"America Has The Tinder To IGNITE Social Uprising - Chris Hedges"
The Jimmy Dore Show (January 15, 2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olBU619Dlsc

". . ."

[20:01] Jimmy Dore: ". . . The Justice Democrats up until this point are a failed experiment. The Democratic Party changes you. You don't change it. And even though they don't take corporate money, they do the bidding of the people who do. They're all careerists and they sell us out for their own celebrity, even if they're not selling us out for corporate donor cash."

Chris Hedges: "Yeah, that's right. And if they won't sell out, then they're destroyed. I mean, their political careers are destroyed."

Jimmy Dore: "Right. Exactly. So we need a third party, because we can't keep voting for Democrats. So what do you make of that. Is that viable? People keep saying it's not viable. I think it is. The Green Party, people say they were so unorganized. They got on 46 ballots when Jill Stein was the candidate. That's super doable in my opinion. What do you think? How important is the creation of a strong third party to change our political system?"

[20:51] Chris Hedges: "I haven't voted for a Democrat since before 2000. I mean, I know all of the roadblocks both parties throw up. I watched with Ralph [Nader]. It's pretty vicious, including keeping them out of the debate. If you can't raise hundreds of millions of dollars, you have no media access. So you could draw crowds. Ralph could draw crowds of ten thousand people. But he could never speak on a televised platform. He was locked out. But I think asking whether it's viable, they will make it very very difficult."

[21:34] But I think the more important issue is that the failure on the left to stand by what it said it believed. I mean, the Democratic Party has betrayed every principle the left claims to support. Which is why the self-identified left are a laughingstock. It's why they have no credibility. And Richard Rorty, in his last book, Achieving Our Country, wrote that teh hypocritical, bankrupt, spineless, self-identified left becomes hated. This happened in Weimar [Germany], it happened in Yugoslavia and, as Rorty says correctly, is that what takes place is that there's a wholesale revulsion towards these self-identified liberals, but more dangeriously to the supposed democratic liberal values that they promote. And that is what feeds these proto-fascist movements, which we saw last week."

[22:34] "And so, we should have walked out on the Democratic party in 1994 after NAFTA and stood by the working class. And we didn't. And they know it. And I come from that. Much of my family comes out of that lower working class in Maine. And I've seen their communities and lives. And I mean, where my grandparents house in Maine, the bank was boarded up. There was a Methodist church that caught on fire and burned. The town doesn't have the money to raise it, so it's just charred embers. I mean, there's methampetaine labs all over the place. That's what we've done. That's what the democratic party has done, and what the self-identified liberal class has done. And that's why they hate us. And, frankly, we deserve to be hated. Well, I mean, I don't consider myself a liberal, but I totally get that. Because they continued to speak out of both sides of their mouth. They continued to speak in that traditional 'feel your pain' language of liberalism while putting a knife in the back of these people.

[23:32] "They know. They know it. So the hatred of the Democratic Party is far fiercer because there was a time when organized labor mattered. It doesn't matter any more. And that was Clinton, by the way. I mean, we have two quote-unquote liberal presidents, let's say, of the twentieth century who were truly, tuly dark figures. One was Woodrow Wilson and the other was Bill Clinton."

Jimmy Dore: "I tried to make the case to people who always urged me to vote the lesser of two evils, and I'd say. 'Bill Clinton is not the lesser of two evils.' and they don't understand. I tried to tell them that it took a Democrat to pass NAFTA because George Bush the First couldn't pass it. It took a Democrat blue dog to come in and give cover to other blue dogs to go against the unions, which is exactly what Bill Clinton and Al Gore did when they started the Democratic Leadership Council, which was a response to Ronald Reagan kicking their ass for eight years. They decided, 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em' and the started the Democratic Leadership Council and people on the executive board were right from the Koch Brothers. I mean, that's who Bill Clintion turned into."

[24:42] He went on to gut welfare while he exploded the prison population, passed NAFTA, and then he went and he deregulated Wall Street which led to an economic collapse within ten years. That's the 'success.' And then he did the Telecommunications Act, which now, you can't get the truth about anything.

[25:01] Chris Hedges: "And let's not absolve Biden. Biden