Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  In 1834 the New York Sun reported on a woman whose husband came home drunk and abusive once too often. It wrote of the event in a manner that would be impossible in today’s cold, stripped-down reliance on fact: “As every sensible woman ought to do who is cursed with a drunken husband, she refused to have anything to do with him hereafter—and he was sent to the penitentiary.” For comparison, here is the final sentence of a 1995 item from the Ann Arbor News, about a man who assaulted a prostitute after she refused to have sex with him: “Employees at the Ramada Inn Ann Arbor, 3750 Washtenaw Avenue, said the man and woman checked in around 2 a.m. Friday.”27

  The creed of “impartiality” and “objectivity” that has infected the liberal class teaches, ultimately, the importance of not offending the status quo. The “professionalism” demanded in the classroom, in newsprint, in the arts or in political discourse is code for moral disengagement. The righteous thunder of the abolitionist and civil-rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the theater productions such as The Cradle Will Rock that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the unions that permitted African Americans, immigrants, and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities such as City College of New York that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are gone. The remnants of the liberal class, and the hollow institutions they inhabit, flee from those who speak in the strange and unfamiliar tongue of liberty and justice.

  V

  Liberal Defectors

  But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criti-

  cism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to diffi-

  culties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of

  authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select

  those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence.

  But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he

  excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his

  influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectu-

  ally courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may

  be the most valuable type. Of course, the authorities will

  always remain convinced of their ability to detect initiative.

  But what they mean by this is only a quick grasp of their

  intentions, and they will remain for ever incapable of seeing

  the difference.

  —KARL POPPER, The Open Society and Its Enemies1

  THE LIBERAL class’s disposal of its most independent and courageous members has long been part of its pathology. The liberal class could afford this rate of attrition as long as the power elite remained accountable to the citizenry, managed power with a degree of responsibility and justice, governed so that it could still respond to the common good, and accepted some of the piecemeal reforms proposed by the liberal class. But as the state was slowly hijacked by corporations, a process that began after World War I, accelerated after World War II and was completed with ruthless efficiency over the past thirty years, the liberal class purged itself of the only members who had the fortitude and vision to save it from irrelevance. The final phase of total corporate control, which began with Ronald Reagan, saw the steady assimilation of corporate ideology into liberal thought. It meant that the liberal class was forced to discard the principle tenets of liberalism. The liberal class, its institutions controlled by corporations, was soon mouthing the corporate mantra that economics and the marketplace, rather than human beings, should guide political and economic behavior. Free-market capitalism, a distinctly illiberal belief system, soon defined liberal thought.

  By the time the touted benefits of globalization—the belief that workers around the world would become wealthier, that the market would lift the developing world out of poverty, that tearing down trade barriers would benefit citizens from both the developed and developing worlds, that peace and prosperity would inevitably result from interconnected global economies—were exposed as a sham, it was too late. The liberal class had driven critics of this utopian fiction from their midst. The liberal class was complicit in the rise of a new global oligarchy and the crushing poverty visited in globalization’s wake on the poor and the working class. It abetted the decline of the middle class—the very basis of democracy. It has permitted, in the name of progress, the dismantling of the manufacturing sector, leaving huge pockets of postindustrial despair and poverty behind.

  But it would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer-leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.

  “My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility,” wrote Leslie Gelb in Foreign Policy in a mea culpa for the whole liberal establishment after the invasion of Iraq. “We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”

  Independent thought, as Gelb and many of those who backed the war understood, is an instant career killer. Doors shut. No longer are you invited on the television talk shows, given grants, feted in the university, interviewed on CNN, invited to the Council on Foreign Relations, given tenure, or asked to write op-ed pieces in the New York Times. There is no cost to being wrong if the policies of the power elite are lauded. There is, however, a tremendous cost to being defiant, even if that defiance is prescient and correct. The liberal class, seeking personal and financial advancement as well as continued entrée into the inner circles of power, is not concerned with the moral but the practical.

  “Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,” wrote Edward Said. “You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”

  “For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence ,” Said went on. “If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite th
e abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”2

  In The Treason of Intellectuals, Julien Benda argued that it is only when intellectuals are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that they can serve as a conscience and a corrective. “For more than two thousand years until modern times, I see an uninterrupted series of philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists, men of learning (one might say almost all during this period), whose influence, whose life, were in direct opposition to the realism of the multitudes,” Benda wrote.

  Once intellectuals transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage, they emasculate themselves as intellectuals. They disregard unpleasant truths and morality to influence or incorporate themselves into systems of power. Stanley Hoffman denounced the liberal class for the bond between the scholarly world and the world of power in his 1977 essay “An American Social Science: International Relations” in Daedalus magazine. Academics and researchers, he notes, were “not merely in the corridors but also the kitchens of power.” What had once been an intellectual exchange had become a professional one. Liberal foundations, Hoffman writes, had became “a golden halfway house between Washington and academia.” Scholars saw themselves as efficient Machiavellians who were there to advise “the Prince on how best to manage his power and on how best to promote the national interest.” Scholarship became directed toward a tiny elite in the hope of shaping policy. And the closer scholars came to the centers of power, the greater the temptation was to “slight the research and to slant the advocacy for reasons either of personal career or of political or bureaucratic opportunity.” This meant that the scholar “may still be highly useful as an intelligent and skilled decisionmaker—but not as a scholar.” Hoffman argued that “the greatest hope for the science would lie in blowing up the bridge that leads across the moat into the citadel of power.”3

  Benda wrote that intellectuals in the past had been indifferent to popular passions. They gazed “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” These intellectuals were not, Benda concedes, very often able to prevent the powerful from “filling all history with the noise of their hatred and their slaughters.” But they did “prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities.” In short, Benda asserted, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good.” But once the intellectuals began to “play the game of political passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators.”4

  Those within the liberal class who challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question reigning political passions, are usually removed from liberal institutions. The list of apostates, those once feted and then ruthlessly banished by the liberal class, is long. It includes all those who refused, in the end, to “be practical” and serve power.

  Sydney Schanberg arrived at the New York Times in 1959 after attending Harvard University on scholarship. He was soon promoted to a job on the city desk, sent as a reporter to the Albany bureau, and then became a foreign correspondent. He covered Vietnam and the India-Pakistan War and opened a bureau for the paper in Singapore in April 1973. He went to Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and repeatedly to Cambodia, where in, 1975, he was nearly killed after staying behind to cover the conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, reporting for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. He tells this story in his book The Death and Life of Dith Pran, made into the film The Killing Fields. The slaughter he witnessed in Cambodia and the disappearance of his assistant and friend Dith Pran into the Khmer Rouge gulags left him angry and troubled at the vast disparity between the official announcements and indifference in Washington and the human misery he witnessed. When he returned to the newspaper, he became an institutional problem.

  “In his work, he seemed like a sickened man; sick of the official lying, sick of safe little men sitting in Washington offices and playing God with the lives of foreign strangers, sick of too much pain, too much bullshit, too much death,” wrote Pete Hamill in a profile of Schanberg in the Village Voice. “He was also laced with guilt; the normal guilt that the living feel after surviving catastrophe, specific guilt because his assistant Dith Pran had been left behind.”5

  Schanberg was appointed the assistant metropolitan editor and later the metropolitan editor. He pushed his reporters to cover the homeless, the poor, and the victims of developers. The social movements built around the opposition to the Vietnam War, however, had disbanded, and with them had gone many alternative publications. The commercial press, no longer shamed into good journalism by renegade publications such as Ramparts, had less and less incentive to challenge the power elite. Many in the establishment viewed Schanberg’s concerns as relics of a dead era. He was removed from his position as metropolitan editor and given a column about New York. He used the column, again, to decry the abuse of the powerful, especially developers, against the poor. The editor of the paper, Abe Rosenthal, began to refer acidly to Schanberg as the resident “Commie” and address him curtly as “St. Francis.” Rosenthal, who met William F. Buckley almost weekly for lunch, and the publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, grew increasingly annoyed with Schanberg’s attacks on their powerful and wealthy friends. Schanberg soon became a pariah. He was not invited to the paper’s table at two consecutive Inner Circle dinners held for New York reporters. The senior editors and the publisher did not attend the previews for the film The Killing Fields. His days at the newspaper were numbered.

  The city Schanberg continued to profile in his column did not look like the glossy ads in the Times fashion section or the Sunday magazine. Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of homeless people were sleeping on the streets. It was one where there were long lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where the mentally ill were tossed onto sidewalks or locked up in jails. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing and New Yorkers who were being displaced by the greed of overzealous developers. He profiled landlords who charged exorbitant rent that drove out the working and middle class. He soon was denied even his column. He left the paper to work for New York News-day and later the Village Voice. Schanberg knew the rules. But he refused to serve his own career interests or the “practical” concerns of his editors.

  “I heard all kinds of reports over the years that the wealthy patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would often get to use the customs clearance provided to the museum to import personal items, including jewelry, which was not going to the museum,” Schanberg said when we met in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I can’t prove this, but I believe it to be true. Would the Times investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.”6

  “And yet they do more than anyone else, although they leave out a lot of things,” Schanberg said of the paper:

  There are stories on their blackout list. But it is important the paper is there because they spend money on what they choose to cover. Most of the problem of mainstream journalism is what they leave out. But what they do, aside from the daily boilerplate, press releases and so forth, is very, very important to the democratic process.

  “Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos is, what the rules are, how we are supposed to behave,” Schanberg added:

  That is not always good, obviously, because this is the consensus of the establishment. But papers, probably more in the earlier years than now, print texts of things people will never see elsewhere. It tells them what you have to do to cast a vote. It covers things like the swearing in of immigrants. They are a positive force. I
don’t think the New York Times was ever a fully committed accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’t know who coined the phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanism means you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it in your own backyard. The Washington Post does not cover Washington. It covers official Washington. The Times ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of the establishment.

  “Newspapers do not erase bad things,” Schanberg went on:

  Newspapers keep the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We discover the civil-rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We go at it hell-bent because now it is kosher to write about those who have been neglected and treated like half-citizens. And then when things calm down it becomes easy not to do that anymore.

  South African justice Richard Goldstone was another high-profile apostate from the liberal class. On the international stage, he engendered a clash with the liberal elite much like that which Michael Moore kindled in Hollywood and Schanberg did at the New York Times.

  The United Nations Human Rights Council created a fact-finding mission in 2009 to investigate violations of humanitarian and human-rights law in the war in Gaza. Goldstone, who is Jewish, headed the mission, and his name was associated with the report for the United Nations that resulted. The Israeli government refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s mission. Its findings were not what Israeli liberal orthodoxy found acceptable. The report detailed human-rights violations carried out by the Palestinians, but it blamed most of the heavy loss of life on the government of Israel. The Goldstone report investigated Israel’s twenty-two-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009. The report found that Israel used disproportionate military force against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip while failing to take adequate precautions to protect the civilian population against the military assault. The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than six thousand homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth. Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the assault killed no Israelis.