Chris Hedges Quote

Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls junk politics. Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. It’s impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America’s optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture, DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes—meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage. It redefines traditional values, tilting courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains. Junk politics miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It’s also given to abrupt, unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized. And finally, it seeks at every turn to obliterate voters’ consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst.28 Politics has become a product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in celebrities who are, as Boorstin wrote, receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.