Predicting things will fall apart is easy, but predicting when is hard. Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, thinks we’ve already entered the collapse phase.

In the U.S., we have myriad problems that increasingly seem unfixable from the inside: gerrymandering, Citizens United, corporatocracy, institutionalized racism, income inequality. You know, gerrymandering might be the most frustrating of them all, since you can’t remedy the rest with entrenched leadership.

Elias Isquith of Salon just interviewed Hedges, who asserts that a revolutionary movement in America would have global stakes. “When we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us,” the author says, making clear what he believes would happen if our society runs aground.

The Q&A’s opening exchange:

Question:

Do you think we are in a revolutionary era now? Or is it more something on the horizon?

Chris Hedges:

It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place.

That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about. He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil. So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean. And the facade of power — both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power — appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility.

There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that. Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place — especially in terms of internal security — have no popularity at all.

All of these are indicators that something is seriously wrong, that the government is no longer responding to the most basic concerns, needs, and rights of the citizenry. That is [true for the] left and right. But what’s going to take it’s place, that has not been articulated. Yes, we are in a revolutionary moment; but maybe it’s a better way to describe it as a revolutionary process.•