Chris Hedges – Thoughts on the Midterm Elections

The opposition parties in the West are no better than the parties already in government

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 the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the show The Chris Hedges Report.

Cross-posted fromChris Hedges’ Substack

The Democrats may have taken control of the House and the Senate, they may have humiliated Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but the real fight is only beginning. It is not simply a battle to hold the corrupt Trump regime to account, something that can only be done if the Democrats are willing overcome their reluctance to carry out impeachment proceedings against the president. It is as well a battle to sweep away the corporate-indentured hierarchy of the Democratic Party, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

The Democratic Party since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who gave us NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Harley Act, and gutted programs such as Welfare, is a more polished version of corporate and oligarchic rule, abjectly subservient to the war machine, the Israel lobby and their funders in the billionaire class.

The country is broken. Corruption, in both parties, is endemic. Federal agencies have been gutted and destroyed. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been handed over to right-wing ideologues. The working class is crippled with debt peonage and substandard wages. Constitutional norms and protections have been erased. Billionaires, including Trump, pay little to no income tax. The 2010 Citizens United supreme court ruling, which allows big business to fund their hand-picked candidates, sustains a system of legalized bribery.

The public may clamor for a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulation of the big banks and private equity firms, an end to arms shipments to Israel and campaign finance reform, but no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party listens or cares. They serve their paymasters.

Will cutthroat capitalism, sold to us under the sanitized name of neoliberalism, be allowed to continue to impoverish the citizenry and funnel wealth upwards into the hands of the 1 percent? Will corporations be regulated and policed? Will corporate criminals be brought to trial? Will our democracy be restored? Or will the grotesque sight of a trillionaire, Elon Musk, gutting federal agencies and pouring hundreds of millions into elections to try and control the outcome be normalized?

The handful of politicians who attempt to confront the corruption and the devastation visited on the American working class through deindustrialization and deregulation such as Bernie Sanders, see their campaigns sabotaged by the Democratic Party leadership, including Barack Obama.

We must demand that progressive candidates, including Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and possibly Maine’s Troy Jackson, build coalitions to oust the Democratic Party leadership, raise the minimum wage, enact universal health care, prosecute corporate crime and impeach Trump. It will be up to us.

The Democratic Party hierarchy will see the results not as a repudiation of Trump, but an endorsement of the flaccid and ineffectual position of a party that stands for little and fights for less. This would be yet another betrayal by the Democrats of voters. It would keep alive the very real prospect of another fascist, one better organized and more intelligent, taking the White House in two years.

Of course, this fight will mean not only jettisoning a corrupt Democratic Party leadership, but turning on the mega-donors, lobbyists and corporations that fund and control the Democratic Party.

The effort to wrest the party back from the hands of corporations and oligarchs will be vicious and difficult. It will require us to rely on the power of mass movements to sever these bonds. Nothing else will work.

If we fail, our anemic democracy will not be saved by these midterm elections but doomed.

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