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[Hedges here uses "liberal class" to describe what I've been calling
the "political class" (traditional since G. Mosca a century ago). Of
course neither of us is using the word in Marx' sense, where class =
roughly a group who have the same role in the process of production.
"Liberal class" here means a privileged segment of the working class
(= those who have to give up control over their work of head and
hands in order to eat regularly), almost an "aristocracy of labor"
as Lenin uses it in<i> Imperialism</i>.] <br>
<br>
"...The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers
toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did
nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working
class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced ... The liberal class
... failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long
night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege
and comfort in the corporate state ... the disparity between the
rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted
totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites,
including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule ...
the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should
be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and
their presence has no influence on power ... Liberals decry ... the
refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the
looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators,
but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the
interests of the corporate state ... But the uselessness of the
liberal class is not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who
suffer the awful indignities of the corporate state ... liberals
become as despised as the power elite they serve ... We have been
robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of
capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state.
Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by
skillful publicists to shout inanities like "Yes we can!' ... The
liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place
by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange
for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press,
the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the
Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain
their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their
purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what
cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even
more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls
now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents."<br>
<br>
The World Liberal Opportunists Made<br>
Posted on Oct 25, 2010<br>
By Chris Hedges<br>
<br>
The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make
sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a
collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal
institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor
unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being
expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated
liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate
assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is
not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which
continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and
issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal
values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for
its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The
virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of
the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry. <br>
<br>
The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform
possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the
Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible
the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided
legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of
African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class,
in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but
empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so
efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the
Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant.
It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of
Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent
underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values
and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal
class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a
legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in
universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging
to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an
apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by
the corporate state.<br>
<br>
Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these
rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human
history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power
become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and
privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded.
Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their
revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more
than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed
at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost
real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the
liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press
or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even
respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a
class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French
aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the
rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be
tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their
presence has no influence on power. <br>
<br>
The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our
democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate
apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we
cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators
and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means
there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal
through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals’
disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the
working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of
traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal
democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are
responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically,
reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are
busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces
hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger
toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause
that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle
class.<br>
<br>
The corporate state has failed to grasp the vital role the liberal
class traditionally plays in sustaining a stable power system. The
corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a
closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the
name of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state
institutions so that government becomes even more ineffectual and
despised. The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the
death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new
class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers,
historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically
fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist
movements. These movements rise to prominence by ridiculing and
taunting the liberal class for its weakness, hypocrisy and
uselessness. The promises of these proto-fascist movements are
fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class
are grounded in truth. <br>
<br>
The liberal class, despite becoming an object of public scorn, still
prefers the choreographed charade. Liberals decry, for example, the
refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the
looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators,
but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the
interests of the corporate state. As long as the charade of
democratic participation is played, the liberal class does not have
to act. It can maintain its privileged status. It can continue to
live in a fictional world where democratic reform and responsible
government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the
corridors of power. But the uselessness of the liberal class is not
lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the awful
indignities of the corporate state.<br>
<br>
The death of the liberal class cuts citizens off from the mechanisms
of power. Liberal institutions such as the church, the press, the
university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions once set
the parameters for limited self-criticism and small, incremental
reforms and offered hope for piecemeal justice and change. The
liberal class could decry the excesses of the state, work to
mitigate them and champion basic human rights. It posited itself as
the conscience of the nation. It permitted the nation, through its
appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define itself as
being composed of a virtuous and even noble people. The liberal
class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy because it
also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who
openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced
a political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real
enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam
Chomsky.<br>
<br>
The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as
well as iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The
liberal class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold
thought, from those forces and thinkers who could have prevented the
liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. Liberals
exude a tepid idealism utterly divorced from daily life. And this is
why every television clip of Barack Obama is so palpably pathetic.<br>
<br>
Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class
warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political
rights for the working class, have been transformed into
domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class. Cars rolling
out of the Ford and GM plants in Michigan were said to have been
made by Ford-UAW. And where unions still exist, they have been
reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of
unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class
weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday and Social
Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political
science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology
of unregulated capitalism and globalization. They have no new ideas.
Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely
self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense. The
Democratic Party and the press have become courtiers to the power
elite and corporate servants.<br>
<br>
Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy
inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor
unions are reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and
benefits, once public education is gutted and the press no longer
gives a voice to the poor and the working class, liberals become as
despised as the power elite they serve. The collapse of liberal
institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped,
with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in
desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least
understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.<br>
<br>
The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have
the moral autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The
rebels, from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been
marginalized, shut out of the national debate and expelled from
liberal institutions. The liberal class lacks members with the
vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies.
It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a
Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle
including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy,
a robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil
liberties, job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the
poor.<br>
<br>
“The left once dismissed the market as exploitative,” Russell Jacoby
writes. “It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left
once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as
rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as
courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected
pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are
witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and
perhaps inversion.”<br>
<br>
Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as
a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in
public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett,
George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and
celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest
moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as
it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as
the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we
do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary
to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without
demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic
response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists
to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”<br>
<br>
The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives
will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward
despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to
confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the
ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within
its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten
quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve
corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance
into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor
movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of
irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the
corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the
unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless
and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of
moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our
most perfidious opponents.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/</a><br>
<br>
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.<br>
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.<br>
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