Street roots
March 18, 2011
POSTM ORTEM , from page 8
functions, when normal mechanisms for
change are shut down, then you vomit up
figures like Slobodan Milosevic or Hitler.
Tea Party figures provide an emotional
consistency hut their political agenda is
utterly irrational. They want to dismantle
government and yet don’t want to touch the
military, the part of the government that
consumes more than 50 percent of
discretionary spending.
They have a great deal of rage, which is
legitimate because they have been betrayed.
by establishment figures like Bill Clinton
■ and Barack Obama. And that rage is also
effectively used by the demagogues to target
weak scapegoats, which always happens, so
they demonize Muslims [andj
undocumented workers [and] funnel that
~ rage away from Wall Street and the criminal
class that manage our financial institutions.
Although we live in a period of relative
stability that will change if we don’t radically
alter our economic and political policies,
especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,.
for which we’re borrowing from the Chinese
at the absurd rate of $2 billion, per day to
fund. If that doesn’t change, we’re playing
with an implosion of our currency, and if
that happens and we entera period of
instability or crisis, we’re no more immune
from the effects of breakdown than were1 the
Yugoslavs or theGermans of the Russians
or anyone else. And then it becomes very
frightening.
These buffoonish figures like Glenn Beck
and others who are laughed off by the
establishment find a following among people
who feel quite correctly that they have been
betrayed by the traditional institutions of
power.
R.L.: Like journalist Jeremy Scahill, you
also see growing privatization o f traditional
government functions as p a rt o f a corporate
class takeover.
c- C.H.: Yes, they’ve hollowed the state out
from the inside, and now„they’re gunning for
social security. They’re parasitic. A
corporation like Halliburton is a classic
example. It is a creature of taxpayer money
and its stock has quadrupled since the start
of the war in Iraq, and yet most of its
subsidiaries are set up in Dubai so they
don’t have to pay taxes. Corporations are
supranational: they’re quite happy to destroy
the state as they’ve destroyed our
manufacturing sector, to leech off the state
in terms of sucking taxpayer money out of
it. Goldman Sachs and; Citibank and Wall
Street investors have done (this), then
refused to invest that money back into the
country. That’s what has happened: a
reconfiguring of American capitalism into a
very frightening feudalism.
R.L.: In “Death of the Liberal Class ” you
date a takeover by corporate power and a state
of perpetual war to the era of Woodrow Wilson
and World War I, .
C.H.: That’s the seminal moment when
the massive reconfiguration of American •
society begins. The first system of modern
mass propaganda was created during World
War I under the Committee for Public
Information headed by George Creel. It
employed the understanding of mass
psychology pioneered by Trotter, Le Bon
and Freud that grasped that people are
manipulated more effectively by appeals to
emotion rather than fact or reason.
The Committee for Public Information
had a news division that churned out pro- -
war stories, a speakers’ bureau and graphic
artists [that] saturated the culture. It was
very closely studied by Goebbels (Hitler’s
propaganda minister). It seduced most of
public issue after I gave a commencement
address at Rockford College that was picked*
up by Fox and all the tfash cable shows. The
Times responded by giving me a formal
written'reprimand saying that I could no
longer speak about the war in Iraq. I had a
choice: I could muzzle myself in service of
my career, which I was unwilling to do? and
(so) I left the papers
R.L.: What are your political beließ?
C.H.: I believe in heavy taxation, heavy
regulation. Without heavy government
interference in a capitalist society, it
descends into a mafia political system and a
mafia economic system, which is pretty
much what’s happened. I’m a European
“These buffoonish figures like Glenn Beck and others who are laughed off by
the establishment find a following among people who feel quite correctly that
they have been betrayed by the traditional institutions of power."
the country, including «a lot of the leading
socialist intellectuals. Randolph Bourne and
Jane Addarns wrote quite movingly on how
effective that propaganda was, and how few
people were able to resist. Those who did
resist were silenced with a cruder form of.
state control Under the Espionage and
Sedition Acts.
Once the war was over, the effective
psychological mattipulation continued, so
the dreaded Hun was instantly replaced
with the dreaded Red. The Espionage and
Sedition Acts were used to deport Emma
Goldman and others. The climate of fear,
the search for the internal enemy, the
constant witch hunts for the communist
sympathizers never left American society.
Dwight MacDonald writes that World War
f “was the rockonwhich progressive
movements broke.”
So we saw a dismantling of populist
radical movements, and an internal purging
within traditional liberal institutions. It was
the radical movements that kept the liberals
honest.
Those radical movements, certainly after
the witch hunts of the 1950s, were
destroyed, and the liberal institutions
pushed out thousands of people — teachers,
social workers, professors, journalises — who
weren’t affiliated with the Communist party
but had a moral autonomy that was
unacceptable. With the rise of neo-
liberalism, under Clinton in particular, these
liberal institutions didn’t fight back or
withered as effective counterweights to
power.
R.L.: You mentioned the press, as a dying
liberal institution. Why did you leave The New
York Times?
C.H.: Because I was very outspoken
against the Iraq War, and that became a
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socialist, not a Marxist. And I’m not an anti
capitalist I’m anti-corporate capitalism, and
if you don’t set up huge barriers to protect
against corporate capitalism, it becomes
predatory and will destroy your country.
R.L.: You foresee not only the end of
democracy but the environmental ruin of
civilization asuie know it.
• C.H.: Of course. The commodification of
human beings, which is what corporations -
do, is matched by a tommodification of the
natural world. Nothing h as an intrinsic
valuer everything is exploited for money or
profit until exhaustion or collapse, and
that’s why the environmental crisis is
intimately twinned with the economic crisis.
.. R.L,: Your prognosis fo r A n w r ia f^ .^
democracy is bleak, but you f in d hope in the
stories o f figures such as Dr. M artin L uther
King, f r , Ralph, Nader, journalists Sydney
Schanberg a n d I .R Stone, historian Howard
Zinn, an d [Catholic social activist] Dorothy
Day.
C.H.: Hope comes from physical actions:
resistance or rebellion. It’s not going to
come from placing our faith in bankrupt
liberal institutions. All those people you
mentioned are essentially American radicals
who understood that. We don’t have a
progressive wing of the Democratic Party
that has any power or influence. Labor
unions are spent. Liberal churches are
irrelevant. Universities and the press have
beencorporatizéd.
So it’s incumbent upon those of us who
care about protecting what’s left of civil
society to recognize that hope comea in
physical acts of resistance. If we’re not
willing to do that, hope is extinguished.