Joshua Scheer

In this live Q&A, Chris Hedges examines the midterm results and warns that a Democratic victory alone will not extinguish the forces driving American fascism. He discusses the fight against corporate control within the Democratic Party, the influence of the Israel lobby and why organized pressure from workers and social movements remains essential to meaningful change.

The Democrats’ midterm victory has opened a window for change, but Chris Hedges warns that the conditions that propelled Donald Trump to power remain intact. In this live Q&A, he argues that corporate domination, economic abandonment and a political establishment unwilling to confront either will continue to nourish American fascism—even after an electoral defeat for MAGA.

Hedges examines the coming struggle between the Democratic Party’s leadership and those demanding universal health care, workers’ rights, an end to arms shipments to Israel and a break with billionaire influence. Taking questions on impeachment, Christian nationalism, the Israel lobby and political organizing, he warns that another Democratic failure to deliver material improvements could produce an even more dangerous authoritarian backlash. The decisive question, he argues, is whether unions and social movements can build enough power to turn an electoral opening into lasting change.

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Chris Hedges: Defeating Trump Is Only the Beginning

Editor’s note: The following transcript is from Chris Hedges’ November 5, 2026, livestream, “LIVE Q&A: Chris Hedges Discusses the Midterms.” It has been edited for clarity and readability. Timestamps, production chatter, verbal fillers and false starts have been removed. Audience questions are read aloud by Hedges. Bracketed notes identify wording that is unclear in the supplied automatic transcript.

Opening remarks

Chris Hedges: Hi, welcome to this livestream on the midterms. I think, like many people, including a lot of journalists at places like The New York Times, I was very concerned by the moves of the Trump administration to potentially invalidate or cast doubt on the balloting process.

But, of course, the kind of tsunami carried out by the Democrats made it impossible for the Trump administration. There were just too many holes in the dike. If there were a few problem areas, such as Georgia in the last election, where Trump called election officials and told them he needed them to find him—I think it was 11,800 votes—then I expect, given past behavior, Trump would have tried to interfere in the elections. But this was such a blowout that it became impossible.

So the question now, of course, is the Democrats and what they’ll do or what they won’t do. I think that’s what a lot of these questions are focusing on. So we’ll begin with the first one.

MAGA’s defeat and the Democratic leadership

Audience question: Lots of people are saying the midterms are evidence that the MAGA movement has collapsed for good. While MAGA in its current iteration may have been defeated, do you think this defeat means the end of the fascist undercurrent in the American elite?

Chris Hedges: No. The fascist undercurrent preceded Trump and will exist without Trump unless the Democratic Party is able to institute the kind of New Deal reforms that will reach that disenfranchised base that supports Trump. And that’s a big question.

My book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, came out focusing on the Christian nationalist movement, which I consider a fascist movement, long, long before Trump, highlighting that very dangerous strain within American politics.

So that’s the question. The question is what’s going to happen in the next two years.

Audience question: Please comment on the following: If the Democrats are serious about addressing what’s gone wrong in this country and serious about the pathology that is Israel, and they seriously intend to do something about all this, then the first thing they need to do is replace Schumer and Jeffries. Otherwise, it’s much ado about nothing.

Chris Hedges: Yes. The problem is the hierarchy of the Democratic Party. Jeffries and Schumer, in particular, are longtime stooges of AIPAC and the Israel lobby. They are corporate-indentured Democrats. As we saw under Obama, as we saw during the Biden administration, they serve their paymasters.

If that happens over the next two years—in essence, another betrayal by the Democratic Party—then I fear that the blowback or the backlash will be fierce and may indeed express itself with the kind of fascistic political movements that we are seeing in France with Le Pen, or in Germany, or, of course, Modi in India or Putin in Russia.

Audience question: Is Jeffries just Schumer 2.0? Is the seemingly growing congressional contingent that rejects AIPAC and corporate control surging now so we can move on and get real leadership in Congress and impeachment of the MAGA posse?

Chris Hedges: Well, first of all, Jeffries, even Sherrod Brown, others have taken impeachment off the table. They’ve said they will not attempt to impeach Trump. They will go after perhaps his family, Eric Trump, and this kind of stuff, and [name unclear], the people around Trump, Kennedy, of course. But they have expressed open reluctance to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.

It’s going to be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. The power of these leaders like Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries is that they’re the spigot. So the money goes through them, and they anoint and pick the candidates and destroy the candidates they don’t want.

Remember their hostility to the mayor of New York, Mamdani, their hostility to El-Sayed. They finally came around in the end because they needed the seat, but they did it kind of grinding their teeth.

Audience question: If we spend all our time critiquing the left wing of the Democratic Party, aren’t we potentially alienating the only allies in Washington?

Chris Hedges: No. The left wing of the Democratic Party is our hope. The problem is the Democratic Party hierarchy and leadership, which is phenomenally corrupt and serves the interests of the billionaire class, corporations, the war industry and the Israel lobby.

If the hierarchy of the party maintains control, then what you’ll get is paralysis, as you saw in the Biden administration, and that could have very dark political implications, especially in two years.

Reform and the struggle for power

Audience question: Would creating a commission for Lina Khan’s style of applying antitrust law to reform media, campaign spending and military-corporate [word unclear] be a sufficient method for congressional reform? What other changes might ensure elected officials follow popular will?

Chris Hedges: Well, you’re already seeing Jeffries and Schumer stack the committees with reliable corporate, AIPAC-friendly Democrats. And they intend that that power structure will remain.

In terms of force, there just are not enough Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed and others who can gain enough traction, I fear, to push back against this hierarchy. This is really the battle.

I think the American public has expressed—you have certainly within the Democratic Party majoritarian support for regulating, controlling big banks, Medicare for All, stopping the funding for Israel, the arms shipments to Israel, etc. But the hierarchy itself is indentured to those lobbyists, those firms, and, of course, they get their money from them.

It’s going to be a very vicious fight if that leadership is challenged. But they have to be broken. They have to be removed if we’re going to respond in any real way to the struggles and difficulties that are facing the American working class. And that’s the question: whether that’s going to happen.

Audience question: Is there any path to pressuring these Democrats to move toward at least a type of New Deal 2.0?

Chris Hedges: No.

Audience question: Won’t their failure just set up the material conditions for something much darker?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, that’s right.

Audience question: Will the GOP abandon Trump?

Chris Hedges: The GOP is already abandoning Trump. Even JD Vance is trying to distance himself from Trump. And now there’s a report that Rubio wants to resign because he doesn’t want to be tainted with Trumpism when he runs for president. So that’s already existing.

Then you’re seeing within the House Republicans, or at least some Republicans, making noises that they will support the impeachment of Hegseth.

But yes, if the Democrats do not begin to institute the kind of New Deal reforms to counter the savage assault of cutthroat capitalism, or neoliberalism as it’s called, then that betrayal, as I mentioned before, will be exceedingly dangerous.

Audience question: What do you think of the Politico story that found Talarico’s campaign was primarily funded by a Miriam Adelson PAC?

Chris Hedges: That was his House campaign. He received $60,000, which was his largest donation. He is beholden to the Israel lobby and AIPAC, unfortunately.

He does not use the word genocide. He does not call for an end to arms shipments to Israel. I think he parses it by saying that he wants an end to offensive weapons, whatever that means. But, yeah, he’s an AIPAC Democrat.

Audience question: Chris, should we rebrand democratic socialism as New Deal democracy in order to appeal to a broader audience of independent voters and even some moderate Republicans? El-Sayed is a good example of a morally courageous and successful candidate who proposed DSA-like solutions for working people without using the word socialism.

Chris Hedges: That’s, interestingly enough, the tactic that Ralph Nader used. I worked for Ralph when he ran, and I did an interview with Ralph today that we’ll put up tomorrow morning on what the Democrats have to do and what will happen if the Democrats engage in the same kind of empty rhetoric and refuse to fight for basic reforms, raising the minimum wage, etc.

Ralph never used the word. He’s a socialist, of course. He’s kind of a Norman Thomas socialist. Norman Thomas was the socialist leader and Presbyterian minister who Ralph just admired immensely. He is a socialist, but he never used the word socialist.

I think socialism, or being a socialist—and I always identify myself as a socialist, but I’m not running for anything—doesn’t have the taint that it had even a few years ago.

Audience question: A couple of years ago, you supported the movement strategy Force the Vote, which advocated the Squad force a vote on Medicare for All in exchange for them voting yes on Pelosi’s bid to remain speaker. The Squad declined to do this and subsequently distanced themselves from everyone involved in the movement, more or less. Do you see the opportunity for a similar movement now, given the increasing popularity of policies like Medicare for All or an arms embargo on Israel?

Chris Hedges: I did support that, Force the Vote. Politics is a game of hardball. It’s a game of fear. It’s a game of pressure. The Squad collapsed, surrendered to Pelosi.

I think it probably is more difficult given the configuration of this House because, at this point, not all the votes are counted. You have over a hundred more Democrats than Republicans in the House. I think it’s like—I forget the figures—244 to 150 or something like that.

So without that margin of error, you can’t bring that kind of pressure. When you have a very slight difference between the numbers of Republicans and Democrats, then a minority group of Democrats, by withholding their vote, can create havoc within the party. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible now.

Candidates, faith and economic abandonment

Audience question: What are [candidate names unclear] chances on the Democratic side, and Rubio’s and Vance’s?

Chris Hedges: It’s too early to tell. It’s just too early to tell. I think it depends on whether the Democratic Party is actually able to institute the kind of New Deal reforms that certainly the base of the Democratic Party, much of the country, is clamoring for.

Biden was just a perfect kind of poster child for this, where all sorts of his campaign promises he just jettisoned as soon as he got into the White House, as, by the way, did Obama: to curb the banks and stand up to those who had carried out the financial fraud of 2008.

You saw Biden, who walked around saying he was the most pro-union president, shut down the railroad freight workers’ strike. So this is the question. We call it in Arabic—it’s called kalam fadi, empty talk—and that’s what the Democrats are really good at.

Audience question: James Talarico and Adam Hamilton both have their faith as a driving factor of their campaigns. Do you envision this to be simply a strategic ploy by the Democratic Party or a legitimate response to the blasphemy of exploitative prosperity gospel from the Christian community? Is this truly how we can bring the so-called Christian fascists back into the fold? And can these leaders improve the economic despair of these communities?

Chris Hedges: Well, I don’t know how deep your faith is if you don’t oppose genocide. Having spent two years with Christian nationalists, you’re not going to reach them rationally. It’s a nonrational belief system: that dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden, this kind of stuff.

These people have retreated into magical thinking given the kind of dislocation and the despair that they’re suffering. In the last chapter of American Fascists, I said either these people are reintegrated into the economy, given a place, a sense of a future for them and their children, a living wage where they can sustain themselves and their family—without that, there’s no way to break the movement.

And, of course, since I wrote that book, things have only gotten worse.

Health care and impeachment

Audience question: Not to be cynical, but the Democrats used to blame Joe Manchin and the Senate parliamentarian for their failure to produce results. Now that they have clear majorities in the House and the Senate, who will they blame now for their failure to increase the minimum wage, to create a single-payer health care option and to end disastrous wars everywhere? I know they’ll blame Trump, but who else? The radical left for being unrealistic?

Chris Hedges: Well, they can’t override vetoes in the Senate. Most of these Democrats, they talk about affordability. They talk about health care premiums, but, with a few exceptions like El-Sayed or the new senator from Maine, they just are not talking about universal health care or single-payer or Medicare for All. They’re not doing that, which worries me.

Obamacare is a defective corporate product, which saw government subsidies funneled into Big Pharma and the health care industry. And it was Obama who, before he even negotiated, took universal health care out of the equation.

There was this woman, Liz Fowler, who was on the committee, and she was a lobbyist for these big health care firms. Remember, the Democratic Party gets a lot of money from these people. So that’s a huge issue.

Audience question: Do you think it’s worth investing energy in impeachment hearings, holding the Trump mafia to account, or should Democrats focus on other things?

Chris Hedges: I agree with Ralph Nader. I think the decision to publicly announce that you’re not going to impeach Trump is just unfathomable. Trump is only going to respond to pressure or fear.

I think going after the naked and massive levels of corruption, insider trading, this kind of stuff within the Trump White House, is a good idea. But I don’t understand. Trump has just committed so many impeachable offenses, starting with the Emoluments Clause, but there are many others. I don’t understand that tactic, and I think it’s extremely shortsighted.

So, yes, you would get to the Senate, and perhaps Trump, because of the configuration of the Senate, would not get impeached, but you’d have hearings. You’d expose the corruption and the constitutional violations that have characterized the Trump presidency. So I think that’s a very, very poor decision.

I think they’re making it because they don’t want to alienate those crossover voters who may have voted for Trump and voted for a Democrat in this election. The tactics of the Democratic Party have always been to target their messaging and their policies to this kind of narrow swing base. I think that’s probably the motivation. But I think it’s a mistake.

The danger of another Democratic failure

Audience question: I understand very little will change with the election of the Democrats to the majority, but isn’t this our last hurrah before full-blown fascism if they don’t enact the policies that are so desperately needed? How do we push them, knowing now more than ever the fate of the anemic democracy depends on it? If they fail us this time, we are doomed.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, I fully agree. If they fail us this time, we’re doomed. My fear is, given the fact that the Democratic Party is a corporate-indentured party, given the fact that it doesn’t function as a political party—and by this I mean what the base of the party demands is irrelevant.

You had these primaries where the only person allowed to run was Biden, who was kind of kept under wraps. Then, when his cognitive decline became impossible to ignore with the debate against Trump, you saw Kamala Harris, who not one registered Democrat voted for, just anointed as the candidate. She ran this vapid, celebrity-driven, issueless campaign, which cost a billion dollars to mount and stood for nothing.

Of course, she continued to support the genocide. You had 77% of registered Democrats who were opposed to the genocide, wanted arms shipments to stop, and she just ignored them. My fear is that will happen again with disastrous results.

If you look at the rise of other fascist movements, take Weimar Germany, for instance. You have the 1929 crash. The Nazis were polling in the single digits before the 1929 crash, and you had the Christian Democrats and the kind of equivalent of the Democratic Party, because of the massive loans that Germany had to take out, servicing the bankers.

They stopped paying unemployment insurance. I can’t remember the numbers, but it was huge, like 34 million people or something, because of the economic depression, depended on it. And you ended up with the fascists.

So it is a very, very dangerous moment. My fear is these figures like Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, without the huge infusions of corporate, oligarchic money, they wouldn’t have a political future. If corporate money was pulled from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders would have won.

Let’s not forget that the DNC and the Democratic Party hierarchy sabotaged the Sanders campaign, including Barack Obama, who was a major figure in sabotaging that campaign. We don’t know, but my suspicion is that if Sanders had run against Trump, he would have won.

I have kind of anecdotal [evidence]. I was writing a book called America: The Farewell Tour. I was in Anderson, Indiana, where the old GM factories were. Now it’s just acres and acres of empty lots surrounded by cyclone fencing because they physically moved those factories to Monterrey, Mexico, where they pay workers $3 an hour.

I was with these old UAW guys, and they all voted for Sanders. But when Sanders was denied the nomination, they voted for Trump, because Trump was speaking, if you remember, that same kind of economic populist message. He’s a con artist, but he was speaking it, which they wanted to hear.

They certainly understood very well what the Clintons had done with the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had destroyed their lives and destroyed their city. Anderson, like all these postindustrial cities, is a wreck.

I think we’re at a very dangerous moment, and I think the only way that we have any hope is that we’ve got to mobilize. We can’t sit back and wait or hope that the Democrats will see the light.

We have to organize for Medicare for All. We have to organize to end arms shipments to Israel. We have to organize to raise the minimum wage. Social Security benefits have not been raised since the ’70s. I can’t remember exactly; they’ve just been frozen. This is just ridiculous.

This assault by neoliberals—or let’s call them what they are, cutthroat capitalists, which own these two parties—on those New Deal programs that are so important to sustain the working class and, in particular, the vulnerable. It was, of course, Clinton who destroyed the welfare system. We’re going to have to fight for them.

You have these figures like El-Sayed and others, but they’re a minority within the Senate and within the House. So movements, mobilizations, organizing are going to become key if we’re going to save what’s left of our faltering democracy. If we have two years of political paralysis, then God help us.

Audience question: There are a hundred so-called progressives. We need 40 in the House to stand up any chance. Or is it just [name unclear] in the House and Abdul in the Senate?

Chris Hedges: Power is a dangerous drug. Look at AOC. People begin to like it, and they begin to shed inconvenient political opinions. That’s the history of Barack Obama. He kind of shed everything, including standing up for the Palestinians or standing by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who was a friend of mine, in the rise to the top. And you see AOC doing this now.

There’s that old book by Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals. It’s a great little book. He’s writing about academics who sell their souls to power. But he writes that you can either serve privilege or power, or you can serve justice and truth. But the more you make compromises to those who serve privilege and power, the more you diminish the capacity for justice and truth until, of course, you stand for nothing, which I would argue Obama is a perfect poster child for.

Iran, Gaza and the West Bank

Audience question: How long till the war in Iran resolves now that POTUS has been rebuked?

Chris Hedges: Well, we’ve lost the war in Iran. The question is at what point we’re going to concede to Iranian demands. Even The Wall Street Journal has written stories about the devastation visited upon American installations and assets in the Gulf.

The naval base at Bahrain doesn’t function. The radar systems don’t function. The interceptors are depleted. The Iranians still have significant missile and drone capabilities, and they have very precise targeting systems, I suspect provided to them by the Chinese and the Russians.

The longer the Strait of Hormuz is bottled up, the worse it gets. Diesel prices are through the roof. This is causing havoc in places not only in the farmland in the United States but in Europe.

But what Trump does, especially under the influence of Netanyahu, I don’t know. I don’t know how many months this has gone on. Was it eight months or something? He’s incapable of facing the reality and resolving it.

Audience question: I’m curious if you’re aware of Milorad Dodik’s trips to Israel and recent visit to Mar-a-Lago and what you make of it. Would Israel regenerate war in Bosnia in its push into the Balkans?

Chris Hedges: I, of course, was in Bosnia for the war. I haven’t been following what’s happening in Bosnia closely.

I think that Israel’s primary concern is Iran and Lebanon and Gaza. I think Israel is still determined to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Of course, they’ve crowded some 2 million Palestinians into 30% of Gaza, and they’re living in absolutely horrific conditions.

Of course, it’s winter now, and they don’t have enough protection. The food is at subsistence level. They don’t have any infrastructure at all, clean water. So I don’t think Israel’s given up, especially when you look at the savagery that the Israeli settlers and the IDF have been carrying out on the West Bank.

They know they can get away with it. They intend to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and they intend to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. The tricky part is: Where do they go?

The Jordanian military, like the Egyptian military, has moved up to the border because they don’t want 2 million Palestinians pushed into the Sinai or Palestinians in the West Bank pushed into Jordan. But Israel is quite upfront about it. That’s Israel’s goal, and it remains its goal, and they haven’t given up on it.

Audience question: What symbol to you represents the international banking class?

Chris Hedges: What symbol? I don’t know. U.S. Congress.

Holding elected officials accountable

Audience question: Does El-Sayed have the popular support to align and vote to move out Schumer and Jeffries?

Chris Hedges: Unfortunately, no.

Audience question: Who is organizing for us to hold the Dems accountable to create a New Deal society?

Chris Hedges: We’re going to have to do that. That’s what Ralph Nader is trying to do. He held an impeachment symposium in July. You can go to nader.org.

Ralph, who has been fighting corporate power longer and with more integrity than any other American, is fully aware of how dangerous this moment is and knows that the only pressure at this point that we can bring against this system is to take to the streets, to organize for the things that we want, to pressure those people in office, to make them afraid, in essence.

If they don’t raise the minimum wage, there’s a cost. If they don’t carry out policies to ensure universal health care, there’s a cost. If they don’t end arms shipments to Israel, there’s a cost.

I think part of the problem for me was that some people were, but not enough people were willing to make Kamala Harris and the Democrats pay that cost. I think the fact of her support for Gaza [wording as transcribed] was partially responsible for her loss.

But we have to make it very, very clear that there’s a price to pay if they don’t begin to enact these policies. That’s got to come from us.

Audience question: What do you think it will mean for corporate regulations under this new wave of Democrats returning to power? Or will the overreach be standardized?

Chris Hedges: Well, that’s my fear, that they won’t rein in those corporations. It’s interesting: Silicon Valley kind of lined up behind Trump. Elon Musk now lives in the blue state of Texas with his giant compound, thinking that that would be a kind of safe haven for him.

But if these corporate criminals are not held to account—and that means, of course, addressing corporate crime—these are the same people that fund the Democratic Party. These are the people that Jeffries and Schumer appeal to.

That is really the battle. It’s not just a battle of removing corrupt leadership embodied in Jeffries and Schumer, but it’s a battle of severing the party from the megadonors and the corporations and the Israel lobby. That’s not going to be easy. And there’s going to be a lot of people in the Democratic Party who don’t want to do it, including, I guess, Talarico.

Audience question: Why did no one filibuster those bills that were aimed at selling our national forests and parks to oil companies?

Chris Hedges: Well, that’s a really good question, and I don’t know why.

Audience question: While the country breathes a sigh of relief around the election results, removing the legislative branch from the immediate control of Trump, how do you keep moving the Democratic Party in a progressive direction in the immediate future? How do we, in one fell swoop, disinvest in the genocide in Gaza, de-escalate with Iran, repeal all Trump tariffs, disband ICE, etc.? Push current Democratic leaders or call for their immediate replacement?

Chris Hedges: El-Sayed has called, to his credit, for the removal of Schumer. I don’t know, he’s probably also called for the removal of Jeffries, but he’s in the Senate.

That is it. That party hierarchy is our enemy. Again, as I said before, we can’t sit back and assume that the Democratic Party is going to carry out, I would argue, the mandates that have put them in power in these midterms.

That’s really going to be for us. We have to create pressure. We have to lobby our Congresspeople. We have to monitor how they vote. We have to confront them in town halls that we organize. That’s absolutely key, and without that kind of pressure, I think there’s no hope.

The filibuster and Trump’s remaining power

Audience question: There is a lot of talk to reform or remove the filibuster among the Democrats generally. Do you think that will be passed?

Chris Hedges: I don’t know. I just don’t know yet. I don’t have a sense of where this Congress will go. Remember, there are all sorts of Democrats who ran in red districts who are not really that different from the Republicans themselves. They call them Blue Dog Democrats or something.

The party itself, there are a lot of divisions and factions within the party. And again, the leadership is bought and sold. They’re owned. Schumer and Jeffries are just awful on Israel. Talarico, I think, as I mentioned before, will not use the word genocide.

Audience question: What are the dangers that the malignant narcissist Trump poses now?

Chris Hedges: Well, one, he can veto everything. Two, Congress is supposed to declare war, but, given the imperial presidency, he can relaunch a war with Iran. I don’t think he would relaunch a war, but he can begin to carry out periodic strikes. He’s already threatening it, and Netanyahu wants it.

He can order the assassination of leaders, heads of state, as he did in Iran. He can order the kidnapping. He can empower ICE to ratchet up its reign of terror. He can still do lots and lots of damage.

Who knows? His health is precarious. He obviously has cognitive issues. He’s kind of lost touch. He was just a drag on the whole campaign. He had just absolutely zero empathy. His speeches are kind of all over the place. But that he still has the capacity to do significant damage? Yes.

DSA, labor and impeachment

Audience question: What do you think of the new DSA candidates either ignoring or rebuking Kshama Sawant? Does that say anything about what they might be willing to do once getting sworn into office?

Chris Hedges: Well, as you know, I’m a huge admirer of Kshama, and I think that the DSA’s big mistake is that they think they can work with mainstream Democrats. Mainstream Democrats are our enemy, as I said before, and Kshama understands that.

Kshama understands that one uses elective office as a platform to build movements. But one doesn’t go into Congress to collaborate with the likes of Jeffries or go into the Senate to collaborate with Schumer, which is, of course, the tactic AOC is taking.

I thought the DSA really treated Kshama very shabbily. She has a track record. As the socialist city councilwoman in Seattle, she achieved a lot: raising the minimum wage, rent control, stopping evictions, a billionaire tax. Amazon was going berserk, spending millions of dollars to try and defeat her. She’s just a city councilwoman.

So I don’t understand the dynamics between the DSA and Kshama Sawant, but I’m a huge fan of Kshama.

Audience question: Can Congress rescind any part of the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget?

Chris Hedges: I don’t think so. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Audience question: As much as I would like to see Trump impeached, I do think there could be backlash from moderates and former Trump supporters. Trump was politically dead in 2021, but [wording unclear] the Democrats resurrected him [wording unclear] lawfare. What do you think?

Chris Hedges: Well, I’ve addressed that issue. I think you’re right that it would certainly alienate Trump supporters and maybe even crossover voters. Yet I think we have to mitigate the kind of damage that Trump still has the capacity to carry out. With impeachment looming over him, I think that would impose huge restraints on him.

I also just think we have to restore the rule of law. He has so many impeachable offenses. If we don’t begin to restore the rule of law, both domestically and internationally, then we descend into a kind of Hobbesian universe, a world where law doesn’t matter. And I know what that looks like because I was in Bosnia during the war.

A brief window for change

Audience question: Do you consider the rejoicing and excitement for this blue wave in left media an overreaction? Should we be celebrating or preparing to put pressure on the Dems we are most likely to push left?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, I think it’s an overreaction. I think many people have failed to see that this is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party. It’s a repudiation of Trump.

We’ve been given a brief window, and I just hope the Democrats don’t squander it, which is why we have to immediately begin to put pressure on the Democratic Party. I’m not even sure it’s going to work. But we have to try because the consequences of this could be really catastrophic.

Audience question: How would you recommend preventing revolutionary optimism from being co-opted by corporate interests and diverting energy away from needed change?

Chris Hedges: Well, I think that you just have moral principles that you won’t violate, ever. I’m not going to vote for anyone who supports genocide, period, which isn’t even a political issue. That’s a moral issue.

I think that we have to define issues that we won’t negotiate on: universal health care, raising the minimum wage, etc. They’re always going to chip away. Look, AOC is a perfect example of what happens, and it’s not a place we want to go because what you’re doing is you are discrediting your own integrity.

You’re selling the vulnerable, the weak, the marginalized out, and they don’t forget.

Elections and the international context

Audience question: Given your concerns about Trump interfering with the election results, what are your thoughts about the integrity of U.S. elections moving forward?

Chris Hedges: There was never any credibility to the charges of voter fraud. It may exist in small cases, but that hundreds of thousands, to quote Trump, of noncitizens were voting, or the ballot boxes or the ballot machines were corrupted—there was no—it was a non-reality-based belief system.

I think that, given the size of the Democratic victory, it kind of obliterated that argument. All of the charges are spurious: mail-in ballots are corrupted, etc. All of the charges that Trump made just were not backed up factually.

Audience question: How do you think this impacts the other countries in the Western world, Europe? I’m in the U.K., and Burnham sounded like a socialist on the surface, but in reality he likely serves the ultrawealthy.

Chris Hedges: Well, yes, as did Keir Starmer and Tony Blair and the rest of the Labour Party. So that’s the problem. You had the transformation of the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton, in essence, into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party just got pushed so far to the right it became a cult.

The Democratic Party, which is a party of war, in Europe would be a far-right party or certainly a right-wing party. Angela Merkel doesn’t question universal health care for Germans.

That’s my worry: that the Democratic leadership, or the people in the hierarchy of the party controlling the party, adopt the rhetoric and do nothing, which is what Obama did and what Biden did. That would just be so disastrous and so dangerous.

Economic pain and organizing

Audience question: What is your assessment of the Christian nationalists on the midterms, Iran war and the ongoing genocide in Gaza?

Chris Hedges: Well, gasoline prices do not discriminate between Trump supporters and Democrats. Rising food prices do not target only Democrats. They also target Trump supporters.

I think what the Democratic Party did effectively was focus laser-like on the rising cost and tied it to the corruption, which is out of control within the Trump White House, and the Iran war. That was the message, and it wasn’t wrong.

That may mean that Trump supporters didn’t vote Democrat, but I suspect a lot of them just didn’t vote. The pain that has been inflicted on the American public is equal-opportunity pain. It hit the Trump MAGA base just like it’s hit everybody else. In fact, because the MAGA base is so rural, it’s probably hit them worse.

The tariffs with Canada—Canada is our largest trading partner—it’s just insane. That was a very, very important issue in states like Michigan.

Audience question: I would appreciate Chris’ advice for how to best advocate for Trump’s impeachment.

Chris Hedges: Go to Nader’s website. Ralph is just determined to push through that impeachment and organize for that impeachment. He’s kind of leading. That’s where all of his energy and all of his focus is at the moment.

Audience question: Although it was nice to see the public repudiate Trump and his harsh administration, a blue tsunami is a little much, isn’t it? The corporatist Democratic Party is claiming a massive victory, but anything short of a working-class revolution is just a ripple in the other direction.

Chris Hedges: Yes, I could not agree more. That’s why union activity is so important. Unions are the driving force behind a socialist system.

Socialism, of course, had a huge following on the eve of World War I, but it was union-driven. That was true in Sweden. Sweden actually put together, at least within the capitalist democracies, the most effective socialist system. But it was done because a huge percentage of the Swedish workforce was unionized, and they used the weapon, the one weapon that workers have, which is the strike.

Now, that’s all been rolled back by Swedish capitalists, and Sweden’s horrible now. But if you go back and look, there was that moment, in the ’50s and ’60s, when Sweden was a very civilized place to live.

The Israel lobby and the future of democracy

Audience question: How do you think the Zionist lobby has been affected by the midterm results?

Chris Hedges: Well, because they poured so much money—I think they spent $300 million trying to defeat—it wasn’t just the Zionist lobby, but $300 million to try and defeat El-Sayed. AIPAC, I can’t remember the figure, I think it was $40 million. It was huge.

But, of course, now they realize they have to hide it because AIPAC is so tainted. So they set up other super PACs that have names that don’t link it to AIPAC. They get their donors. So they’re still a force.

It used to be, a few years ago, AIPAC would hold its convention in Washington. Senior Republican and Democratic figures would be falling all over themselves to go address AIPAC.

Remember Obama, when he first ran, gave this horrific speech that must have been written by Rahm Emanuel or some Zionist. It was just appalling. After that speech, especially having spent so much time in Gaza, I thought, “Forget it.”

But that’s changed. AIPAC’s a tainted commodity. That doesn’t mean they won’t still try and funnel significant funds. They did in this election. They do funnel significant funds, but they mask it.

And this is the last question.

Audience question: Is it possible that our culture has just become too cynical for representative democracy to function?

Chris Hedges: No. I think that the corporate psychopaths—and they’re very cynical, Peter Thiel and these people—are really quite openly hostile to democracy.

But I think that these midterms are a kind of desperate cri de cœur on the part of an electorate that wants their democracy back. The question is whether the Democratic Party is going to give it to them. And that’s a big question.

If it doesn’t, then all of these fascistic strains within the United States will be exacerbated. This is really the last moment, I think. My fear is that the hierarchy of the party is so corrupt and so beholden to the special interests that many people in the American republic detest that they could destroy what little credibility they have left.

Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us.