
This book is a stone-cold bummer; I suppose the collapse of societies always is. That’s the premise underlining Chris Hedges’ journey here. He travels through abandoned towns, open-air drug markets, run-down casinos. He even ventures into the minds of white nationalist extremists. In Hedges’ view, America is likely entering its death spiral. Each chapter seems to function as a signpost on the way to that destination. The author wants to explore how we got there and what might rise from its remains, for good or ill.
America: The Farewell Tour is compelling and heartbreaking. It’s also incredibly dense in its references to other writers and ideas. Hedges is incredibly well-read and has an active mind. He’s clearly leaving it all out on the field here by trying to give you the full scope of what he’s thinking and reading. I noted more authors to read later than I have since A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. A few of the people who made the cut:
- Alfred W. McCoy – In the Shadows of the American Century, on the demise of the American empire;
- Sheldon Wolin – Democracy, Inc. – on whether any institutions in America can still be rightfully called democratic;
- Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations – the first great theorist of capitalism,
- Pankaj Mishra – author of The Age of Anger: A History of the Present;
- Emile Durkheim – The Division of Labor in Society – one of the earliest sociologists;
- James Howard Kunstler – World Made By Hand – a novelist writing about collapse;
These are joined by quotes and comments from classic political theorists and writers like Hannah Arendt, Voltaire, and socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci. You need more than a quick Google lookup to get a sense of what Hedges is getting at when he cites these people. Hedges is taking part in a greater conversation, and I want to understand where I fit in it.
First stop for Hedges on his farewell tour: an abandoned lace factory in Scranton, PA. This small city is well-known if you’re from Pennsylvania. It’s a once-bustling place whose better days are long, long behind it. It was the butt of jokes on a national level as the setting for the U.S. version of the TV show The Office. Now, it’s a classic case of crumbling infrastructure, shrinking prospects, and tightening budgets. It’s emblematic of the American Rust Belt. Once, it was a proud union stronghold staffing factories and mines. Now, Scranton’s lacking much to offer besides healthcare, service jobs, and warehousing. Hedges uses it as a case study in what gutting social welfare programs, privatization and deregulation, and capitalism itself will lead to. The author quotes Marx, who said capitalism has within it the “seeds of its own destruction” and is premised on the need for infinite growth. When it’s able to expand no longer, it will consume the infrastructure, resources and people that once sustained it. You’ll end up with workers unable to buy the products they create. Soon companies will abandon those workers for even cheaper workers elsewhere. The march of automation might also make them obsolete. Cities caught in this cycle gut programs, sell assets, and stop responding to their citizens’ needs. They become the dwelling places of ghosts.
Repeat this trend across the country, at every level, and you begin to see the picture Hedges is painting. Collapse is the endgame. Political division, lost opportunities, societal decay, climate destruction are worsening. In our future, open violent conflict may manage to destroy our ways of life. It could even transform the map of the United States altogether, erasing its name. In its place? A balkanized patchwork of something else.
The overwhelming impression Hedges leaves in his work includes:
- The economic gains of workers and middle-class people after WWII have been slowly reversed. This was a conscious process by capitalist forces in control of government over the last few decades;
- Capitalism works to commodify and profit off of our bodies and our desires. This includes exploiting the vulnerable in forms like prostitution. Hedges is very, very critical of sex work, and seems to believe that it cannot be reformed or used as a way to liberate people;
- As Pankaj Mishra writes in Age of Anger, resentment is the default standpoint and ideological force of the modern world;
- Professional gambling is a rigged game of illusions, designed to ruin those who practice it. It’s also an analogy for how the wealth of modern capitalist countries is based on debt, illusory, and also doomed to fall;
- The government’s main role in our lives is to use force to protect property;
- If people exploited by this system want change, they need a popular movement. That movement must also frighten the powerful. When push comes to shove, politics is a game of fear.
Hedges believes there is some hope in a popular nonviolent resistance movement. But he doesn’t believe it can be successful if it isn’t disruptive, organized, sustained and community oriented. He cites the example of the Standing Rock protests against an oil pipeline running through indigenous burial grounds. I want to believe he’s right – although reading America: The Farewell Tour convinced me that such a movement must also be capable of defending itself. Labor movements won by blood the gains made by labor movements in the 1800s and early 1900s. These include the norms of a weekend or an eight hour workday. All involved armed strikers ready to fight back when attacked by police, thugs, or soldiers.
It’s a terrifying thought, in a lot of ways. No sane person in a country where where we try to resolve disagreements peacefully relishes the idea of doing it old school. But this book, and others I’ve read this year, remind me that the era of relative peace we’ve known was limited in its longevity and its scope. It had a beginning not long ago, and it benefits white men – especially those with property – more than any other group. It will almost certainly have an end, and the effects will not be limited to one group, but probably impact us all. This is one of those times where it’d be really nice to be wrong.
America: The Farewell Tour
A way to visit America's abandoned cities, addicts, sex workers, gamblers & more as we lurch toward collapse. Be sure to tip your corporate overlords on your way out.
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