[Peace-discuss] The Left on Liberals

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This piece is making the rounds of those who consider themselves Left as 
opposed to Liberal.  It risks sounding like what one local liberal sniffs at as 
"prolier than thou," but it does suggest what the differences are.  --CGE]

	Liberals Are Useless
	Posted on Dec 7, 2009
	By Chris Hedges

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge 
our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for 
candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They 
insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and 
a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of 
the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the 
ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads 
them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral 
posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal 
class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is 
going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my 
case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an 
organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? 
Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a 
brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully 
packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would 
much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected 
nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is 
what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met 
Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the 
way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you 
don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war 
demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. 
And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the 
dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There 
is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression 
in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people 
dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of 
communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that 
know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when 
there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess 
I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in 
Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their 
cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come 
to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other 
forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to 
affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too 
refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice 
does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but 
neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is 
not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt 
liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up 
for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should 
have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And 
it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services 
Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent 
the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the 
Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not 
enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end 
torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or 
halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The 
imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The 
state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan 
as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich 
the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses 
to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end 
our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums 
of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what 
point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if 
we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and 
integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, 
as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to 
hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was 
the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks 
picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the 
rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a 
revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 
minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being 
warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not 
like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We 
fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like 
Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They 
worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of 
them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing 
through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would 
joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who 
abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high 
school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across 
the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to 
feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals 
at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in 
good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are 
qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under 
stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to 
those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a 
bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here 
we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. 
We are.

Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph 
of Spectacle,” will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across 
the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the 
withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/