Brilliant analysis

May 18, 2026

Chris Hedges can be seen as a modern day exemplar of the parade of great civilisational thinkers from Polybius in Ancient Rome to Oswald Spengler in the 19th Century to Peter Turchin and Jarad Diamond in the Twentieth Century who have set out the inevitability of civilisational decline.

Hedges’ wonderfully analytical mind has distilled this line of intellectual thought into a coruscating prediction of the currently evolving fall of the US empire. Nearly all of these prophets have focused upon severe economic inequality, weakened social cohesion, unchecked elite competition, unsustainable resource use and a loss of the ability to adapt and reform. These have ineluctably led to vast corruption, criminality, religious fanaticism and indiscriminate violence by the elites, which Hedges so presciently describes in the US.

Those elites will, and have done, everything possible to silence the voices of such people. It is up to all of us to prevent the silencing of these voices if we are to survive in any recognisable civilisational form.