The Collapse of America

Long before Donald Trump was dreaming of a White House with gold walls, back when the world’s hugest Twitter account was in its infancy, promoting a blustery businessman’s appearances on late-night television, the American journalist and author Chris Hedges was already lamenting the collapse of his country. As Americans celebrated their first black president, Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter as well as a Presbyterian minister, published 2009’s Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. His follow-up, Wages of Rebellion (2015), laid out the inevitability of revolt in the age of the Occupy movement and Arab Spring. His books skirt traditional left and right divisions, bringing a clear eye and righteous rage to his nation’s political and social ills. In the latest, America: The Farewell Tour, as befits the times, his arguments have taken on a fevered urgency.

As a novelist, critic, and, for the past four years...