While he presents the election of Donald Trump as a symptom of the country’s troubles, he places blame equally on both parties, claiming that the Democrats have betrayed the working and middle classes. Convinced that without radical change, the U.S. will only last one to two decades before a complete collapse, he lays out a revolutionary solution that some will decry as socialism while others will endorse for its commitment to justice. This is an exceedingly dark, passionate, and provocative book, certain to arouse controversy but offering a point of view that needs to be heard.

In his current book, Hedges raises provocative questions. Has the destructive aspect of capitalism reached a tipping point? ... Hedges’ answer consists of a grim doubling down ... Traditional institutions of liberalism, including the Democratic Party, are, in Hedges’ view, hopelessly corrupted ... Insofar as Hedges holds out any hope, it is through local community organizing and groups like Black Lives Matter. For the most part, however, the prospects for the country are bleak ... Both righteous and self-righteous, Hedges is addicted to fire and brimstone. A Jeremiah preaching eternal damnation, he is adding to the already crowded shelf of American narratives of decline.

Hedges portrays this nightmarish situation as the fulfillment of Karl Marx’s prediction of the eventual end of capitalism. This vision of capitalism’s demise is slightly puzzling, given that in his account, capitalism seems to be steamrollering everything in its path. But he argues that all this winning is only serving to make clear capitalism’s fundamental hollowness and deceit, which represent the seeds of its ultimate destruction ... The most engaging parts of the book are the searing portraits he presents of individuals victimized in six arenas that he explores in detail: drug addiction, pornography, gambling, the criminal justice system, extremist groups and the search for meaningful, well-paid work. He takes the reader inside these issues in ways that are often telling and memorable, and sheds light on a variety of troubled U.S. cities ... Yet this exploration of American society is unrelieved in its negativism ... he demonizes his political opponents and invokes black-and-white dichotomies with a cringe-worthy lack of self-reflection ... He evinces a relatively simplistic vision for economic revival ... the reader is left not just reeling from the unrelieved darkness of the verdict against capitalism but wondering about some basic questions.

Pulitzer-prize winning author Chris Hedges argues that America’s ruling elites have rigged the system and neutered government controls so as to aggrandize their profits while immiserating nearly everyone else. Other authors have reached similar conclusions while pouring over statistics and writing op-eds in their ivory towers. But Hedges has gone where despair and hate penetrate everyone and everything—from boarded-up factories and porn studios to bankrupted Trump casinos ... The views of Chris Hedges reflect not only the experiences of a well-traveled journalist and war correspondent (who covered violence in Central America, Sudan, Palestine, East Germany, and Yugoslavia) but also his close reading of scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Pankaj Mishra. Each chapter is backed by dozens of citations ... Hedges sides with Rosa Luxemburg (assassinated in Germany in 1919) against Lenin. As she warned, revolutions from above end in tyranny. But then Hedges writes that Lenin 'to achieve power in the 1917 revolution, was forced to follow her advice, abandoning many of his most doctrinaire ideas to respond to the life force of Russian Revolution itself' ... This kind of distortion—not a black on white falsehood—should lead readers to take other sweeping statements with more than one grain of salt.

In America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges is trying to rally the troops to salvation. But his heart doesn’t seem in it. Rather, the mood of his writing conveys a hopelessness, an inevitability, a remorse, a despair much like the early pages of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant post-apocalyptic The Road ... In summary, the prophetic America: The Farewell Tour reads like an obituary: 'The United States of America, born in 1776, dies after a long illness.' If Hedges is right, a country once the pride of liberty is about to become the world’s largest gravesite. And where does that leave us?

Hedges is ticked off, as ever, and here he is in full-tilt righteous indignation, making it clear that it’s not just Christians who are awaiting the apocalypse. Hedges limns an America whose economy is presupposed on mindless consumption and permanent war, in which the rich are now busily honoring Karl Marx’s prediction that in the end times, 'the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it' ... Where he uses hard data...Hedges is nearly unassailable. Where he relies on mere rhetoric, as in a rather strange disquisition on sex work, sadism, and capitalism, he’s less satisfying. His breadth of reference, however, is refreshing, drawing on the likes of Plato, Émile Durkheim, and Eric Voegelin—and lots of Marx—for reinforcement. While often an exercise in preaching to the choir, the book is also a fiery sermon that weighs the nation and finds it wanting.