Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. His point of view and things is Marxist although he himself is not a Marxist and things. In 2010 he published Death of the Liberal Class. As for foreign policy Hedges, who lived in the Middle East for many years, is fluent in Arabic, and has read the Koran, anyone familiar with the region knew that, contrary to Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertions, U.S. soldiers invading Iraq would not be greeted as liberators, “that the oil revenues would never pay for the reconstruction, and that democracy was not going to be implanted in Baghdad and radiate outward across the Middle East.”
The following are my highlights of what I found the most significant in the book.
Late Nineteenth Century
The late nineteenth century was the pinnacle of liberal activism and ideas. Workers organized, there were campaigns for women’s rights, “universal education, housing for the poor, public health campaigns, and socialism.” World War 1 destroyed human beings faith in their fellow human beings. It consolidated state and corporate control of the country. “It created mass culture, fostered through the consumer society the cult of the self, led the nation into an era of permanent war, and used fear and mass propaganda to cow citizens and silence independent and radical voices within the liberal class.”
Early Twentieth Century
“The social demands of unions in the early twentieth century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday, and Social Security, have been abandoned.” It is common now for universities, commercial artists, and self-help gurus (Oprah Winfrey).
“The repeated anti-Red purges of the twentieth-century United States, during and after both World Wars, and continuously from the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, were carried out in the name of anticommunism, but in reality proved to be devastating blows to popular social movements.”
Before the United States entered World War I it was living with the consequences of the Civil War, pacifism. William Jennings Bryan and others “championed” pacifism and argued that the U.S. stay out of the suicidal First World War.
Before the First World War Americans elected “populists and reformers.” After the war, the propaganda which switched American political thought “not only bolstered support for the war - including among progressives and intellectuals - but also discredited dissidents and reformers as traitors.”
“The war, sold with simple slogans such as the war to end all wars or the war to make the world safe for democracy, did not so much emasculate intellectuals, artists, and progressives as seduce them. . . . The nation descended into a collective war madness.”
Throughout this corporate coup scholars succumbed to “slight the research and to slant the advocacy for reasons either of personal career or of political or bureaucratic opportunity.”
“Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917, which criminalized not only espionage but also speech deemed critical of the government.”
“No other president in American history did more to damage the independence and freedom of the press, or set back the cause of social reform, than Wilson.”
President Wilson appointed George Creel to be get the U.S. mentally prepared for war. As head of the Committee for Public Information (CPI) he corralled the newspapers giving them propaganda packaged as news releases manipulating public opinion. Patriotism of those who opposed the war was questioned.
This propaganda practice is based on the works of such thinkers as Sigmund Freud and his son-in-law Edward Bernays, who founded the field of advertising and public relations.
The Liberal Class
Anger and betrayal are the words Hedges uses to explain the frustration of millions of Americans. These feelings “spring from the failure of the liberal class over the past three decades to protect the minimal interests of the working and middle class as corporations dismantled the democratic state, decimated the manufacturing sector, looted the U.S. Treasury, waged imperial wars that can neither be afforded nor won, and gutted basic laws that protected the interests of ordinary citizens.” Thus, the liberal class is out of touch and refuses to defy the corporate assault.” This leaves the far right of American politics an opening to be the answer for common peoples problems.
We now have a myth of “democratic liberalism.” The liberal class promotes “electoral politics and constitutional reform instead of serious actions to reign in the corporations and the government. Liberals rely on laws for change but fail to recognize that those can be changes just as easily as they can be passed.
This all began with the election of Ronald Reagan. The corporate state overwhelmed the liberal class as the “liberals did not protest the stripping away of the country’s manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs.”
“Fear is a potent weapon in the hands of the power elite. The fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism, was used to suspend civil liberties, including freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and the right to organize-values the liberal class claims to support. In the name of anticommunism, the capitalist class, terrified of the numerous labor strikes following World War II, rammed through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, culminating with a congressional override of President Harry Truman’s veto. It was the most destructive legislative blow to the working class until NAFTA. It was fear that in 2001 allowed the state to push through the Patriot Act, practice extraordinary rendition, and establish offshore penal colonies where we torture detainees stripped of their rights. Fear led us to embrace the endless wars in the Middle East. Fear allowed us to stand meekly by as Wall Street helped itself to billions of taxpayer dollars. The timidity of the liberal class leaves it especially prone to manipulation.”
After World War II an unofficial blacklist of supposed communists in government and society was created. Hollywood writers, actors and directors, journalists, union leaders, former Vice President Henry Wallace and other government employees, teachers. “The purge was done with the collaboration of the liberal class. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), for example, backed the witch hunts.”
The dismissal of suspected communists from their jobs throughout the United States were done mostly without hearings. “They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their profession.”
“Henry Wallace, who ran for president as a third- party candidate . . . in 1948 and had been Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, was subjected to a vicious assault by the press and the liberal establishment. Wallace was discredited and finally exiled from political life as a communist sympathizer. The complicity of the liberal class was, in part, a product of insecurity, especially since many reformers and liberals had flirted with communism during the Depression, given the breakdown of capitalism in those years. But it was also the product of craven careerism and desire for prestige and comfort.”
“The liberal class is expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses while studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures.”
Their embrace of Transcendental Meditation, Hare Krishna, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching “would have dismayed the Wobblies or the militants in the old Communist Party. . . . There was no political vision. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, with its narrator’s search for enlightenment, became emblematic of the moral hollowness of the New Left. . . . The political and moral void within the counterculture meant it was an easy transition from college radical to a member of the liberal class.”
The liberal class abandonment of the working class and its embrace of corporations “will soon give way to a systems collapse.”
The liberal response to the election of Ronald Reagan was awful. The did not “protest the stripping away of the country’s manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs. . . . . They busied themselves with the boutique activism of political correctness.”
It was the white liberals who, with nothing else to do as the “oppressed” began to speak for themselves, created the “political correctness movement. The inane brilliance of this was that, by inventing disadvantaged groups, nobody could say that they didn’t have the right to speak for them.”
Taft-Hartley Act
Unions, following the Taft-Hartley model, “remained virulently anticommunist, spoke in the language of militarism and the Cold War, and were largely unsympathetic to the civil rights and antiwar movements.”
Hedges asks how could such a man be admired and carry such influence when there had been such a struggle over the decades by the working class for the right to organize, “have decent wages and the forty-hour week. How was it possible to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which, in one deft move, emasculated the labor movement?”
Militant unions were attacked but anticommunist unions remained. Those anticommunists unions abandoned class struggle and “collaborated with the capitalist class and merged with the liberal establishment.”
Academia
Chris Hedges who I am reading is a leftist. And he writes that academia became dominated by the “charade of protest” and the “charade of radical analysis.”
These theorists invested their energy in multiculturalism, with branches such as femnist studies, queer studies, and African American studies. . . . . multiculturalism, rather than leading to a critique of structures and systems that consciously excluded the poor and the marginal, became an in itself.”
“Political debate was replaced by multicultural discourse. Public values were subordinated to tortuous textual analysis. There was nothing worth investigating, these postculturalists insisted, outside of the text. . . . They wrap ideas in a language so obscure, so abstract, so preoccupied with arcane theory that the uninitiated cannot understand what they write. They make not attempt to reach a wider audience or enrich h public life. . . . they have produced nothing of substance or worth. . . . so much academic jargon that it is unreadable.”
The New Left
The 1960s protests Hedges found hedonistic and worshipped the “cult of the self that corrupted earlier twentieth-century counterculture movements.” The anti-war protesters and the American working class split as the former had college deferments and the the latter went to Vietnam.
As a result the New Left looked to third world revolutionary movements for inspiration. The labor movement, including the workers, “they considered bought off by capitalism.” As the New Left and the Black Panthers diverged form the American working class they became enamored with the violence promoted by Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky. They also followed the Beat generation which disrespected “authority [and] focused on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment.” This included the use of hallucinogenic drugs.
“The New Left of the 1960s turned out to be a mirage. . . . it existed in a historical vacuum. The counterculture of the 1960s, although it attracted a wide following a the height of the Vietnam War, never replicated the power of the Popular Front of 1930s, which had included the working class and mixed social, labor, and political movements. . . . Protests did not challenge corporate power but were media spectacles.”
Ralph Nader
The attack on Ralph Nader who began his public career as an honored consumer advocate is illustrative of the power of corporate America and “the complicity of the liberal class in our disempowerment.” By the time Reagan was elected “the government was firmly in the hands of corporations” who did not care about the facts Nader and others presented.
Further criticism of Nader circulated around that he lost the 2000 election for Al Gore. But it was “fraud by the Republican Party” and “an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party” that lost the election, for both Nader and Gore. Nader argued that there were few differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats went along with Bush’s war in Iraq. “They stood by as Bush stacked the judiciary with “Christian” ideologues. . . . They permitted American children to get fleeced by No Child Left Behind. They did not protest when Federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudoscience about creationism, reproductive rights, and homosexuality. . . . strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act . . . and thrust impoverish Americans aside through passage of a corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. And then the Democrats helped transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street.
Nader points out the “the system is broken. . . . After Unsafe At Any Speed” came out in 1965 “it took only nine months for the Federal Government to regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Three years after the collapse of Bear Stearns, however, there is no adequate financial reform.”
“The corporate media, which abet out vast historical amnesia, do nothing to remind us how we got here.”
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King said, “The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness.”
King would be attacked by some of his associates and of course the liberal class for his anti violent message because he stated that the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” is America.
President Richard M. Nixon
“Once Richard Nixon began to use illegal tactics against the liberal establishment, the commercial press fought back.”
The collective and accumulative history of working class rebellion and resistance was ignored by the press. In addition, the power elite “colluded with Richard Nixon to crush McGovern in the 1972 presidential election.”
I.F. “Izzy” Stone
It was I.F. “Izzy” Stone who in his I.F. Stone’s Weekly, challenged the official American orthodoxy about the Vietnam War. He began by noting that “one bullet embedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the . . . attacks took place.” In addition, he found in a State Department publication meant to justify the expansion of the war that in the early 1960s only 179 of 7,500 weapons “captured from the Vietcong came from the Soviet bloc. The remainder . . . came from U.S. arms provided to the South Vietnamese.”
Howard Zinn
“Howard Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.”
Noam Chomsky
Quoting Noam Chomsky as saying, “No one wants to say it anymore, but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing.”
The Media
The media is intimated to cooperate with the government and corporate America in relation to war and thus, creating a “culture of permanent war. In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, there were many credible critics, including former U.N. inspectors such as Hans Blix, who questioned the lies use to justify the invasion and occupation, but the media refused to include independent voices. . . . Liberals are reduced to arguing over tactics.”
“There are more African American men behind bars than in college. . . . The cell block has replaced the auction block.”
The powers that be in the United States have purposely designed “prisons and urban ghettos” to control African Americans. But the liberals speak of a “postracial America.”
Obama
“Obama seduced by power and prestige, is more interested in courting the corporate rich than in saving the disenfranchised.” An executive he admired was the president of FedEx who is a union-buster. He maneuvered Congress into passing a law “banning the Teamsters Union from organizing workers at FedEx.”
Conclusion
Hedges opposes violence as the kind he saw in the former Yugoslavia as it disintegrated because “it always results in the brutal sacrifice of innocents and the destruction of the culture and traditions that make us human.”
Hedges believes that democracy is “designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted to serve the status quo. The abject failure of activists and the liberal class to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism, or to build a humane policy toward the world’s poor stems from an inability to face these new configurations of power.”
Despite being promoted as a democratic dream the Internet actually accelerates “our division into antagonistic clans, where we are sucked into virtual tribal groups that chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies.”
Interviewing Martha Hennessy, the famed activist Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, who said, The heartlessness was introduced by Reagan. Clinton put it into place. Clinton put it into place. . . . Americans have retreated into collective narcissism. . . . There are more elements of fascism in place than there were in the 1930s.”
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