Comments to Chris Hedges‘  Treason of Intellectuals on Truthdig, (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/01-0) and those related to Obama’s intention to cut Social Security and Medicare on Firedog lake, suggest that we are witnessing a decisive change in the meaning of  ‘leadership’.

From huntsmen to kings, there have always been leaders. Until recently, this fact was part of conventional wisdom, and yet, with the advent of deliberative chambers, the notion had already began to change. Instead of the bravest and cleverest male being recognized by his peers as their uncontested leader, interest groups began to dilute a king’s power. With the advent of banking and industry, hereditary kings required the knowledge of ‘gray eminences’ to guide them. In the twentieth century, as all-powerful kings were replaced with democracies run by presidents, political parties made opposition to power legitimate, and money began to talk.

And yet, until the end of World War II, the concept of ‘leader’ remained intact, embodied in images of a smiling Roosevelt, a ranting Hitler and a cunning Stalin. Until recently there could be no wars without leaders: the sovereign on horseback flanked by standard bearers was durably replaced by a captain whose bravery and fairness commanded the respect of his troops. Leaders are also indispensable when ‘classes’ make history.  The French Revolution was prepared by the writings of countless intellectuals such as Voltaire and Rousseau.  But without the rise of leaders such as Danton and St. Just – whatever their later sins – the desperation of the French peasants would never have coagulated into the force that took the Bastille. The same holds true for the Russian Revolution, prepared by writers like Tolstoi and Dostoievski, but implemented thanks to the leadership of Lenin and his comrades.

After a failed campaign against it by the West, the Russian revolution of 1917 gave rise to European-wide efforts to deflect its influence, leading to fascist governments in Italy and Germany and eventually to World War II.  That conflict, led by towering military leaders such as Eisenhower and MacArthur, put the brakes on a system in which the state and industry cooperate to secure the obedience of the many to the few. However it did not adjudicate the antagonism between liberal markets and central planning. There followed half a century of hot and cold wars against regimes intent on securing a reasonable share of wealth for the most, as opposed to the  greatest share for the few.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the   release from its orbit of the countries of Eastern Europe, the struggle against specific, really existing socialist governments morphed into a worldwide campaign against an increasingly demanding many by generals beholden to CEO’s. As blog comments are beginning to recognize, fascism has achieved an astounding resurrection. Thanks to drones and electronic communication, a global financial and industrial elite can now realize Hitler’s’ dream of conquering the world, without requiring an identifiable leader, however tempting it may be to ascribe that role to recent American presidents.

Obama (referred to in one blog comment as ‘Obomber’) is seen either as a closet conservative who made progressive promises in order to get elected, or as powerless in the face of Republican stonewalling. I believe more disturbingly that this   intelligent, educated and deft president thought he could manipulate the power elite, but quickly found out he would be putting his life on the line.

Whatever the reasons for Obama’s betrayal, the  really significant fact is that legitimate government counterbalanced by an identifiable opposition has been replaced by Eisenhower’s oft-cited ‘military-industrial complex’. That entity is no longer the powerful element of society that he knew, which could be kept in check: it has grown to replace the concept of legitimate government counterbalanced by a legitimate opposition, and consigned the concept of leader to the dustbin.

Last year Chris Hedges put his freedom on the line by suing members of the U.S. government over section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act that authorizes the president to detain individuals indefinitely without habeas corpus. He was later joined by other activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. A district court judge ruled the law unconstitutional but the administration has obtained a stay of that decision by the Supreme Court pending its appeal to that body.

I totally agree with Chris Hedges’s that if imprisonment without a hearing is judged constitutional by the highest court in the land, we will be living under a fascist dictatorship, and with his indictment of intellectuals who continue to play it safe. But we must remember the fate of German intellectuals who tried to warn their countrymen of the growing danger: those who did not leave in time died in concentration camps. And we must ask ourselves whether, in the absence of mass leaders, the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword.

If, like many progressive Americans, you despair of the major news channels, but are lucky enough to live either in the Northeast, D.C., California, the Chicago area, or the Carolinas, you have an alternative:  Russian Television, coyly known as ‘RT’ has been available since October on your local MIND TV channel.  Staffed with American, British and other native English speaking newscasters and hosts, and featuring progressive writers like Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann, and many others, RT  broadcasts 24/7 to over 100 countries on five continents from its studios in Moscow and D.C.  It’s motto is: “Question More”.

Of course you’ll get Russian news with a Russian slant, but you can allow for that, whereas the world news covered by RT is usually absent form MSNBC or Democracy Now (though some of it may be found on Grit TV – I haven’t checked).

Today, Friday, March 23, I learned that the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, unanimously approved a new law which should make it easier to create and register political parties, requiring only 500 members instead of the 45,000 threshold that contributed to widespread dissatisfaction with the last election.  Also, major Russian energy companies have been trying to delay or opt out of the government’s ambitious privatization program ahead of an imminent power change in the Kremlin.  (You can see these stories at RT.com.)

In international news I learned that a European Security Conference is wrapping up in Moscow, at which President Medvedev called on the United States to get with it: although the U.S. is participating in this conference, Americans don’t hear about it.  Someone may mention in passing that the Russians want our guarantee that a projected missile defense shield will not be targeted at them in writing, making it sound like an unreasonable demand.  This item is particularly interesting because it illustrates the fact that other major players, such as the European Union, are increasingly united and bold in their opposition to America’s plans to rule the world.

RT reporting on the Syrian crisis tends to mirror Russia’s support of President Assad, but it also features members of the opposition.  Of late it has been highly critical of Al-Jazeera’s handling of the crisis, which tends to mirror the American position.  About a week ago RT reported with obvious glee that several anchors and at least one high-ranking manager had quit over what they considered ‘the supposedly third-world friendly’ Dubai-based channel’s pro-Americana bias.

In American news, RT reported today that a woman was injured Wednesday during a police crackdown on OWS, and that the Occupy Movement is calling for a general strike on May first.  This date will probably not mean anything to most Americans, but it has been the rest of the world’s Labor Day for decades.  The call itself is highly significant, since the last time a general strike affected large parts of the U.S. was in 1877 with the Great Railroad Strike.

There is a lot of business news on RT, including what sounds like pretty detailed analysis by several of the channels young, female anchors perched on high stools in short tight skirts.  (Most of the male feature anchors tend to be older and not very attractive…)

Who would have thought that some day Americans would have to rely on Russian Television to find out what’s going on in the world – and at home:

A Marine based in Camp Pendleton, California, created a Facebook page called “Armed Forces Tea Party,” which currently has approximately 19,000 likes and slogans such as “NObama” and “One Nation, under Obama, with poverty and unemployment for all.” Authorities say he has been under the microscope since 2010.

Serendipitously, only days after it cleared Congress, President Obama signed H.R. 347, which makes it a felony to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.

A feature currently being shone analyses our infatuation with guns, featuring lengthy interviews with Virginia gun owners on the occasion of that state’s lifting of the law the limits gun purchases to one a month.

In sum, all our dirty laundry is hung out to dry by the country we think we defeated twenty years ago. Worldwide.

Transformation I (see below)  noted that all rulers tend to go as far as their people will let them in the abuse of power, a notion admirably tagged with the word ‘kleptocracy’ by jared Diamond  in Guns, Germs and Steel.

The follow-up illustrates Chris Hedges’ contention in Death of the Liberal Class that when the needs of the majority are not met by the kleptocracy, and the middle class that stands between it and the majority fails to take its responsibilities, violent change tends to occur. Hedges’ diagnosis is not only illustrated by history, it is born out by the second law of thermo-dynamics, which I have found to be a precious matrix for political analysis.

Energy organizes molecules to do work, creating what physicists call ‘order’. The lack of energy to do work is called entropy, which physi-cists call ‘disorder’. The state of entropy, when nothing can happen, is associated with the notion of equilibrium, and occurs in systems such as automobiles, that do not communicate with their environment, and therefore are ‘closed’ systems, when their supply of energy runs out. By this definition, oligarchical political systems – or kleptocracies – are also closed systems, since they do not respond to inputs from society.

Very differently, open systems are those which communicate with their environment and hence receive a constant flow of energy/information that keeps them in a state ‘far-from-equiibrium’ that avoids entropy. People tend to visualize a stable state as immobile, when in fact to maintain itself, it must oscillate, however slightly. However, any number of factors can cause the flow of energy to increase to the point where oscillations become totally unstable. When an accelerated flow of energy takes the system too far from equilibrium, it eventually reaches a threshold known as a bifurcation point, or tipping point, from which it dissipates and reforms at a new level of organization. (Open systems are also known as ‘dissipative systems’, and it is the process of dissipation that creates life.)

The irreversible, multiple feedback process that leads to the tipping point makes an open system unpredictable: partly depending on the its previous history, if it does not break down, the new level of organization it creates may or may not represent a higher level of order and complexity, and that is why physics is relevant to politics:

According to the biologist Stuart Kauffman in At Home in the Universe there are three possible states that societies – seen as systems – can be in: one of equilibrium, one of near equilibrium – both of these being closed systems – or a far-from-equilibrium, open state that takes energy from outside and will eventually evolve toward a new dynamic regime.

Think of a system in equilibrium as one that corresponds to a totalitarian state: it does not communicate with its environment. An ‘open’ system takes energy from its people, and by constantly counter-balancing these energy flows, maintains itself for a time in the ideal far-from-equilibrium state. In this state, which we call democracy, it can achieve relatively good compromises. Democracy oscillates between oligarchy – rule by a few – and the inefficiency of a multi-party regime. Constant counter-balancing between order and disorder – or what the Russian physicist Prigogyne calls order floating in a sea of disorder -  is what makes it so unsatisfying. Eventually, democracy reaches a tipping point from which something new emerges, possibly a closed system embodied in a totalitarian regime. According to Kauffman, in this kind of system, poor compromises are found quickly (lots of people go to jail). On the other hand, democracy can dissipate into a chaotic regime (anarchy), where no compromises are found (everyone does his/her thing). Warnings of anarchy are brandished by power to discourage change, but in fact, the opposite of democracy is neither anarchy, nor totalitarianism. Embodying the state of constant balancing between two extremes, democracy stands alone as a yin/yang system.

One of the reasons why even at its best democracy doesn’t solve all our problems, is that we can’t accept the idea of life being sustained at the edge of chaos, to be eventually followed by dissipation. Oblivious to the fact that there’s no definitive, final state, in our linear determination to achieve ‘it’, we overrun everything in our path, opting out of the processes of gradual trans-formation followed by other life forms.

To be sure, we continue to take in ordered structures (food), using them as resources for our metabolism. But instead of allowing  waste – a dissipative structure of low order, hence close to entropy – to be recycled into the environment where it will eventually recreate food/energy, we accumulate it in the form of things. The environmental crisis we’re in results from a lack of open system exchange, partly caused by the human tendency to cling to things.

If we wish to save ourselves when the present chaotic climate becomes an accelerated feedback loop rushing us toward disaster, we will have no choice but to abandon most of our things. Only a world tota-litarian regime would be able to enforce such discipline, and stop the world from falling off a cliff. Such a regime is taking shape before our very eyes, but its purpose is to save the planet for the few. Suffice it to evoke the fundamental difference between a tribal circle and an elected government, to realize how decisively we’ve lost our voice in the decision-making process.

Next – Totalitarianism vs Anarchy

Chris Hedges’ new book The Death of the Liberal Class should be mandatory reading for anyone who hopes that activism can still make a difference.  It is probably the best of his books, the work of a mature mind and a disciplined pen. When the book club I run read Empire of Illusion, published in 2009, its members accused Hedges of not providing solutions to the problems he exposed.  This time he does, and they are brutal.

Identifying hedonism, fear and distrust as the weapons of choice of a system that is too far gone to save, he faults the liberal class for having identified itself with power that is determined to ‘recreate the world through violence’.  In a powerful indictment of the media, academia and government officials, he describes the ‘Freudizing of society’: The belief that if our individual repressions can be removed – by confessing them to a Freudian psychologist – then we can adjust ourselves to any situation, and the world would no longer need to be changed.

Hedges harbors a particular – and justified! – animosity toward the press, which reduces news to ‘facts’, allowing the public’s emotions – which determine how they think -  to be manipulated by surveys and polls, where labels, celebrity gossip, angry rhetoric and syndicated columns replace local reports, town debates and other forms of popular expression.

Hedges traces the demise of committed journalism in the early twentieth century, noting how the shift “from hatred toward ‘the Hun’ to hatred toward the Red was seamless.” (Early propaganda tied communists to the German war machine, much as, today, the Tea Party lumps Communism and Fascism together.)

Those of us who criticized the right for lumping liberalism and socialism can learn from Hedges analysis of its evolution:

“The liberal class – buoyed by the rise of an independent press,  militant labor unions, workers’ houses, antipoverty campaigns, and the rising prosperity of the country bequeathed by the industrial revolution – embraced institutions, and especially the state, as tools for progress. This created a new form of liberalism that departed from ‘classical liberalism’. While the two belief systems shared some of the same characteristics including a respect for individual rights, the new liberal class was and remains distinctly utopian.’ It places its faith in practical state reforms to achieve a just society… (whereas) classical liberalism was colored by a healthy dose of skepticism about human perfectibility.”

Hedges’ disdain for intellectuals who have chosen to work within the system is boundless. He explores the influence of the Social Gospel movement, which he obviously admires as a former seminarian, and some of the best parts of the book are devoted to Dorothy Day and the movement she founded,  Malcolm X, and King who, according to Hedges, was much farther to the left than is commonly believed.

I interrupted this diary for lunch, but Hedges’ book provided a template for understanding the news on Democracy Now running on my computer: today, Wikileaks revealed U.S. pressure on European countries as well as the European Union itself to eliminate the barriers to genetically-modified seeds, and Amy Goodman’s guest scientist described laboratory studies on mice that vividly illustrated the corporate/government nexus that Hedges’ excoriates in his book. How to be surprised that out tax dollars allow our diplomats to strong-arm the rest of the world into buying Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds, even if they cause cancer and other damage to humans? In the same broadcast, various peace and pro-Palestinian activists told of getting ‘a knock on the door’ at seven a..m. from FBI agents armed with subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, or with authorizations to search their homes and cart away boxes of documents. One of them referred to the visitors as ‘the thought police’, because these activists are being investigated for their opinions.

I will return to Hedges’ book tomorrow. It is too long to accommodate my preference for writing relatively short posts, but I want to get this out: Hedges’ warnings that it may be too late for anyone to reverse the tide may strike some as exaggerated, but there is not a single point that I disagree with.

Tomorrow: Hedges talks about Marx and climate change.

As we head toward the mid-term elections, progressives will wring their hands in vain until some of its fat cats put their money where their inner beliefs are, breaking the spell of Seditions Acts, HUAC, (think McCarthy), and un-Ameri-canism.

As the Tea Party gobbles up what’s left of the Republican Party, Goebbels would be proud. At first it seemed that the Palin-inspired movement would declare itself a Third Party, with good chances of winning elections as an emanation of one of the two established parties. Either because they didn’t believe a third party could win, or because they feared it just might this time, the leaders of the Grand Old Party, caved and joined the rebels.

Why can progressive democrats not respond? How much cour-age does it take to declare loud and clear that this country needs less flag-worship and more social-democracy; that we fail at our peril to join the rest of the civilized world in recognizing that freedom must go with responsibility, that creativity is not impeded by solidarity? As fascism rears it ugly head, neck and arms, our loudest, most desperate voices, such as Chris Hedges and Curtis White, can only rail hyperbolically at the powerlessness of the many to effectively demand that we turn this ship around: apparently, Soros, Gates, and other philanthropes believe money can buy immunity from witch-hunting. By failing to lead the people, they break the chain Che Guevara referred to when he told me, with that tone of patient exasperation that was his specialty: “Its always been the bourgoisie that has made revolutions.” Our top-of-the-line apparently believes luck will protect them, when freedom to speak and to write disappears, and their wealth is comman-deered for whatever folly the Tea Party decides that God – ‘our God’ – commands. Yet they have been complicit in the failure of the press to combat a 70 year-old court decision that jour-nalists may not belong to a union. After firing a reporter for taking the workers’ side in his writing, the Associated Press was able to impose the following principle:

The reporter’s job is to present facts as an objective observer, avoiding partisanship….News can only be presented to the public with objectivity if newspaper owners are free to choose those it deems best qualified to report and present the facts.

In other words, journalists must have no opinions, much less an ideological preference, for then they would no longer be objective. They must disregard family environment, their conscience and convictions in order to present the facts ‘objectively’. Generations of journalists have been trained in this ethic – in turn training the public to believe that objectivity really exists.

And yet, aside from the human factors, four other things make true objectivity impossible. First, choices are made throughout the publishing process: What news will be covered? Who will be assigned to twhat? How much space will each story be granted, what page will it be on, will there be a picture? etc., etc. Obviously the most important thing in all this is not the fact that these constraints exist, but the journalist’s and the public’s failure to recognize that they affect objectivity.

Second, the paper – or the news channel – relies on investors and advertisers. The media having become less a purveyor of news than of advertising, the information it carries must not contradict the opinions of its advertisers – or shareholders.
Third, as governments and companies become increasingly adept at constructing events, the line between news and propaganda is fatally blurred. Last but certainly not least, the media loves to amplify the importance of passing events without explaining the processes which led to them. They never tells us why other people attack us – or refuse to do our bidding – providing carte blanche to the military-industrial complex to continue its deadly business. See Andrew Bacevich’s latest book: Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

Can wealthy progressives still tip the balance by funding mass media with a different message? One thing is certain, they will not be able to ward off the coming fascist state by organizing protests, because progressive protestors lack the ideological education and tradition of workers’ rights required to command attention. The Democratic base needs a crash course in the history of democratic worker’s rights, and their implementation in the social democratic countries which are our allies. Only then will they be able to stand up to the Tea Party and its selective and often erroneous interpretation of our two-hundred year Constitution.

The worst inequality is ignorance. In the end, it’s always about fairness. The American tradition calls for freedom to pursue happiness, while the rest of the world wants liberty, equality and solidarity. Not only Communists, but many Muslims as well, in particular those inspired by the original martyr, Mohammed’s cousin Ali, whom the Shi’a worship and the Sufi dance to.

Taking a cue from the brilliant Harpers’ Index, I’m starting a slightly different one.  It will be something like a game score card, tallying the “strikes” that left and right make in a game that would be funny if it were not deadly serious.

One for the left: Ralph Nader comes out with a book entitled:  “Only the superrich can save us”.  (This is not meant as a joke.  It is a novel based on the fact that all revolutions are led by the upper class.)

One for the right: The National Endowment for the Arts is called out for contacting artists to suggest that they illustrate some of the President’s important themes, such as global warming and health care.  The NEA is a government agency and therefore must remain “non-political”!

One for the left: Michael Moore’s film “Capitalism: A Love Story” may do more to alert Americans of the idiocy of their political system than all the intelligent, well-documented, well-written books on the subject.

One for the right: ACORN, a national community organizing collective that helped Obama get elected, is accused of skullduggery on a par with Lehman Brothers.

Readers may wonder why I bother with these carryings-on.  It’s because little by little, the right is inching its way toward something that would be worse than a come-back: the closing of a trap around a people that led the world for half a century.  Like a great ship that cannot turn on a dime, the “force” that Chris Hedges referred to when, a few years ago, he wrote “War is a Force that Give us Meaning”, is now a force that is taking us, not “down a slippery slope” but on a descent into hell.

As I write in “A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness”, one has to be on the right side of the issues, all the while knowing that we can only tend toward our goals, which can never be irreversible. For many of us, this is getting more and more difficult.

The trap that the right, via a constant barrage of “revelations”, is closing around the American people, would outlaw political activity in so many ways, to so many categories of people and circumstances, that we could scarcely call ourselves a polity.

Theoretically, the President has a “bully pulpit” to make his views known, but a federal agency cannot invite artists to illustrate his goals. And unlike countries with parliamentary systems with multiple – often many -  political parties, we do not have “party” newspapers, hence the bully  pulpit is a fiction, because the president has no media outlet to get his case across to the population at large.  The press is supposed to be a watchdog, but it has turned into a sinister voice for every indiscriminate negativism.  The so-called ‘objectivity’ of the most powerful news channel, CNN is but a veil over the insidious tones of its presenters – as opposed to its “analysts” who have an official ax to grind: Democrat or Republican.

President Obama is not only a prisoner of the forces that allowed him to become president, stacking his cabinet with the star players of our economic disaster, his cool and his intelligence are shackled by chains forged over two hundred plus years of constitutional, legislative and other devices intended to keep the few on top.

It is unlikely, under these circumstances, that the superrich will save us, because by and large they are as ignorant as the masses.  Our only hope is that the rest of the world will save us by forcing global reforms, and asserting the power of the many.