America's Democratic Collapse

From AlterNet, a speech recently given at Furman University by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges:

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The "consent of the governed" has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, "a coup d'etat in slow motion." We are being impoverished -- legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that -- a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweatshops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.

I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough.

And

How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation -- the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy. This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled "Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power." In it, he wrote:

The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.

Click here for the rest.

If you want a "theory of everything," at least as far as politics and economics go, for where I'm coming from as a blogger, and more importantly as a United States citizen, this speech is it. I mean, I tend to focus more on how our public education system and American culture, both popular and "high," function so as to aid and abet this "coup d'etat in slow motion," but Hedges' words pretty much nail it: all that good shit you were taught in school about how great America is, all the stuff in movies that makes your eyes tear up about our freedom loving nation, it doesn't count for shit anymore; the American experiment is over.

In short, private power, a.k.a. the economic might of corporations and the fabulously wealthy, now rivals public power, and in many cases far surpasses it. Sure, we're still a relatively free nation, but what good is freedom without democracy? That is, our freedoms amount to nothing if we, the people, don't have the lion's share of say in how the country is run. Conventional wisdom continues to assert strongly that it's all about Democrats and Republicans, but both parties are far more beholden to the sources of their campaign monies than they are to voters--the more dollars you give, the more "access" you have, the more influence and sway you have; it's good that so many voters have given five and ten bucks here and there to the Obama campaign, but that's not going to give anybody five minutes in the Oval Office with him.

I'm very excited by the very real prospect that the next President could be a Black man. But the collapse of our democracy is clearly the most dire threat this nation has ever faced, bigger than the forces of fascism, bigger than the Confederacy, bigger than the Great Depression. And Obama says nothing about it. I have no hope that he will start speaking about it anytime soon. Bloody hell, in his ascendancy to the top of the Democratic Party Obama has played this new anti-democratic system like a violin: I have every reason to believe that he's as much a part of the problem as the Clintons are.

I'm sad and scared. Sad because of the end of everything I've believed in since I was a little boy. Scared for the same reason. At least I'll have plenty of material to blog about if Obama wins it.

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