Chris Hedges "Death of the Liberal Class"

thank you oh this is the first time I've spoken about this book which is not for sale you should get it at your hopefully you have a local independent bookstore go to Amazon of the last resort please and I'll tell you a little bit about the genesis of the book because it's sort of indicative of where we are as a country I had written a column about how the internet was not going to save us that the death of newsprint like the decline in the publishing industry indicated a shift from a print based culture to an image based culture and that with that shift we weren't just transferring systems of information into a new medium we were recreating the way we communicate that the dialogue with Indian image based culture is radically different from the kind of dialogue or conversation we have within a print based culture I spent almost two decades as a newspaper reporter fifteen of them with the New York Times and the process by which you report and present information in print requires one to go out to investigate to interview to write to organize information that information is edited and fact-checked the lies that the commercial media tells you is primarily are primarily the lies of omission that was not true of course in the lead up to the Iraq war it wasn't true in terms of the financial meltdown which none of the major papers managed to get a handle on beforehand because they were all running off an interviewing Robert Rubin its Citibank or officials at Goldman Sachs who they'd gone to college with or this kind of stuff but it is radically different from an image based culture which is primarily emotion driven that and most of the images that are disseminated throughout our culture are skillfully put together and disseminated by for-profit corporations so that we are made - or we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge which is precisely how we ended up with Barack Obama the knopf which of course like all of these large publishing houses is owned by a transnational corporation asked me to write a book on the press the advance wasn't I live off of my advances the advance was pretty low I said no and then while giving a talk at the Ford Foundation they said they would kick in money for me to do it it was a bad idea I learned it as a writer never write about somebody else's idea so I proceeded to produce this manuscript and turn it in on time on the press and when Knopf got it they were horrified because it exposed the rot within the commercial media the complicity of the commercial media with the power elite and all of the things they won't write about all of the things they won't tell you and the editor called me up and said that they didn't like it and but that was all right they would help me take out all the negativity all the negativity would be removed and then Knopf would happily publish it and what they wanted was a mythic version of the press the without fear or favor America's a great investigative and and truth-telling enterprise of journalism is collapsing under the onslaught of declining circulation declining ad revenues and American democracy will be irreparably damaged now I share with them the feeling that the loss of a print-based media will be deeply damaging but I was not about to mythologize an institution that I know intimately and know far better than any editor at Knopf and so I frantically called nation books and asked them to to buy out the the advance which they did moved it and and then reconfigured the entire book because what I had done was right about one pillar of the liberal establishment the press and its collapse but what I realized in the process of writing that was that all of the pillars of the liberal establishment have collapsed and the cultural and political consequences for us are catastrophic the liberal Church I grew up in Schoharie New York not very far from here my father had five churches I used to go he used to consolidate two of the churches but he would preach the same sermon three times every Sunday and I would go with him and in between services grill him about what he had said for 20 minutes the the liberal Church the universities the press labor culture which is of course been corporatized and a Democratic Party have all failed us they continued to espouse or speak in the rhetoric of liberal values but what they do and the Alliance's that they have made have essentially removed them from traditional liberalism and turn them into collaborators with the corporate state and with the forces that have made war against liberal values and so I broaden the book to include all of the pillars of the liberal establishment and speak the name of the book is the death of the liberal class and speak about what's happened within our society and I reach all the way back to World War one when I think it began I draw a lot on a great anarchist writer who if you haven't read I highly recommend Dwight MacDonald and that certainly the height of American movements of progressivism of socialism within this country was right on the eve of World War one publications like Appeal to Reason the masses had a huge circulation a million people voted for the socialist candidate Eugene Debs powerful labor unions like the Wobblies CIO big bill Haywood writers Upton Sinclair muckrakers like Ida Tarbell or Ida Wells or these were incredible figures and they married a sense of justice and a sense of compassion for the weak within the society too powerful movements including movements within the liberal Church formed around the social gospel which was articulated by Walter Raja Bush the war World War One essentially ended that the war was not a popular war Wilson had actually run for his second term on the with the saying that he had kept us out of the war but of course the bankers which had given tremendous loans to France and Britain where terrified that should the Germans win the war these loans would never be repaid so there was an impetus to push America into the conflict Wilson complied and he created essentially the first system of modern mass propaganda under the Creole Commission the committee for Public Information led by a former muckraking journalist named George creel who would end his days by the way working for Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon and not surprising and and what they did was saturate the country through radio print graphic art film they had a film division you know the Beast the Kaiser so there was a film something named roughly something like that and they turned the country now they build their propaganda off of the at that time the new studies of Freud laboum Trotter and others who understood that people were not actually moved or compelled to act by reason but by the manipulation of emotion and all of the people from the creel Commission including Edward Bernays moved immediately after World War one to Madison Avenue began working not only for government but for corporations and that is when in American society we instilled consumption as a kind of inner compulsion and we created this concept of permanent war we were we demonized the Hun but the moment the war was over we demonized the red the Communists and it's interesting that the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act which were passed during the war as essentially a way to protect America from internal enemies was used immediately after the war to go after the remnants of progressive movements survived the war and the repression was fierce during the war and that's how you got Emma Goldman and everybody deported to Russia that's how you got appealed to reason being shut down and and we embarked on a period that had not been foreseen or understood by social theorists political theorists in the 19th century including Karl Marx this concept of permanent war of permanent fear of that need to constantly be vigilant within your own organizations within your own society for forces that were going to disrupt or destroy American democracy and what happened of course and it's really the history of the 20th century is that the liberal class proved to be most complicitous in turning on those within their own organizations who were deemed to be anti-communist many of them of course were not communists when thinks of figures like I of stone would be a good example big bill Haywood the leader of the Wobblies who had to spend the last ten years of his life as a refugee and the Soviet Union these figures who had moral autonomy and the courage to stand up for the working men and women and of course the people who were most adept at using these these witch hunts were the careerists the people who had the least sort of moral focus the most self-centered the most Craven and the liberal organizations in essence began to consume their own they began to consume the best within themselves you had a breakdown of American capitalism in the 1930s you had a resurgence a brief resurgence of the progressive movement many people in the 30s either were involved or at least flirted with communism because capitalism clearly had not worked when the capitalist society began again - courtesy of the Second World War to create a kind of stability they immediately turned on the remnants of that progressive movement which is how people like Henry Wallace who had been Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president ran as a populist the last politician we really had who stood up and he was not a communist who stood up against the war machine who stood for the rights of workers who denounced the excesses of capitalism he was completely discredited and by the propaganda machine and and essentially exiled from the political establishment and immediately after the war we had a series of draconian measures including the taft-hartley Act 1947 1948 which was the single most devastating piece of legislation to the American working class and has never been repealed by the way until maybe NAFTA courtesy of Bill Clinton so the liberal class plays a curious function in a capitalist democracy and it's essentially this they provide a kind of safety valve a mechanism by which reform is possible so that when you have a period of immense discontent and one can look at the 1930s or one can look at the 1960s there are channels within the established power structure by which this discontent can be expressed which is how we got the New Deal it's how we got civil rights legislation and the liberal class at the same time and the reason that it is it given the positions of relative privilege that it has within the society serves to discredit radicals serves to discredit people who question the virtues of the capitalists or the corporate state I mean a good example would be there was a retrospective ten years after the Vietnam War where they had brought generals former generals who said well if we just fought the war harder we could have won and then they brought sort of James chase and other members of the liberal establishment who said well we meant to do well we went in there to try and bring democracy to Vietnam but it didn't work it wasn't going to work and and what you get in both narratives in essence and this is of course what why the liberal class is tolerated is that no one questions the virtues of those who carry out the enterprise itself you saw the same thing you'll see the same thing with retrospectives on the Iraq war where people will say we weren't prepared for the insurgency or we didn't have enough troops for the occupation but the liberal class is not allowed to attack the motivations of those who propel us into war we know that's just a window into the function of the liberal class in return the liberal class first of all is given positions of relative economic privilege in terms of their positions within universities as clergy as members of labor unions who don't speak of transforming American society but is working as junior partners with corporations within the arts I mean the arts have been completely corporatized in the same way that higher education has been corporate and the Democratic Party the problem is that with the march of the corporate state the rise of the corporate state which began with Reagan in earnest with the deregulation and the destruction of antitrust laws was accelerated by Bill Clinton certainly the greatest traitor to the American working class ever produced by the Democratic Party the Clinton understood that if he did corporate bidding in terms of structuring the economy he could get corporate money he understood or he thought that workers and unions had nowhere else to go they'd have to vote Democratic anyway and so complaintants conscious goal was to attract corporate money and and carry out in return the passage of draconian legislation which has thrust a knife into the back of the American working class NAFTA 1994 the Welfare Reform Act 1996 the financial services Modernization Act of 1999 you know Canada doesn't have a banking crisis because Canada didn't remove the firewalls between commercial and investment banks they didn't allow local banks to become hedge funds and and in return corporations began to give money to the Democratic Party so that by the 1990s the Democrats had fundraising parity with the Republicans now this essentially killed the liberal class because traditional liberal values both in terms of a defense of civil liberties a defense of the working class a a belief that you know those who had fallen on hard times whether unemployed or others should be given resources to help them sustain themselves and in times of difficulty they spoke continued to speak in this language but we're carrying out ruthless policies which was creating immense amounts of suffering in the very constituencies that they claimed to defend and I think that when you look at that shift among the working class which really moved all masse away from the Democratic Party one can see an immense erosion following NAFTA and and so we end up with a Democratic Party that speaks in a voice of such flagrant hypocrisy that it has killed its own credibility look at the elections of 2006 when the Democrats sought to retake control of the Congress which they did they campaigned primarily on an anti-war message against the war in Iraq and what did they do when they took power they not only continued to fund the war but increased troop levels in Iraq by 30,000 the the the the reforms that have been instituted by the Democratic Party are so alien to the rhetoric that the mechanism that safety valve which can make a capitalist democracy function has essentially been turned shop so that now with the creation of a kind of permanent underclass and even Lawrence Summers you know acknowledges this when he talks about a jobless recovery the inability on the part of working men and women to get access to credit the you know they keep prolonging unemployment benefits because courtesy of Bill Clinton once unemployment benefits run out people are going to have to try and live on the 143 dollars a month they receive from welfare so the anger that we are seeing expressed throughout the society through the Tea Party through militias through the Christian Right which I'm going to speak about a minute comes with a two-pronged attack one is against the power elite which is for them to find as Washington one of the most interesting aspects of the Tea Party movement is the way dick armory with corporate money went into the movement and made sure that the anger was deflected from Wall Street and directed towards government with not very subtle undertones of overt racism and the the other prong of the attack is against the liberal class hatred for the liberal class and I would argue that this hatred is not misplaced that the hatred for the liberal class is deserved because the liberal class and especially the the sort of progressive wing of the Democratic Party did traditionally watch out for the interests of the working class and for money for corporate money they sold workers out and of course now the middle class and so they you can watch it with Obama I mean if you look at the Obama administration there is on any substantial issue virtually no difference from an administration run by John McCain I mean the tragedy for me of the Obama administration is that the Democrats once they took power essentially codified the destruction of domestic and international law that had been carried out by the bush administration the Democrats couldn't even find it within themselves to restore habeas corpus they I was part of the ACLU lawsuit against the government for the FISA reform Act the FISA reform Act was pushed through Congress to essentially make legal retro actively but was illegal and that was the warrantless wiretapping and he's dropping as well as storage of email phone messages of tens of millions of Americans we had 30 cases working our way up through the lower courts against Verizon and AT&T returning this information over the government in direct violation of our constitutional rights and those cases would have one and those telecommunication companies knew it and so what did they do they went to Washington with millions of dollars much of which they handed off to Democratic congressmen including senator at the time senator Obama and an Obama although during the campaign had promised that he would filibuster the FISA reform Act went and voted for it the continuation of our doomed imperial project in Iraq the escalation of the war in Afghanistan which you don't hear this from the New York Times we're losing and we're losing the war badly the looting of the US Treasury on behalf of Wall Street all of this was begun by the Bush administration but continued and embraced by the Obama administration by the Democratic Party and I think if there's probably no better example of how utterly bankrupt our liberal establishment has become than by looking at everything the Obama administration has carried out including abandoning a commitment to protect a woman's right to choose including abandonment of a public option the so-called health care reform bill is essentially just the equivalent to the pharmaceutical the for-profit pharmaceutical and insurance industry of the bank bailout bill four hundred billion dollars in subsidies they can still raise co-payments and premiums they're getting all sorts of exemptions because companies like Aetna don't want to be forced to provide medical coverage to sick children it's legally permitted now in this country for for-profit insurance companies to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to try and save their sons or daughters any honest discussion of health care would acknowledge the fact that our for-profit health care system is the problem and must be destroyed but that will never happen it won't happen because the industry's money and lobbyists drive the discussion both on the airwaves with the court years who function as pundits and analysis analysts as well as within the political process itself which is why you had Dennis Kucinich during the Democratic primary standing literally in a snowbank in New Hampshire because he would not be invited into the room of the the for-profit health care companies actually sponsored the debate in Iowa which of course they were not going to give a figure like Kucinich and much less Ralph Nader a position this was these kinds of critiques and frankly this kind of truth was something that corporations in the corporate media consciously locked out of the debate and the liberal class was complicitous completely complicitous the danger when a liberal class breaks down is that there becomes no mechanism anymore by which mounting rage and anger can be expressed within the system and it's fascinating to go back and read Dostoyevsky the end of the 19th century Dostoevsky watched a similar breakdown in Russia's liberal class notes from underground is about the defeated dreamer the cynical liberal the person who voted for Obama and had so much hope and the hope wasn't delivered and so they retreat into this narcissistic self-centered bitter room underground MouseMan that's what demons is about and Dostoyevsky argues that when the liberal class collapses when the pillars of the liberal establishment no longer function you enter an age of moral nihilism he presently foresaw the inevitable result of a system that didn't work and that's where we are our system doesn't work and it doesn't work ultimately not because of Sarah Palin or the Christian Right or Glenn Beck it doesn't work because the liberal class failed us the liberal class failed to find the intellectual and moral fortitude to defend liberal values at a time that they were under egregious assault I come out of the church I went to seminary and I watched the liberal Church in the face of the rise of the Christian Right a movement essentially by the definition of basic Christianity a heretical movement a movement that acculturated the worst aspects of American nationalism chauvinism imperialism and capitalism into the Christian religion as if Jesus came to make us wealthy as if Jesus would bless the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs all over the Middle East as if the miracles of the gospel were ones that were going to turn us into millionaires and they said nothing they did nothing they didn't respond now what's the point of getting a seminary degree what's the point of studying the Gospels and the messages of Jesus Christ for three years if you're not willing to go out within the culture and stand for those messages and defend them and it wasn't just the church was all of the liberal institutions but the church is a good example and the whole language of Christianity has been hijacked by a mass movement I wrote a book called American fascists the Christian Right and the war on America is trying to reach out to them and because I look at them as a mass movement not as a religious movement and the problem with a liberal Church is that they couldn't accept that heretics exist and they did not have it within themselves to stand up and fight this heretical movement and what's happened as we are propelled down this road towards an oligarchic or a neo feudal society is that we are creating a permanent underclass a permanently enraged underclass now part of the way or the mechanism that it by the wider corporate state uses to keep the lid on this is of course the prison system 25 percent of the industrialized world's prisoners are in America most of them of course they're people of color and that's not accidental the most politically astute class in terms of understanding the structures of power are African Americans because of course they've borne the brunt of that abuse throughout their history and that's why they've been so swiftly decapitated my friend the poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes the cell block has replaced the auction block and I just spoke at Youngstown State Youngstown Ohio all the steel mills are gone leveled and you know what is built in the middle of Youngstown a supermax prison actually there's more than one there's a private prison there's another prison and there's a supermax prison it's America's growth industry and as you found this dispossessed working class into the ground as their communities physically disintegrate and you just can walk out on the street to see it here but this is just replicated in post-industrial pockets throughout the country you bring with it all of the attendant problems substance abuse domestic abuse depression and the real world in essence the world the reality-based world increasingly becomes unbearable and that is what draws so many of these people into the embrace of the Christian Right which is in essence a worldview that is disconnected from reality it's a non reality based vision that finds its coherence in a belief in magic and miracles in a belief that God has a plan for us that God will intervene on my behalf that God has a destiny for me and I learned when I spent two years writing my book on the Christian Right that you can't push these people because the rage or the anger that you engender is the anger of someone who is terrified of being pushed back into that reality based world that almost killed them and that explains their love of apocalyptic violence they relish the thought that all of those secular forces that almost destroyed them but one day be physically destroyed as well as everybody who was a part of that culture and apocalyptic violence a belief in magic an embrace of historical and personal destiny a culture that communicates through image and spectacle is a totalitarian culture we have created in the words of the great political philosopher Sheldon Wolin a system of invert totalitarianism inverted totalitarianism is different he writes from classical totalitarianism it doesn't find its expression in a demagogue or a charismatic leader but in the anonymity of the corporate state in inverted totalitarianism you have corporate systems that purport to pay loyalty and fealty to the Constitution and electoral politics and the language and iconography of American patriotism and nationalism but if so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizens impotent what we have undergone is a coup d'etat in slow motion and we have lost and they have won in inverted totalitarianism economics Trump's politics which is different from classical totalitarianism or politics Trump's economics and with that inversion comes a different form of ruthlessness the commodification of American culture the commodification of human beings whose worth is determined by the market as well as the commodification of the natural world whose worth is determined by the market means that each will be exploited by corporate power until exhaustion or collapse which is why the environmental crisis is intimately linked to the economic crisis societies that cannot regulate capitalist forces as Marx understood cannibalize themselves until they die and that's what we're undergoing I want to end by speaking a little bit about resistance what that means I hope by now most of you have seen through the facade of Barack Obama who functioned for the corporate state as a brand he I think in many ways was sent what we saw done by Benetton on Calvin Klein where they used people of color and hiv-positive models as a way to associate their products with risque style and progressive politics but the result is was the same it was to confuse a passive consumer that a brand was an experience which is why just before Obama assumed office Advertising Age awarded Obama their top annual award he beat Nike Zappos Apple and that's marketer of the year we are not going to Salvage either our environment or our country through electoral politics I had lunch recently in New York with father Daniel Berrigan and I was asking him if he'd followed the elect followed the elections and he quoted his brother Phil and said if voting was that effective it would be illegal I think that from now on all resistance is local food will become very soon a major political weapon we are already creating in these post-industrial pockets food deserts I wrote a story for the Nation magazine that they keep holding on Camden New Jersey which per capita is the poorest city in the country as well as the most dangerous and there's no supermarket the only outlets to eat our church's fried chicken and local donut shops it's essentially fat grease this is true in West Virginia in the places that have been cold out banks have packed up and left the communities themselves are falling into irreparable decay and these post-industrial pockets are growing panics can in expanding at a greater and greater rate and the corporate state is not going to step in to do anything to ameliorate the suffering the human misery that that it causes that's going to be our job we are going to have to begin to build locally we are going to have to remember that the true correctives to American democracy have never come from the top down that the question as the great philosopher Karl Popper wrote is not how do we get good people to rule most people papa writes correctly our who are attracted to power our a best mediocre which is Obama or venal which is Bush the question is how do we make the powerful afraid of us and all of the the social movements that were built starting with a Liberty Party that fought slavery the suffragists for women's rights the labor movement the civil rights movement the anti-war movement made the powerful frightened of them which is why the last truly liberal president in the United States was Richard Nixon because he was actually scared of movements and passed OSHA and the Clean Water Act and the mine and Safety Act all of which were written by Ralph Nader who I voted for in the last election and and we have to recover that we have to remember that it is not our job to take power that's not our job our job is to remain fast around moral imperatives that we do not compromise on it is our job to defend a dispossessed working class it is our job to defend sick children it is our job to defend those who are being tortured abused and killed in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan because of our rapacious and out-of-control war economy and we have to beginning be willing to get up and make personal sacrifices on behalf of these moral imperatives even if at first we become pariahs that is the only hope left anybody who's foolish enough to think that going to a ballot box at this point and voting for a Democratic candidate is going to change anything I think as as is living in a universe that is as non-reality based as the Christian Right and if we can recover that ethic if we can understand that rebellion or resistance is a way to safeguard our own integrity our own individuality if we can look down the long-term and say maybe not in our lifetime but we will carry this for the generations that come after then I think we can speak about hope if we refuse to do if we remain passive and complacent then I think both our nation and finally the ecosystem that sustains human life is doomed thank you you

Channel: mediasanctuary

Views: 112,322

Rating: 4.8905873 out of 5

Keywords: christopher hedges, truthdig, middle east, death of the liberal class

Id: bYCvSntOI5s

Length: 45min 23sec (2723 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/gowoodard]

You must show this video to everyone you know. I am 65 years old; and this is one of the most important political speeches I have seen in my lifetime. The ideas proposed in it must have a wider circulation, or we are all doomed.

[u/[deleted]]

Been posted like 20 times, but worth the watch IMO.

[u/BritainRitten]

I find this very interesting, but I don't know that r/economy is the place for this. I would suggest cross-posting this elsewhere, like r/lectures, r/politics, etc.

[u/[deleted]]

Who killed the [US] liberal class?

Woodrow Wilson

[US] Liberals did.