Donald
Trump’s Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites
By
Chris Hedges
March
06, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig"
-
The liberal elites,
who bear significant responsibility for the
death of our democracy, now hold themselves up
as the saviors of the republic. They have
embarked, despite their own corruption and their
complicity in
neoliberalism
and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous
moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is
quite a show. They attack Trump’s “lies,”
denounce executive orders such as his travel ban
as un-American and blame Trump’s election on
Russia or FBI Director James Comey rather than
the failed neoliberal policies they themselves
advanced.
Where
was this moral outrage when our privacy was
taken from us by the security and surveillance
state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed
out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and
2.3 million men and women were packed into our
prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why
did they not thunder with indignation as money
replaced the vote and elected officials and
corporate lobbyists instituted our system of
legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned
critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a
nation to be governed by the dictates of
corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why
did they cater to the foibles and utterings of
fellow elites, all the while blacklisting
critics of the corporate state and ignoring the
misery of the poor and the working class? Where
was their moral righteousness when the United
States committed war crimes in the Middle East
and our militarized police carried out murderous
rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not
moral. It is self-exaltation disguised as piety.
It is part of the carnival act.
The
liberal class, ranging from Hollywood and the
Democratic leadership to The New York Times and
CNN, refuses to acknowledge that it sold the
Democratic Party to corporate bidders;
collaborated in the evisceration of our civil
liberties; helped destroy programs such as
welfare, orchestrate the job-killing North
American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific
Partnership deal, wage endless war, debase our
public institutions including the press and
build the world’s largest prison system.
“The
truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to
know. The truth is more important than ever,”
reads a television ad for The New York Times.
What the paper fails to add is that the hardest
place to find the truth about the forces
affecting the life of the average American and
the truth about empire is in The New York Times
itself. News organizations, from the Times to
the tawdry forms of entertainment masquerading
as news on television, have rendered most people
and their concerns invisible. Liberal
institutions, especially the press, function, as
the journalist and author Matt Taibbi says, as
“the guardians” of the neoliberal and imperial
orthodoxy.
It is
the job of the guardians of orthodoxy to plaster
over the brutal reality and cruelty of
neoliberalism and empire with a patina of
civility or entertainment. They pay homage to a
nonexistent democracy and nonexistent American
virtues. The elites, who live in enclaves of
privilege in cities such as New York, Washington
and San Francisco, scold an enraged population.
They tell those they dismiss as inferiors to
calm down, be reasonable and patient and trust
in the goodness of the old ruling class and the
American system. African-Americans have heard
this kind of cant preached by the white ruling
class for a couple of centuries.
Because the system works for the elites, and
because the elites interact only with other
elites, they are mystified about the revolt
rising up from the decayed cities they fly over
in the middle of the country. They think they
can stuff this inexplicable rage back in the
box. They continue to offer up absurd solutions
to deindustrialization and despair, such as
Thomas Friedman’s endorsement
of “a culture of entrepreneurship” and “an ethic
of pluralism.” These kinds of bromides are
advertising jingles. They bear no more
connection to reality than Trump promising to
make America great again.
I
walked into the Harvard Club in New York City
after midnight on election night. The
well-heeled New York elites stood, their mouths
agape, looking up at the television screens in
the oak-paneled bar while wearing their Clinton
campaign straw hats. They could not speak. They
were in shock. The system they funded to prevent
anyone from outside their circle, Republican or
Democrat, from achieving the presidency had
inexplicably collapsed.
Taibbi, when I interviewed him in New York, said
political power in our corporate state is
controlled by “a tripartite system.” “You have
to have the assent of the press, the donor
class, and one of the two [major] political
parties to get in,” said Taibbi, author of “Insane
Clown President:
Dispatches From the 2016 Circus.” “It’s an
exclusive club. It’s like a membership system.
They all have to agree and confer their blessing
on the candidate. Trump somehow managed to get
past all three of those obstacles. And he did it
essentially by putting all of them on trial. He
put the press on trial and villainized them with
the public. I think it was a brilliant
masterstroke that nobody saw coming. But it
wouldn’t have been possible if their
unpopularity hadn’t been building for years and
years and years.”
“It’s a kind of
Stockholm syndrome,”
he said of the press. “The reporters,
candidates, and candidates’ aides are all thrown
together. They’re stuck in the same environment
with each other day after day, month after
month. After a while, they start to
unconsciously adopt each other’s values. Then
they start to live in the same neighborhoods.
They go to the same parties. Then it becomes a
year-after-year kind of thing. Then after that,
they’re the same people. It’s a total perversion
of what’s supposed to happen. We’re [the press]
supposed to be on the outside, not identifying
with these people. But now, it’s a club.
Journalists enjoy the experience of being close
to power.”
At first the press, especially the television
press, could not get enough of Trump. He
received
23 times the coverage
of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke about things
that do not make for great television—inequality
and corporate corruption. Trump brought in the
advertising dollars. 2016 was
CNN’s most profitable year.
Then, alarmed at Trump’s ascendancy, the press
set out to destroy him. The press applied its
Darth Vader Force choke. It did not work. They
tried it again and again. The Force had deserted
them.
“When a candidate makes a mistake and steps in
it—[2004 presidential hopeful] Howard Dean is
the classic example,
the scream—then
they [TV news shows] replay it every hour, 100
times a day,” Taibbi said. “The critical part is
that Dean was already in violation leading up to
that moment. He was not the right person because
he was anti-war. He got his donations from the
wrong people. He makes the mistake. The press
pig-piles on the person just instinctively. All
this negative attention. The candidate freaks
out and apologizes. He disappears for a while.
He tries to soldier on. The next thing you know,
there’s a Page 16 story: Candidate exits the
race. It’s a script. But it didn’t work with
Trump.”
The
press, like the Democratic Party, is an
appendage of the consumer society. These
institutions are not about politics or news.
They are about imparting an experience. They
create political personalities, marketed as
celebrities, to make us feel good about
candidates. These manufactured emotions, the
product of the dark arts of the public relations
industry, determine how we vote. Issues and
policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and
entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of
his fictitious self.
“When
you work in that environment long enough you
unconsciously become an agent for whatever that
commercial strategy is,” Taibbi said of the
press in our corporate-run political theater.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
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“What we call right-wing and liberal media in
this country are really just two different
strategies of the same kind of nihilistic
lizard-brain sensationalism,” Taibbi wrote in
“Insane Clown President.” “The ideal CNN story
is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story
is probably a baby thrown down a well by a
Muslim terrorist or an
ACORN activist.
Both companies offer the same service, it’s just
that the Fox version is a little kinkier.”
The
pseudo-events on television displace reality.
This is how a reality star becomes president.
Sixty million people think Trump’s manufactured
persona—the predominate tycoon—on “The
Apprentice” is real. Our perception of the truth
is determined by what appears on the screen. If
an event is never broadcast, it somehow never
happened. The electronic image is the word of
God. The corporate state controls most of what
is seen and heard on television, what ideas and
events can be discussed in the mainstream media
and what orthodoxies, including neoliberalism
and the war industry, must never be questioned.
We suffer an intellectual tyranny as pervasive
as that imposed by fascism and communism. Trump,
who is as gullible as the most habitual
television viewer, exemplifies our cultural and
political death. He is no more “authentic” than
Hillary Clinton. But he appears on our screens
as more authentic because he is more deeply
embedded in the medium that controls our
thoughts. He is what is vomited up from the
perverted zeitgeist of a nation entranced and
dominated by electronic hallucinations.
“People have this idea that Trump has no
connection with the ‘common man,’ but he does,”
Taibbi said. “He has exactly the same media
habits that ordinary people have. He believes
the stuff that he reads on the internet and
watches on television implicitly and
unquestioningly. That is what gives him that
connection with people. He thinks like they do.
He has the same habits they have. A classic
example is the thing with the so-called 3
million
illegal … voters.
He reads that, probably in an
Infowars story,
it’s policy like two minutes later. He doesn’t
go through the process of asking himself if it’s
untrue. He’s a perfect consumer in that respect.
That’s what makes him so dangerous.”
“[George W.] Bush was child’s play compared to
what we’re dealing with now,” Taibbi said. “Bush
was a puppet. He was a vehicle for a very
familiar form of right-wing capitalist politics.
This Trump thing is totally different. Trump
really is the actual engine behind this
phenomenon during the entire campaign. There
were no people behind the man, I don’t think.
The presidential campaign has no relation to the
issue of whether or not you can govern
effectively. The campaign is a television show.
The values that decide whether a person becomes
a candidate or can’t become a candidate are more
or less arbitrary. It has a lot to do with the
commercial value of the candidate. You can’t
have an unentertaining candidate because the
press needs to make money. They will
unconsciously gravitate towards someone who does
what Trump does, which is get [website] hits and
eyeballs and ratings.”
Trump’s
popularity increased the more the establishment
condemned him. This would have sent a profound
and disturbing message to anyone not as clueless
as our liberal elites. They did not get it. They
thought they could trot out Bill Clinton, Barack
Obama and Hollywood celebrities and get the
rubes to fall for their routine one more time.
They thought the country would again obey.
The liberal class, by embracing neoliberalism
and refusing to challenge the imperial wars,
empowered the economic and political structures
that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to
Trump. Multiculturalism, when it means, to use
the words of
Cornel West,
nothing more than having a president who is a
“black mascot for Wall Street,” betrays the
disenfranchised and endows the ruling elites
with a false progressivism, a false humanism and
a false inclusiveness.
Hillary
and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and the current
Democratic Party leadership designed and built
the massive system of imprisonment, essentially
ended welfare, expanded our wars and pushed
through NAFTA. They destroyed the lives of
hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class
families and are responsible for the mounds of
corpses in the Middle East. Yet these liberal
elites speak as if they are champions of racial
and economic justice. They appear in
choreographed pseudo-events to demonstrate a
faux compassion. Now they have been exposed as
fakes.
A
genuine populism, one defined and often
articulated by Bernie Sanders, could sweep the
Democratic Party back into power. Regulating
Wall Street, publicly financing campaigns,
forgiving student debt, demanding universal
health care, bailing out homeowners victimized
by the banks, ending the wars in the Middle
East, instituting a jobs program to repair our
decaying infrastructure, dismantling the prison
system, restoring the rule of law on the streets
of our cities, making college education free and
protecting programs such as Social Security
would see election victory after election
victory.
But this will never happen within the Democratic
Party. It refuses to prohibit corporate money.
The party elites know that if corporate money
disappears, so do they. The party’s hierarchy,
pressured by Obama and the Clintons, elevated
Tom Perez over Keith Ellison—whom a major donor
to the party, Haim Saban,
condemns as an “anti-Semite”
because of Ellison’s criticism of the Israeli
government—to head the Democratic National
Committee. They will press forward repeating the
same silly slogans and trying to use the now
ineffective Force choke on their political
enemies. They may have lost control of the
Congress and the White House and hold only 16
governorships and majorities in only 31 of the
states’ 99 legislative chambers, but they are
incapable of offering any meaningful alternative
to neoliberalism and empire. They are devoid of
a vision. They can only moralize. They will
continue to atrophy and enable the consolidation
of an American fascism.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
excoriated Russia’s bankrupt liberal class at
the end of the 19th century. Russian liberals
mouthed values they did not defend. Their stated
ideals bore no relationship to their actions.
They were filled with a suffocating narcissism.
In
“Notes From Underground,” Dostoevsky lampooned
the defeated dreamers of the liberal class,
those who preached goodness but lived in moral
squalor. These defeated dreamers denounced the
social and cultural depravity they had largely
created. They had an open disdain for the
uneducated, the poor, the working class, the
lesser breeds beneath them. And in the end they
ushered in a moral nihilism to empower a
dangerous class of demagogues, killers and
fools.
“I
never even managed to become anything: neither
wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an
honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the
Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out
my life in my corner, taunting myself with the
spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it
is even impossible for an intelligent man
seriously to become anything, and only fools
become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man
of the nineteenth century must be and is morally
obliged to be primarily a characterless being;
and a man of character, an active
figure—primarily a limited being.”
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years.
