[Peace-discuss] The World Liberal Opportunists Made

Thu Oct 28 23:10:12 CDT 2010

[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/Imperialism/.]

"...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."

     The World Liberal Opportunists Made
     Posted on Oct 25, 2010
     By Chris Hedges

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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!"

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.

  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/

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