CHRIS HEDGES spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and was part of a team of reporters who won a Pulitzer prize in 2002 for the paper’s reporting on global terrorism. He was awarded the Amnesty International global award for human-rights journalism the same year. Mr Hedges left the New York Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. He is now a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, a non-profit media centre in New York. He also teaches inmates at a prison in New Jersey. Mr Hedges has written 12 books covering war, religion and political issues in society. His new book, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” in collaboration with Joe Sacco, a graphic artist, looks at "sacrificial zones" in America—areas where, he says, unregulated capitalism has consumed human beings and the natural world in the name of profit. When did things start to go wrong?

In America we have undergone a corporate coup d’état and this has been part of a long process that began with the destruction of popular and radical movements during the first world war. On the eve of war America had over 70 socialist mayors and Eugene Debs [a union leader] polled 6% of the vote in 1912. Appeal to Reason [a socialist political weekly] had the fourth-highest circulation in the country.

In order to bring America into an unpopular war, Woodrow Wilson created the first system of modern mass-propaganda—the Creel Committee. It drew on “crowd psychology”, pioneered by Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Sigmund Freud and others, suggesting that people were not moved by appeals to reason but by emotional manipulation—what Walter Lippmann called “manufacturing consent”. Debs ended up in prison [for opposing the war] and after the war many of these people went off to Madison Avenue to work for corporations. They upended traditional American values of thrift and self-effacement and replaced them with the cult of the self, hedonism and consumption presented as an inner compulsion.

Suggested reading: “Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx (1867)

And yet there is always so much talk about freedom in America.

This is what makes America different from Europe. Whatever the repression, Europe still has pockets of dissent: communist labour unions in Italy and France, for example, though Britain tends to replicate the United States a little more. In America we destroyed our radical movements and disembowelled liberal institutions in the name of anti-communism. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s was very different from the radical left that existed at the turn of the century, not least because it was divorced from labour.

Once the Vietnam war was over many of the people who were active against it were integrated into an economic structure that unplugged them from social activism. Guy Debord does a good job of laying out the extent to which the counter-culture of the 1960s adopted the cult of capitalism.

Suggested reading: “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord (1967)

What about now? Well, once this slow-motion coup d’état had taken place we began the reconfiguration of American society and the global economy into a form of neo-feudalism. In the 1970s we shifted (in the words of Harvard historian Charles Maier) from an empire of production to an empire of consumption. And we saw the rise of faux liberalism. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair spoke the “feel your pain” language of liberalism but served corporate interests. Under President Clinton we passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the working class since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. He destroyed welfare and deregulated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) resulting in roughly half a dozen corporations controlling everything most Americans see or listen to. He destroyed the banking system and demolished the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which precipitated the global meltdown of 2008. Sheldon Wolin, a political philosopher, argues that what kept the American public politically passive was access to credit and cheap mass-produced consumer goods. Now the credit is gone and those goods aren’t cheap any more. Suggested reading: “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time” by Karl Polanyi (2002)

Are we doomed?

I used to wonder if Aldous Huxley was right or if George Orwell was right. It turns out they both were. First you’ve got Huxley—people bought this orgy of hedonism and, while they were stripped of power, the country was harvested. Now we’ve got Orwell—the security and surveillance state. I sued President Obama, and won, over the clause in the National Defence Authorisation Act (2011) that permitted the American government to use indefinite military detention.

Suggested reading: “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” by John Ralston Saul (1992)

You make it sound very planned. It seems more incremental and less like a huge conspiracy when you live through it.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s subservience to the dictates of the marketplace. This subservience has ramifications which people are not aware of. Oil companies don’t think about global warming, they’re focused on making as much money as they can. Look at the destruction of the western plains; they weren’t thinking about the future extinction of the buffalo. It’s not a conspiracy theory but it’s a strange kind of myopia. You destroy the Appalachians to get the coal—blow the tops off the mountains, poison the water, turn it into a wasteland—so people in car parks and business towers can leave their lights on all night. Corporate forces are willing to sacrifice all of us, even the planet.

Bleak.

It’s not new. If you look at the collapse of past civilisations—from Easter Island to the Mayan empire—you get an oligarchic elite that retreats into sanctuaries and drives the population harder and harder in order to maintain the staggering level of consumption at the upper levels. That’s what’s happening in American society. The difference now is that when we go down we’re going to bring the whole planet with us.

Globalisation as a Utopian movement? There is nothing in history to suggest that kneeling before the dictates of the marketplace is a rational way to create a functioning civilisation. It’s insane, but the systems of propaganda are such that to challenge these beliefs, that are so embedded in society as to be presented as natural law, now puts you outside the mainstream. Any centralised power that can’t be challenged is totalitarianism.

Suggested reading: “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” by Sheldon Wolin (2008) and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt (1973)