Creating a post to hold notes/comments for the reading group at the end of the month. As I mentioned previously in the thread for the general on 7/3, I’ve proposed reading The Death of the Liberal Class (2010) by Chris Hedges as a potential source to read in conjunction with our work on the second WCU article. The whole book is available for free online, which would make it ideal to read for the next few months, if people are interested in doing a long-form read for a while. Or perhaps going back and forth from reading a longer piece every other month while reading a shorter piece in-between.
I bought a personal copy of Hedges’s book last month and have read the first two chapters. His main thesis is that the liberal class in America is an obsolete institution that only caters to corporate interests, allowing for an increasingly reactionary Republican Party to capture the legitimate rage expressed by working class people disenfranchised by capitalism, to label themselves as the “party of the working class” despite being just as anti-worker as liberals. Hedges argues that democratic liberalism as it is practiced in the U.S. and Western Europe effectively “died” with the advent of World War I, and that powerful elites have been propping up the “carcass of democratic liberalism” (8) ever since. In a sense, liberal democracy is in the same state as Friedrich Nietzsche claimed about God in the late 19th century: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The belief of liberal democracy, much like the belief of God in our modern times, has become untenable for many, signifying a decline in how society structures itself. Many people still refuse to believe in the “death” of either, choosing instead to continue following hollowed-out systems of belief (whether whole or half-heartedly) rather than discovering alternatives.
Feelings this brings up for me in a jokey sense 
In terms of what Hedges means by the “liberal class,” he defines it as a cross-stitch between the Democratic Party, mainstream media platforms like MSNBC, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, etc., academia, labor unions and churches with a liberal bent. What these institutions have in common is that they are “more prudent to engage in empty moral posturing than confront the power elite” (9). Hedges claims that “the greatest sin of the liberal class” (15) is its effective silencing and blacklisting of any potential for emerging radical elements within its ranks from the 20th century to now that has stripped it of any real, credible voices that could appeal to the working class. Class conflict in of itself has been purged within mainstream political discourse and with that any real semblance of hope.
I think that this book might be useful to look at when formulating our own understanding as an org of who liberals are and the limitations found within liberal institutions as we develop our argument on “Why Liberals Lose.” This book was published in 2010 so one area of focus for us to look at and critique Hedges’ work is whether his definition of the “liberal class” is succinct enough or is missing something 15 years later. I do think at least that Hedges is correct to not just equate liberals with Democrats, that liberal institutions expand outside of the Democratic Party itself, though they are often working indirectly on the same political project. However, he also lists “the arts” as another part of the liberal class, which I feel is too broad a term to mean anything within his thesis. I understand that many artists (writers, filmmakers, painters, comedians, actors, etc.) typically skew liberal, but I think specifying “the arts” as artists who attach themselves to creative spaces that appear progressive but cater to state/corporate interests such as Hollywood or literary organizations like PEN America (an org that Hedges himself left in 2013 after the appointment of former State Department official Suzanne Nossel as PEN’s CEO) would be clearer to Hedges’s argument.
I also found a NPR interview with Hedges about this book where he states in the beginning that “Liberal institutions are absolutely vital for a democracy. They are that mechanism or safety valve that makes incremental or piecemeal reform possible.” He comes across as more of a social democrat or democratic socialist in parts of this interview along with parts of the book I’ve read. While rereading through the first chapter, I noticed that while Hedges’s critique of liberals can be connected to a critique of capitalism, he himself doesn’t explicitly make that connection, often using terms like “corporate power” or “power elite” instead of just saying capitalism. In the second chapter, I did notice him mentioning capitalism, but with caveats like “unregulated” or “unchecked” capitalism. I’m aware of Hedges as a journalist but not deeply familiar with his actual politics beyond that around the same time he published Death of the Liberal Class he identified as a Christian anarchist. Not to dwell too long on comments he made 15+ years ago, but perhaps some of the language used by Hedges is also tactical in trying to persuade people, liberal or conservative, who were more likely to listen to an argument like this around the time of the Great Recession. At least from my observation, I view Hedges’ politics in a similar vein to Noam Chomsky’s (someone Hedges quotes a bit in chapter two), in that I usually think their analyses are generally correct, but both have been criticized by Marxists and anarchists as being essentially liberals, that their proposed solutions (when they do propose a solution) are toothless and often revert to traditional liberal solutions. Both of them seem to be the logical stopping point for anyone on the “academic Left,” in that being prolific when writing down your viewpoints reaches a gap for political education if you’re not really putting them into practice, if you’re more prone to quoting philosophers and political scientists than political organizers. If there’s no discernible sense of praxis in your politics, then you run the risk of repeating yourself, where your insight becomes less valuable to those who are trying to organize and have internalized most of the points you’ve made.
https://www.npr.org/2010/11/08/131166027/hedges-laments-the-death-of-the-liberal-class
Edit: As of 7/12, I’ve finished reading all of Death of the Liberal Class. My main criticism is the structure of the book. Publications that reviewed it in 2010 like The New Yorker described Hedges’s book as a “uncompromising rant,” treating it as more of a polemic than anything else. And while reviews from liberal commentary sites said something of this vein to be dismissive of Hedges’s core argument, I do believe that it’s accurate to say that the book is unfocused at times. There are points, especially in the second and sixth chapters, where Hedges spends pages not really talking about his main target, the “liberal class,” but about different things.
In the second chapter, “Permanent War,” Hedges argues that the only thing that the liberal class in America can do anymore is maintain the military-industrial complex through the notion of committing “forever wars” under the guise of national security. The corpse of democratic liberalism, as Hedges outlines in the first chapter, is used as a prop to keep the myth of America as a democracy functioning so that fewer people notice that they have little to no direct input in foreign or domestic policy. Hedges spends a lot of time quoting Chomsky in what feels mainly like a glow-up of him. The rest of the chapter is mostly spent talking about Afghanistan and offering the reason that Obama didn’t end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but instead expanded American military presence in the Middle East during his administration is because of how lucrative war in of itself is to corporations with military contracts and to justifying the existence of American military presence around the globe. A lot of Hedges’s analysis in this chapter feels like a snippet of things he’s talked about in his previous books like War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), in that his critique of the liberal class becomes displaced as he starts talking more specifically about the failures of the War on Terror. While I can kinda see the throughline of how the ideology/rhetoric of “permanent war” is an effective propaganda tool that the liberal class uses to uphold American hegemony, Hedges’s argument is disjointed since he really doesn’t mention the liberal class all that much in this chapter and really just starts focusing on war as it is used as a political force in this country. His argument could have been made clearer if he perhaps related the idea of “permanent war” to how it also emboldens the police state in America, how liberals support the creation of more for-profit prisons, the militarization of police, funding for ICE, etc. How this propaganda technique influences American policy domestically as well as abroad.
Glancing at old reader reviews online, some people view Hedges’s final chapter “Rebellion” as him bashing the Internet and that it makes him sound like a crank. Noting that this book was published in 2010, a lot of people still had a rosier view of the Internet as a democratizing force, which 2016 was the year for a lot of people where their views of the Internet were complicated. The last ten pages to this book Hedges argues that “The great promise of the Internet – to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy, and unleash innovation and creativity – is yet another utopian dream” (208). Hedges, for the most part, is vindicated, I feel, with his comments on the Internet, that it’s become more of a space to control and fragment reality than it is in bringing people closer. Even though I found myself mainly agreeing with his thoughts on the Internet, Hedges can still come off as a crank in this section, especially when it comes to how he seems to view all entertainment, whether off or online, as merely a distraction. In the start to the fourth chapter, “Politics as Spectacle,” he bemoans how art has become disconnected from working class interests, has become too abstract, too mediocre and devoid of any real political messages. While I agree with Hedges to a point that contemporary art is heavily influenced by elite interests, as it’s wealthy patrons who ultimately determine which artists receive funding and recognition from art institutions, I’ve never really been fully sold on the “all modern art is bad” argument as it comes across as too reactionary and ahistorical for me. It’s definitely true that art in general has become less thought-provoking and more manufactured for mass appeal, but that’s always been the case for mainstream art. Hedges comes across at times as a leftist who sees no value in art unless it contains a clear moral/political message to it, which is a kind of puritan mentality that I’ve noticed from some leftists who don’t engage with popular culture at all. Yes, a lot of art is elitist historically and/or commercial art nowadays, but many people engage in it nonetheless. And a lot of people derive their politics from the kind of media they consume for fun, which is a reality that we do have to contend with when educating/organizing people. Kinda going off of something I recall hearing from @chima once or twice before, leftists need to do better at just acting “normal,” that is, (at least from my POV) not trying to be dismissive of every single thing that is produced within our pop culture just because it was developed within a consumerist culture, which Hedges does a bit in this book with his thoughts on art and the Internet. His final thoughts in this book again feel disjointed, like they belong in another book of his, specifically Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), which seems to be Hedges’s book-length lamentation of consumer culture in America.
The third and fourth chapters are the strongest part of Hedges’s book, with decent examples in the third chapter “Dismantling the Liberal Class” on how the liberal class typically operates in controlling public opinion like the establishment of the Committee for Public Information (CPI) in 1917 to stoke up support for American involvement in WWI and discredit anti-war supporters, which Hedges cites the CPI as the first big propaganda machine in America that informed the same techniques to quell anti-war protestors during the Vietnam war or during the beginning of the War on Terror. His other main example is the death of the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program that lasted from 1935 - 1939 until Congress pulled its funding after a congressional committee denounced the program for “disseminating communism.” The death of the Federal Theatre Project and the harassment experienced by the program’s more radical creatives, would go on to inform the Red Scare tactics employed by Hollywood and HUAC in the 1940s and 1950s. Chapter five, “Liberal Defectors,” lists a handful of people, artists, intellectuals, political activists, academics, journalists (including Hedges himself) who were at one time part of the liberal class, but were pushed out and lost the platforms they once had when they decided to voice out opinions that were deemed antithetical to liberal orthodoxy.
Overall, I would have appreciated this book much more if Hedges took a chapter to define each institution that he broadly defines as being part of the “liberal class”: the Democratic Party, the media, the arts, progressive churches, labor unions, and academia. Instead, he bounces around giving examples for one sector to another, too often focusing on certain sectors (the media, the arts, academia) more than others. Very little focus is given to how labor unions exactly capitulate to the interests of the liberal class in Hedges’s mind, and Hedges surprisingly (given his Christian faith seems to inform a lot of his politics) doesn’t talk too much about churches except really when he starts to talk about MLK in the fifth chapter. Even Hedges’s critique of the Democratic Party, while it’s there, feels underdeveloped.
As I mentioned before in the group chat, this book feels like it could’ve been boiled down into a more focused long-form essay. Criticism aside, I still think that this book could be a useful piece to “read around” when discussing the sorts of institutions that form the “liberal class” and how they impede either directly or indirectly on social change. If I were to include one sector of the liberal class that Hedges fails to talk about it’s non-profits/NGOs and how Democrats overly rely on orgs like Planned Parenthood, the NAACP, GLAAD, etc., to represent the issues of certain marginalized groups that they claim to care about, thereby sanitizing political activism to a point where it becomes more about representation than actual material change. How think tanks influence policymaking is another avenue Hedges could’ve explored but doesn’t within the framework of the liberal class.
https://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2011/02/23/death-liberal-class
Found this review of Hedges’s book from 2011 by Samuel Farber that is the most useful review of the book I’ve encountered. Farber’s criticisms are similar to how I felt reading the book. As Farber states, Hedges’s classification of a variety of liberal institutions as a liberal class “ignores the fundamental social and economic characteristics of a class.” Hedges is unable to adequately provide a distinction between the liberal class and how it may intersect with parts of the capitalist and working classes, which is perhaps why he doesn’t offer any substantive analysis on labor unions, for example. Farber, while he seems to like the book, thinks that Hedges’s thesis is ultimately “confusing and unconvincing.” Hedges’s use of the term “liberal class” might be more counterproductive than constructive in identifying the culprits most responsible for the apathy present in American political discourse. Farber is also critical of Hedges in his final chapter, that he’s too “doom and gloom” in his prediction for the future, which Farber himself describes as “cataclysmic.” Hedges claims that he doesn’t realistically see any hope for real political change any time soon, which while I agree with Hedges here, I also agree with Farber’s assertion that “A politics that suggests that success is irrelevant to political action is bound to discourage popular participation in movements.” Again, Farber views some of Hedges’s language as counterproductive, in that Hedges simultaneously acknowledges the need for political resistance, yet admits that it won’t amount to much, that the best we can do right now is to build small, self-contained communities that can endure acts of authoritarian state violence and environmental collapse. Hedges’s view here seems informed by a sense of Christian self-sacrifice, that it is noble to take up a cause because it’s the right thing to do, even if you’re guaranteed to lose, which, according to Farber, is perhaps a fine moral stance, but not a good political one. Farber thinks Hedges severely underestimates the potential for popular resistance and how quickly it can occur, even amidst a lack of viable alternatives.