My thoughts on Biden’s exit

By Chris Hedges

Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he had zealously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble through the words on a teleprompter and not always aware of what was happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature from start to finish—he has held federal office for 47 years. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was chosen as the 2024 nominee in a Soviet-style primary battle. The billionaire class will now choose someone else. Democratic Party voters are mere props in this political farce. Unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class chooses as their presidential candidate, Donald Trump has a real and committed base, however fascist.

In Hitler and the GermansPolitical philosopher Eric Vogelin rejects the idea that Hitler – gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar – hypnotized and seduced the German people. Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” around him because he embodied the pathologies of a sick society plagued by economic collapse and hopelessness. Vogelin defines stupidity as “loss of reality.” Loss of reality means that a “stupid” person “cannot properly align his actions with the world in which he lives.” The demagogue, always a idiotis not a freak or a social mutation. The demagogue expresses the spirit of the times in society.

Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States and caused 30 million workers to lose their jobs in mass layoffs. As I wrote in America, The Farewell Tour, This attack on the working class triggered a crisis that forced the ruling elites to develop a new political paradigm. Propagated by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime, and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift. Those going through profound economic and political changes were told that their suffering resulted not from rampant militarism and corporate greed, but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that supported the New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked for favoring criminal black youth, “welfare queens,” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a Art Populism, launched by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly stood for family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith, and a return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, has become almost indistinguishable from the established Republican Party with which it is allied today.

The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the takeover of democratic institutions by a greedy oligarchy, grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations, and unbridled militarism. The Democrats will appoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for the intemperate greed of corporations, the folly of endless wars, the promotion of genocide, and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. And it looks like they will give us Trump again. God help us.

NOTE FROM CHRIS HEDGES TO THE READERS OF THE SCHEERPOST: Without your help, I can no longer continue writing a weekly column for ScheerPost and producing my weekly television show. The walls are closing in at an alarming rate, and elites, including Democratic Party elites, are becoming more vocal in their calls for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription to it, sell your data, or accept advertising. Please subscribe, if you can, at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue publishing my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and producing my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Please share this story and help us expand our network!

Chris Hedges

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 head of the newspaper’s Middle East and Balkans bureau. Before that, he worked abroad for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitorand NPR. He is the host of the show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for The New York Times’ coverage of global terrorism and 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 bestselling American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War Against America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle and was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle for his book War is a force that gives us meaningHe writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

You can also make a donation through our PayPal account or join our Patreon.