The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.
By Chris Hedges
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.
Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.
The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”
Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.
A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.
Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”
The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.
Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.
Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.
The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:
[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.
But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.
The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.
Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.
He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.
Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.
“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”
The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.
The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.
There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.
Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.
The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.
Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.
They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
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Comments
19 responses to “Chris Hedges: Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to America Will be Christian Fascism”
Ridiculous — “Christian fascism”.
It’s absurd to fearmonger over a supposed impending Christian fascism when in the here and now bloodthirsty and sociopathic Zionists are totally dominating the scene.
And it’s not the Christian fundamentalists who are directing this show, it’s the Zionist supremacists who essentially dictate to everyone: State Dept, Executive, Legislature, mass media, etc. Even “big oil” takes a back seat to these arrogant sadists.
So Christopher bemoaning the ghost of Christian fascism is a bit much at this time.
(By the way, I tried posting this exact above post on ConsortiumNews under this same article a few days ago and CN never posted it. Interesting. Disturbing.)
Zionism and Christian Fascism are very similar in their goals to destroy Democracy in the World.
Did Consorium News publish this article?
Yes. But they cowardly refused to post my comment.
Chris is not keeping up, the preferred slur is “Christian nationalists.” I wrote my first substack about “Christians” — mainstream — and their allegiance to the state. The Episcopal bishop of Maine sent out a letter yapping about Christian nationalists, and, frankly, I can’t think of any greater Christian nationalists than the Episcopalians who are in every branch of government.
That said, the psychotic believers in such nonsense as the rapture and the coming armageddon are very dangerous people because they have lost all touch with reality. They spend their time proselytizing because they’re trying to convince themselves that they are true believers. No one who has sincere and deeply held beliefs needs to shove them down someone else’s throat.
It doesn’t really seem possible to tie fascism to Christianity or any other religion as far as that goes. Fascism seems like a corporate entity, or some other type of Mafia that takes control of a government and it’s operations. It could be something like Boeing, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, and several others to numerous mention. Like Drew said above, however many of these corporations and entities can be tied to Zionism however, not all of them. AIPAC could easily be considered a fascist organization, in my opinion, for sure AIPAC controls my congressmen at both state and federal levels.
No matter how we define the process at work in America and the world at large, including the never ending work of the global elites as represented by the WEF (World Economic Forum) in Davos Switzerland by its director Klaus Schwab, the final result will be the same.
The birth of the BRICS entity lead by the Russia-China unbreakable partnership, is running at full steam with a dozens long list of countries waiting to join. Only a nuclear holocaust will prevent the eventual liberation of the planet. We must be grateful to the three last Democrat administration for having accelerated the process of implosion. For the final chapter we thank you Joe, God bless you.
There is a lot of potentially dangerous cross-fertilization between the evangelical Christians and the Zionist Jews regarding the way they envision their respective endgames. They want Armageddon (WWIII) for different reasons, but they both want it. Primitive, irrational religious beliefs are not a good fit with the high-tech world of the twenty-first century and could have catastrophic consequences for the entire planet if these fanatics get their wish!!!
Excellent comment! As I said above, this is psychotic thinking, and just because it’s indulged in by millions does not make it sane.
Thank you, Susan! I read your comments and I’m delighted to see that you have more than a superficial understanding of what I consider to be a very serious problem.
Christian Facism and Zionism are two sides of the same coin; the ruling Oligarchy.
Christian fascism, to use Chris’ terminology is really just a description of the behaviour of those who have swallowed the zionist propaganda about the return of the Jews to a mythological and anti-Christ “homeland”. It actually is nothing more than a giant robbery scam involved endless lies and mass murder.
Chris’ summary of the economic destruction of the US and most of the West is accurate but offers no real solution. A real solution must include a total rejection of the puritanical view of each person as being little more than a working economic unit. We are all much more than that. We must cease believing the bankers centuries-long lies about the nature of money which should instead be openly recognised as a man-made accounting system for facilitating the modern production system which no longer requires full employment as well as ensuring that the citizens of a nation have the financial means to purchase what their collective efforts have produced. Endless and ever-growing debt, which is a natural and unavoidable result of the present bankers policy that aims to create a world slave state must be exposed and rejected.
The study of the mechanics of the existing banking-money system done a 100 years ago by the engineer C. H. Douglas (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=Douglas+Social+Credit+Oliver+Heydorn&ia=web) should be studied. Douglas recognised that increasing technology would gradually reduce the requirement for human labour in production and suggested a national dividend paid equally to every citizen as a correcting mechanism to ensure there was always an equity between the costs of production and the collective purchasing power needed so that industry could recover all it’s costs. The myriad of existing and complicated and failing welfare programmes are a disgusting and grossly inefficient and inhumane attempt to keep a debt money system and a corrupt power-crazed banking elite in positions of extreme power.
Excellent comment, Bill!
After 20 years of study of all existing economic systems at the English library, Marx dissected and predicted the pitfalls of Capitalism. Further along Lenin early in the twentieth century, explained how the system would naturally evolve into Imperialism. I doubt that anything else can be said about a dead end exploitative regime, like the one presently running the world.
Scrdmgl, this is scientifically absolutely correct. I wonder if in USA do exist organized and territorially radicated leninist parties or movements like in europe, asia and south america.
Americans have a very hard time joining together to accomplish anything; neoliberalism is fully fledged here.
You might enjoy the story of a socialist group in Boston in the 1970s which held some sort of open forum, hoping that working-class people would attend. They did not. I was a radical leftist and an actual working-class person (typesetting, proofreading, etc) and I was looked down upon by so-called leftists. It was an early lesson in being skeptical of people, especially people who had unearned income.
People seem either to enjoy creating tiny groups of supposed radicals, which accomplish nothing, or they’re gullible. I received an alternative horticulture catalogue last year which included slamming Russia for their “unprovoked invasion.” This is a group of people (Fedco Trees) who think they’re opposed to GMOs, seed patents, etc, and they did not know that Monsanto has plans for using Ukraine to spread more GMOs. They certainly did not know the history of the proxy war in Ukraine.
What does one do with such people, except what I did, objecting to using politics (of which they know nothing) in a horticulture catalogue? My guess is that they are Democrats, immersed in a cult from which they cannot escape.
A universal state compensation would be useful on short term, but a further obstacle toward crisis and revolutionary organization. We in italy experimented it since 2019, and did nothing positive to promote proletariat fight, it only divided the class, empoverished other assistance instruments and furtherly alienate and frustrate workers conscience and dignity on long term life and political projects. It is going to be eliminated by new right wing government elected by same delusional electorate who mandated those rules, it pushed back years the inevitable, future acknowledgment of a communist internationalist solution.
I am a Canadian of Italian ancestors (Catanzaro, Calabria), too bad that Italy lost the great leader Enrico Berlinguer. Italy needs another such leader desperately, at least even a true nationalist politician that would take the county out of NATO. That’s why I support Le Pen hoping that like Gen. De Gaulle moves the country away from the US-NATO alliance. One step at the time is good enough for me, later we can settle accounts for a final change of regime.
When intelligent, albeit, ignorant people understand all religion is a form of insanity then humans can become civilized. Religion is the insane adult version of make-believe. At present religion is not used as a helping hand up religion is used as a fist to beat people down. The judeo, christian, islam religion is the most severe form of religious insanity. Become civilized dump superstitious ignorant religious insanity. Specifically the three in one religion previously mentioned!