A culture awash in lies: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist delivers stark warning on US democracy

3 Mar 2025

Donald Trump is a symptom of systemic corruption, not the disease, author and war correspondent Chris Hedges tells US worker conference.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and war correspondent Chris Hedges delivered a blistering attack on the hypocrisy and dangers of the current US political establishment at a Workers Strike Back conference in Seattle last week.

“A culture awash with lies” is how Hedges described the US, adding that the attraction of US President Donald Trump, “although vile and buffoonish”, was because “he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade”.

Trump lied “like he breathes” said Hedges, adding, “but the lies told by the two establishment parties caused far more pain and did far more damage than the lies told by Trump. Trump is the apotheosis of this culture of mendacity, deception and exploitation.”

Hedges, who has covered many wars, including in Central America, the Middle East and the Balkans in his illustrious career, warned that the rise of corporations and oligarchs would lead to “an authoritarian or Christian fascist state”.

Seen it all

In 1990, while covering the first gulf war for the New York Times, Hedges refused to participate in the military pool system which restricted movement and reporting of media. He was arrested by the US Army and stripped of his press credentials, but continued to report on the war.

He was later held prisoner in Basra after the war by the Iraqi Republican Guard. At present, Hedges edits the influential The Chris Hedges Report on Substack and is a tireless campaigner against the unchecked power of states.

The Workers Strike Back conference by the independent “rank-and-file workers’ movement” took place in the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Centre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8PnryeLUwQ

He told those gathered that Trump did not herald the collapse of democracy.

“He heralds the ripping away of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretence of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease.”

The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, Hedges noted, with deindustrialisation, deregulation, the bailout of big banks in 2008 using taxpayers’ money, through the surveillance of citizens, deep social inequality and “endless futile wars”.

Legalised bribery

The US electoral system was “defined by legalised bribery” and Democrats were “as guilty as Republicans”, he said. Hedges quoted philosopher Sheldon Wolin, who described the US system of governance as “inverted totalitarianism”.

It was a system “that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had handed the internal levers of power to corporations and the rich”.

However, at present “we are shifting to totalitarianism’s more recognisable form, one dominated by a demagogue”, he warned.

Read more: How we can resist Trumpism before it is too late

Two-tiered legal system

The US, said Hedges, lived with a two-tiered legal system where poor people were harassed, arrested and jailed for “absurd infractions”, such as selling loose cigarettes.

This while “crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40% of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution”, Hedges quoted from one of his many books.

The working poor, whose unions and rights had been stripped and whose wages had stagnated or declined over the past 40 years “have been disempowered and impoverished”.

“Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism,” he warned.

Labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” were meaningless, as “evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who turned to Wall Street bankers to formulate her economic policies and bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating”.

A culture awash in lies

Hedges said it no longer mattered what was true, “It matters only what is correct.”

The correct ideology of neoliberalism was as delusional as the correct ideology of the Christian fascists as “neither are reality-based belief systems”.

The “money-drenched, heavily managed elections” in the US were “little more than totalitarian plebiscites designed to give a veneer of legitimacy to oligarchic and corporate power”.

The political malaise was mirrored in a cultural malaise of what philosopher Søren Kierkegaard termed “a sickness unto death”, a “numbing of the soul by despair and moral nihilism”, he said.

In his book Empire of Illusion, Hedges wrote that this cult of the self dominated the US cultural landscape and that it had within it the “classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt”.

Read more: Licking the US jackboot is plain unsanitary; it’s time for South Africa to grow up

People felt “we can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.”

Hedges warned that things were not going to get better.

“The tools to shut down dissent, the abuses of an imperial presidency, have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.”

Hope has a cost

Those who succumbed to apathy or complicity, said Hedges “are enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.”

It is worth quoting Hedges at length at this point.

“Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something.

“The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes.

“Hope never makes sense. Hope is absurd. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbour is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good.

“This is the secret of hope’s power. It is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our neighbor, even our enemy, our own face.

“I cannot promise you it will be easy. I cannot assure you that tens of thousands will join us. I cannot pretend that going to jail is pleasant. I cannot say that anyone in Congress, anyone in the boardrooms of the corporations that cannibalise our nation, anyone in the press, will be moved by pity to act for the common good.”

This was a battle, quite literally, “between freedom and slavery, life and death. It is that grave. It is a battle that no matter the odds must be fought. In the end, I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists,” Hedges concluded. DM

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

World

Seen it all

Legalised bribery

Two-tiered legal system

A culture awash in lies

Hope has a cost