Chris Hedges: The Liberal Class

joining us now in studio Chris Hedges author of death of the liberal class and we welcome you I think our first peel of surprise winning author on this program I think so regardless we're happy to have you here let's go through some of these definitions make sure we're all talking about the same thing what is the liberal class that you refer to it is defined by the liberal institutions a couple of which you mentioned the liberal religious institutions primarily the church universities of course labor unions in the United States that would be the Democratic Party in Canada that would be the Liberal Party these are institutions which while certainly compromised with the power elite often making concessions which sometimes are morally questionable nevertheless provided mechanisms of reform possibilities of change channels of change within established Democratic structures so that when you had movements of massive discontent whether that was the Great Depression in the 1930s whether in my own country the civil rights movement the anti-war movement you had vehicles by which this discontent could be expressed within the system and bring about reform I want to give a good example of how these institutions have protected liberal democracies in the past well I think that the perfect example in the United States would be the New Deal where you in essence had the collapse of capitalism and you had and Roosevelt was not a radical figure he was a figure the radical there were radical movements of course the Communist Party was fairly strong up until the end of the 1930s the United States you had radical unions the CIO and in many ways what Roosevelt did was step in on behalf of the capitalist class to save it that would be a perfect example of how liberal institutions have a kind of modus operandi with a business or a corporate elite and you know who agrees with you on that Conrad black who wrote a glowing tome about Roosevelt it's always for you the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that does this how come well traditionally although this has changed the Republican Party represented the interests of the more money than conservative elite the Democratic party at least until the presidency of Bill Clinton cared about the interests of the working class as well as the underclass those people who needed welfare you know social support systems that changed and quite consciously in the 1990s when the Democratic Party led by Clinton realized that it too could serve corporate interests and take corporate money and by the 90s the late 90s the Democrats had fundraising parity with the Republicans in terms of corporate money and then by the presidential election which saw Barack Obama soon office they got more but of course they had to do corporate bidding and that meant betraying the very liberal values that traditionally were part of the party so we had NAFTA we had so-called welfare reform we had the deregulation of the banking system which you've not done in Canada and that we're now seen over a hundred bank collapses a year huge zombie banks like Citibank were now going through a massive mortgage fraud crisis and all of this was put in place not just by the Republicans by the Democrats interesting though because when you look back at the 1990s that you've just referenced mr. and mrs. everyday America remembers that as being a very good time for them not just for the interest here decrying but the budgets were balanced services were good people had jobs there seems like there's a disconnect I know you've got a real you get a real man on for Bill Clinton there's no question that comes through but don't mr. mrs. everyday front-porch have a bit of a love on for Bill Clinton right now because they think he did defend their interest ring good well that's the popular perception but it's just factually not true even in my own business you know I was working for the New York Times the deregulation of the FCC which has resulted in a essence a half dozen corporations Viacom Disney General Electric Rupert Murdoch's News Corp controlling just about everything at this point most American see watch or listen to and and that was all Clinton let's not forget that real wages in the United States have been on a steady decline since the early 1970s and what sustained a level of consumption and a lifestyle was credit and now with the banking collapse that credit has dried up that the jobs that we lost by the destruction of our manufacturing base are not coming back Lawrence Summers the economic advisor in the Obama White House and of course the Treasury secretary under Clinton who orchestrated much of this deregulation tacitly admits this when he talks about jobless recoveries so we are now reaping the consequences of a series of policies which served a corporate oligarchy or a corporate elite at the expense of what at this point has become a disenfranchised working class let's talk about one of the other pillars mass media you say the mass media is letting us down and I wonder what won't the media write about that that therefore is not serving our liberal democracy well well the I think unlike Canada we have to make a clear demarcation between the electronic media in the United States and the print media you still have and you know you're an example of this serious programs on electronic media that's all been obliterated our public television station has been utterly gutted the last show on there that dealt with issues of power bill Moyles a journal has now been taken off the air Bill's retired and not been replaced and so we have in essence the there's been an utter corruption of journalism on the commercial networks it's all celebrity gossip and trivia and tawdry soap operas built around politicians and their love mistresses or Tiger Woods sex tapes or whatever and in the print media is of course dying because that traditional role of newsprint which connected buyers with sellers has been obliterated with vehicles of electronic information or the dissemination of information that no longer gives them a monopoly and and so they have become even more craven there's always been with I spent 15 years of the New York Times I think a to comfortable relationship on the part of major news organizations like the New York Times with the elite I mean so much of what they what they build their status on is accessibility and of course during the Bush administration they had plenty of accessibility to the Bush White House but they ended up essentially disseminating the lies that were used to justify the Iraq war or we can look at the financial meltdown which the newspaper utterly missed despite a very robust business section because they relied for their information on Robert Rubin and Citibank and the heads of Goldman Sachs instead of going out into poor neighborhoods where subprime mortgages were being shoved down the throats of people who the bank's knew could not repay we talked Bill Clinton let's talk Barack Obama Barack Obama in the not quite two years he's been president has brought in an unprecedented health care package he got a massive stimulus package through the Congress a financial deregulation package not deregulation excuse me re-regulation package is he rebuilding the pillars in a way that you would find favorable no I mean Barack Obama has been a disaster let's take the so-called health care reform bill which is about four hundred billion in subsidies to the for-profit health care industry the in essence it is the insurance and pharmaceuticals equivalent of the bank bailout let's talk about the bailout that you mentioned the problem is that all of that money went in to the hands of financial speculators who caused the problem to begin with who are not lending the money there is no credit and we have a you know liberal economists including Paul Krugman at The New York Times who keeps saying well we need another bailout we need another bailout because we have to give money to create jobs and other stimulus you mean yeah and uh and it's not going to happen no we that that we lost our chance and I think Barack Obama as many has proved feckless and weak he in essence what the Democratic administration has done is codified the destruction of domestic and international law that was put in place by the Bush administration I mean remember he's not even restored habeas corpus are you comparing him to the almighty or the altar we had a prime minister here named Brian Mulroney who say that all the time don't compare me the almighty compare me to the alternative better than that is I think that if you look at the structural embrace or the the structure of the Obama administration it is not in any way remarkably different from the Bush administration and and would not have been any different from McCain administration and that's when we get to what Sheldon Wolin calls our great political philosopher from Berkeley and Princeton calls the system of inverted totalitarianism that in essence we have under go ders steal a line from John Ralston Saul we have undergone a kind of coup d'etat and slow-motion and I think that's right that I think the levers of power is so corrupted that the citizenry has been disempowered remember that the first bailout plan seven hundred billion dollars proposed for Congress was opposed across the political spectrum constituent calls were a hundred to one against it some of the most impassioned speeches against it were delivered by far-right Republicans from Texas and yet it passed anyway why because the corporation's wanted it passed the church secretary got down his hands and knees and kissed Nancy Pelosi agreeing and that's how a guy threw a knee in his and is his worth it was taught you know wrapped up in about five hundred million dollars in Goldman Sachs we mentioned that has there ever been in your view a dismantling of the liberal class in history and out-and-out dismantling not so much dismantling as corruption and I think that when the liberal class or liberal institutions go bankrupt and this is something you know that obsessed off staffs key that's what demons is about it's what notes from underground is about it's something that I watched in the former Yugoslavia what an essence that you do is you shut off that safety valve you shut up shut off the possibility for reform within the system and that's what notes from underground is about it's about the defeated dreamer the the person who went and shouted yes we can and voted for Barack Obama and nothing changed and he retreats into cynicism and when your liberal institutions no longer function then you enter in Dostoyevsky's words an age of moral nihilism and I think that's where we're headed and I think we can already see it leaping up the fringes of the American political establishment at the Tea Party the Tea Party militias or the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party many of whom in a few days are going to assume positions of power because you think they're going to do so well in the midterms yeah let me read an excerpt from the book Michael this graphic if we could place we have entered a historical vacuum the system's built around the old beliefs have failed but new alternatives have yet to be articulated the longer the power elite and the liberal class speak in words that no longer correspond to reality the more and embittered and betrayed populace loses faith in traditional systems of government and power the inability of liberals and the power elite to address our reality leaves the disenfranchised open to manipulation by the demagogues here you are the moral nihilism Dostoevsky feared with the collapse of the liberal class inevitably leads to social chaos play that out for us a little bit more I mean you touched on what a few elements of this are going to be okay the Republicans do great next Tuesday Obama continues a downward slide where do you see this going well the problem is that because liberal institutions and the liberal class did not defend basic liberal values especially a concern for the working class much of the rage and rage is the right word that is being expressed through movements let's like the Tea Party is directed not just at the government and and it's interesting that the manipulators of the Tea Party like dick armory have army army have veered or deflected that rage away from Wall Street towards government with very you know overt undertones of racism towards Obama and so the that there's also a rage at the liberal class which continues to speak in a language which purports to care about the interests of the working class and the middle class and yet has served corporate interests to continue fraud and abuse and the end and the degradation of the working so in some respects they're getting their own just desserts I think that they that the rage that is justified and I think liberals have to wake up and recognize that we should begin to articulate this rage because if not it is going to continue to be co-opted and channeled by essentially proto-fascist anti-democratic movements we our next politician in here last a few days ago actually who said anger is not a great governing society anger is not a great philosophy by which to govern a society or build a society for that matter and yet you want to recapture some of that on the liberal side of the spectrum I think that we have to begin to understand what we've done to our dispossessed working class and that it is incumbent upon us if we care about our democracy to Rhian franchise these workers back into the economy and if we don't we are going to end up with a neo feudalistic or an oligarchic state and look at you can go back and read Plutarch and Thucydides you cannot maintain a democracy in an oligarchic system okay that's the thesis of death of the liberal class Chris Hedges is our guest and coming up next on the debate is Chris Hedges right as the liberal class really let us down stay with us

Channel: TVO Today

Views: 65,256

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, Agenda, Steve, Paikin, current, affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Liberalism, Intellectualism, Democracy, Western, Politics

Id: _dANFfwcSGc

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2010