– Hedges: We Must Grasp Reality to Build Effective Resistance (The Real News, July 18, 2013):
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HEDGES: Because the formal mechanisms of power don’t work. We’ve undergone with John Ralston Saul calls correctly a coup d’état, a corporate coup d’état in slow-motion. And it’s over. They’ve won.
We live in what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls a system of inverted totalitarianism. And by that he means it’s not classical totalitarianism. It doesn’t find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state, that in classical totalitarian regimes you have a reactionary or revolutionary party that replaces one structure with another. In inverted totalitarianism, you have corporate forces that purport to be loyal to the Constitution, electoral politics, the iconography and language of American patriotism, and yet internally have seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent, and so that this political theater which we are witnessing is a charade. The Democrats are as beholden to corporate power as the Republicans. The judiciary has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state.
And our only hope left is to build mass movements of dissent–and I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe–that can wrest power back from this rapacious corporate elite that quite literally will kill us.
And I see–of course it’s bleak. And, you know, I’m sorry. The climate science reports are bleak. I’m not making it up. And this kind of mania for hope is really a kind of sickness, because it prevents us from seeing how dire and catastrophic the situation is if we don’t radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and to the ecosystem. And so of course people don’t want to hear it. You know, they want to become entranced or mesmerized with the trivia that dominates the airwaves and the sagas and soap operas, and, you know, we are fed this mantra that is really fiction. And the mantra goes that we can have everything we want, that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. And that’s given to us by Oprah, and it’s given to us by Hollywood, and [crosstalk]
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