A Quote by Chris Hedges

When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment - this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.
The political world is changing rapidly. What the establishment has learned, what the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment, the media establishment, is the world is not quite what they thought it was. With the middle class disappearing, with people working longer hours for lower rages, with people worried about the future of their children, what you are seeing is a lot of discontent at the grassroots level all over this country. And that's what's going on right now.
Up until, really, Roosevelt, African-Americans largely voted ninety per cent Republican. That was the political origins, that's what their political voice was in the Republican party. During that history, that last sixty or seventy years of history, the Republican party effectively walked away from the community. They were afraid to really embrace civil rights even though they embraced civil rights legislation. And so it's not enough to just to put it on paper, you gotta actually show up and be in the community, and understand what that struggle was really about.
Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly if belatedly that conservatives disdain for liberal intellectuals had slipped into disdain for the educated class as a whole, and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole.
For longer than I've been involved in the political process, the Republican establishment has claimed to want to provide an alternative for the black community, yet party elite refuse to show up for the game.
Socialism would gather all power to the supreme party and party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants no longer servants, no longer civil.
People were touchingly naive at the dawn of the Internet revolution when they said the Internet will route around censorship the way it routes around damage. With any revolution, the establishment catches up and figures out how to screw it up. The answer is to keep technology advancing fast enough so that those who would try to control it can't. It's up to people to defend what they care about. We shouldn't be complacent that this stuff is going to be a force for good.
The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.
A lot of people disagree with me on this, but the people who want somebody not of Washington, it's serious this time. It's - the disconnect between the Republican Party establishment and the Democrat establishment and the people of this country is longer, broader, wider than I've ever seen it.
O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all?
The priesthood of God has become the eminent power for good in the world. We are no longer a handful of people on the fringes of society. This great power for good has been entrusted to us, and we must not weaken it by failing in our responsibilities.
I definitely care about what's happening in our country. I grew up in a family that was very liberal and had very strong opinions about liberal ideas. I was around those thoughts and had conversations about those things and did the best I could to absorb what was happening around me and have my own opinion about it.
You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.
So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the most astonishing deeds, and which, more then once, showed me that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only obstacle to the sucess of those projects which require rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, when you have once devoted your life to your enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or, rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources doubled.
You cannot be a party which takes money from Wall Street, which is not strong on the pharmaceutical industry, which is ripping us off every day, which is not strong on health care in taking on the insurance companies, which has not shown a desire to stand up and fight the economic establishment, and then tell working families that you are on their side. People see through that.
When the Republican Party is no longer the party of fiscal conservatism then clearly I would argue that we've lost our way.
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