Book Review: "Death of the Liberal Class"

You must read this book. Chris Hedges is one of my favourite writers and he's in top form here - which is to say, absolutely devastating. He tears apart the liberal class for its failure to halt the expansion and consolidation of the corporate state. At this dire historical moment, when the rapacious forces of totalitarian capitalism have destroyed the global economy and are pushing the human race to unprecedented catastrophe through wanton ecological destruction, the liberal class is marked most obviously by its impotence, its utter betrayal of the values it claims to stand for, and its continuing obsequience to power which guaranteed its own demise as a relevant political force. All the traditional institutions of the liberal class - the media, universities, church, trade unions, the arts, etc. - were long ago bought off by corporate interests. Through this act they sold their souls.

Hedges traces the beginning of this long historical process to the First World War, when the dawn of mass commercial culture combined with virulent nationalism and militarism to demonize any opposition to the war as treasonous. The liberal class wholeheartedly joined in this effort, and they later attempted to remain in the elite's good graces by embracing anticommunism. By assisting in the blacklisting and eradication of the American Left during the McCarthy era, the liberal class removed the one force that kept it honest...but also one that supplied it with political cover. With the elimination of radical socialist and communist movements, liberals could no longer claim to be on the centre-left of the U.S. political spectrum, but effectively became the "far left". Today, in the epoch of the violent decay of global capitalism, without the language of class struggle to make sense of developments, the American liberal class has nothing left to offer - and into that ideological vacuum has stepped a plethora of right-wing demagogues eager to commandeer the populist mantle in the face of a confused and angry public.

I appreciated the gusto with which Hedges attacks traditional bastions of the liberal establishment. Universities, for example, have contributed to their own intellectual decay by cordoning off professors into super-specialized fields and frightening away the masses with laboured academic jargon that can appear meaningless (I too blame the French post-structuralists). Art, too, became the domain of the elite as it embraced the abstract and failed to connect with the average viewer. In the same way as the internet divided people into politically homogenous enclaves through the process of "cyberbalkanization" (which Hedges examines near the end), so the art and academic worlds separated themselves from the broader population by speaking only to each other in specialized language.

If Hedges' writing is characteristically excellent, his final chapter reminded me of our differences in political opinion. I cannot say I disagree with his advocacy of rebellion for its own sake, as a quality that helps us retain our humanity. But by explicitly distancing himself from the notion of "revolution", which aims to create a new social order, Hedges distances himself from the solution and reveals his spiritual side. The spiritual is all well and good for uplifting the "soul", but in terms of real political struggle, rebellion for its own sake is not enough. We need a real revolution to determine where to go and how to fight the corporate state. For that, I turn to Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, with a side dose of Saul Alinsky.