U.S. Death March
Regardless of the outcome, the election will not stop the rise
of hypernationalism, crisis cults and other signs of an empire's
terminal decline.
By Chris Hedges
Information Clearing House
August 12, 2020
The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by
elections.
The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the
soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults
movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable
psychological and financial distress.
These crisis cults, already well established among followers of
the Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking
and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy
prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security.
The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance
and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and
corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage
our failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale
government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part
of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering
towards oblivion.
I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the
communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former
Yugoslavia.
I have smelled this stench before.
The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust
for racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white
nationalism.
The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a
mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump,
Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan,
to wantonly pillage and loot.
The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor
neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military
budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population
will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs
shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow.
The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price
millions more out of the health care system.
The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary
form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims,
immigrants and dissidents, will be defamed and attacked.
The hyper-masculinity that compensates for feelings of impotence
will intensify.
It will direct its venom towards women and all who fail to conform
to rigid male stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and
intellectuals.
Lies, conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news — what Hannah
Arendt called “nihilistic relativism” — will still dominate the
airwaves and social media, mocking verifiable fact and truth.
The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the human species
and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its
apocalyptic conclusion.
“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front
of us to stop us seeing it,” Pascal wrote.
The worse it gets — and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in
wave after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead
by December and possibly 400,000 by January — the more
desperate the nation will become.
Tens of millions of people will be thrown into destitution,
evicted from their homes and abandoned.
Social collapse, as Peter Drucker observed in Weimar Germany
in the 1930s, brings with it a loss of faith in ruling institutions
and ruling ideologies.
With no apparent answers or solutions to mounting chaos and
catastrophe — and Biden and the Democratic Party have already
precluded the kind of New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic
power that saved us during the Great Depression — demagogues
and charlatans need only denounce all institutions, all politicians,
and all political and social conventions while conjuring up hosts
of phantom enemies.
Drucker saw that Nazism succeeded not because people believed
in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities,
he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile
radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government
which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency,
the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of
their course.
“Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in
the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright
and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile
and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933,
wrote much the same in his autobiography: “The people are tired
of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask what has reason
done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge
done us.”
After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem
“In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
Crisis Cults Crave Conflict
The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian,
those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the
cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a
crisis to the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that
plagues sick societies.
Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised,
America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is
obliterated another takes its place.
Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict. This is what
made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage
of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be
replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations.
The intoxication and addiction to greater and greater levels of
violence to purge the society of evil led to genocide in Germany
and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. It is what Ernst
Jünger called a “feast of death.”
These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood,
irrational and schizophrenic.
They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down.
They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and celebrity
culture become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities
and murder become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice.
Greed and nepotism become civic virtues.
What these cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow.
At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the
French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the
Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God.
The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated
churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of
priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed
themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion.
In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal
contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book On Suicide
found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no
longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and
collective acts of self-destruction proliferate.
Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give
individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a
project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through
rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal
to patriotism, and shared national beliefs.
The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity.
They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and
the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The
breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological
distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair
anomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create
a sense of organic solidarity no longer function.
The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get
a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status
and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie.
The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color,
nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States.
They offered some Americans — especially those from the white
working and middle class — modest social and economic
advancement. The disintegration of these bonds has unleashed
a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized.
The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States —
opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups
and mass shootings — are products of this anomie.
So is our political dysfunction.
Mocking Merit
The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were
reconfigured to mock faith in a meritocracy and the belief that
hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society.
American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out,
has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown
only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached
to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than
$20 an hour now, not $7.25.
Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than
$12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-
sponsored health insurance.
A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote,
the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000
below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is
down 40 percent and for Latino families the figure has dropped
46 percent.
Some four million evictions are filed each year. One in four tenant
households spends about half its pretax income on rent. Each night
some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on streets or under
bridges.
And these stark figures represent the good times Biden
and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore.
Now, with real unemployment probably close to 20 percent — the
official figure of 10 percent excludes those furloughed or those who
have stopped looking for work — some 40 million people are at risk
of being evicted by the end of the year. An estimated 27 million
people are expected to lose their health insurance. Banks are
stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected wave of
bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans,
personal loans and credit card debt.
The ruleless-ness and anomie that defines the lives of tens
of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the two ruling
parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy.
If we do not address this anomie, if we do not restore the social
bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will
accelerate.
This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated
in varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the
finale of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary
France, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia.
The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations
seized by a tiny and corrupt cabal — in our case corporate — leads
to an inchoate desire by huge segments of the population to destroy.
The ethnic nationalists Slobodan Miloševic, Franjo Tudjman,
Radovan Karadžic? and Alija Izetbegovic? in the former Yugoslavia
assumed power in a similar period of economic chaos and political
stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering from widespread
unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half
from what they had been a generation before.
These nationalist demagogues sanctified their followers as righteous
victims stalked by an array of elusive enemies. They spoke in the
language of vengeance and violence, leading, as it always does, to
actual violence.
They trafficked in historical myth, deifying the past exploits of
their race or ethnicity in a perverse kind of ancestor worship, a
mechanism to give to those who suffered from anomie, who had
lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new, glorious identity
as part of a master race.
When I walked through Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half
of the population is African-American, with the civil rights attorney
Bryan Stevenson a few years ago, he pointed out the numerous
Confederate memorials, noting that most had been put up in the
last decade. “This,” I told him, “is exactly what happened in
Yugoslavia.”
A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds
the collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates
the supposedly unique virtues of the race or the national group.
It strips all who are outside the closed circle of worth and
humanity.
The world instantly becomes understandable, a black and white
tableau of them and us.
The Mask Is Off
These tragic moments in history see people fall into collective
insanity. They suspend thought, especially self-critical thought.
None of this is going away in November, in fact it will get worse.
Joe Biden, a shallow, political hack devoid of fixed beliefs or
intellectual depth, is an expression of the nostalgia of a ruling
class that yearns to return to the pantomime of democracy.
They want to restore the decorum and civic religion that makes
the presidency a form of monarchy and sacralizes the organs of
state power.
Donald Trump’s vulgarity and ineptitude is an embarrassment to
the architects of empire. He has ripped back the veil that covered
our failed democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try this
veil cannot be restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden
cannot bring it back.
Political, economic and social dysfunction define
the American empire.
Our staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects
over 5 million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic
fallout the pandemic has caused, has exposed the American
capitalist model as bankrupt.
It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven
decades, to look at other social and political systems that serve
the common good rather than corporate greed.
The diminished stature of the United States, even among
our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms
of government and new forms of power.
It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy.
It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience
to bring down the empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us.
If we mobilize to build an open society, we hold out the possibility
of beating back these crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting
the march towards ecocide.
This requires us to acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets
of Beirut, that our kleptocracy, like Lebanon’s, is incapable of
being salvaged.
The American system of inverted totalitarianism, as the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we are to
wrest back our democracy and save ourselves from mass extinction.
We need to echo the chants by the crowds in Lebanon calling for
the wholesale removal of its ruling class — kulyan-yani-kulyan —
everyone means everyone.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55446.htm
