 First edition | |
| Author | Chris Hedges |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Nation Books |
Publication date | 2010 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 978-1-56858-644-1 |
Death of the Liberal Class is a 2010 book by the American journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges writes on left-wing politics in the United States, and asserts the decline of a privileged and increasingly ineffectual "liberal class" due to corporate political dominance. [1] [2]
Death of the Liberal Class begins with a sympathetic profile of an impoverished Libertarian Party activist, Ernest Logan Bell. Bell articulates a plethora of injustices related to widespread corporate dominance of American life, and mixes left- and right-wing positions in his criticism of liberal politicians. Hedges then discusses how Bell and the interests of many working Americans like him have been abandoned by a liberal class that championed deindustrialization, financial deregulation, and unmitigated outsourcing. The liberal class is described as a body of people employed in privileged, largely managerial positions in liberal institutions; including churches, media, the Democratic Party, labor unions, and academia. Hedges argues that political theater and moral posturing has replaced meaningful agitation for reform, and charges that the liberal class has turned into a class of apologists for the corporate interests that killed them.
The second chapter posits that one of the core weaknesses in the power of the liberal class is its history of supporting war efforts in the United States. Nationalist narratives in wartime tend to dominate public discourse and mute interest in social reform. This pervasive war footing creates a near-totalitarian influence in media to service national myth. This complacency concedes power to an aggressive right wing. Hedges praises the authorship, political activism, and media criticism of Noam Chomsky. Hedges then contrasts the acceptance of pro-war liberal figures following the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq with the widespread denunciations of Michael Moore for criticizing the war while accepting an Oscar in 2003. The use of mercenary forces such as Blackwater is discussed, along with other forms of war profiteering in the United States defense industry. Hedges then outlines the ignored grievances of members in the armed forces that foretold American defeat in the War in Afghanistan. Hedges alleges that the American efforts in Afghanistan were primed for failure due to the neglect of resolving Afghan poverty, food shortages, and social issues that combined to form popular sympathy for the Taliban. Hedges concludes the chapter covering the social abandonment of wounded veterans and other people destroyed by violent conflict.
Hedges places the beginning of widespread institutional decay of the liberal class near its inception during World War I with the founding of the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel, which effectively killed the populist pacifism movement through war propaganda. The CPI's state-sanctioned propaganda demonized peace activists and social radicals. The liberal class was broadly complicit in furthering the war frenzy, and CPI propaganda was published in thousands of newspapers across the United States. Former employees and volunteers in the CPI went on to employ similar propaganda tactics in the private sector, effectively spurring the rise of corporate marketing. Hedges then discusses the Federal Theatre Project and the radical messaging of plays such as The Cradle Will Rock . The FTP was eventually ended, despite its popular support, due to mounting pressures from business interests and a successful defunding effort from House Un-American Activities Committee members. Hedges argues that this attack by corporate interests on the radical theater led to self-censorship within the arts, and that the liberal class further betrayed the voices of American workers by supporting anti-union legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act.
The fourth chapter begins with a criticism the counterculture of the 1960s for failing to engage with the interests of the American working class. Hedges accuses the New Left of that era of being morally vacuous for preferring hedonism over solidarity, and disparages the rise of abstract art that avoided class-conscious political messaging. This move towards abstraction and spectacle is alleged to be part of a corporate seizure of the arts that coincides with corporate domination of other public-facing media. Hedges briefly discusses his own conflict with his former employer, The New York Times , for his public opposition to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq. He then furthers that American journalism, despite its merits, is a corrupted pillar of the liberal class that has been repurposed to serve the narrow interests of corporations under the guise of objectivity.
The following chapter serves as an acknowledgement of the many prominent individuals who have pushed for liberal reforms despite abandonment by institutional liberal forces. Hedges alleges many in the liberal class have sacrificed their moral conscious in their pursuit of careerism through placating the economic elite. Hedges praises the reporter Sydney Schanberg, who was celebrated in his coverage of the Cambodian genocide. When Schanberg returned to the United States to report on New York City metropolitan issues for The New York Times, he was vehemently disparaged and eventually demoted by then executive editor A. M. Rosenthal for his reporting on corruption and abuses by prominent New York City real estate developers. Hedges additionally profiles the personal and career attacks made against Richard Goldstone and Norman Finkelstein for their public recognition of Israeli war crimes. Hedges contrasts the treatment of disparaged critics within the liberal class against the inaction and general acceptance of mediocrity in the face of a plethora of crises impacting the American working class. Hedges then praises many other voices of dissent within the liberal class such as Dorothy Day, I. F. Stone, Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Ralph Nader. Hedges notes that Zinn was the target of surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that Nader's activism was barred from being reported in the Times due to the actions of Rosenthal. There is an additional mention of the radical activism of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that was whitewashed in media in an effort to make King a revered figure of American liberalism. The chapter is concluded by covering the friendship and admiration held by former United States president Barack Obama towards the aggressively anti-union CEO of FedEx, Frederick Smith.
The end of the book discusses Hedges' preferred means of resisting the devastation wrought by unchecked global capitalism. The liberal class, reduced to a vestigial appendage within the halls of power, is argued to be helpless in agitating for reforms as it had in the past. Hedges fixates on the ecological costs associated with modern capitalism, and points to the liberal class' continued faith in progress despite mounting environmental and economic crises as evidence of their naivety and incompetence. Hedges expresses a fear that violence may become a justifiable means of resistance due to the perceived potential for inverted or classical totalitarianism in the United States. He additionally expects a future collapse of global civilization due to accelerated climate change, along with some potential for human extinction. Hedges cites the potential for positive feedback loops for greenhouse gas emissions such as Arctic methane emissions, along with the failures of Barack Obama and other world leaders in accomplishing any meaningful climate progress at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Hedges argues for stronger community organizing, but personally expects successful resistance to be unlikely. Hedges decries the collapse of literacy in the United States, and claims that the Internet may worsen functional illiteracy and destroy social connection through cyberbalkanization. He calls for people to defy the arbitrary constraints of the dead liberal class and seek new ways to disrupt corporate power. Hedges concludes that rebellion is a moral obligation no matter the costs that may be administered for defiance.
Death of the Liberal Class generally received mixed reviews.
In a Harvard Political Review piece by Caroline Cox, the book is described as "at once engaging and wildly excessive." Many arguments in the book were considered "hyperbolic," but Cox praised Hedges' analysis of journalism as "the highlight of his book." Despite reservations regarding Hedges' tendency towards "apocalyptic predictions," Cox concluded that "Death of the Liberal Class is a book all liberals should read to reassess their own role in American democracy." [3]
A review by historian Samuel Farber in Socialist Worker was mixed. Farber called Death of the Liberal Class a "well-written and hard-hitting book" and praised Hedges' analysis of the media, journalism, and the Committee on Public Information. Farber criticized the "confusing and unconvincing" coverage of American class relations, and claimed that Hedges fundamentally underestimates the potential for successful popular resistance around the world. [4]
The book was featured in an NPR segment, [5] had a brief positive review in Publishers Weekly , [2] and a short negative review in The New Yorker . [6]
Obey, a 2013 documentary by British filmmaker Temujin Doran, is based on Death of the Liberal Class. [7] The book also inspired a poorly received 2016 off-Broadway stage production with the same name written by Robert Lyons. [8]
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922). The book was honored with the Orwell Award.
The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies, both foreign and domestic, is "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which corporate media is structured creates an inherent conflict of interest and therefore acts as propaganda for anti-democratic elements.
David Edwards is a British media campaigner who is co-editor of the Media Lens website with David Cromwell. Edwards specialises in the analysis of mainstream, or corporate, mass media, which are normally considered impartial or liberal, an interpretation both men believe is disputable.
David Cromwell is a British media campaigner and oceanographer. With David Edwards, he is a co-editor of the Media Lens website.
The Committee on Public Information (1917–1919), also known as the CPI or the Creel Committee, was an independent agency of the government of the United States under the Wilson administration created to influence public opinion to support the US in World War I, in particular, the US home front.
Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions is a political book written in first person by conservative radio personality Michael Savage.
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister.
The Goose-step: A Study of American Education is a book, published in 1923, by the American novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair. It is an investigation into the consequences of plutocratic capitalist control of American colleges and universities. Sinclair writes, “Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist." (p. 18)
The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations is a 1957 book written by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. In the book, Huntington advances the theory of objective civilian control, according to which the optimal means of asserting control over the armed forces is to professionalize them. This is in contrast to subjective control, which involves placing legal and institutional restrictions on the military's autonomy. Edward M. Coffman has written that "[a]nyone seriously interested in American military history has to come to terms with Samuel P. Huntington's The Soldier and the State."
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America is a 2007 non-fiction book by the American journalist Chris Hedges. American Fascists profiles the rise of an American Christian right, and argues that the politically active bloc possesses the features of a fascist movement.
Gabriel Morris Kolko was an American historian. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War, he had also been credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire." U.S. historian Paul Buhle summarized Kolko's career when he described him as "a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism...[and] a very major historian of the Vietnam War and its assorted war crimes."
The Brass Check is a muckraking exposé of American journalism by Upton Sinclair published in 1919. It focuses mainly on newspapers and the Associated Press wire service, along with a few magazines. Other critiques of the press had appeared, but Sinclair reached a wider audience with his personal fame and lively, provocative writing style. Among those critiqued was William Randolph Hearst, who made routine use of yellow journalism in his widespread newspaper and magazine business.
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin coined the term inverted totalitarianism in 2003 to describe what he saw as the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin analysed the United States as increasingly turning into a managed democracy. He uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to draw attention to the totalitarian aspects of the American political system and argues that the American government has similarities to the Nazi government.
A People's History of American Empire is a 2008 graphic history by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle. The book combines material from Zinn's history book A People's History of the United States and his autobiography You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train with new material from other sources, most notably George Lipsitz's A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s and Jim Zwick's Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Various historic subjects are covered as well as Zinn's own history of involvement in activism and historic events. The book was the last of Zinn's books that was published within his lifetime.
Occupy is a short study of the Occupy movement written by the American academic and political activist Noam Chomsky. Initially published in the United States by the Zuccotti Park Press as the first title in their Occupied Media Pamphlet Series in 2012, it was subsequently republished in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books later that year.
A People's History of the United States is a 1980 nonfiction book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn presented what he considered to be a different side of history from the more traditional "fundamental nationalist glorification of country". Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
In political science, the term class conflict identifies the political tension and economic antagonism that exist among the social classes of society, because of socioeconomic competition for resources among the social classes, between the rich and the poor. In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting radical sociopolitical changes for the social majority, the working class.
David H. Webber is the author of The Rise of the Working Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon and Associate Dean for Intellectual Life at Boston University School of Law, where he writes about shareholder activism and litigation.
The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus is a 2013 book by David Burns published by Oxford University Press. It is a cultural and intellectual history of Jesus as envisioned by various left-wing radicals in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I. The book received positive critical reviews.
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle is a 2009 nonfiction book by American journalist Chris Hedges. Empire of Illusion examines a claimed cultural decay in the United States as a result of a malignant consumer culture and corporate influences.