HEDGES: Now, I should add that in American society we have a long tradition of extremist vigilante right-wing violence, which can be categorized as fascist, where you fuse the language and iconography of the state with the Christian religion, where you demonize the vulnerable--Muslims, undocumented workers, homosexuals, intellectuals, liberals, feminists--they have a long list of people they hate. And those are powerful forces within American society.

The left has been destroyed, especially the radical left, quite consciously in the whole name of anti-communism, and The Death of the Liberal Class really explains the destruction of those movements. But those movements were important, because as Howard Zinn points out in the People's History of the United States, they opened up the democratic space. The people who founded this country were slaveholding, white, male oligarchs who were terrified--and you can see it in the Federalist Papers--of any kind of popular democracy, and so that all of the advances within American society and, you know, within the industrialized world--we had the bloodiest, deadliest labor wars of any country. Hundreds of workers were killed. Thousands were wounded. The violence was quite brutal and quite extreme.

And so you saw with the abolitionists, with the labor movement, with the suffragists, even with the civil rights movement, movements outside the power structure condemned as radical that forced a liberal elite to respond and open up space. Now the radical movements are gone and destroyed. And more importantly, the liberal institutions have been disemboweled to serve corporate interests.

So the result is that we as citizens have through the traditional structures of power been left powerless to respond. The only hope left is to get out in the street and build the kind of mass movements that I saw in countries like East Germany, where you had half a million people showing up in Alexanderplatz in East Berlin or half a million people showing up in the streets of Prague in Wenceslas Square during the Velvet Revolution, which I also covered. I'm not even--I'm not going to--I'm not naive enough to tell you it's going to work, but appealing to the better nature of the Democratic Party, I can assure you is not going to work.

JAY: But doesn't this mass movement need some kind of electoral strategy? Otherwise you wind up in a situation, don't you, like what happened in Egypt, where Mubarak falls but there is no electoral strategy of the left in any place, so it's the Muslim Brotherhood that winds up--.

HEDGES: No. I've covered totalitarian states all over the world, and they all have elections.