Hedges, Chris
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Hedges argues that the traditional "liberal class" historically functioned in capitalist democracies as a safety valve, moderating the system's excesses (citing Roosevelt's New Deal, which Roosevelt himself privately described as necessary to prevent revolution and ultimately "save capitalism") — but only within firm limits, tolerated so long as it never questioned the ruling class's core legitimacy; crossing that line, as Chomsky did, turns one into a pariah, with the liberal establishment itself, positioned as society's moral arbiters, serving as the primary mechanism to discredit radical critics (a dynamic he says he experienced personally when he was attacked by liberal commentators for opposing the Iraq invasion despite being right that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction).
He describes the contemporary political order, drawing on political philosopher Sheldon Wolin's concept of "inverted totalitarianism" (from Democracy Incorporated), as a slow-motion corporate coup d'état in which democratic institutions retain their façade (elections, congress, courts) while corporations have seized the actual levers of power — a system Wolin argued was sustained by cheap credit and cheap consumer goods, and which Hedges predicts reverts toward classical charismatic-leader authoritarianism (Trump, Orbán, Modi, Erdoğan) once that access is withdrawn. He details the mechanisms of this capture: campaigns funded by oligarchic money (citing Hillary Clinton's billion-dollar campaign as "legalized bribery"), corporate lobbyists writing legislation regardless of popular support (Wall Street accountability), the destruction of organized labor (only 11% of the US workforce unionized), and a Republican-Democrat "duopoly" united on all major structural issues (war, free trade, mass surveillance, police militarization) while performing conflict only on cultural matters.
He extends this analysis to journalism and academia as sites of deliberate corporate capture: he cites the 1971 Powell Memo (written by Lewis Powell, later a Supreme Court justice) as a blueprint for corporate pushback against 1960s social movements, explicitly naming Ralph Nader (whose speeches Hedges once wrote) as a target to be destroyed, and describes the defunding of public universities forcing dependence on corporate and oligarchic donors, which he says purged even elite institutions (citing Sheldon Wolin's ostracism at Princeton, and closed philosophy and humanities departments) of anyone who wouldn't embrace neoliberal orthodoxy. He argues this produces historical and cultural amnesia — citing Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States as documenting how all democratic openings in American history (abolition, suffrage, labor rights, civil rights) came from popular movements rather than elite benevolence, a history he says is now largely erased from education.
He offers an extended, sympathetic-but-structural account of radicalization (jihadism in Gaza and European banlieues, the January 6 mob, Trump's base) as a product of despair and exclusion rather than innate extremism, drawing on historian Fritz Stern's concept of a pre-fascist "yearning" and Hannah Arendt's account of fascism as magical thinking that fills a vacuum when reality becomes unbearable — extending this to his own controversial position opposing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, which he argues mocked the one source of dignity available to profoundly dispossessed Muslim youth. He is highly critical of corporate media's transformation into entertainment (horse-race politics, manufactured demographic-targeted outrage, the erasure of foreign bureaus and labor correspondents), and of the "woke" identity politics adopted by a defanged liberal class, which he argues functions as a form of internal colonialism validating the underlying system of exploitation (citing Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice) rather than challenging it.
He explicitly criticizes Macron by name as "the classic technocrat who serves the interests of corporate power and the oligarchic elite," willing to override popular opposition (citing the pension reform) as a textbook example of inverted totalitarianism operating identically across most industrialized countries, not uniquely in France. He closes by describing his own resilience as a war correspondent as rooted in having already confronted forces that were trying to kill him, and in a religious-ethical conviction (from his Harvard Divinity School training) that one opposes evil because it is evil, not because one expects to win — framing the corporate system's deepest threat as coming from those who "speak the language of love," which he considers fundamentally incompatible with a system built on the objectification and monetization of human beings.
Excerpts
On the liberal class's function of tolerating dissent only up to a point:
“The liberal class or the liberal establishment is tolerated as long as it doesn't attack or question the virtues of the ruling class — once you cross that line, for instance like Noam Chomsky, you become a pariah.”
On inverted totalitarianism as a slow-motion corporate coup:
“What we've undergone is a kind of corporate coup d'état in slow motion — no country, France, the United States, controls their own economy anymore [...] the images, iconography, language, symbols, even institutions remain the same, but internally corporations have seized all of the levers of power.”
On Macron as a technocrat of oligarchic power:
“Macron is the classic technocrat who serves the interests of corporate power on the oligarchic elite, and is quite willing to override populist sentiment to do it — as we saw with raising the retirement age, he doesn't care that most people don't want it.”