The next few weeks and months will see us stabilize and weather this crisis or descend into a terrifying dystopia.
by Chris Hedges
It is no longer our economy but ourdemocracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslaviathat gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the WeimarRepublic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown inczarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and theBolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The ragebubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class,glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerousright-wing backlash.
As the public begins to grasp the depthof the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic andRepublican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state,as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans becomeworthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up insmoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigoratedradical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is truefor all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. Anddespair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness,will be one of our few surplus commodities.
Karl Polanyiin his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out thedevastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—thatgrow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that“fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refusedto function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved,without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafiapolitical system—which is a good description of the American governmentunder George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, thekind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and thenatural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures thedestruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried thefree market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whoseworth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society thatno longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacreddimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commitscollective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until theydie. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, alwaysdestroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.