Edit: Full Text -
@ChrisLynnHedges
My thoughts on Biden dropping out:
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.@JoeBidenMy fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.
Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1815425971643986009
He is right about so much of it but has to bring the Soviet Union. It’s just so annoying, looking at you Michael Hudson.
I mean there are writers who criticize the USSR from a Marxist framework and then there are fucking memers like Pettifor and Hedges who namedrop it inexplicably on unrelated occasions. For some reason Pettifor just used it as a pejorative when talking about state-funded for-profit neocolonization projects proposed in the Sahel by western countries. The relationship was supposedly that the USSR would run state projects for profit only at state expense. Which, almost deliberately skirts around the real Mao Zedong thought criticism which is that the USSR sapped rural agricultral production for the military and bureacracy and ultimately was destroyed by corruption. Pulling out these weird unanalytical historical parallels would make Stalin weep.
Honestly calling recolonization efforts in Africa “Soviet style” just made me get a bit off track there my apologies not gonna edit that though
I’m leaving a lot out here of course but overextending aid to peripheral nations in a similarly provocative and unsustainable manner instead of fostering mutual development probably hurt the USSR a lot in the long term, though I think it could have turned around instead of collapsing, because it was already in a situation to counterbalance the US. I don’t really like historical hypotheticals but I like to imagine an alternate history where China and the USSR averted some conflicts of the split with better mutual understanding of development economics and why China’s growth model with protecting the agricultural sector was so important to growing the base of the industrial economy that contains a subset that contributes to military production (China doesn’t devote an outsized portion of GDP to its military but is able to match the USA with defense + efficiency + being a large country with many Chinese)
IIRC some writers even say the Soviet mode of production extended after the collapse of the USSR