In the video interview below, Chris Hedges talks to Ralph Nader about our current fascist dilemma, and how we got here. He recounts his years and his successes as a consumer advocate, successes he owed in large part to a reasonably functioning democracy with the guardrails still in place. He emphasizes that democracy can only survive if there are viable opposing parties. That all began to change and deteriorate when (under Clinton) the Democratic Party started competing with the GOP for the largesse of Wall Street. The financial sector, not the working class, became the most important constituency of the Democratic Party. The two parties became (at least in terms of their constituencies and the interests they served) what he calls a “duopoly.”

Here’s an excerpt of his talk, his words:

“The Democratic party not only is wallowing in corporate PAC money, they have contracted out their campaigns to corporate conflicted political and media consultants who raised the money, developed the strategy … and blocked us from input into the Democratic party at the national, state and local level. And that that blockage kept the Democratic Party from taking the most obvious positions that could have won easily the House, Senate and the Presidency last year.

“For example, they could have made a big deal out of a frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25. That’s 25 million workers would get a raise to 15 bucks an hour. And they didn’t do it. Kamala Harris just made a throwaway line. They didn’t listen to Bernie Sanders. For example, they could have increased benefits of Social Security, which have been frozen for 50 years. Instead, they said we protect Social Security as it is now. That’s 65 million people would have gotten higher Social Security benefits. They could have defeated the Republicans on the child tax credit extension. 61 million kids from conservative and liberal families were getting an average of $300 a month … and they didn’t do that.

“Instead Kamala Harris sent her brother-in-law to to Wall Street to talk to Goldman Sachs and corporate law firms to advise her on her economic and tax policy. And her her most memorable phrase is “opportunity economy.” Well, that really spells specifics to put food on people’s table. So basically the Democratic party owes America a huge apology in maybe 10 installments, of how they sabotaged the only party that could have saved the Republic from the fascism and the corporatism and the militarism of the GOP.

“Instead the Democratic party became part of the problem. They also were militaristic. They were corporatised. And they weren’t all that great in terms of opening the channels of government to civic input. And so they had an autocratic dimension as well.”

VIDEO INTERVIEW: How the Media Walked us into Autocracy (w/ Ralph Nader) | The Chris Hedges Report