Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties.

By CHRIS HEDGES

22July, 2024

Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a Teleprompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years – from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic.

In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.

Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted 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 undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied.

The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation 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. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication.

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