The formulaic response to America on the Left is all too familiar – we are wrong pretty much whatever we do, our culture despicable, our military ventures criminal, our economic and moral systems salvageable only by appeals to statism.

So there I was, on a recent Sunday morning, trying to enjoy some intelligent conversation on CSPAN only to be confronted by Chris Hedges, encouraged by Rob Suskind, pronouncing the end of Western civilization and life as we know it.

The litany of horrors Mr. Hedges introduces us to is breath-taking – from the environment, to professional wrestling, businesses that (egads) want to make money, imperial wars, and an illiterate public immersed in fantasies of the sort sure to leave our nation in the backwaters of cultural evolution.

Mr. Hedges has written a book, Empire of Delusion, that annunciates all of this and more. And it flows naturally out of other books he has published since leaving his lofty perch as a New York Times elite reporter.

He has written, for example, that a certain breed of Christian fundamentalist is dangerous to American democracy and is imbued with fascist tendencies, that our troops in Iraq are the true threat to the citizens there (not the folks who have blown up women and children for years or created massive killing fields), and that the new atheists are as dangerous as the new fundamentalists (well, he almost gets that one right). Hedges is obsessed with the corruptions of capitalism but he has no solutions, just his haunted house of horrors.

The problem is that Hedges can see only out of his leftist eye. He is appalled by American illiteracy (so am I), but he blames not the Left which exerts so much control over our schools and universities and our popular culture, but what he calls the military industrial academic complex. He is right to deplore fanaticism of the religious/political stripe, but he finds charlatans worthy of exploration and condemnation almost exclusively on the right. He has little to say about leftists who riot or compare President Bush to Hitler or talk jocularly that perhaps the former president should have been assassinated, for example.

Hedges is appalled by the lack of morality in business and culture, but attacks the very people who would – through an honest appeal to traditional morality – seek to restore it.

He condemns business almost universally as an ignoble venture, but he is in business himself – publishing books that rip his own country and no doubt getting paid handsomely for it.

Hedges abhors President Bush because he won elections on style points (I kid you not), but neither he nor Suskind seemed capable of comprehending that the true vacuous element in our midst today are those who have cultivated out of thin air the cult of President Obama, a man who (how embarrassing) is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize only because he is perceived as the anti-Bush by leftist European political culture.

The formulaic response to America on the Left is all too familiar – we are wrong pretty much whatever we do, our culture despicable, our military ventures criminal, our economic and moral systems salvageable only by appeals to statism. We have heard it all before — see Chomsky, Vidal, Zinn, Galbraith, Krugman, Phillips, Franks, et. al…

Still, Hedges is a useful example of the troubling trend in our political discourse, for he lacks the fundamental capacity to view honestly the hypocrisies on his side of the political equation. He is not alone — intellectually honest discourse is near impossible to find in our polarized political and media climate. I am increasingly concerned about the overboard rhetoric of President Obama's detractors on the Right just as I am disturbed by the Obama administration's efforts to intimidate critics.

The failure of mainstream media to serve its fundamental role as a reasonably objective reporter of truth and a critic of power, whether a Democrat or a Republican is wielding that power, only encourages a deeper reliance on politicized information as frustrated citizens try to get from radio or talk television what the news divisions are failing to cover.

One of the rich ironies of Hedges' work is that he appeals to certain ideas that traditional conservatives share: a community of values, a spiritual view of life that tempers human arrogance, and a commitment to restoring economic sanity to the country.

Yet, in none of these efforts is the Left of which he is a part doing any serious heavy lifting. In fact, the statism that is emerging in our political culture (see Mark Levin's thoughtful book, Liberty and Tyranny) is going to narrow the corridors of freedom, entrench waste and corruption and potentially bring down not only the parts of our economic system that need correction, but those parts that function well and deliver much appreciated and needed services. The decline in values he claims to lament are precisely the values that the liberal/postmodern experiment to a significant degree helped engender — broken families, sexual adventurism of a destructive kind, instant gratification, cynicism about America's political culture.

Still, there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to cataloging the abuse of common sense. Hedges is right that there are hucksters on the Right, just as there are political hucksters on the Left (Vidal and Chomsky come to mind). But it is the desire on all sides to score quick, cheap political points that derails the efforts of thoughtful people to conduct a serious discourse on our problems. The greed we find on Wall Street and in our Corporate board rooms is evident as well on Main Street, and in a mass ethos that has embraced the idea that one is entitled merely by wanting it to fame, fortune and the good life. At least the reasonable Christian Right knows that the good life is built on a foundation of values, not on the sand of easy money, power and fame.  

Hedges calls himself a Luddite and this might explain why he is, himself, so out of touch with some of the emerging dynamics that might temper his pessimism about America's future. The pollster John Zogby, in his fascinating book, The Way We'll Be, suggests (by implication) that Mr. Hedges' doom and gloom does not mirror the changing landscape of American political culture.

On the contrary, he suggests that:

• millions of Americans, including many of us conservatives, are mindful of waste and the need to be better stewards of the environment and our own health;
• many young people agree that the pursuit of money for its own sake is an empty ambition;
• evangelicals, in fact, are far more moderate than the left/liberal media would have you believe;
• technology, for all its downside, is empowering people to act more independently, no longer beholden to media, government and corporate elites;
• Americans, right or wrong, are increasingly open to more global approaches to critical challenges, from the environment to terrorism – but whether the rest of the world is truly committed is a matter Hedges and other opponents of American unilateralism rarely address.

No, Mr. Hedges is an alarmist, and as a consequence is not a reliable witness even if some of his concerns deserve serious reflection. (He reminds me of Lewis Lapham and Mencken in that regard.) There are others who address these issues less hysterically and more fairly: Christopher Lasch, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry, John Diggins and Rod Dreher come immediately to mind.

Read Mr. Hedges at your own risk, for you might be tempted to down a happy pill once he begins his assault on the human condition.