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The Election March of the Trolls
We have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity—the 2012 presidential election. Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalists.
The only commodity the troll state offers is fear. The corporate trolls, such as the Koch brothers, terrify the birthers, creationists, militia lovers, tea party militants, right-to-life advocates, Christian fascists and God-fearing red-white-and-blue patriots by proclaiming that, unless they vote for Perry or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann or some other product of the lunatic fringe of our political establishment, the American family will be destroyed, our children will be corrupted and the country will turn socialist. Barack Obama, who they whisper is a closet Muslim, will take away their guns, raise their taxes and bring homosexual couples into kindergartens.
For those, usually liberals, still rooted in a reality-based world, one that believes in evolutionary science, the corporate trolls offer a more refined, fear-based message of impending doom. If you abandon the Democrats we will be governed by Bible-thumping idiots who will make us chant the Pledge of Allegiance in mass rallies and teach the account of Genesis as historical and biological fact in our nation’s schools.
And underneath it all runs the mantra chanted in unison by all the trolls—terror, terror, terror. The troll establishment spins us like windup dolls and laughs all the way to the bank. What idiots, they think. And every election cycle we prove them right.
“The only people who grasp the distinction between reality and appearance, who grasp the laws of conduct and society, are the ruling groups and those who do their bidding; scientific, technical elites who elucidate the laws of behavior and the functions of society so that people might be more effectively, albeit unconsciously, governed,” wrote James W. Carey in “Communication as Culture.”
The trolls dominate or have neutralized every major institution in the country on behalf of their corporate paymasters. The press, education, Wall Street, labor and our political parties are managed by trolls or have been destroyed by them. Sometimes these trolls speak like liberals. Sometimes they speak like conservatives. Sometimes they are secular. Sometimes they are Christians. But the language they use is a cover for the relentless march toward a totalitarian capitalism and a kingdom where the trolls, if not the rest of us, live happily ever after. Rick Perry and John Boehner overtly make war on Social Security. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi say they would like to save Social Security but are sadly powerless before the decisions of a congressional super committee they helped form. The result, of course, is the same. We get to choose the rhetoric and manner in which we are deceived and disempowered. Nothing more.
All cloying appeals to the Obama administration to use stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, public transit and reclaiming dams, as well as to create jobs, are about as effective as writing heartfelt appeals in the era of the old Soviet Union to Uncle Joe Stalin. The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.
A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. These forces demand that we serve the dictates of the marketplace. They are destroying all legal impediments to corporate exploitation and profit, as well as dismantling the regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen. They defend torture, offshore penal colonies, black sites and kidnapping (they call it “extraordinary rendition”) of state enemies. They protect and abet financial fraud. They wage pre-emptive war. They refuse to restore habeas corpus. Without warrants, they monitor, eavesdrop on and wiretap tens of millions of citizens. They order the assassination of U.S. citizens. They deny due process. They give corporations the status of persons. They ignore the suffering of the unemployed and the poor, slashing basic social service programs while doling out hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds to corporations. On these key issues, the only ones that really matter, there is no disagreement among trolls from either the self-identified left or the self-identified right. All their public disputes in the election cycle are a carnival act.
All conventional forms of dissent, from electoral politics to open debates, have been denied us. We cannot rely on the institutions that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. The only route left is to disconnect as thoroughly as possible from the consumer society and engage in acts of civil disobedience and obstruction. The more we sever ourselves from the addictions of fossil fuel and the consumer society, the more we begin to create a new paradigm for community. The more we engage in physical acts of defiance—as Bill McKibben and others did recently in front of the White House to protest the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico—the more we can keep alive a new, better way of relating to each other and the ecosystem.
Most important, we must stop being afraid. We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president. We have to defy all formal systems of power. We have to listen closely to the moral voices in our society, from McKibben to Noam Chomsky to Wendell Berry to Ralph Nader, and ignore feckless liberals who have been one of the most effective tools of our disempowerment. We have to create monastic enclaves where we can retain and nurture the values being rapidly destroyed by the wider corporate culture and build the mechanisms of self-sufficiency that will allow us to survive. The corporate coup is over. We have lost. The trolls have won. We have to face our banishment.
In William Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus” the Roman consul is deposed by the mob. Coriolanus, whatever his faults, turns on those who thrust him from power to declare a valediction we should deliver to our class of ruling trolls and all those who remain in their embrace.
Brutus:
There’s no more to be said, but he is banish’d,
As enemy to the people and his country:
It shall be so.Citizens:
It shall be so, it shall be so.Coriolanus:
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.
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198 Comments so far
Show AllInteresting historical parallel: As Austria slid into fascism, its leading social critic stopped writing social criticism and started writing about Shakespeare. It could be that the only truths left worth holding onto are those given to us long ago.
As was H.L. Menken in America forced by the Wilson government to stop publishing his social commentaries during the first world war. This government intrusion to suppress speech strangled what had been a very robust national dialogue of freethinkers and other iconoclastic writers in the popular press. That tradition never recovered. It did however give Menken the time and desire to write 'The American Language' which remains the most comprehensive work on our unique vocabulary.
Excellent point!
As a journalistic survey of less than 4 pages of verbal dynamite about what CONSTITUTES OVERLENGTHY OBSCENE PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS TODAY in the USA, this "dark,passionate" but super-illuminating crescendo of prescient brilliance WON'T and CAN'T be matched anywhere!
Chris Hedges is far more than the Edward R. Murrow of the 21st Century; he will remain a one-of-a-kind absolute truthteller, who is crucial to the continuance of any kind of Democracy in this Home of the Knave and Land of the Bended Knee!
Beautifully said Simonsez!!
Thank you!
"It could be that the only truths left worth holding onto are those given to us long ago."
The Emperor has No Clothes
In Hans Christian Anderson’s iconic fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, two swindling weavers promise an Emperor a “new suit” that they tell everyone will be invisible only to those who are unfit for their positions. So, when the Emperor parades before his subjects, the spellbound people laud his beautiful new clothes in fear of being exposed as unsophisticated or stupid. Eventually, it took a child to cry out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” before the king’s subjects could muster enough confidence to admit the obvious reality.
Scholars note that the phrase “emperor’s new clothes” describes a common situation where “weavers” of official policy insist that the value of their labor be recognized apart from the physical reality of the moment, and has become a standard metaphor for anything that smacks of pretentiousness, pomposity, social hypocrisy, collective denial, or hollow ostentatiousness.
While today’s existing global power structure continues to try to conduct business as usual and insist that the economy is in good standing, there is no question that existing systems are unsustainable. The economic value of all of our assets and resources are at stake, and dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than their root causes, while delaying the consequences and numbing the public to their real effects only exacerbates the inevitable results... http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/09/state-world-economy-emporer-clothes/
Balance in Contentious Times
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/09/election-day-balance-contentious-times/
How do we build a sustainable civilization?
http://www.triplepundit.com/author/sldi/
We have to be extremely careful here.
While I can agree in essence with the occurrences written about in this article, and even with many conclusions, the entire article itself is rhetoric serving the purpose of generating emotion.
I believe that the term, Troll, has to do with comment injecting rhetorical disagreement or farce, in order to throw discussion off on tangents, or with the purpose of creating chaos of a discussion.
That we often see in climate change discussion, and certainly by writers who rather blindly support extreme political philosophies who enter comment threads.
However, I take grave exception to the construction of this article. It is perhaps the specific educational subjects leading to a writer's acceptance and use of words, methods of argument, or the writer's own emotions leading to descent into rhetoric.
In the latter case, especially the disguised or unintentional inflammatory tone requires strong editorial help.
Shakespeare created theater, as did the great Greek playwrights. Theater is often intended to use fiction or created dialogue to expose us to strong emotion. Catharsis is the word used to signify completion of an issue. Great theater does not leave us hanging, nor is it inflammatory.
Those who need or use fiction or historical occurrence to inflame others are indulging in methods of propaganda: attempting to emotionally control others into supporting themselves or the things they themselves believe.
It is quite inappropriate to use fiction to support social policy. We have seen the rise of Ayn Rand works as bible. Additionally, an extremely strong case can be made for rejecting the use of bible as bible.
In contrast, Shakespeare very often ended his plays with a reminder that this was but a play, and wished his audiences well, or apologized for its excesses or lacks. Much commentary of his works concerns the necessity of placation to reigning powers, but those final words were not part of a fiction, and were warmly addressed to all.
He brought civil catharsis.
Once a historical person to whom I take some great exception, addressed a Parliamentary (the word means speaking) House with these words:
"gentlemen, in the bowels of christ, consider you might be wrong." That was Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan who believed in a superior whose name has been invoked for perhaps more death, torture, and mayhem than any other rationale ever used.
I speak from a more radical viewpoint than I have experienced in anyone outside those who spent some years incarcerated along with me for our own civil disobedience.
Rhetoric such as this is to be shunned.
The prison walls are high, topped with wire and guarded with guns. Inside the gray concrete walls roam the hopeless, in dim illumination from the narrow slits of light. But the gates are open! unguarded. They are all blind, and like moles, fear the light of day.
It's not that moles fear daylight. They are ill equipped to deal with it, hence they avoid it in the interest of survival.
What's appears to be prison to some, is merely a secure refuge to others. Many will evenutally venture outside if the food and water inside run out and they are not being bombarded like at Masada or confined with armed guards like they were at Jonestown.
“We get to choose the rhetoric and manner in which we are deceived and disempowered. Nothing more.”—- profound observation by Hedges!
This is a great article by the leading revolutionary “democracy-thinker” of our times.
Hedges understands the deadly danger of what he calls the “corporate state”—- but as a rallying cry for the Second American Revolution the term ‘corporate state’ is weak and will not light the spark of the Revolution.
As was true in 1775, the cry for Liberty & democracy over violent ‘EMPIRE’ is the only sufficiently accurate, compelling, and energizing call to Revolution.
Despite how much Hedges, and many other great social critics and movement organizers, have written in the last several YEARS about the massive oppression we face, there remains no substantial recognition that our former country has been captured by a disguised global corporate/financial/militarist EMPIRE, which hides behind the facade of its TWO-Party modernized “Vichy” sham of faux-democratic government——just as the occupying Nazi Empire hid behind its far simpler single-party “Vichy” regime.
This is why the only successful campaign strategy for the essential third ‘peoples party’ to create a new America is to focus all efforts on exposing the fact that our country has been captured by a disguised ‘Empire’—- just as surely as France was captured by the Nazi Empire.
Americans of both left and right will only rally and fight “Against EMPIRE”
No political pawns, or “Trolls”, of the Empire from either of the totally ‘bought and owned’ Republican or Democratic Parties will ever dare to even whisper about Empire, nor can any political whore candidate, R or D, respond to the challenge that our former country is now fully controlled by a disguised global Empire!
During the sell-out, Slick Willy Clinton’s campaign, the claim was, “It’s the economy, stupid”, but the reality that no Democrat or Republic candidate for president in 2012 can ever respond to when the American people raise the shout of a second American Revolution is, “It’s the Empire, stupid!”.
‘Globalization’ is simply the branded and polite marketing term for global EMPIRE!
This disguised global empire is the causal cancerous tumor that creates all ‘symptom problems’ like wars, economic oppression, massive inequality, environmental destruction, and all other ‘issues’ that are used to divide and distract resistance from attacking the core of the Empire.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Liberty & democracy
over
violent
empire
New America People’s Party 2012—- our last chance “Against Empire” [Michael Parenti]
You are one of the gifted contributor's that make CD the remarkable website it is!
Loved the article until we get to the point where Hedges' best suggestion is to curl into a ball and suck one's thumb while contemplating poetry.
The way forward is organization inside and outside of the political arena, 100% disconnected from the Democrats. Lefties should be running for office at every level of every office; support your Green Party or whoever else is up to the task.
Perhaps maybe we should TRY THAT ONCE IN EARNEST IN LARGE NUMBERS before giving up forever..? "We tried nothing and it didn't work!"
Obama and Pelosi, not to mention the Koch Bros. and Rick Perry, love the idea of anyone with two brain cells to rub together withdrawing from the public arena.
As far as I am concerned, you are not a leftist if you advocate running for office! There is no way in hell you will change the nature of this empire's drive towards a hegemonic global empire by voting! They will assassinate anyone that ever got close to the levers of power.
Further, Hedges routinely writes about civil disobedience and resistance. If anyone is sucking thumbs, it's the fools who think that getting into office will change this system. The only thing that will change this system is a mass movement based on a radical restructuring of the economy, our communities, and a commitment to direct action.
But all the recent -successful- transformational mass movements have had an electoral and establishment political aspect.
Strategically speaking it is foolish to just toss out the opportunities that are still provided in the remnants of the Constitutional System.
We aren't dealing with a normal constitutional situation. the ruling elite hate the constitution, and the patriot act essentially made it a dead document, thanks in no small part to people believing the lies of 911.
There will be no normal reforms allowed to go through. Yes, it is that bad, IMHO.
But that isn't what I meant.
I meant that excluding "voting" removes one of our tools -no matter how worn or broken.
Why do that?
Venezuela in 1998 was not in what we might consider a "normal constitutional situation", and street actions and a broad social movement there were accompanied by the rise of the "Fifth Republic Party".
Just before I respond, I don't necessarily disagree with your larger point. All options should be used, but only, in my opinion, in the context of a much more radical, movement based, community based approach.
I think assuming that voting is one of our tools is a mistake, especially in a system run by corporations. A lot of good people waste their time working to elect leaders that can only win office by taking corporate money. Does anyone believe that these politicians will turn their backs on the pay masters? Does anyone really believe a candidate can win real power without their backing?
No one I talk to believes either of those things. It's a delusion, IMO, to continue to believe that we live in a democracy. Local elections maybe. maybe.
What you are saying just sounds too much like previously tried and failed strategies for me to feel comfortable with it.
I think that we need to emulate Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador and use a campaign for a Constitutional Convention as the wedge and a "radical, movement based, community based approach" as the hammer to break the forces that killed our First Republic, then establish a Second Republic.
They were just copying us anyways. ;)
This is the sort of voting I am talking about. A vote for a State Legislator who will vote for a Convention at the State and Federal levels. A vote in -no doubt unofficial- public referenda for a Convention (exercising our 9th Amendment Rights). Voting as part of one of the most radical movements this country has ever seen.
Good point Matti. Malatesta acts as though, poof, people are just going to jump out in the street, without leadership, and in unison understand what is going on and the solutions needed. Suggesting that not voting at all, ie, for Greens or Independents, is naive, as roughly half the eligible voters don't vote already and it hasn't accomplished anything but make the two party system stronger, because the non-voters don't vote for third party candidates and they remove themselves from relevancy. Voting for independents is one tool of change that is relatively effortless and doesn't stop one from using other tools of change.
With all due respect, I don't think voting is a tool of change. In the context of the US, and in the context of corporate rule, it has become an effective propaganda system to instill in it's participants that 1) we live in a democracy, 2) we actually have power to change the system, and 3) that those we elect are accountable to the people first, and corporations second.
Well put.
right on malatesta,beautiful comment!!!! hokahey/it is a good time to live
It's a rather good thing, that being the case, that no one's political standing including my own is affected one whit by what you think.
Once again it's - "We're willing to try nothing and it hasn't worked - time to give up!"
I suppose that you think, then, that if mass social movements (curiously successful despite no sympathetic office holders at any level of government!) were working that no one in that instance would be assassinated, or they still would be but you find this preferable to office holders killed or... what..?
Unless what you are saying the only option remaining is giving up/ not doing anything because all is already lost. That's what "leftists" do, do they? Pathetic.
Those are the only meanings I can glean by your drive-by discouragement, asserting we should not to do THE ONE THING THAT HAS THE BEST CHANCE OF SUCCESS.
Get with it, people. In a three-way winner-take-all race 40% is a winner. A lot of elections have dismal turnouts. You think we could get 39% of the 45% of people who bother voting to do so for some good candidates? I sure think so. That seems like a perfectly attainable goal to me.
"The corporate coup is over. We have lost. The trolls have won. We have to face our banishment." Me thinks poor despondent Chris has given up and has decided to 70's style to just dance to the numbing Disco beat. He's of course wrong. The trolls will over reach. Look at the ex- Soviet Union for the truly totalitarian regime it once was and where is it today? If he thinks the "inverted totalitarianism" of the Global Crony Capitalist Empire will fair much better he forgets that it will face its own crisis soon enough as the planet wreaks havoc on it in coming decades. It to will collapse in the face of its own success fouling the nest in lives in.
Waiting for the trolls to overreach is really the same solution as withdrawal from public/political engagement. The trolls will have overreached only when they bring down the biosphere with them.
indeed.
Sea Glass, your hope that the "Global Crony Capitalist Empire" will fail (or be reformed) in the next century or two is comforting except for the words of John Maynard Keynes that "in the long run we're all dead".
No, unfortunately, Sea Glass, if we miss the only opportunity now to confront this first truly global Empire, as it comes to power at the beginning of the post-nation-state 21st century, it will more likely lead to extinction than to a next reform, Reformation, Renaissance, etc.
Even a quick review of Paul Kennedy's fabulous "Rise and Fall of The Great Powers" regarding the evolution of Church-centric Empire, and then multiple Nation-state-centric Empires, clearly shows the truth of history --- that shifts from era to era favor Empire as the first from of control, and only much later transition toward more liberal forms of self-governance.
If we allow the first form of this coming post-nation-state world to be Empire we will "hang together".
Best,
Alan
Seaglass (i like your name),
I tend to agree with you. However, given that it will all implode, because that is the natural way of such systems, that doesn't mean it will only effect the 'players'. We are all connected, which is the lesson that needs to be grasped.
Living in eastern PA and feeling the storm which came up the coast and the earthquake which also came up the coast - within days of each other - i see that this lesson will be, as it has always been, repeated ad infinitum. We are ever more interconnected, as we see with the whole global economic crash, Japan nuclear meltdown and.........................There is no avoiding lessons that repeat. Denial doesn't work. But we are all in this together, that is one certainty. I believe it is up to everyone who has the eyes to 'see', to do 'something'. Suvival of the individual can't be separated from the whole. It is just the way it is.
"One Love".... ;-)
I am prepared to be bashed. But being real trumps being liked.
I think Mr. Hedges has said nothing that isn't in the comments section here every day of the week. Except he added litererary references.
I rarely agree with anything you have to say. This time, however, I do agree with you. I'd have accused him of plagiarizing us, but he writes better than we do. :)
By Godfry there is humor to be found in disaster!! LOL, Aaronica. Good post, and right on.
Indeed, Aaronica, although Obedient Servant and a few others could give him a run for his money! ;-)
I hate* Hedges for his prescience and bewilderingly rich, beautiful prose that bely the misery of the future ahead. His writings validate (and make cohesive) my often apoplectic feelings about the state of the world. I look forward to his column every week. It's like that painfully sad girl who looks into your soul and tells you of imminent doom, but you're mesmerized all the same.
*And by hate I clearly meant gleefully resent and admire. Were I to have his skill with the written word :)
I am prepared to completely *not* bash you because I think you're right.
In fact, aren't a couple of sentences out of Parson Hedges' bimonthly jeremiad exactly the same as from one of his earlier articles?
Nice piece, though I wish Hedges understood the word,"troll." It refers to someone who appears on a blog to make some flaming comment contrary to the bulk of opinion and then disappears. His use of the word is something else. It's a bit like his using the phrase, "liberal class," a locution that makes no sense at all. There is a "liberal perspective;" there is the "working class;" but there is no "liberal class." When the meanings of words are not respected, the essay appears to be a rant rather than a statement. With a bit more reflection, Hedges could do better.
I wonder if you understand the meaning of the word "concern troll"?
For everyone else, it is hilariously ironc that this troll always pops up when Hedges renders a stunning critique of the status quo Dems and disappears down the rat hole of inert DNC organizational impotence in between articles.
drosera is a long time CD poster and has written many excellent comments on many subjects. This is the first I've seen, however, of "walkinbull".
drosera notes, "the essay appears to be a rant rather than a statement. With a bit more reflection, Hedges could do better."
The article is hardly a "rant" which means this statement falls under the rubric of misinformation, or obfuscation. Thus, I characterize it as an back-door attack on Hedges -- refer to the link on "concern trolls" below.
Your 'concern' is typical of your ilk. You might not recognize me only because I don't make a living of posting on forums like this, but I have been here from the start of this site being launched to read the fine narrative offered by authentic progressives like Hedges. (But I pretty much ignore the Dem apologists like KVH, Nichols, Hartmann, The Nation, et al.) Does that help you out?
If you need your hand held, I would advise you look elsewhere.
So, what's my ilk?
Your "ilk" seems to me to be of a "party line" nature. "The essay appears to be a rant" is a rather mild statement a reader may or may not agree with, but he or she would be very dense not to perceive it as an opinion.
I'd rather not hold your hand, if you don't mind.
You know, I am going to leave you alone with your pre-suppositions. (Too bad you did not read the article.)
Oh bugger off.
It is you who is the concern troll.
I thought trolls lived under bridges and demanded tolls from unsuspecting goats. In which case Hedge's usage is appropriate.
Hedges is covering the corporate empire with broad strokes but one facet of our plight is quite ironic, indeed.
"A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. These forces demand that we serve the dictates of the marketplace."
At times the political left in the U.S. has drawn inspiration from foreign ideologies and revolutions. The Russian Revolution, the anti-colonial revolutions of Asia (Ho Chi Minh), the Maoist 'peasant' revolution, Che Guevara, Fidel & the Cuban Revolution-- all come to mind.
The Italian, Russian, and Spanish anarchist and syndicalist movements have also contributed to the U.S. 'left' in the work of Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman, the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, and books such as Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' where he writes admiringly of the anarchists and the CNT running Barcelona. Noam Chomsky borrows much from this tradition.
However, as the leftist political movements of the 1930s and later 1960s were buried by the corporate state, the left began more and more to simply demand respect for U.S. traditions such as the Bill of Rights, honest implementation of the 14th and 19th Amendments, adherence to the 'War Powers Clause' (only Congress can start wars) etc.
Other than obsessions with the Second Amendment-- gun rights -- and novel interpretations of the 1st Amendment (Citizens United) that insists that corporate money equals "free speech" leading to the direct purchase of elections -- the Amerikan right now appears to view the rule of law as an impediment to the exercise of absolute power.
http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/the-anatole-france-first-amendment-of-citizens-united
In their ever wilder gyrations, Amerikan 'rightists' shows less and less interest in the actual Constitution, equal treatment under the law, or even U.S. traditions and communities (in the sense of Edmund Burke's conservatism).
Describing characters such as Dick Cheney and Chief Justice Roberts as 'conservatives' is misleading. These are men who have complete contempt for any law abridging the powers of corporations or the state to act in behalf of the plutocracy.
It is liberals and leftists who plead for the protection of Habeas Corpus, respect for the 4th amendment, enforcement of fraud and banking laws against the financial elites, adherence to international laws & treaties (against torture, against illegal invasions such as Iraq, etc.)
Ironically, liberals and leftists now stand as conservatives, vainly attempting to slow Amerika's rush into the vortex of corporate totalitarianism.
Environmentalists and conservationists, in this sense, are also authentic conservatives as they attempt to preserve the natural world and the Holocene climate from plunder and annihilation in the global corporate 'marketplace'.
The anarchist writer Paul Goodman was one of the first to offer an insightful version of this neolithic conservatism.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/mar/26/notes-of-a-neolithic-conservative/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goodman_%28writer%29
Nicely stated.
Corporate lobbyists run America. Both Parties are criminals taking bribes for funding their elections. The third branch, the justices have just approved bribing elected officials by claiming corporation are people and their bribes are free speech.
So we need to start by realizing DC offers nothing to the people. On every issue they go against what is best for the people and what the vast majority want.
I did not see anywhere any sign of giving up on Mr Hedges part. The Shakespeare quotation was suggested by him as a chorus we should shout at the lords and flunkeys of Empire. In a recent speech at Berkeley he said civil disobedience and massive movements of defiance were what is needed now. NOT, quoting Berrigan, because it is sure to work, but because it is the right thing to do and rebelling by doing the right and just thing in the face of dominating power is the only meaningful life left to us.
He also pointed out that the act of one single person choosing to do the right thing can have ripples we will possibly never know of, but they're there...
The Dem courtiers from the apologetic wing did not take long to leap on this prophetic piece by Hedges. When it comes to their corporate, status quo party and its interminable giveaway to the wealthy elite, you can count on the cubicle Dem trolls to be out in force. Do I hear an amen from Lefty?
What are you talking about? I just read through the comments and didn't see any that could be characterized as "Dem courtier" "apologetic wing".
Right you are walkinbull.
Obama gives new meaning to the terms 'deceit', 'collapse', 'collaborator', and his own favorite psych projection during his 2008 shill campaign: running the old "OKey Doke".
Best,
Alan
Concern trolls are noted by attacking the strongest voice (in this case Hedges) to disseminate disinformation, obfuscation, and inert, disempowered political memes.
I refer all the leftists who already fall outside of the status quo box of impotent Democratic Party hegemony to review this to get a clear portrait of their aims:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=concern+troll
Essentially, the "concern troll" is a sub species of troll driven by their handlers to negatively attack the strongest progressive voice on the Common Square: in this case Chris Hedges