Chris Hedges: America is a Tinderbox

[ucrdem]

29. The rest of the quote is worse. He's saying elections are meaningless if not actually dangerous:

JAY: But doesn't this mass movement need some kind of electoral strategy? Otherwise you wind up in a situation, don't you, like what happened in Egypt, where Mubarak falls but there is no electoral strategy of the left in any place, so it's the Muslim Brotherhood that winds up--.

HEDGES: No. I've covered totalitarian states all over the world, and they all have elections.

JAY: No I didn't--I said doesn't it need an electoral strategy.

HEDGES: I'm not sure that it does. I think that the problem is--you know, and Karl Popper writes this in The Open Society and Its Enemies. He said the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says that's the wrong question. Most people, Popper writes, attracted to power are at best mediocre, which is Obama, or venal, which is Bush. The question is: how do you make the power elite frightened of you? Who was the last liberal president we had? It was Richard Nixon--not because he was a liberal, but because he was frightened of movements. And there's a scene--I think it's in Kissinger's memoirs, 1971, huge antiwar demonstration surrounding the White House, and Nixon has put empty buses, city buses end-to-end as a kind of barricade, and he's standing at the window wringing his hands, going, Henry, they're going to break through the barricades and get us. And that's just where you want power, people in power to be. And that's why Sarkozy, who was a cretin, was unable to do too much damage to France, because if you got up in France and told French university students that they were going to pay $50,000 a year to go to college, they'd shut the damn country down.

Basically what he's getting at is that a) elections are irrelevant, or downright pernicious, because they tend to produce "weak" heads of state, like Obama, whom he reviles constantly, and Hollande, current socialist president of France, implied in his bit about Sarkozy, a neocon who was humiliated at the French polls a year ago. So Nixon and Sarkozy are peachy, and elections are totalitarian because they put Democrats and Socialists in power. That's Hedges in a nutshell.