By Chris Hedges
Wikimedia Commons /
edited for effect
The Klan marches on
Washington, 1928, right around the time of another economic
disaster.
The old assumptions and paradigms
about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent
populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to
take their place. This populism will determine the future of
the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.
I watched these competing populisms
flicker Thursday night at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington,
D.C., when I moderated a debate between independent
presidential candidate
Ralph Nader
and Constitution Party candidate
Chuck Baldwin.
The two candidates come from opposite ends of the political
spectrum. Nader, in essence, is a democratic socialist in
the mold of
Eugene Debs
or
Norman Thomas.
Baldwin, a founder and minister at the Crossroad Baptist
Church in Pensacola, Fla., is an evangelical, right-wing
populist.
Baldwin, like Nader, rails against
corporatism and our involvement in foreign wars, wants to
repeal NAFTA and denounces the curtailment of civil
liberties. But Baldwin goes on to support the abolishment of
whole departments of the federal government, such as the
Department of Education. He calls for U.S. withdrawal from
the United Nations and NATO, the elimination of the Food and
Drug Administration, the outlawing of abortion and removing
all restrictions on the purchasing of firearms. One of his
catchier campaign slogans is: “To help keep your family safe
and your country free, go buy a gun.” He wants to seal our
borders, deny amnesty and social services to illegal
immigrants and end birthright citizenship for the children
of illegal immigrants. He calls for dismantling the Federal
Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, overturning the
16th Amendment and the personal income tax, and returning
the American monetary system to hard assets: gold and
silver.
These candidates, while marginal
figures in the current election, express the two forms of
populism that will soon find a wide political currency. The
anger toward our elites will morph into rage. These new
populisms may not be articulated by Nader and Baldwin, but
they will be articulated by people like Nader and Baldwin.
The ideological foundations of
free-market economics and a consumer society have collapsed.
This collapse is hard for us to fathom. We are still in
shock and denial. We cling to old structures of meaning and
outdated words to describe them. We have yet to realize that
all our political science and economic textbooks have become
junk. We have yet to formulate a vocabulary to describe our
altered reality. We grasp, on a subliminal level, that
laissez-faire capitalism is gone, but we have not viewed the
corpse, scheduled the funeral and read the last rites.
“People get very clearly that
Washington found hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out
rich people in a way the government does not usually
intervene,” said
Anthony Pollina,
The Progressive Party candidate for governor in Vermont.
“They understand that the government came up with all this
money to support the wrong group of people. People get that
in their gut. There is anger. It is not rage yet. There is
still a little bit of disbelief. I may be running for
governor, but all people want to talk about is how did we
come up with all this money to give to rich people on Wall
Street and why didn’t they let them pay their mortgage off.”
Millions of people will lose their
homes. Jobs and savings will vanish. The government will
continue to lurch from crisis to crisis. The greed of huge
corporations, especially as they continue to cannibalize the
country, will see them, and our elites, become the enemy.
Exxon, to give one example, made $40.61 billion in profits
last year while we struggled to fill the tanks of our
automobiles and trucks. Oil and gas corporations, despite
these profits, ruthlessly refuse to fill furnaces in winter
when people cannot pay the bills. AIG, the insurance giant,
after being saved with an infusion of $85 billion in
taxpayer money, squandered $440,000 on an executive visit to
a California spa. It spent $86,000 for its executives to
hunt partridges in the English countryside and then blithely
asked the U.S. government for an additional $38 billion.
Elites, when they confuse the
artificial court life of Versailles with the real world,
die. These capitalist entities, grossly out of touch,
incompetent, blinded by greed and power and morally and
intellectually bankrupt, are committing collective suicide.
“People are beginning to understand
that when the economy is weak you have to put people to
work,” Pollina, who is now outpolling the Democratic
candidate, said. “We have a crumbling infrastructure in the
state and a need for affordable housing. I have put forward
three or four different ways to raise revenue to put people
to work, including closing a loophole in our capital gains
tax. I think people are attracted to me because they are
realizing that this is now the most important thing we can
do. We have to put people to work. We cannot continue to
abandon them.”
The flagrant corruption of our
political system—hostage to the hundreds of millions of
dollars handed out by the corporations and elites to
Democratic and Republican candidates—will become clearer as
our initial shock wears off. The new American will be about
the basics—jobs, food, health care and a place to live. We
will discard the old vocabulary, the one still used by the
Democratic and Republic parties, and learn to speak in the
fiery language of populism. We will turn with a vengeance on
the 1 percent that has amassed more wealth than the bottom
90 percent combined. The populist conflict will see a battle
between a frightened and dispossessed majority and the
corporations and elites who seek to ruthlessly cling to
power and wealth.
“Over the years people became
disengaged,” Pollina said. “They stopped paying attention.
This crisis has forced them to pay attention. It directly
affects their economic future and ability to put food on the
table. Outrage will lead to more involvement. This outrage
could, however, fuel a right-wing populism around the
country, although not in Vermont. Here I think people will
move more to the left. In Vermont they have somewhere else
to turn—I am here,
Bernie Sanders
is here, the Progressive Party is
here—but on the national level this could see people turn to
the right wing.”
A victory by Barack Obama may
embolden right-wing populists. They will be able to use
Obama and “liberal Democrats” as a lightning rod for the
failings, growing poverty and incompetence of the state. The
elite, as happens in all such moments of confusion, revolt
and social chaos, will probably be forced to make an
uncomfortable alliance with right-wing populists if they
want to survive. The center of the political spectrum will
melt.
“A lot of people feel the two
parties have reached a consensus that all they have to do is
support rich people to protect their hides,” Pollina said.
“The two parties have come together to throw money at people
who do not need it. People are beginning to understand they
are no better off and probably their grandkids will pay for
this. There is a great deal of resentment over the fact that
Republicans and Democrats will risk everything to prop up
rich people.”
We have begun a socialist
experiment. George W. Bush and John McCain, in stunning
repudiations of all they claimed to believe, call for
massive state intervention in the financial markets and the
use of billions in government funds to buy major stakes in
banks. The question is not whether we will build state
socialism. This process has already begun. The only question
left is whether this will be right-wing or left-wing
socialism.
The left, with a few exceptions,
like the Progressive Party in Vermont, has largely thrown in
its lot with the Democratic Party. Right-wing populists, as
is evidenced by the acrimonious split in the McCain
campaign, remain clustered around the fiefdoms of large
megachurches that stoke hatred and frightening totalitarian
visions of a Christian state. The left has no correlating
centers of activism, organization or mass support,
especially with the decline of labor unions. If left-wing
populists do not rapidly build local organizations, as was
done in Vermont, to compete with the right-wing populism of
the Christian right, the
most dangerous mass movement
in American history, they will be easily swept aside.
There is not much time left. A
Democratic victory in November may signal not a reversal of
our fading fortunes but the start of a precipitous slide
toward the Christian dystopia peddled by people like
Baldwin.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist whose weekly column appears Mondays
on Truthdig. He is the author of “American Fascists,” an
important book on this topic.