America: The Farewell Tour

by Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges’s profound and provocative examination of America in crisis is “an exceedingly…provocative book, certain to arouse controversy, but offering a point of view that needs to be heard” (Booklist), about how bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in a culture of sadism and hate.

America, says Pulitzer Prize­–winning reporter Chris Hedges, is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair, and a civil society that has ceased to function. The opioid crisis; the retreat into gambling to cope with economic distress; the pornification of culture; the rise of magical thinking; the celebration of sadism, hate, and plagues of suicides are the physical manifestations of a society that is being ravaged by corporate pillage and a failed democracy. As our society unravels, we also face global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change. All these ills presage a frightening reconfiguration of the nation and the planet.

Donald Trump rode this disenchantment to power. In his “forceful and direct” (Publishers Weekly) America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges argues that neither political party, now captured by corporate power, addresses the systemic problem. Until our corporate coup d’état is reversed these diseases will grow and ravage the country. “With a trademark blend of…sharply observed detail, Hedges writes a requiem for the American dream” (Kirkus Reviews) and seeks to jolt us out of our complacency while there is still time.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Economics, Audiobook, Philosophy

416 pages, Audiobook

First published August 21, 2018

About the author

Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.

Hedges is known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.

Reviews

[Sam Quixote · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s Christmastime which means most people will turn to re-read old favourites or pick up something feel-good, escapist and/or seasonal. And then there are people like me who couldn’t care less about the holidays and just want to read something gripping and brilliant yet so bleak that by the end you’ll be playing Russian roulette while your family breaks out the Monopoly. That’s right, Chris Hedges is back with a new book to tell everyone once again that WE’RE ALL FUCKED in America: The Farewell Tour!

But seriously, this is a great book and not at all something to laugh about (pfffthahaha... ahem. I’ll put away the adulterated beverages for the moment).

Hedges’ thesis is that the American Empire is on the brink of collapse and sets out to explain why. The subjects include: industrial decay; environmental negligence/destruction; mass unemployment and low paying, unsecure jobs; the erosion of democratic institutions; cripplingly expensive education and healthcare; drug epidemics; ubiquitous, cruel porn; the rise of gambling and its subsequent addictions; unfettered corporate capitalism; and an overpopulated prison system in desperate need of reform. None of it is undeniable and it’s a convincing argument for a challenging future to come.

He makes a number of important points like how the more aggressive the left becomes - through groups like Black Lives Matter and antifa - the more they undermine their position. The state only becomes more powerful in response as they’re pressurized to maintain order which they do through drafting harsher laws taking away personal freedoms and making the police force more militarised. The alternative solution? Consistently applied resistance through nonviolent action in large groups.

I think porn could have a detrimental effect on kids growing up on it, giving them a warped sense of sex and relationships in general, particularly if they get into the harder stuff early on. Not that that genie’s about to go back into its lamp but, eh, hopefully they’ll figure it out and realise sex in loving relationships is more fulfilling.

I really liked the idea of not looking for an exceptional individual to lead the way but to look to each other and ourselves to build towards change together - the disappointment that was Barack Obama shows that no matter who we think is The One to make all the difference, there isn’t any one person who will do this. Hope and Change are important and worth fighting for but we have to realise it and not expect someone to do it for us.

It’s not Hedges’ but he quotes former British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston who said something profoundly true like “We have no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests”, which is a line I can’t stop thinking about. It remains so applicable today.

Hedges is a liberal socialist but he goes after the Democrats as much as the Republicans for suckling on the corporate tit and selling out the electorate. He makes the salient point that as much of a buffoon as Trump is, the Media and the Democrats’ blaming Russian interference as the reason why they lost the election is dishonest and misleading. They lost because of the massive - and growing - disparity between rich and poor in America and they voted, rightly or wrongly, for someone who promised to change that, as they did for Obama. By irresponsibly not addressing these problems, there will only be further voter apathy towards the system until it breaks down completely and the people revolt.

All of the personal stories here were morbidly fascinating from the gambling addict, the drug addict/prostitute, and the young drug addict who died; some people just live harrowing lives having been completely let down by the mythical “American Dream”.

There’s a lot I agree with here - and I imagine most people will too as I like to think most people are kind - except for the end where Hedges descends into pure fantasy, talking about a future without war, free healthcare and education for all, and so on. I take his point that we must have ideals and dream big in order to progress - history is made by the dreamers who were told their ideas were impractical - but I don’t think we’ll ever escape war or greed or cruelty in general; that’s just how humans are wired. There will never be a global society - we need our tribes; that too is part of our biology, for better or worse.

Hedges cites other sources saying that the collapse of the American Empire has already begun - it supposedly started in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq - and will reach its apex in the 2020s and be done by 2030. Speculation doesn’t do much for me. It’s an educated prediction based on past empires’ patterns of behaviour but it’s still just pie in the sky that any chump could engage in.

It also doesn’t account for the fact that we’ve never had population figures this high or technology like we have now ever before. This is where the quiet optimist in me pipes up, shrugging off the doom-mongering and thinking - hoping - that the best and brightest among us will find, and realise, solutions to these problems. We’re smarter than we’ve ever been and, as bad as things are in America, and around the world thanks to corporate capitalism - which is something that will have to change soon for the betterment of everybody - I can’t believe it’ll all end within a decade or so.

And then there’s the fact that America: The Farewell Tour is very similar to Hedges’ 2009 book Empire of Illusion. This book is basically Empire of Illusion: Redux with more up-to-date examples. He said then that the Empire would come crashing down soon and it didn’t happen in the last nine years so why would it happen in the next nine? Though, if you’ve read Empire of Illusion, in reading this you might find the subjects/tone/message repetitive, it’s still damning that the problems highlighted in that previous book continue today - in fact might arguably be worse.

Which is why, when I was thinking to myself “What is the point of books like this? Chris Hedges is harping on for the umpeenth book in years and years and nothing changes!”, the answer is self-evident: because change needs to happen and it isn’t. And so we have people like Hedges writing necessary books like this to point us in the right direction: a more egalitarian one.

Regardless of my own minor critiques of it, America: The Farewell Tour is an important book that reminds us that the answers to our questions lie within us and in the people around us. Though the subject matter may be dark, it is superbly written - you won’t find gloom and doom communicated more compellingly anywhere else. Chris Hedges’ strong, compassionate narrative voice remains a powerful Virgil for any reader descending into the uniquely 21st century circles of hell that is modern America.

A late winner for my favourite nonfiction read of 2018!

I’ll leave you with this from the book’s last page:

“The theologian Paul Tillich did not use the word ‘sin’ to mean an act of immorality. He, like Kierkegaard, defined sin as estrangement. For Tillich, it was our deepest existential dilemma. Sin was our separation from the forces that give us ultimate meaning and purpose in life. This separation fosters the alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness, and despair that are preyed upon by mass culture. As long as we fold inward and embrace a hyper-individualism that is defined by selfishness and narcissism, we will never overcome this estrangement. We will be separated from ourselves, from others and from the sacred.”

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for a nice, easy, feel-good read, this is not the book you want. If, however, you want a book that will deliver the cold, hard facts about the state of America today and its likely future, this is the book for you.

Chris Hedges paints the landscape of America in all its brutality and bleakness. He does not mince words, he does not try to make us think "things are not quite as bad as they seem". It is depressing and it is frightening. But it is reality. It is a book I think all Americans need to read. All great empires eventually come to an end and America is no exception. Mr. Hedges shows how and why we are on the decline, and how capitalism must eventually collapse in on itself. Unbridled capitalism has no hope but to fail in the long run. Mr. Hedges calls out the greedy corporations that are destroying this country and subjecting Americans to ever-increasing poverty. He speaks out about the greedy politicians, Democrats included, who take money from corporations and then are beholden to work for them, not us. He shows how this has been going on for quite some time, and how things are increasingly worse. It is scary. The processes that are crippling the country have been in place for awhile, from corporate welfare to a militarized police force to wide-spread surveillance of citizens. Mr. Hedges draws on facts; this is not just some conspiracy theorist bewailing the state of America and how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and all the other liberal elites are working with ISIS to bring about a Muslim theocracy or some other such bullshit. We DO, however, need to worry about a Christian theocracy. So many people are calling and hoping for Trump's impeachment, not realising that Pence as president would be a much greater threat to our freedom. The Christian right has been working hand-in-hand with people like the Koch brothers for decades. They want to have an America where people are forced to "be" christian, where the christian version of Sharia Law rules the land and where workers have no rights and the masses are in effect slaves. Indeed, our for-profit prison complexes are already set up to force millions of people into slavery for greedy corporations.

The chapters in this book are divided into the ills of capitalism in decline: Gambling, pornography, addiction, hatred. It was especially difficult to read the chapter on pornography. Mr. Hedges does not spare us any lurid detail. He shows how sadism is a direct result of capitalism. He extensively quotes philosophers of the past who spoke out on the evils of capitalism, and he conducts many interviews with people suffering as a result of unbridled capitalism, from sex workers to prisoners to gambling addicts.

There is so much information in this book that it's difficult to write a review. There is so much I'd like to share, that I think is imperative for every American to know. If you are American, I urge you to read this book. It will not be easy; it is terrifying. However, Mr. Hedges also shows us how the people can and must come together to fight for our country. We have a narrow window of time in which to do so, and we need to start now. As Mr. Hedges says, "Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy." We need to come together, work together. We need to stand up for the rights and equality of all Americans, and fight back against those whose corruption, greed, and lust for power know no ends and which will eventually destroy us all if left unchallenged. We cannot do that if we are not informed. Please, read this book!

[David Wineberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

History Catches Up To America and It’s Not Pretty

America: The Farewell Tour is a book, but also a symphony. The opening movement, Decay, has every instrument blasting, overwhelming the reader with a multitude of themes: accusations, facts, and historical proofs about the true state of the union. The middle movements are much more narrowly focused and deep. They are in many ways quieter, and somber. They detail the decline and fall of typical Americans thanks to the policies outlined in the first movement. They are slow and sad, depressing and relentless. The grand finale Freedom, echoes the opening movement, showing the way forward to be bleak and grim. The only hope is for people to take back society from the corporate capitalists. It won’t be easy and it will never be complete. But if we don’t even try, the whole empire dissipates.

Writing skillfully and carefully, Chris Hedges shows the decline of the American ideal dating from the Great Depression. Neighbors helping neighbors, the idea of the common good, and corporate capitalists giving in to FDR in order to drag us all out of the seemingly bottomless pit of poverty and suffering.

It worked. We moved forward as we never have before (or since). And promptly forgot all the lessons. We are far along the retrograde line of uncaring, self-obsessed greed, hubris and arrogance. It will not end well, as history shows repeatedly. But it will end soon, unless history suddenly stops repeating itself. America and its bloated, ineffective military, will be sidelined. Its world-record debt will come due. The decline will be ugly.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Chris Hedges (a socialist) detests Donald Trump and all he represents. He likens Trump to Nero fiddling while Rome burns, except Trump is the one lighting the fires. He says Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. The shift from common good to “race, crime and law and order” is typical of declining empires, he says. It expresses a nostalgia for a time that never was and can never be, the way we’re going about it. People are simply fooling themselves. He cites Irving Howe, inspired by Faulkner: “They need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.” That is a concise summary of politics today. The sounds and fury of the Trump Administration, blasting against the sounds and fury of Congress, have us addressing no real problems with anything like workable solutions. Meanwhile, the quality of life plummets for the 99%.

The middle chapters examine issues like heroin, porn, gambling, racial hatred and work, which no longer allows middle class living. Nearly half the population is in a state of poverty, despite exceptionally low unemployment.

Possibly the saddest chapter is the incarceration state. States have gotten past the Civil War to re-implement slavery themselves. They keep literally millions of blacks and Hispanics in slave labor, doing the work of dozens of major, household-name corporations, and profiting mightily. The prisoners, often paid pennies an hour if they are paid at all, go into debt, because they have to purchase everything (from toothpaste to stamps, as well as medical co-pays for every little thing) from the company store at hugely inflated prices, while their wages are little or nothing. The system is all about keeping the system going. Rehabilitation is not a consideration. The states want prisoners back in custody.

Idiotic laws like not mowing the lawn regularly or riding a bike without both hands on the handlebars ensure a constant flow of new victims. Absurd fines and impossible bail guarantee the supply. States have contracts with prison managers to keep the prisons humming at a minimum 90% capacity, so they must find new recruits daily. This is an example of American exceptionalism: wrong incentives to achieve the corporate agenda. Hedges says “Prisons are prototypes for the future, an example of the disempowerment and exploitation corporations seek to inflict on all workers. “

The final movement, Freedom, is self-mocking: when a government watches you 24 hours day, you cannot use the word “liberty”, he says. The “toxic brew” of American exceptionalism means all our institutions are corrupt and cannot be relied on for anything that doesn’t fit the corporate agenda.

The solutions are hard. We need to build our own service/protest groups, open up to our communities, stay away from government and corporate grants, and keep actively building resistance. But not resistance for the sake of resistance; there must be a goal. Antifa will fail because it is purposely isolated and goalless. Prison strikes for better working conditions can succeed because of all the contracts states have with corporations to deliver goods and services. Hedges says: “As long as personal violent catharsis masquerades as acts of resistance, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence, because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.” Hedges gives sickening examples of the state putting plants in protests to start the violence that will allow for live fire by the militarized police.

Finally, we fool ourselves if we think talking will do any good: “Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless. They don’t have one.” Tough love from a straight shooter.

David Wineberg

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was first introduced to Chris Hedges work through his sobering “War is a Force That Gives us Meaning”, released not long after the 2nd gulf war. Having spent significant time in the Balkans and other war zones, he began to recognize how hopelessness and fear can easily be manipulated by governments to create cults of personality and fragmented communities filled with distrust of each other. From there, it’s a small step toward violence and even genocide.
Hedges is not saying that the America of 2018 is on the verge of ethnic cleansing but it is undoubtedly a staggeringly fragmented society in which dissent against your idealogical “team” is not tolerated and “truth”, as Rudolph Giuliani recently said, is not “truth” if it doesn’t subscribe to your world view. Contrary to popular thought, this is not something created by Donald Trump. While he may be the public face at the moment of the mendacity, cruelness, and insecurity that seems so omnipresent at this moment in history, Hedges argues that it has been a slow decline over the last 40 years which are now bearing fruit in our discourse and our culture.
One needs only to look at the chapter headings to see where Hedges believes this decline is manifesting itself.
“Decay”, “Heroin”, “Work”, “Sadism”, “Hate”, “Gambling”, and “Freedom” all look at individual areas of American society where despair and economic inequality have created bleak landscapes that leave people feeling without agency in their lives. This breeds a kind of nihilism where when people feel their lives cease to matter, becoming unmoored from the sense of community that holds societies together. It’s a nihilism based primarily in a lack of being invested in a community and in the need to feel something, anything, regardless of whether it is based in fact or will negatively impact those around us. Be it through drugs, gambling, kinship with nationalist or racial groups hate groups, or sadomasochism, in a world that feels empty, these things make us “feel”, even as we know it will result in our destruction.
Hedges believes that we do this to ourselves primarily because of economic exploitation. Struggling to feed your family or living in poverty is not as some would have us believe, the result of moral weakness and laziness. Rather, economic inequality is ensconced in America’s very system of government which depends on those with power, maintaining it any cost through the exploitation of the poor. America’s history is littered of examples of the disenfranchised (Suffragists, Black Americans, Native Americans, workers, to name but a few) taken to a breaking point at which they refuse to accept their fate and rise up. Often after bloody struggle, cosmetic changes are conceded by the wealthy who are afraid of losing it all (Hedges relates a story of FDR assembling a recalcitrant group of corporate leaders and telling them that if they don’t agree to to give something back to workers in a New Deal, the workers are going to upend Capitalism itself and take it all), and an America that seemed to be on the brink of collapse comes back from the brink until the powerful attempt to scale back their concessions as much as possible later. Such has been the back and forth in America that has kept it relatively stable even as more people slip into crushing poverty.
That is, Hedges writes, until the present day. What America sees now in the person of Donald Trump and the monied interests and ideologues behind him, are men (and they are primarily men) who have given up the pretense of even giving scraps back to the exploited in society. What was once a fear of unrest among the poor is now open rapaciousness and contempt. Hedges argues that this represents for most societies its last days. It is Nero playing his fiddle. It is Russia invading Afghanistan. It is the French in Vietnam and Algeria.
It is difficult to imagine America walking itself back from its ultimate fate even in a society that wasn’t living in a fantasy of narcissistic distraction and celebrity where life begins and ends on a screen. Will America collapse into anarchy? That seems exceedingly unlikely. Will it see wages and lives become even more depressed as the wealthy attempt to squeeze even more from workers? Increasing violence in its streets as frustration boils over? An overburdened social safety net unable to contain the exploding health crisis as more people medicate themselves numb? A collapse of democracy itself into a kind of Chinese style authoritarian/capitalist hybrid?
These options seem frightening but can we say they seem impossible? After touring the American prison system, talking to its prostitutes, sharing stories with its opioid addicts, it’s gamblers and conspiracy theorists, Hedges believes that rather than impossible, it is the most likely ending to America’s story. We can only hope he is wrong.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could only take this in very small bites. Each chapter takes more out of you than its predecessor, it seems, as the open sores on the sordid underbelly of the nation are exposed via heartbreaking interviews with Americans whose lives have been ruined by opioid addiction, gambling, unemployment, the porn/human traffic 'industry', etc. Essential stuff, for sure, but tough on the stomach.

[Chris Chester · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in high school, right in the middle of the invasion of Iraq. At the time I remember being angry that more people weren't telling the truth about what the war meant, even as I gave my own tacit support, implicitly believing the untruths about weapons of mass destruction.

That was more than 15 years ago now and I've read a lot more and my skepticism about the American project is now grounded in both first-hand observation as well as the classics. I have a whole Goodreads shelf dedicated to American Empire after all!

But there's still a soft spot in my heart for writers like Hedges who seem to look at everything around them with a turned up nose, seeing moral and physical decay in everything. Because I still agree with a lot of what he says. And I still think it's a shame that so many people believe the fairy tales about the American dream, though that is obviously changing.

I think the problem with America: The Farewell Tour is that Hedges is trying to execute his same old shtick during a time (a presidency?) where anybody of a liberal persuasion is already inclined to see the negative in everything around them. I don't need you to tell me about the crises of climate change, opioids, mass shootings, obesity, gambling and war — I work in a newsroom and I read about that shit every day! Everybody does.

And it seems as though in Hedge's attempts to out-gloom the prevailing gloom, he went out on a limb a little bit in some areas that wound up feeling weird and sort of lazy.

For example, he aims to tackle pornography in a chapter titled "Torture." To prove how pornography is evidence of the moral decay of the west, he goes to a BDSM club somewhere and describes the weird scene in pages and pages of explicit detail. So much detail, in fact, that it begins to feel a little bit like he is enjoying shoving the reader's face in it? Then he tries to make a flimsy link between BDSM, pornography and rape, saying, "Along with the rise of pornography there has been an explosion in sex-related violence, including domestic abuse, rape, and gang rape."

Except even a cursory search of the statistics shows that's not true. The rate of rapes in the U.S. has crept back up since a low in 2013, but it's nowhere near what it was even in 1990. And that's even as a larger cultural movement has come about explicitly encouraging victims of rape to come forward — where many in the past would never have sought justice or be counted.

That's not to diminish the related issues like the trafficking and exploitation of women and children for the purposes of pornography and prostitution, but trying to link those things to the behavior of consenting adults strikes me as both moralizing and lazy. Especially for a topic like pornography, which seems to be fueling a sea change in the way that young people relate to one another physically and emotionally. If you're looking for signs of decay, the corrosion of that kind of intimacy would be a fruitful line of inquiry. But Hedges misses it completely in his zest to describe pornographic acts.

Some of his other lines of attack also fell a little flat to me. I think he might have had the germ of something interesting when he started attacking the hedonism and empty self-worship at the core of more liberal forms of spirituality. But it was less than half-baked. It's not enough to gesture at cosmetic surgery and narcissism in a paragraph or two and call it a religion.

"The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with hedonism, wealth, and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing. Few achieve the imagined pinnacle of success, and those who do are often psychopaths." This is a great point! But you can't just drop it in there and not develop it.

It was also striking the way he dismissed "identity politics" out of hand. In this case, I happen to agree that a larger class consciousness is probably the more fruitful area of political change rather than focusing on the grievances of specific groups in isolation from others. But not only did he not define the term, but simply blowing off the legitimate concerns of people of color and the LGBT community because their priorities aren't the same as yours is again quite lazy.

And in the conclusion he ends with a whole list of policy sea changes that he says are definitively going to happen, but you get the sense that he doesn't actually believe it. At least on this point, I find it hard to disagree with him, because while we can sort of sense the broad outlines of what needs to happen in terms of developing new community structures separate from the decaying outline of American empire, we're not going to be the ones to build them and it's impossible to anticipate how they're going to happen. Still half-baked, but I have to give him a pass there.

So overall, lots of negativity, most of it justified, but sprinkled with some jarring assumptions and leaps of old man logic that make Hedges seem slightly disconnected from reality. The book was still a healthy dose of political reality, but I have to give it two stars instead of three for one main reason.

The most interesting prose in the book is easily the passages that he lifted wholesale from other writers. (With attribution! That's an important thing to note for a guy rightly accused of plagiarism -- something he never addresses by the way!) I get why he structured things this way, particularly since much of this book is based on blogposts he wrote for TruthDig, but this isn't a college term paper. This isn't aggregation. It strikes the reader — like many of his unsupported suppositions — as lazy.

Still, if I was going to hand somebody a book to get them into my headspace about American empire, I may yet hand them this book — two stars or no.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

the american empire is coming to an end. the nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in europe, latin america, asia, and africa to do its bidding. add the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists, and warmongering generals. and to be clear, i include democrats.

pulitzer prize-winning journalist chris hedges has long been a trenchant, incisive writer, and his new book, america: the farewell tour, may well be more urgent and penetrating than anything he's published previously (recognizing the depth and breadth of his impressive backlist). across seven chapters ("decay," "heroin," "work," "sadism," "hate," "gambling," and "freedom"), hedges catalogs and chronicles the myriad ways in which the country continues to unravel (to put it mildly). several portions of the book are excruciating to read, devastating and disturbing in equal measure.

the u.s. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. the last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. the kleptocrats openly pillage and loot. programs instituted to protect the common good—public education, welfare and environmental regulations—are being dismantled. the bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. poverty is a nightmare for half the population. poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets. our prison system, the world's largest, is filled with the destitute. there is no shortage of artists, intellectuals and writers, from martin buber and george orwell to james baldwin, who warned us that this dystopian era was fast approaching. but in our disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images, cult of the self and willful illiteracy, we did not listen. we will pay for our negligence.

america: the farewell tour paints a sobering picture of a nation in swift decline. hedges pulls not a single punch in his critique and analysis of the country's perdition. whether confronting a failing health care system, prostitution (and the corollary of sex trafficking), the opioid crisis, the loss of unions and well-paying jobs, debt servitude, religious hypocrisy and duplicity, pornography, the resurgence of bigotry and hate groups, the pitfalls of gambling (casinos alone generate more than $37 billion annually, far more than all four major sports leagues combined [$17.8b], the movie industry [$10.7b], or the music industry [$6.8b]), our for-profit prison system, the militarization of our law enforcement agencies, government corruption and malfeasance, or out-of-control military spending, hedges decries the capitalist system which engenders and encourages all of the above.

this moment in history marks the end of a long, sad tale of geed and murder by the white races. it is inevitable that for the final show we vomited up a figure like trump. europeans and americans have spent five centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth in the name of human progress. they used their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone or anything, especially indigenous cultures, which stood in their way. they stole and hoarded the planet's wealth and resources. they believed that this orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. they do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. but even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to break free from our evolutionary past. as the warning signs become more palpable—rising temperatures, global financial meltdowns, mass human migrations, endless wars, poisoned ecosystems, rampant corruption among the ruling class—we turn to those who chant, either through idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what worked in the past will work in the future. factual evidence, since it is an impediment to what we desire, is banished.

regardless of political leanings or ideological partisanship, hedges's new book ought to be read by each and every american (perhaps especially by those least likely to do so). finishing america: the farewell tour, it's hard to come away with a sense that we're anything but royally fucked. while none of this began (as so many seem sadly to think) with the inauguration of our 45th president, the rapidity by which we near our own demise is certainly accelerating. hedges encourages sweeping change and his intense aversion to capitalism (and all that it has wrought) cannot be easily dismissed (nor should be at all). hedges has long been a harbinger of the coming storm and america: the farewell tour is but the latest attempt to forewarn and forearm. dismaying and alarming as it may be, this book is altogether necessary, if difficult to digest. chris hedges (who is also an ordained presbyterian minister and has a master's degree from harvard divinity school) is an unflinching writer and, like so many of our best and brightest, is hardly paid the due heed he deserves—much to our own peril.

the conflict will not end until followers of the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed. take away a person's dignity, agency, and self-esteem and this is what you get. as political power devolved into a more naked form of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment expand, so will extremist groups. they will attract more sympathy and support as the wide population realizes, correctly, that americans have been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives—lives that are getting steadily worse.

[محمد شفیعی · Rating 5 out of 5]

تمام شد، این کتاب رو ترجمه کردم و ان شاء الله به زودی راهی بازار بشه، بسیار کتاب خوب و دقیقی هستش و امیدوارم توزیع خوبی داشته باشه و به دست مخاطب برسه
فصل به فصل به یکی از مشکلاتی که جامعه ی آمریکا باهاش درگیره میپردازه و تو این روند میشه فهمید سرمایه داری وحشی و شرکتها چه بلایی سر یه کشور میتونن بیارن (به نظرم بعضی از مواردش در اشل خیلی کوچیکتر مورد ابتلای جامعه ی خودمونم هست و اگر بهش فکر نکنیم به همون بلا دچار میشیم)

[Maru Kun]

Good interview with Chris Hedges on this work: Radio Open Source - Farewell Tour. Pretty much everything Chris Hedges says is woefully depressing. I just can't help agreeing with ninety percent of it.

[Gary Moreau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throughout history, all great civilizations have ultimately decayed. And America will not be an exception, according to former journalist and war correspondent, Chris Hedges. And while Hedges doesn’t offer a date, he maintains we are in the final throes of implosion—and it won’t be pretty.

The book is thoroughly researched and the author knows his history. And despite some of the reviews it is not so much a political treatise as it is an exploration of the American underbelly—drugs, suicide, sadism, hate, gambling, etc. And it’s pretty dark; although he supports the picture he paints with ample statistics and first person accounts.

There is politics, but the politics provides the context for the decay. And it’s not as one-dimensional as other reviewers seemed to perceive. Yes, he is no fan of Trump or the Republican leadership. But he is no fan of the Democratic shift to identity politics, or antifa, either.

One reviewer thought he was undermining Christianity but I didn’t get that. He does not support “prosperity gospel” theology, but I didn’t see any attempt to undermine fundamental religious doctrine. He is, after all, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and an ordained Presbyterian minister.

He puts the bulk of the blame for the current state of decay, in fact, where few other writers do—squarely on the back of the owners of capital and the super-companies who now dominate nearly every industry. The social and political division we are now witnessing, in other words, has been orchestrated by the capital class; the class of investors, banks, and hedge fund managers who don’t create value so much as they transfer it from others with less power. And I think he’s spot on right.

We have seen a complete merger of corporate and political America. Politicians on both sides of the aisle serve at the pleasure of the capitalist elite because they need their money to stay in power. Corporations enjoy all the rights of citizenship save voting, but who needs to actually cast a ballot when you can buy the election.

And what the corpocracy, as I call it, is doing with all that power is continuing to reshuffle the deck of economic opportunity to insure that wealth and income continue to polarize. It’s a process they undertake in the name of tax cuts for the middle class (which aren’t), deregulation (which hurts the middle class), and the outright transfer of wealth and property (including millions of acres of taxpayer-owned land) from taxpayers to shareholders (the 1%).

I know because I was part of it. As a former CEO and member of four corporate boards I had a front row seat from the 1970s on. The simplest analogy is that the gamblers rose up and took control of the casinos and the government had their backs in a kind of quid pro quo, all having to do with money.

They made it stick because they turned corporate management into the ultimate capitalists. The people who used to manage companies are now laser focused on managing the companies’ stock price and enhancing their own wealth. Corporate executives, in a word, became capitalists, not businessmen and women, giving the foxes unfettered control of the hen house.

They got to that position through a combination of greed—both corporate management’s and that of shareholder activists—but were enabled and empowered by Washington. Beginning in the 1970s the Justice Department antitrust division, the Labor Department, the EPA, and other institutions assigned the responsibility to avoid the concentration of power that Adam Smith warned us about, and to protect American workers and the environment, were all gutted and stripped of power.

They blamed it on globalism, but that was the result, not the cause. Gone are the days of any corporate sense of responsibility to the employees, the collective good, or the communities in which they operate and whose many services they enjoy. It is the corporate and financial elite, and they are now one and the same, who have defined the “me” world in which we now live.

And the process continues: “The ruling corporate kleptocrats are political arsonists. They are carting cans of gasoline into government agencies, the courts, the White House, and Congress to burn down any structure or program that promotes the common good.” And he’s right. And Trump is carrying those cans.

Ironically, Trump’s base, who have been most marginalized by the corpocracy, are the ones who put him there to continue the gutting. But Hedges has an explanation for that. “In short, when you are marginalized and rejected by society, life often has little meaning. There arises a yearning among the disempowered to become as omnipotent as the gods. The impossibility of omnipotence leads…to its dark alternative—destroying like the gods.” (Reference to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.)

The economic history and understanding of economic theory here is rich and detailed. Capitalism, as Marx and others pointed out, creates great wealth in the beginning but is doomed to failure due to its inability to continue to find sources of growth and to manage inequities in wealth creation. And you don’t have to be a socialist to see that this is true. Capitalism must be managed. And our government is currently making no attempt to do so. It is, in fact, dynamiting the institutions responsible for doing so.

All told, this is a very good book. If you don’t like reading about underbellies (I found the chapter devoted to sadism personally unsettling, being the father of two daughters.) you will find some of it pretty dark. Having said that, however, the writing is very good and Hedges never wallows in the darkness. He’s clearly not selling the underbelly; he’s trying to give it definition.

I did think that some of the chapters might have been broken down into different sub-chapters and there is a lack of continuity in some places. All told, however, I do recommend the book. There is no denying the fundamental thesis.

The problem is, however, we’re all blaming it on the proverbial ‘other guy.’ Perhaps this book will help us to understand the real culprit—the capitalist collective. “The merging of the self with the capitalist collective has robbed us of our agency, creativity, capacity for self-reflection, and moral autonomy.” True, indeed.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a bad book. It’s just not saying anything of real significance. Is it one of those books that hashes and rehashes semi recent events and comes up with a witty analysis to show how smart the author is. Now the author is pretty smart and the analysis is pretty witty. But it’s not actually getting at anything of substance. That’s not a knock against this book specifically but more against books of this type.

“Big business does bad things”
“Trump tells lies”
“Welcome to late stage capitalism”
“Government is a soulless machine”

And while I’m impressed with the authors quoting of Marx and other deep thinkers. I couldn’t shake the feeling that most of this book is just intellectual porn. It’s going to make you feel temporarily righteous for reading, but empty inside afterwards. It doesn’t address core issues, it misses layers of nuance and leaves the reader exactly where they started except the reader is a bit more indignant and self righteous than before.

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hedges is not going to win any award for Optimist of the Year and, as others have noted, this book is sobering to the point of being bleak. But it is hard to argue with his thesis - the United States is in a state of late capitalist decay thanks to years of Reaganite policies that have favoured the rich while keeping everyone else either stupefied or distracted. Hedges uses the election of Trump as an obvious jumping off point for a detailed examination of what has gone so wrong in the last 60 years, but his chilling argument is that Trump is not the cause of American woes, he's just their latest and most obvious symptom. Which means removing him from office may feel good for most, but it will not cure the malaise that caused his bizarre ascent to power in the first place.

Hedges is a Christian socialist and, as such, a particularly vociferous critic of the Evangelical Right, which he unhesitatingly identifies as a fascist movement. But in places his Christianity does veer into reflex moralism, with a conflation of things that he finds personally repugnant (BDSM, pornography) as not just (to him) straightforwardly wrong but also a sign of civilisational decay. This means parts of his book, such as his disdainful description of a bondage workshop in San Francisco, reads more like "things Chris Hedges finds distasteful" rather than "evidence the US is collapsing". Some of his historical allusions are also slightly jarring. His exploration of how the Nazis used and harnessed anti-Nazi violence by Socialists to actually gain support is a good counter to the simple-minded Antifa dogma that the Nazis rose because of a lack of German people punching SA men in the streets. But he repeatedly draws on examples of what he sees as leading to the collapse of the Roman Empire which actually come from the Empire's height and centuries before any decline or fall. Nero and Caligula may well have been nuts and the first century AD Roman elite a vastly wealthy 1%, but it's hard to see them as therefore the cause of a collapse that came ... a whole four centuries later.

Those quibbles aside, Hedges does such a good job of detailing exactly how rotten so many American institutions have become that his final chapter's call for "what we must do" actually falls rather flat. After the detailed pages of careful argument and examples of the systemic problems that makes up about 400 pages, the lightly sketched solutions seem featherweight by comparison. Perhaps he's writing a new book outlining the solutions he proposes in more detail - I certainly felt like I needed to read one after this grim volume. I'm just glad I live in Australia, where (despite the best efforts of our conservative politicians and their masters) most of these problems don't exist, are not as profound or are blunted by strong counter-balancing laws and institutions. If I lived in the US this book would make me consider emigration.

[Kurt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A detailed description of all the reasons why America's hey day is over and not to be repeated – at least not in any future that we will ever recognize as "American".

We are following the same downward spiral that previous empires have taken. Our non-manufacturing, service and consumption-oriented, and finance-heavy economy is an unsustainable house of cards. The illusion of security and well-being that the rising stock market showcases benefits only the most wealthy in our society (for how long?), while the less fortunate become increasingly enslaved by poverty, addiction, racism, and various institutionalized forms of discrimination and injustice. For-profit prisons (America, with only 5% of the world's population, incarcerates 22% of the world's prisoners), lack of access to adequate health care, and chronic non-living wages ensure that the poor will remain poor while the middle class loses ground and the wealth gap widens. Our arrogant attempts to exercise our will upon the rest of the world through military might is doomed to the same failure that the Roman Empire experienced and for the same reasons. Our refusal to even acknowledge (much less deal with) the reality and seriousness of man-made environmental deterioration bodes poorly for all future Americans.

Needless to say, this is a depressing read. There were a few moments where the author seemed to be injecting a ray of hope. But those moments were few and far between, and often they were almost immediately shot down by the author himself. I hope, and it's always possible, that he is wrong about all of this in the most spectacular way, but I wouldn't bet much on that outcome.

[Chris Dietzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything I've read by Hedges has been 5 stars and yet this may be his best book yet. And when I say 'best' I mean 'utterly depressing yet brutally accurate.' One of the reasons I'm a fan of Hedges is that he doesn't fall into the left-vs-right nonsense that most political writers and journalists succumb to. His entire mindset is the establishment-vs-people, and that, combined with his appreciation for history and his refusal to try and make things sound better than they are, gives readers an important and honest account of where the United States is and where it's rapidly trending. (Spoiler alert, the empire is crumbling.) Highest recommendation for anyone who loves nonfiction or real life dystopians.

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other reviewers have mentioned, this is not a happy, feel-good read. I can't even say that it is an entirely enlightening read, at least to folks who have been half paying attention to the demise of political discourse and civil society in the United States.

Hedges pulls no punches but carefully makes the case that the America that inspired much of the good in the 20th Century--helping free Europe from fascism, making progress in human rights, providing better working conditions, and starting to treat the environment with respect--has lost those values. Instead they have been replaced by greed and vice that are often found at the end-of-life stage of other world-empires.

Of course, the US has never been the perfect, shining exception that it has always touted itself to be. I know that. However, looking at the political divisions in the country over the last 20 years or so, and after reading books such as those by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander recently, I have essentially lost most of the qualified respect that I have had for the political system in place across the border from Canada. Although I have always found American citizens themselves to be genuinely decent people, something rotten has crept into their corporate-driven society.

Something is very wrong in a country that has so much wealth and resources, but where the gap in wealth and resources between the top 1% and the other 99% is abysmally vast. Something is wrong in a country that has decided to keep black people as slaves, not outright as in the plantations and cotton fields of two hundred years ago, but by incarcerating them for minor offences and exploiting their labor in modern prisons--by labeling them as felons for the rest of their lives, squeezing them into a trap from which they cannot escape. Something is seriously wrong in a country where its political leaders act like mafia-dons, claiming that they can literally "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters". Something is disgustingly wrong when our sons are taught that sadistic pornography is a manual to a good and healthy love-life. Something is sadly wrong in a country where news must be entertaining, such that the public cannot learn about the actual pros and cons of a particular issue but instead must be spun to emotionally respond to a point of view, typically one that benefits corporate and personal wealth of the powerful. And I know these trends are not just affecting America, they are creeping into vogue all around the world.

Sadly, unsurprisingly, Hedges infers that the US is in for a bad time, and there is no easy fix. Impeaching Trump and electing Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in 2020 won't simply reverse all these problems. The roots are too deep. Indeed, Trump is a symptom and not the cause. Like his previous book Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, Hedges prescribes non-violent resistance. The 99% cannot afford to go along with the corporate agenda of runaway capitalism any further. Personally, I'm not sure what such rebellion looks like. Should Americans stop paying their taxes? Hold rotating general strikes? Surround Capitol Hill? I'm not sure Hedges even knows what form resistance should take. However, I know that he believes that it is a moral imperative to act against the greed and hatred of these powerful forces. That I do know...

[Shauna Sorensen · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star for the only interesting parts of this book: the quotes from other sources and some of the interviews. Here begins my rant...

In the beginning of the book, I was very interested in the way he blended philosophy, sociology, and the stories of real people. But the philosophy soon petered out and the biggest misses came when he began working in a sort of armchair psychology. There's a big difference between talking with someone about their personal experience and asking them to speak in generalities about everyone who has had a similar experience to them.

I initially noticed the lack of stories of people of color. But, it's the beginning of the book, maybe that will be solved later? (Spoiler: Nope.)

Then I got to the Sadism chapter. I few pages in I took a pause to re-read his bio: Oh. Harvard Divinity School? Minister? I guess that explains why this whole chapter was just about his moral disgust with BDSM and porn. Hey, how novel, a straight, white, religious white main entirely uninvolved in sex work railing against its legalization, often straight-up equating it to sex trafficking, and telling women what their sexual desires should be.

Are there real problems included in this chapter? Absolutely, there are problems in the porn industry and sex work. However, this is not the person you want addressing it. There is a noticeable absence of trans women or male sex workers (not even mentioned) and instead the whole chapter comes off as a misogynistic rant. All the big issues in this chapter end up taking a backseat to the long, in-depth descriptions he gives of the acts performed in various porn films.

Towards the end of this chapter, he quotes someone who says that the "left" is afraid of words like "morality" and does not understand "unethical" behavior, which is exactly the problem I came to have with this book as a whole. Morality and ethics are, to a large extent, subjective and all the larger issues of inequity (who is involved in sex work and why? Who is endangered and why?) that are included in this book are bogged down by his Christian perspective.

Then we get to the Hate chapter and the fun continues. Hedges criticizes a binary view that has antifascists on one end and...uh...fascists on the other. Yeah, this whole chapter is just "both sides"-isms. He asserts that antifa is hostile to organizing, are similar to vegans (in their hyperpurity and rigid dogma), and consumed by hate, despite the fact that anyone who is anti-fascist is actively fighting for the rights of others with their hate directed at the people supporting racism, xenophobia and inequality.

He makes his centrist stance crystal clear when he quotes someone who says people "have to go through the process of trying to work with the system and getting screwed. We can't short circuit the process." The why of this is never addressed. Also not addressed is that the system itself is the problem if it allows for inequity.

Another interesting quote towards the end of the chapter that was apparently written without any irony is: "The conflict will not end until followers of the alt-right and anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed." I'm getting a headache even thinking of how to address that.

I hated this book.

[Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebellion Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Hedges Magnum Opus. There's not much else to say. For those who follow his Articles (now moved from website Truthdig to Scheerpost) and read his books, there's not much new in Hedges sweeping analysis of American culture, corporate capitalism, and civilisational collapse. However, the interviews and time spent with those on the sharp end of the sword of Americas decline are unforgettable. It's incomprehensible at times how some of these individuals still keep going in the face of the overwhelming unfairness arrayed against them.

The last chapter, Freedom, is a particularly moving read. The prison system is a truly mind boggling monstrosity to behold, and I feel that alone, if it were broadcast to the nation, would be enough to show Americans just how indefensible the system is.

For those who have not read Hedges before, I would seriously consider starting here. It might be his latest work, but it combines pretty much everything he has been writing and fighting for these last two decades.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book documents the current state of America, with a special focus on everything that has gone wrong and that threatens to undo the country's democratic structures and economic viability. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of this breakdown in society. The author writes very well. And what he uncovers is extremely disturbing. My only caveat is that his solutions seem too based in Marxist dogma. He dismisses other approaches as if they could never have any important effect. I remain unconvinced that the solutions he proposes a) will work, and b) are the only ones possible. But keep in mind that I am in favor of any solutions that create a more egalitarian society based on justice and compassion and empathy.

[Keith Akers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Hedges offers us a light-hearted, nostalgic romp through the absurdity and humor of the last days of the American Empire. NOT.

All right, his writing is depressing, excellent, and accurate. But what do we do with it? I am using this book selectively. It requires a context --- which Hedges does not explicitly provide.

As advertised, the book is provocative. Hedges describes a surprising variety of the seamier sides of American life, and then relating all of this to his overall theme of "decline." There's politics, sexuality, the opioid epidemic, the explosion of hate groups, the suppression of the Standing Rock protest, and more.

The main problem I have with the book is that all this depressing stuff isn't given a context. Fine, I agree, we need a radical approach. And so . . . what do we do now?

It's not all doom and gloom. In the last chapter, he suggests some ways of addressing the situation, talking about "organizing" and "freedom." He even throws in references to Kierkegaard to illustrate his points, which I thought was EXTREMELY cool. We're not sick, we're suffering from despair, the "sickness unto death"! But overall the book conveys well a sense of depressing inevitability, roughly along the lines of "it's awful, so get used to it." In short, he seems to be promoting despair, exactly the thing that Kierkegaard warns us against. I don't think that Hedges' failure to provide any meaningful context is deliberate, as if it were some sort of Socratic interchange to challenge the reader. It's something that just happens as he writes the book --- so I assume that this depressing general inevitability is exactly and precisely what he wants to convey.

I did not read the entire book, covering about 2/3 to 80% of the book. (Thus, I read more of this book than his equally fine book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.") At several junctures, I could see where the discussion was going, and I said, "I get it, now where do we go with this?" I'd flip ahead some pages until I saw this being addressed (it usually wasn't), or until I saw the subject changing. If I didn't see the subject changing, I'd go to the next chapter, and start reading when the subject did change.

There were several sections where Hedges really did provide me with new information. I noticed this especially in chapter 2 on "Heroin" (actually, opioids) and chapter 5 on "Hate" (actually, the people who make up the far right). I just didn't know about the opioid epidemic and I found this chapter very sympathetic to the victims. They're not just depraved addicts! And often they can't avoid the downward spiral, even with family and friends helping, and with all the will in the world.

The chapter on "Hate" was likewise enlightening and sympathetic. I know a little about hate, I suppose, just because I often feel anger. Hedges provides as sympathetic a description of mass murderer Dylann Roof --- and the far right more generally --- as you will likely ever see. Hedges is obviously on the left end of the spectrum and strongly disapproves of both murder and the far right. As I was reading this, though, I couldn't help but see how anger plays out in promoting this sort of violence, and in many ways the people who make up the far right are quite sympathetic people. You can't help but identify with their frustration even though you wouldn't do what they are doing.

In the final chapter, on "Freedom," Hedges seems to want to provide us with something just a bit hopeful. He tells us about the Standing Rock protest, which is evidently a model for what we should do, but it is presented as a depressing failure --- so I found myself, once again, flipping through pages, waiting for Hedges to make his point, and mostly not finding it. Both "organizing" and "freedom" (which Hedges mentions) are possible constructive approaches here; I'd just like a bit more on all of this. Tell us how and why Standing Rock was a positive experience, if that's how you think of it; or tell us how you personally stay effective in your own work, if you have.

"America" is similar to those animal rights videos of brutality on factory farms. I don't view these videos myself; I'm already vegan and it's simply too traumatic. Why should we deliberately inflict trauma on ourselves? To make us angrier still? How effective would we be when we are angry? This is a rhetorical question! You're not very effective when you're angry. You're most effective when you're calm and informed.

So, long story short, how do we respond to Chris Hedges' latest book?

1. To most of my liberal or left friends (or even conservative friends, if I have any), I would recommend the book, especially the chapters on "Hate" and "Heroin." But I would suggest caution. As they constantly say in yoga: if it hurts, don't do it. Don't read any more than you have to.

2. To Chris Hedges himself, I'd say: Lighten up, dude! You're famous, you're socially relevant, and you're really smart. Don't despair! Things are just now beginning to get interesting.

[Unabridged Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

RTC ugh... that was tough to get through, but it's so relevant.

[Steve]

DNF @ 5%

I received this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was hoping to read a balanced view of the current slow collapse of the American republic, but instead it's a book of solid bashing of conservative values. Definitely not going to finish this one!

[Vincent Masson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Hedges has become a new idol of mine. I love people with passion, and he is extraordinarily passionate. He doesn't mince words. He doesn't shy away from ugly truths. His commitment to the middle class is nothing short of heroic, to me. As someone that has gone to many entry level jobs with a fake smile to sell products people don't want or need - for years - it's slightly jarring to see someone so intelligent coming to the defence of people like me.

He's taught me to open my eyes to a great many things, and question the profit-driven environment I live in. His stories about his time reporting overseas in War is a Force that Gives us Meaning moved me as much as any non-fiction I've ever read. He exposed me to John Ralston Saul - one of the great thinkers of my country, Canada. I think he might be one of the last true role models for children in America.

"America, The Farewell Tour" is a very good book. If you're familiar with Hedges, you'll probably be familiar with many of the ideas here -- the unfettered capitalism that has left the middle class financially impotent. The degradation of any values that has given rise to BDSM and other forms of sado-masochism. The prison industrial complex that perpetuates modern slavery, and the rise of hate groups and fascism. It's all laid in the typically thoughtful, well articulated way that Hedges always has - drawing heavily on History, facts, ideas of previous thinkers. The final chapter, "Freedom", was a behemoth in itself, that felt like it's own book.

The section about BDSM - while interesting in a morbidly curious kind of way - didn't really seem like it fit into the theme of American moral decay. He mentions that Germany has legalized prostitution, but it seems like 8 European countries have as well. He doesn't provide any facts about whether those countries have similarly gone downhill morally, though.

Have they seen rises or declines in rapes, for instance? How has legalizing prostitution there affected anything beyond seeing women in windows in the Red Light District? I've seen arguments that suggest that legalized prostitution would lower cases of rape by providing those men with an additional outlet. I understand that Chris Hedges comes from a religious background, and therefore might feel more strongly about this issue than me.

But if legalizing prostitution prevents thousands of women from being raped every year, isn't it fair to at least consider it as a possibility? But maybe I'm missing his point. He equates the whole business with what author Michael J. Sandel calls "the Market society" - which is to say that everything is for sale. Whatever you do or don't want to do, you can probably pay to do it or not do it. Perhaps what Hedges is saying is that if we didn't organize our society around profit, the business wouldn't exist at the level lit did, but he didn't completely convince me.

Still, a wonderful, passionate, and powerfully written book.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh Chris, how can a I love you one minute then be rolling my eyes the next? I'll always be interested in what CH has to say, I've read most of his books and War is A Force that Gives Us Meaning is a favourite book of mine but he has gotten more and more into"Old Testament" mode as he has gone along and this book is a good example of that. He is at his best when he is out talking to ordinary people as the superb journalist and writer that he is, the stories about the opiod deaths and the responsibility of the drug company who manufactured Oxycontin and the web of sales staff, doctors etc who hawked the product within Americas nutty private (un)healthcare system, are superb. CH really is extraordinary at talking to people and bringing them to life. His writings about the extreme hardcore pornography that is easily available worldwide to anyone with smartphone is wildly underreported. He's less good when he starts on his increasingly baroque and gloomy preacher-mode explanations for why capitalism, and the US, are terrible all the time. It's the contradictions that grate. One minute he's telling off Antifa for their extremism and lack of civility but finishes the book with an extreme call to action to defeat evil that wouldn't be out of place in the Lord of the Rings. He blames Democrats for losing the working class but largely ignores the racism that was the single biggest predictor of support for Trump. He also castigates "corporate democrats" for blaming Russian interference on their election loss. Was that the only reason? No. Should it have been that close? No. But all things being equal the Russian interference - which is an indisputable fact - made enough of a difference to tip the 80,000 votes needed in the key states that pushed Trump over the top. CH may not like this, and think it's too much of an excuse, but it's still true. But for Hedges it doesn't matter any way because to him Clinton is no better than Trump. This is a lazy postion at best, it's the old communist notion (Steve Bannon would approve) that it's better to let the world burn down so as to hasten the end of the old corrupt order and bring about the glorious true age of socialism where everybody is suddenly much nicer to everyone else etc. This is exactly what I thought when I was 19. Would President Clinton have been perfect? No. Would she be doing all the awful things Trump is doing? No. Real peoples real lives would be measurably better off from the Paris Peace Accords to the Standing Rock Dakota pipeline issue.

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that may change the way you look at porn!

How did the book make me feel/think?

In a galaxy far, far away... okay, this galaxy, the Empire lumbered along, bringing with it great joy and prosperity to all.

Well, the Empire may fracture, crumbling before our eyes, with all of us complicit and distracted by the noise filling our craniums daily.

It’s 5 AM. I’m riding the elevator down from my home on the tenth floor. My eyes are drawn to the video screen above the keypad. “A family home in a province 1,000 miles away caught on fire. The three children inside perished.”

I don’t know them. They are the first thing pumped into my brain. Am I supposed to carry the grief of their loved ones through the day—passing it along to everyone I meet?

I walk the last few blocks to work.

I’m forced to stop frequently to avoid being walked into by pedestrians enamoured by their phones.

I don’t exist—to them.

AMERICA: THE FAREWELL TOUR is a thorough analysis of the fracturing of an Empire that is losing its way.

Could the end be nigh?

Could the top rung be knocked down, shattered, left tattered for the next generations to suffer through the mess we’ve brought upon ourselves?

I think the answer is: PROBABLY.

I think we have collectively buried our heads in the sand for a long time.

AMERICA: THE FAREWELL TOUR is a sobering, intimate, engaging, eye-popping, stimulating, deeply upsetting, depression-inducing, and uplifting look about how we got to where we are; and where we are likely heading, with an olive branch stretching down to us, offering a fragile path to soften the unavoidable blow.

WHERE ARE WE?

LET’S (the next word needs to be put to rest—the last time used, here) UNPACK.
 

“Some rich man came and raped the land. Nobody caught him.”

• The Last Resort: The Eagles

People, I have a dream to sell you. You can be whatever you want to be. Believe me. We are all created equal. I will show you the way. Just follow me.

Why are you snickering, rich man?

INDUSTRY

We industrialized. We began making things. Everything. The rich men sat at the top. Everyone else worked for them.

The work sucked, but nobody (other countries) was making things. We didn’t mind the rich getting fat off our labour—we had good lives. We could afford to buy the stuff we produced.

Then: the rich men wanted more.

We did as well, but the wealthy resisted us reaching into their pockets, so they looked for others to do labour for less.

Why pay Timmy in Indiana $25 per hour + health benefits when I can spend (insert name of a worker from another country, here) 25 cents per hour with horrid working conditions to produce the same products?

You don’t have to answer.

Sure, it might piss off Timmy at the worker in the other country, but he sure enjoys buying the products for less. In the meantime, the rich build massive shopping centres for the Timmy’s of the world to consume foreign-made goods.

A decade slips by.

Another decade slips by.

American wages stagnate.

Sports + celebrity + drugs + booze + shiny things distract us, numb us, dumb us down, we don’t want to look at what’s happening.

The sand hole for our heads becomes appealing.

For a few people, the distraction stops working. They look. They realize WTF—I think we’re being played.

The dream fractures.

However, only a few open their eyes—most people prefer to live in ignorant bliss.

The rich men get fatter.

Hey, you can keep your job if—if—we can shred your wages—and, who needs health benefits?

Industrialized America implodes.

Timmy’s outrage is misguidedly directed at (insert name of a worker from another country, here).

Religion gets involved.

Without an agenda.

Snicker.

The zealots want power. Some religions worship wealth, ignoring the “potentially” mortal sins of political leaders by justifying “God wouldn’t reward sinners with wealth.”

Communities collapse, and we need more distractions.

DRUGS

“Have a little taste, Timmy; this will numb your ills.”

Timmy likes to be numbed.

Timmy chases numb.

The pharmaceutical industry sees an opportunity. And, suddenly, America’s drug problem trips out of the ghettos into every town.

“Build a wall, and we will be saved. The only reason I popped a pill in the first place is (insert name of a nefarious foreigner who handed me the glass of water to wash it down here). I’m not responsible for…me. I like to blame.”

And, with the building of the wall, the complexities of addiction flutter away into nevermore.

Timmy hurts his knee working his wage-decreasing, soon-to-be-eliminated job. A doctor prescribes painkillers. Timmy can’t afford the healthcare. That’s okay. An illegal immigrant will sell him something to ease his pain.

What’s that?

The illegal immigrant is Caucasian, born in Omaha. Crap.

THE RICH MEN HAVE A SOLUTION

Toss as many people as they can in prison.

That will fix the problem.

It will also serve another purpose: cheap American Labour.

Not to mention, ‘labour’ likely to show up daily because they have nowhere else to go.

If you are lucky enough to escape prison, pop another pill, and drown yourself in the realities of reality television + the release of cheering for your favourite teams.


A LITTLE SECRET

Drugs used to be a ghetto-related race problem. However, with the shattering of the industrialized American model, everyone can fall more from middle class to poor. Oh yeah, the little secret: the rich men don’t care: the only colour they see is GREEN.

Another decade blasts by as the “American Dream” splinters apart. For those of us who aren’t too addled with addiction, those who can still find the strength to climb, we don’t realize the rung we’re reaching for no longer exists because our brothers and sisters are desperately holding onto it as they spiral downward.

Don’t worry, people. We’ve got your back. We’re increasing the military budget to protect you from those who’ve done this to you. Look over there → them.

WORK

In many cities, the cost-of-living indoors has skyrocketed. For many (half of Americans), there may be work, menial, and living close to where you work becomes increasingly unattainable. The next thing you know, if you are poor, you face commuting most of your days away to serve the wealthy.

Too tired and beat down to resist, or ask (demand) for more, a more that doesn’t exist.

That’s okay; the costs of televisions have dropped significantly.

What’s that?

To have channels to watch I must pay an astronomical amount, that’s okay, I can’t miss the game.

Beaten down, you skip paying the transit fare.

You get caught.

You’re ticketed.

You’re now in the system.

If you don’t pay the fine, your menial job might become day labour in a special camp.

PORN

There is not single actor in the porn (sex-for-pay) industry who entered the sector chasing the American Dream. Desperation for survival is the gateway.

Argue if you’d like?

The broken become more broken and desperate, only to eventually be chewed up and spat out when the curtain on their “careers” slam shut.

The more consumption, the more extreme and violent porn becomes.

Consumers become desensitized.

Consumers risk becoming predators unable to give intimacy.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

And the porn wheel keeps spinning with curious American boys becoming exposed, and by the time they hit 12 or 13 years of age, normal to them… sorry girls, good luck.

With the pimps industry profiting, everyone else falls deeper into addiction.

As we pour more money into the military to protect us from external enemies, with the opportunity of a good-paying job, guess what: walking lockstep with the pimps of porn, is the recruiters of the military. Lucky for them, there is a gaggle of young men who are unable to see a future, ready to enlist.

Even more fortunate → can you taste the sarcasm?

These young men’s minds are filled with love and stability.

HATE

Now that we’re drug-addled, broke, unemployed, divorced, masturbating to… “ewe.”

“Hey, Timmy, my cable’s been cut. Can I watch the game at your place? Thanks. Look at those idiots kneeling. Respect the flag, you (insert profanity-laced racial slur here).”

“I need someone to blame. I need someone to blame. I know — anyone who doesn’t look like me. This land is my land.”

I feel deep sorrow for any of us stumbling around on this rock who believe “others” are the problems plaguing the world today.

AMERICA: THE FAREWELL TOUR highlights the horrific realities of the sickness of hate in brilliant clarity.

Haters, do you really believe if only a few drops of water were left, your Caucasian neighbour wouldn’t off you; because you’re Caucasian?

I don’t care where the root of racism or hatred originates; you don’t have to participate.

If that makes me naïve, so be it.

Hey, young unemployed guy with no prosperous future in sight: do you want to go mess up some people in a foreign land?

We’re we invited?

Silly question. Hey, what type of porn do you like?

In a boardroom (probably fictitious), the powers that be see opportunity, and determine the best way to keep impoverished, is to point at others, making them the ones to blame.

And, oh yeah, make poverty a growing business. Desperation begets a fine, begets interest, begets another fine, begets more interest, begets—“hey, the people of colour did this to me,” begets—

ESCAPE

If only there were a way out. A way to jump back on the dream train. I know. I can win the jackpot.

What do I have to lose?

Spin, spin, spin, so close. Spin, spin, so close. Insert more money. This music is calming. I like it here. Create heavy users. Was that subliminal?

Spin, spin, spin, so close. Insert more money.

Hey, Timmy, did you buy a ticket for the Powerball? You never know?

What do I have to lose?

And with another ticket purchased, the poorest of the poor voluntarily pay the taxes corporations used to pay.

How’s the wall coming along?

Why does the second floor of your casino, say 14, on the elevator keypad?

Don’t worry. I’ve got your back. Let’s put more money into the military. They’re” coming for our way of life. I’ll protect you.

Hey, Timmy, did you ever notice there are no right angles in casinos? Why won’t they let us decide?

And Timmy, it’s the strangest thing. Every time I’m breaking in the pain of loss, a cocktail server magically appears.

A SOLUTION?

Check unfettered capitalism.

We are being played. The repetition of history suggests just before an Empire collapses, it goes through a period of prosperity followed by stagnation and deindustrialization, with new realities coming in the eroding of the middle class. Flailing Empires become ripe for divisiveness and addiction. Often laced with morally debunked excess, where many people are lost → chasing their first highs brought on by the taste of money, sexual depravity, isolation, anger, and a need to blame others → creating a fertile environment for those who have your “least interests” at heart to gain control.

Even though you understand, you’ve been grifted. And divided for feeding the addictions of the rich. You still slam another needle into your arm. Believing your next high will be the one allowing you to escape the madness.

If I had to pick one thing in this engrossing book that struck the chord the most for me, and I’ll paraphrase: Privatized Prisons: In many states, if the prisons don’t reach specific occupancy rates (90%), the State must pay the penalty to the Corporations that fund them.

A rich man came and raped the land. Nobody caught him. Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and Jesus, people bought them.

I almost forgot; I said the book is uplifting. It is! Chris suggests the importance of talking to each other, creating a sense of community, to stop hiding behind screens. To stop blaming.

America is a fantastic place, full of opportunity and beauty. It’s up to us to soften the inevitability of change by merely talking to each other—if we do; if we say hi to our neighbours, then and only then, we might realize there is no reason to hate.

Thank you, Chris, for painting the picture in such a concise way, humanizing the realities of what came before and what may be on the horizon.

[Arianne X · Rating 5 out of 5]

America in the Weimar Age

First, there is this arresting sentence on p.23. “Prescribed rituals and behaviors, including acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil, will vanquish the malevolent forces that are blamed for the crisis.” Is this not what happened on January 6, 2021?

Next, page 53: “A population beset by despair and hopelessness finds intoxicating empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation.” This we saw acted out on January 6, 2021 as the members of the herd surrendered their capacity for ethical judgement and their agency for moral choice to the herd. Human beings enthralled with the intoxication of the adrenalin rush that comes from conformation and violence become beasts; beasts reacting in an instinctual manner against that which their senses tell them is a ‘real’ threat. Here, by ‘real’ I mean the honorary title we give to the subjective description of experience derived from our immediate physical senses. This is as true of the Antifa Black Bloc as it is of the fascist alt-right. What they both lack is the Will to Power.

The chapters are really case studies in social pathology and read like a page turning novel told in the written voice of the authentic victims. Though the examples presented are extreme cases, they are becoming all too frequent and are creating an abnormal that is rapidly becoming the new normal. Still, I believe these examples demonstrate how our vaunted humanitarianism is only pretended. Life presents many reasons for bitterness, many of which are lovingly documented in the chapters covering decay, hatred, sadism, addiction, etc. Appeals to innocence become grotesque when compared to the nature of life in the neoliberal paradise into which the American republic has been assimilated. This is why optimism is reckless and irresponsible. Existence itself provides cause enough for pessimism.

The new vanguard of the radical right and the radical left are those marginalized by the neoliberal cult of capital. Thier antagonisms are more ostensible than fundamental. Both sides feel equally scorned by, and disillusioned with, the political/economic system. The global predatory neoliberal capitalist system works very well for very few and not at all for the very many. In this sense, the system is working as designed and replicates the elitism and class divisions endemic to human history. This makes the New Deal and the post WWII (1945 – 1980) social democratic consensus an anomaly or an exception to the human condition. All progress is subject to reversal. That is, predatory exploitation is the norm of the human condition, it is only the means of predation that change. Christianity, though now benign in the liberal instantiation as preferred by Chris Hedges, was one of the primary predatory means of exploitation in the past and in its current conservative fundamental incarnation is once again becoming a means of predatory exploitation. Neoliberalism can be thought of a secular version of Calvinism. Neoliberalism melds well with the new Christian doctrine of the prosperity gospel and is creating neo-feudal system where the working poor are the new permanent class of serfs. At current wage rates, a person cannot physically work enough hours to move out of the new permanent low wage worker serf class. Unfortunately, this state of affairs is in keeping with human history. This is why I am not hopeful; the true political task of the select few is in managing and maintaining just such an arrangement. The political system is built to maintain and manage, not address and remedy, the system of inequality and injustice, control and dominance by keeping individuals in fear for their own wellbeing and by keeping organized groups in opposition to each other.

The American Weimar:

We do seem to be living in an American Weimar moment. The farewell tour given by Chris Hedges is for the rational, progressive, compassionate America. Farewell to the America with social and public institutions that could address the needs of the populace. The emerging America is a place of public paralysis, a place where the grotesque, the stupid and the brutal are elevated to create a new antireality based on willful ignorance. We are currently living in an American Weimar Age to be followed by an American fascist age. The proto-fascism of Trump, himself a viral political infection, was buffoonish, clownish and incompetent. Just a cartoonish simulation of a genuine fascist. The next fascist leader will be skilled, capable, and shrewd.

The Short Path to Fascism:

This fascist leader will have to be skilled, capable, and shrewd because the path to fascism is short. Such a leader will already have the surveillance state capabilities at his, or even (not likely) her, disposal. It will start with the loss of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. From here, the U.S. will not be able to cheaply and easily borrow to refund its enormous debt. This will lead to much higher interest rates and crippling interest expense for the federal government. The temptation to default will be enormous with the only escape being hyperinflation. The weak dollar will result in instantly more expensive imports which is an additional cause of inflation and massive unemployment. Radically reduced standards of living will lead to radically elevated politics. At this point, the stark choice will be between revolution or hyper-nationalist fascism. The power elites and corporate interests will always favor the stability of fascism that will at least confirm them in their position and status rather than the radical reordering and unpredictability of a revolution.

Meanwhile in Weimar America

Not only can we little agree on the truth, we can no longer agree on the definition of truth. We are moving from an age of merely manipulating truth and reality to an age of manufacturing truth and creating reality with our willful self-deceptions and manufactured delusions fully intact. This can only create what Chris Hedges calls “collective psychosis”. This is how simple folk tales and puerile conspiracy theories easily replace truth or reality. Simplicity equals sincerity in America. A reality of complex history, uncomfortable facts, nuanced ideas, psychological depth and social sophistication is unthinkable for the narrow minded with shallow interests. We cannot face the reality of who and what we are, we are instead trapped, or prefer to be trapped, in the illusion of what think we are. Reality must be avoided or denied allowing the unassailable untruth of conspiracy theories to be presented as the truth. Rather than being something that is distorted or avoided, truth and reality become incomprehensible concepts. Perhaps this means that the truth of our reality is just too painful to confront and the truth of ourselves too loathsome to face. We prefer to live in an unreality TV, social media, internet world - we even elected an unreality TV star as president, as a simulated president that is. “…we are becoming a population of fragmented goons and divided buffoons left to rot in the swamp of disgusting daily social media bodily discharges or perish in the TV blast furnace of rubbish or drown in the internet ocean of puerile tripe.” - From ‘Incomplete Book, Underground Essays from an Underground Existence Lived Above Ground’, p. 194.

The plague bacillus of racism never dies for good, it goes dormant for a period of time only to reemerge with more or less virulence with each new outbreak of this American social disease. Americans, at least white Americans, cannot bear too much reality. The truth of the nation is sinister enough, but not to this level of cruelty. This is why the real war is on reality itself as expressed in the atavistic rage we saw on January 6, 2021. The source of the rage against reality is the radical attenuation of social bonds and civil ties brought about by rapacious global capitalism. It is the expression of the rage in the form of the neofascism from the right as well as anarchism from the left. The Proud Boys and Antifa or Black Lives Matter share the same roots of despair emerging from the scorn they have experienced that has grown to produce poisonous but alluring flowers of differing fragrance. With the flowering of the left and the right, the causal forces are misidentified as law and order or civilization versus barbarism or as a clash of civilizations to be met with force rather than understanding that the casual forces at work are the result of civilizational pathologies that create new classes of the disinherited and the never inherited who actually have much in common, their ostensible antagonisms are artificial and serve the purpose of dividing these movements against themselves. The clashes between the far right and far left only divide the disposed, they are thus not a threat to the system that each opposes. The universal dispossession that the left and the right share in the social isolation found in crumbling schools, decaying infrastructure, police brutality, systematic and systemic racism, lost ways of life, lack of employment security the gig economy, the hustle culture providing jobs where not enough can be earned no matter how hard or long one works. Add to this mounting debts, devastated communities, lack of health care, economic stagnation and gutted social services. This is the result of reducing social life to nothing more than a series of transactions. It turns out that the global marketplace is not the final instantiation of progress and rationality. The corporate state remains secure as long as the false divide between resistance from the left and the right can be maintained.

My criticism of Chris Hedges (my thoughts notwithstanding, this is still a 5-Star book):

I agree with Chris Hedges as to the current set of social pathologies, our current state of affairs as well as his acute analysis of the path by which we arrived here. I also admire and enjoy his skilled prose style. I still see him as an important and highly articulate voice and much needed social commentator and cultural critic that we are fortunate to have. He understands that material conditions and radical material inequalities are the fundamental basis of attitudes, belief, opinions, outlooks, philosophies and pathologies.

However, I think Hedges is engaging in a certain amount of his own self-deception when it comes to Christianity. He tells us that right-wing Christian fundamentalism is a heresy. I agree that right-wing Christianity is a monstrous abomination, but why are we still styling social commentary and cultural criticism in terms of heresy? Hedges tells us that liberal, or what he must see as mainstream Christianity (he is an ordained Presbyterian minister), dropped the ball so to speak and allowed the heresy of right-wing Christian fundamentalism to propagate.

Chris Hedges, and other liberal Christian ministers, criticize the fundamentalists for reading the Bible literally. It seems to me that this is the most honest way to read the Bible and this honest reading reveals Christianly as a retrograde religion, this is only honest Christian revelation. It is Chris Hedges who must engage in exegetical acrobatics and intellectual sophistry to draw ethical lessons from the retrograde Bible. It requires a very tortuous interpretive effort to claim that Bible says something other than what it says. The Bible is a toxic vat of staggering cruelty, rape, genocide and racism that continues to destroy lives to this day. It makes believers privilege the abstract fiction of God over concrete reality and the wellbeing of real embodied human beings. I speak from the of experience of living with such a person. Perhaps this explains the source of my antipathy for Christianity.

In any case, the fact that Christianity can be so twisted is owing to its own fundamental inconsistences and internal contradictions. It is Chris Hedges who must perform intellectual acrobatics to avoid the traps of these inconsistences and contradictions. Chris Hedges nuances Christian thought to carveout the Christian right and identify it as a heresy from what he believes to be mainstream Christianity. However, I believe that the Christian right is the evil spawn of Christianity and thus Christianity must be held fully accountable. The Christian right is full of charlatans because Christianity is a charlatan religion. Christianity itself is the source and root of the Manicheanism, misogyny, magical thinking, science denying and crude fanaticism that enables the reality of maniacal politicians such as Trump who are supported by the truest and deepest believing Christians. What does one expect from a bronze age belief system? The Old Testament can best be thought of as ancient barbaric Jewish mythology and the New Testament as literary fiction, and not very appealing in terms of decent literature or engaging fiction. Biblical practices are no different than voodoo practices. Bible believers are astonishingly ignorant, astoundingly intolerant, staggeringly bigoted and stunningly credulous. I can understand why Chris Hedges is appalled by the Christian right but nobody should be surprised by it.

The religious impulse banishes critical thinking and feeds magical thinking and fantasies in other areas thought such as politics and economics. The folly of QAnon, a hate group that practices group prayer, is easier to understand in light of past human religious follies. The American brand of fascism will have a Christian face. An important aspect of Christian fascism that Hedges does not want to or cannot face, is that it is still Christian, heretical or otherwise. The nonsense of Christian religious belief does not make the public delusions, popular superstitions and bombastic nonsense coming from the halfwits, buffoons, clowns and fanatics of a group such as QAnon any more bearable, just more understandable.

[Shihab Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book 10 stars. It is, I argue, one of the most important books anyone could ever read in our times.

they should teach courses on the contents of this book. so many hard truths and undeniable facts.

I am in absolute awe.

also, the author acknowledges Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sobering depiction of American life in the throes of disintegration under a regime of corporate capitalism that is systematically dismantling our civil society. The ubiquitous influence of corporate lobbyists in the drafting of our legislation, the cannibalization of public utilities by for-profit corporations in an age of fiscal austerity, the outsourcing that has left large swathes of American workers trapped in the rusted shells of what were once our great industrial cities, the forced extinction of labor unions, the replacement of public welfare with corporate welfare in the forms of taxpayer-funded bailouts and subsidies, and the transfer of public land to private energy companies have decimated the livelihoods of millions of Americans, with devastating consequences for our politics, our social and cultural cohesion, and our quality of life.

The res publica, the publicly-owned state which is meant to be our best defense against the rapaciousness of private interests, is now a carcass to be scavenged by an international elite which knows no loyalty, no social responsibility, and which views governments as so many corporate boards to be bought out and plundered through “activist investing” in the manner of Carl Icahn. There has always been a pernicious corporate influence on American government, but never before the age of Trump has the corporate consolidation of totalitarian power been so openly and defiantly manifested. It is conceivable to argue that Trump has nominated cabinet officers for the purpose of dismantling the departments they lead; we have a Secretary of Education who favors the privatization of our educational system, a Secretary of Energy who views coal and fossil fuels as the wave of the future and who has publicly doubted the role of human activity in climate change, and until March of this year we had a Secretary of State who was formerly the CEO of ExxonMobil, but Trump fired him for being too good at his job. Trump is a symptom of the disease—not the disease itself—but he makes a perfect representative for the failure of our democracy.

In these conditions, American society is plagued by what Hedges calls “diseases of despair”: pathological and self-destructive practices that reflect, each in its own way, the self-destruction of the country. The stories he tells are not for the faint of heart. We follow a heroin addict who turns to prostitution to pay for her addiction; a young woman who enters the pornographic film industry and discovers, through her own victimization, the sadism, abuse, and exploitation behind its sexy and glamorous exterior; a college cheer coach who falls down a rabbit-hole of right-wing conspiracy theories after being fired from her job; the listless youths of political groups like Antifa, the Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys, who try to find meaning and companionship in frivolous street engagements designed to demonstrate their own righteousness rather than effect meaningful social change; a gambling addict who wins $140,000 and gambles it all away on the same night; and a clique of desperate prison strikers who are subject to forced labor for dozens of private businesses, debt peonage, long periods of isolation, and arbitrary violence.

Is it possible to fight back? We have to hope so; but doing so will require real organization, tangible objectives, unlikely alliances of mutual interest across cultural, racial, and political fault lines, and a heavy dose of courage. Hedges gleans some encouragement from the Standing Rock protests, which were sustained, organized, and rooted in the real, organic community ties that are everywhere being undermined. The way forward must begin with a rediscovery of our genuine humanity.

Delete Twitter.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to frighten power elites do not succeed. They never adequately addressed white supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism.” But Chris warns, “the corporate state, no longer concerned with addressing economic and racial inequality, is readying for a confrontation.” Since 1997, the Department of Defense has given “over a staggering $5.1 billion in military hardware to police departments.” Why fix things, if you can criminalize poverty? Michele Alexander has said that mass incarceration is a great success. if judged “as a system of social/racial control”. From 1970 to 2005, our prison population has gone up 700 percent. “The true credo of the white race is we have everything, and if you try to take any of it from us we will kill you.” But Malcolm X said, “you get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom: then you’ll get it.”

Aristotle said, Democracy could not exist with huge levels of inequality. Everyone had to have a stake in society. Epicureanism arose to keep people from being political as had been suggested by “the Socratic call for civic engagement.” “There are far more calls by God of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Book of Revelations for holy war, genocide, and savage ethnic cleansing than in than in the Koran”. Our banks would just about break even without corporate welfare. Chris talks of “political arsonists” who would burn down any structure or program that promotes the public good.” The problem is that today the left and the working class don’t stand together, leading Chris to say, “We cannot battle racism without battling for economic justice.” And ignoring climate change won’t help the “128 U.S. military installations at risk from rising sea levels.” Daniel Boorstin writes how Americans increasingly live in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality. We are the most illusioned people on earth, yet we dare not become disillusioned.” Chris sees the future of the U.S. government as “reduced to protecting property rights, ‘homeland’ security, and waging war.” Chris sees a nation that by criminalizing drug use has “splintered and atomized to render real relationships and community difficult and often impossible.” “They seek in opioids the affirmation, warmth, and solidarity that should come from families, friends, and communities where they can find purpose and dignity.” Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic that “the poorest third of households buys one half of all lotto tickets.” Slot Machines are “electronic morphine.” “Idiots only know one word – ‘more’.”

Most writers about our crumbling empire/civilization can put you to sleep while telling you, but Chris is very sensitive to write as to not bore himself, therefore you won’t be bored. Noam Chomsky basically covers the same territory as Chris and does so more thoroughly. However, Chris also offers: 1. an on-the-ground war journalist’s slant. 2. a preacher/minister’s slant. 3. a Bobby Kennedy Jr. unusual literary reference slant

[Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” — George Carlin

“Even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.” — David Foster Wallace

After finishing America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges, one thing becomes clear: while this book was published after the 2016 election, the rise of a Trumpian figure seems, in hindsight, less like an anomaly and more like an inevitability. Hedges exposes the shadows of the American economy—the despair, depression, and hopelessness of those abandoned by the system. He paints a bleak but necessary portrait of a nation unraveling, where addiction, economic desperation, and exploitation intertwine.

From opioid addiction to gambling, from alcoholism to sexual exploitation, Hedges' stories all point to a common denominator: a lack of economic opportunity. Many of the people profiled in this book live on stagnant wages between $7.25 and $10 an hour, trapped in a cycle where one mistake can send them spiraling into poverty and addiction. In that context, the election of Trump—twice—is not so much a triumph of a political ideology as it is a rejection of a system that has failed them. And while Biden’s victory in 2020 may have seemed like a referendum on Trump, it feels more like a rejection of the Democratic Party’s empty promises rather than an embrace of the MAGA right.

The anger of those denied the proverbial American Dream manifests in different ways. Some turn to self-destruction, numbing themselves with vices until they either hit rock bottom and stay there or die there. Others, lacking any real political alternative, embrace the strongman—not because they believe he will save them, but because they want to burn the system down.

“Democracy,” Aristotle wrote, “could not coexist with high levels of inequality. Everyone had to take a stake in society.”

But how do you ask voters to care about democracy when the system itself has been designed to reject it? The rise of authoritarianism and fascism in Western-style democracies isn’t just some historical accident—it’s a direct blowback from an economic system that concentrates extreme wealth and power in the hands of a few while leaving the majority powerless. In that vacuum, rage is easily misdirected.

If working-class voters see politicians constantly surrounded by billionaires like a pack of wolves, how can they not come to the conclusion that the system is rigged? And in the absence of a real left-wing alternative, many of them choose destruction over submission. “Let’s burn it to the fucking ground.” This is where fascists thrive—they harness that anger and channel it into culture wars rather than class struggle.

Take Elon Musk, for example—the richest man in the world, currently on a ketamine-fueled rampage to dismantle what he sees as a corporate state threatening his empire. He calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, guts regulatory agencies that are meant to keep billionaires like him in check, and yet somehow, working-class voters cheer him on. Why? Because they’ve been conditioned to believe that billionaires—rather than a functioning social safety net—are their saviors. This is peasant-minded thinking: the delusion that the richest man in the world shares their interests.

Why Is Patriotism Strongest Among the Forgotten?

How do we explain the paradox where the very people most abandoned by the system—the rural poor, the working class—are often the most patriotic? Drive through any struggling town in America, and you’ll see American flags on trailers, on farms where poverty is crushing, in places where the system has left people to die with nothing. Why the patriotism?

Even something as small as an athlete kneeling during the national anthem ignites deep anger from those same working-class Americans. This isn’t about the act of kneeling itself—it’s about a broader anxiety over identity and decline. If America’s symbols are under attack, many believe that their last shred of stability is being taken away, too.

This kind of patriotism isn’t necessarily love for the current system—it’s a love for an idealized version of America, one that no longer exists. And as Hedges suggests, it’s a powerful tool used by politicians and corporations to keep the masses distracted. Culture wars become the battlefield, ensuring that economic justice is never the focus.

“Poverty is not an aphrodisiac. Those who sell their bodies for sex do so out of desperation. Selling your body for sex is not a choice. It is not about freedom. It is an act of economic slavery.”

One of the most chilling parts of America: The Farewell Tour is its dissection of the false liberalism that often masquerades as progressivism. There is a fundamental difference between liberalism and leftism that this book captures well.

For example, many liberals will champion sex workers' right to earn a living, which is fair. But leftism asks a deeper, darker question: Why do so many women end up selling their bodies in the first place? The reality is that sex work in many cases isn’t about choice—it’s about survival. Hedges makes it painfully clear: this isn’t a profession most women would willingly choose if they had economic security. Many of them are coerced, abused, assaulted, and forced into it by the sheer brutality of poverty. If we accept this as a normal part of our society, then we are, in effect, accepting economic humiliation and exploitation for all of us.

The Populist Surge: A Response to Corporate Left Failure

The rise of Trump and global right-wing populism isn’t just a reflection of conservatism’s strength—it’s just as much a failure of the corporate left. The Democratic Party is imploding because even its own voters are disillusioned. When people feel like they have no real political representation, they either check out entirely or they gravitate toward anyone who appears to be smashing the system.

And now, as Trump prepares for another term, we see the empire’s decline accelerating. The administration is gearing up for another massive tax cut for the rich, increased defense spending, and gutting social safety nets.

No functioning empire behaves this way.

When a country slashes taxes for billionaires, abandons the poor, and pours endless funds into its military-industrial complex, it is not thriving—it is looting itself before the collapse. And as Trump’s erratic economic policies take shape—**tariffs imposed, then lifted, then re-imposed with no strategy—**we are witnessing the predictable chaos of a crumbling empire.

The Democratic establishment, meanwhile, is simply waiting for Trump to be “bad enough” so they can once again run a neoliberal candidate with the same failed policies that got us here in the first place.

We’ll see how this plays out.

This is a harrowing book—one that doesn’t pull punches. Some chapters, particularly those on sadism and sexual exploitation, are difficult to get through. I would put a content warning on those sections; I had to skip parts myself.

But despite its bleakness, America: The Farewell Tour remains an astute political analysis that has aged with eerie accuracy. Seven years later, nothing has changed—if anything, Hedges’ warnings have only become more relevant.

4.6 stars. A must-read for anyone trying to understand the deep, systemic forces shaping America’s decline.

[Nancy Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars for great writing and very good points; 2 stars for ridiculous conclusions.
Uber-leftist Chris Hedges is a Presbyterian minister and is unabashedly Marxist, judging from the number of quotes lifted from Marxist literature. Marx, of course, advocated for communism, a concept unpalatable to most Americans but backed up by some very good reasoning.
Hedges effectively uses concrete examples of the decay in American standard of living and lost of jobs, starting close to home at the Scranton (Pennsylvania) Lace Company, which in its heyday employed 1,200 workers who made Nottingham lace from 1891 until the factory abruptly shut its door in 2002. Production stopped mid-shift, leaving partially completed rolls of lace on the looms and punch cards scattered on the floor.
The company, Hedges tells us, had its own coal mines and cotton fields. "It made products that the workers, including Hillary Clinton's father and grandfather, viewed with pride....Curtains. Napkins. Tablecloths...During World War II, the facilty manufactured bomb parachutes and mosquito and camouflage netting...It has been replaced in Scranton and across America by desperation, poverty, drift, a loss of identity, and a deep and crippling despair."
He goes on to describe Scranton's desperate financial straights, the drastic increase in property taxes, and municipal employees pensions and health care costs.
Hedges rightly blames Wall Street and the kleptocracy (an accurate term for the elite who pull the strings on the politicians) for this crisis. He backs up his assertion that "as we witness the denouement of capitalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as the system's most prescient and important critic." Like hearing it or not, he accurately states that "Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structure that sustained it. It would pretty upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the basic needs of ordinary citizens."
He illustrates this with Scranton's selling off of municipal water to private firms, and the privatization of our nation's prison system. to which shameful effects he devotes an entire, very revealing and infuriating, chapter.I personally am familiar with a number of people who, for various reasons (none of which in my personal experience has been to do with any heinous or violent crimes) have been sucked into the so-called criminal justice system, which is designed to keep inmates coming back.
Hedges writes that Marx predicted the ultimate corruption of capitalism, a system which "would, as it has, increasingly automate or relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class--the bulwark of capitalist democracy--that would be disguised by massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant and borrowing soared," and "foresaw that in later stages of capitalism global corporations would exercise a monopoly on the world's markets."
Now, I have never been a big fan of Marx, but I have to give him credit. He hit the bullseye here. As predicted, taxpayers fund defense contractors, energy companies, Big Banks, private prisons etc. subsidies to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars.
Hedges temporarily won my heart by joining in my China bashing: "Global capitalism, in its final iteration, may replicate China's totalitarian capitalism, a brutal system sustained by severe repression where workers are modern-day serfs," putting American workers in the impossible position of competing with workers who earn a dollar an hour (or those in Bangladesh, who earn 32 cents an hour) He also decries the use of "undocumented" workers in formerly well-paying, often unionized construction jobs, and the use of foreign technical workers replacing American professional one-third their normal salary on H-1B, L1, and other work visas.
A longish but very good quote from the author regarding the loss of America industry, on the firm Magnequench, which once had a plant in Anderson, Indiana :
"Sintered magnets are made from rare earth materials pulverized into a fine powder. These magnets are key components in electronics, especially aviation. The firm's biggest client was the Pentagon, which uses the magnets in the guidance system of cruise missiles and the Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM bomb. Magnequench made 85 percent of magnets bought by the Pentagon. The plant, however was bought in 2004 by the Chinese, who shipped the machinery to China.
"The Chinese appeared to have acquired Magnequench to obtain sintered magnets for their long-range missiles and for the firm's computers used to facilitate the enrichment of uranium firm or nuclear warheads. The 450 workers lost their jobs. The only rare earth mine in in Batou, China. China now has control of both the technology and rare earth materials to produce the magnets, something that should have been prohibited by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which regulates the sales of high-tech and defense industries to foreign firms."

Other chapters are just as gloomy, covering "Heroin," "Sadism" and Hate," concluding with "Freedom," which is no more cheering.
Hedges writes about methods of protesting (he does not advocate violence) and his conclusions seem to me highly unlikely: he hopes for full-employment of a totally unionized workforce, with the profit motive losing its importance (good luck with that); "The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour an a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work... a parent will receive 2 years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks...Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate nuclear weapons and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning the police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets ... there will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free form day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven."
*Sigh* I imagine that he plans to print a whole bunch of money to fund all this stuff? It sounds like la la land. He does offer some good ideas: "training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons...Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marine will come home." I'm good with that. He is smart enough to know that NAFTA needs abolished.
The author is correct that our corporate capitalism is probably irreversibly corrupt, and I do admire his lack of hypocrisy, rare in most self-described proud liberals, in openly declaring (while making it very clear he detests Trump) the Democratic Party is just a better disguised mechanism for grinding the labor, talent and wealth of the working and middle classes into the coffers of the elites. My favorite quote from the book, I think, is this ""The kleptocrats --and now, those they con --have no interest in the flowery words of inclusivity, multiculturalism, and democracy that a bankrupt liberal class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public on behalf of corporations. "