While it’s a bit extreme to say liberals hate socialists more than fascists, it’s true they tend not to side with the left … until a ruling right-wing party starts threatening their comforts directly or indirectly through its policies. There’s a usually small window where the left can turn them into allies, but that’s not going to happen if the left is more interested in scolding liberals or waxing rhapsodic about the “meaningfulness” of violent revolutionary conflict.
Hedges’ insights are usually on-point, but he delivers them like an austere preacher demanding total purity. That’s toned down in this video, so I hope it will sound the alarm more effectively than it does in his books and interviews.
If anything Toffler underestimated the level of anxiety that could be created by this level of change. He was writing during the post-war economic anomaly, when automation and race-to-the-bottom globalism wasn’t yet fully deployed to decimate the American middle class.
Related to what happened afterward is this idea of “closing the Gates of Ijtihad”, which sounds an awful lot like Francis Fukuyama declaring the “End of History” on behalf of neoliberal capitalism in 1992. Such proclamations are always outpaced by reality.
I had a history professor who told us that the worst, or rather the closest we came to some sort of big insurrection (at least, after the Civil War), was the 1890s. I took the class 28 years ago, so at this remove I don’t recall the specific reasons, other than (for one specific example) Czolgosz assassinating McKinley.
A lot of it had to do with labour unrest and anarchist agitation in the face of Gilded Age inequality and seemingly untouchable monopolies/trusts. The Haymarket Affair of 1886 in particular threw a major scare into the powers that were, but there were plenty of other violent incidents like the Pullman Strike that continued up through Teddy Roosevelt’s trustbusting reforms . The unrest continued after that, with the 1920 Wall Street bombing marking the end of that phase. Then nine years of capitalism-a-go-go before a return to potential insurrection only saved by FDR and the New Deal (with extreme opposition from conservative business tycoons)
The only reason things didn’t go over the edge into full-scale revolution during the 1890s was that the robber barons and their pet politicians had some raw understanding that they had to make some concessions to labour and the unions that began representing it. There were also extremely harsh and violent crackdowns, often using private armies like the Pinkerton agency,
What happens in a situation of extreme inequality when unions have been villified and destroyed and when the 0.1% and its bought-and-paid for politicians barely acknowledge (or needs) American workers? Stay tuned.
While I agree with you for the most part, he also says that those in power are listening, though I think his implications of why they are listening are quite different and more nefarious than my initial remark might have implied (but was not intended). There’s where I disagree with him: regardless of their motivations, I don’t think anyone in “power” is listening at all.
Or that the won’t get worse. A common fallacy is that things can’t get any worse. They can. Doesn’t mean that the will, but they certainly can get worse.
In the 60’s, US government power was divided between the parties, and the courts provided some check to executive abuses. In the 60’s, there was a military counterforce to keep the mess from spreading globally.
