraction from the work of organizing.
Below find my notes from the book for future reference.
My notes:
- Book’s open scene is in the Scranton Lace factory,a large manufacturer that once employed 1,200, then closed mid-shift in 2002
- Mugwumps were characters from William Burrough’s 1959 book Naked Lunch
- “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Matt Taibbi writes, “it doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off even when it’s filming its own demise.”
- “Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism”
- The famous Hannah Arendt quote: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie.
- “The permanent lie”
- Author says Ajit Pai’s net neutrality “effectively killing free speech on the internet”
- Voltaire: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities
- Rosa Luxembourg: nationalism is always used to betray class
- Gramsci “confused and fragmentary” or Marx’s “false consciousness”
- A failed democracy, Plato warned, creates the conditions for tyranny under popular support
- Author is “those of us who fail to overthrow the corporate state”
- “When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters.”
- Samuel P Huntington’s “excess of democracy”
- Corporate coup d’etat
- 1971 Lewis Powell Atrack in American free enterprise
- Hedges criticizes Democrats combining to hollow out American manufacturing with elites that “sold us on corporate capitalism and globalization” — in Bidenomics, he writes more recently here that essentially it was too little too late
- The “electronic hallucinations” of reality TV have replaced political discourse and Trump is just it’s “grotesque visage”
- Says multiculturalism is a “spent force” used for three decades by Democrats to cover for corporate interests, and Obama criss-crossing country on behalf of Hillary was its final gasp
- Scranton coal union organizer John Mitchell worked with Mother Jones, the activist
- Plato writes The Republic after the fall of Athenian democracy
- Durkheim division of labor in society: work gives meaning
- Simone Weil: “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity or even a duty”
- Freud: societies are either in Eros or in the death instinct
- James Baldwin: black people “dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing “
- Baldwin writing about Dickens having a character in Tale of Two Cities wanting to go extinct and thinking it a wrong interpretation of poor and maligned: “life is their only weapon against life; life is all that they have”
- Durkheim: man has to connect his life to something greater than himself and outlives him, so that he never dies
- Durkeim’s anomie
- Christine Pagano in Heroin chapter: brought her son Liam in the car while she turned tricks, later raped so many times in Camden that one brutal time she asked if she could have a cigarette break in the middle — which she was allowed
- Father of Shannon, another addicted person in the chapter said of rehab: “you go where your money can take you”
- Eugene V Debs socialist party in 1920s before broken, his “Appeal to Reason” newspaper closed in part because it railed against First World War
- “We can only pit power against power. Our power only comes when we organize”
- Tours of BDSM and porn culture and Dylan Roof whites supremacy and gambling
- Author favorbly compares Rachel Moran “Paid For” book with his War is a Force book
- “The war industry, like the prostitution industry, feeds off the despair, poverty, and hopelessness that flick the lives of many of the young, especially young men and women of color”
- “If sex work is work, what are its primary qualifications” Moran wrote. She answered her own question: “The ability to resist your urge to vomit, to cry, and to pretend that your current reality wasn’t happening.”
- “Selling your body for sex is not a choice. It is not about freedom. It is an act of economic slavery.”
- Islamberg an Islamic community gets alt right and alt lite attention
- “Resentment… remains the default metaphysics of the modern world” since Rousseau defined it: Panaj Mishara Age of Anger
- “American Sniper lionizes the most despicable aspects of US society”
- Diana Johnstone: antifa is more inspired by Batman than by Marx
- Mark Bray in his antifa book, the left in Weimar in Germany was plenty violent. This author says Bray argues “ the left in Germany should’ve learned from the abortive uprising that answering fascist violence with violence was political suicide”
- Theodore Roszak The Making of Counterculture: “progressive adolescenization”
- Derrick Jensen told author of violent tactics: “Their thinking is not only nonstrategic but actively opposed to strategy”
- Unite the Right Charlottesville: antifa protected Cornel West but doesn’t justify other violence
- “On the street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the under class.”
- Politics isn’t made of individuals, it’s made of classes”: Sophia Burns“Catharsis Is Counter-Revolutionary”
- Aviva Chomsky in How Not to Challenge Racist Violence calls boycotts and signs as “apolitical”
- “There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anti-capitalist uprising, to use the false argument of more equivalency to criminalized the work of all dissidents.”
- “Continuous gaming productivity”
- 1 in 5 gambling addicts attempt suicide, the highest rate of any addiction, per national council on problem gambling
- “ this is the new American capitalism. It is not about producing products, but escapist fantasies.”
- Replacing corporate income tax with casinos and state lotteries
- Roger Caillois: a culture’s pathologies are captured in the games they venerate
- Henry Lesieur wrote slot machines are “addiction delivery device”
- 1986 Bill Moyer’s special on Atlantic City: casinos collapsed small business
- Trump Atlantic City fiasco: indebted, his lawyers got him out of losing his Casino license despite not having required cash — but the division of gaming enforcement repeatedly chased Diane Pussehl over a minor $500 chip incident
- Michael Hudson in his Killing the Host book: Goldman Sachs has a tautology: because they charge so much they must be worth it
- Adam Smith: profits are highest before a collapse because a rentier class is squeezing the value they can
- What is faith? Daniel Berrigan says it is the belief that the good draws to it the good
- Emma Goldman anarchy
- “In every civilization its most impressive period seems to proceed death by only a moment,“ the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote “like the woods of autumn, life defies death in a glorious pageantry of color, but the riot of this color has been distilled by an alchemy in which life has already been touched by death.”
- Our capitalist elite has us forgetting John Locke’s liberty, equality and freedom — and only focusing on property
- “All our institutions are corrupted,” having “ingested the toxic brew of American exceptionalism”
- Protests that don’t truly disrupt power are “reenacting 1960s protests”
- Street violence always strengthens the state: George Lakey (manual for direct action). In Italy and Germany, the left took the bait but in Norway and Sweden the left stayed nonviolent
- 40% of the firefighters in California fires in fall 2017 were prisoners
- Alabama prison work stoppages
- Siddique Abdullah Hasan
- Alfred W McCoy proposes some multinational corporations In the Shadow of the American Century, suggests an American collapse by 2030 — but McCoy and the author wrote confidently about China before it too faltered
- “Empires in decay, blinded by their hubris, and unable to accept their diminishing power, refuse to confront hard and unpleasant facts. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.”
- Of the 69 defined empires, none had effective leadership at the end, and instead ceded control to demagogues — most entered into “micro militarism” like Athens in Peloponnesian War and UK into Red Sea, trying to show a power they no longer have
- WEB Dubois: war gives oligarchs and the poor something “artificial community of interest”
- in 1930 FDR wrote a letter to his friend and said “no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.” .. and ascend the idea was hand over some of your money now or lose all of your money in a revolution.
- We are in Gramsci’s interregnum, the author says — when the old had fallen but the new has not yet come
- Author does name himself as a socialist on p 303
- “Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a complete human being… Resistance must become our vocation.”