Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  Capitalism, as Marx understood, when it emasculates government and escapes its regulatory bonds, is a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force is plunging us into a state of neofeudalism, endless war, and more draconian forms of internal repression. The liberal class lacks the fortitude and the ideas to protect the decaying system. It speaks in a twilight rhetoric that no longer corresponds to our reality. But the fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but also for the bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is exposed as a lie, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic façade exists, liberals can engage in a useless moral posturing that requires no sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate, vindicated by their pathetic cries of protest.

  The best opportunities for radical social change exist among the poor, the homeless, the working class, and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our only hope is to connect ourselves with the daily injustices visited upon the weak and the outcast. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. We must hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly abandoned on city sidewalks, take their medication. We must go back into America’s segregated schools and prisons. We must protest, learn to live simply and begin, in an age of material and imperial decline, to speak with a new humility. It is in the tangible, mundane, and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back, that we will articulate an alternative.

  Dorothy Day, who died in 1980, founded the Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in the midst of the Great Depression. The two Catholic anarchists published the first issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933. They handed out twenty-five hundred copies in Union Square for a penny a copy. The price remains unchanged. Two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in the Lower East Side soon followed. Day and Maurin preached a radical ethic that included an unwavering pacifism. They condemned private and state capitalism for its unfair distribution of wealth. They branded the profit motive as immoral. They were fervent supporters of the labor movement, the civil-rights movement, and all antiwar movements. They called on followers to take up lives of voluntary poverty. And when the old Communist Party came under fierce attack in the 1950s during the anticommunist purges, Day, although not a communist, was one of the only activists to denounce the repression and attend communist demonstrations.

  The Catholic Worker refused to identify itself as a not-for-profit organization. It never accepted grants. It did not pay taxes. It operated its soup kitchen in New York without a city permit. The food it still provides to the homeless is donated by people in the neighborhood. There are some 150 Catholic Worker houses around the country and abroad, although there is no central authority. Some houses are run by Buddhists, others by Presbyterians. Religious and denominational lines are irrelevant. Day cautioned that none of these radical stances, which she said came out of the Gospels, ensured temporal success. They were not practical. She wrote that sacrifice and suffering were expected parts of the religious life. Success, as the world judges it, should never be the final criterion for the religious and moral life, or for the life of resistance. Spirituality, she said, was rooted in the constant struggle to fight for justice and be compassionate, especially to those in need. And that commitment was hard enough without worrying about its ultimate effect. One was saved in the end by faith, faith that acts of compassion and justice had an intrinsic worth, even if these acts had no disernable practical effect.

  Those within the Worker worry that economic dislocation will empower right-wing, nationalist movements and the apocalyptic fringe of the Christian Right. This time around, they say, the country does not have the networks of labor unions, independent media, community groups, and church and social organizations that supported them when Day and Maurin began the movement. They note that there are fewer and fewer young volunteers at the Worker. The two houses on the Lower East Side depend as much on men and women in their fifties and sixties as they do on recent college graduates.

  “Our society is more brutal than it was,” Martha Hennessy, Day’s granddaughter, told me over tea at the Catholic worker house in New York. “The heartlessness was introduced by Reagan. Clinton put it into place. The ruthlessness is backed up by technology. Americans have retreated into collective narcissism. They are disconnected from themselves and others. If we face economic collapse, there are many factors that could see the wrong response. There are more elements of fascism in place than there were in the 1930s. We not only lack community, we lack information.”10

  As our society begins to feel the disastrous ripple effects from the looting of our financial system, the unraveling of our empire, the effects of climate change and the accelerated impoverishment of the working and middle classes, hope will come only through direct contact with the destitute, and this hope will be neither impartial nor objective. The ethic born out of this contact will be grounded in the real and the possible. This ethic, because it forces us to witness suffering and pain, will be uncompromising in its commitment to the sanctity of life.

  “There are several families with us, destitute families, destitute to an unbelievable extent, and there, too, is nothing to do but to love,” Day wrote of those she had taken into the Catholic Worker house:

  What I mean is that there is no chance of rehabilitation, no chance, so far as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance of adjusting them to this abominable world about them—and who wants them adjusted, anyway?

  What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.11

  Father Daniel Berrigan broke into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17, 1968, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan. The group removed several hundred draft files of young men who were to be sent to Vietnam. They carted the files outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm to protest the war. Father Berrigan was tried, found guilty, spent four months as a fugitive from the FBI, was apprehended, and sent to prison for eighteen months. There would be many more “actions” and jail time after his release from prison, including a sentence for his illegal entry into a General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, on September 9, 1980, with seven other activists, where they poured blood and hammered on Mark 12A warheads.

  Berrigan, unbowed at eighty-seven when I met him, sat primly in a straight-backed wooden chair in his upper Manhattan apartment. The afternoon light slanted in from the windows, illuminating the collection of watercolors and religious icons on the walls.12 Time and age had not blunted this Jesuit priest’s fierce critique of the American empire or his radical interpretation of the Gospels. “This is the worst time of my long life,” he said with a sigh. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system. I see those expectations verified in their paucity and their shallowness every day I live.

  “We are talking, even in the length of years I’ve had, we are talking short term,” he said:

  It is very important to keep that kind of perspective. We haven’t lost everything because we have lost today. The biblical evidence for the survival of any empire is not very large; in fact, the whole weight of biblical history goes in the other direction. They all come down. According to the Book of Revelation, Babylon self-destructs. There is not even a hint of an enemy at the gates. “Fallen! Fallen! is Babylon the Great.
” I think we are somewhere in that orbit where the fall of the towers was symbolic as well as horribly actual. The thing is bringing itself down by a willful blindness that is astonishing. I happen to go very strongly with the Buddhist understanding that the good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I put a secret footnote in my mind. I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. There is a biblical ignorance about all this that is very revealing. . . . I have come to the conclusion that the stronger a series of events in a lifetime hearken to the Bible, the less one will know about outcome. That was true from Abraham to Jesus. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go. My impression being that the tactic is of secondary importance. If we are talking real, we are talking about a community with a common spirit, the ability to open the Bible with a common understanding. In this world death seems often redundantly powerful. And yet we have the resurrection to cope with.13

  The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but also the myths and ideologies Americans used to define, enrich, and empower themselves.

  “Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians,” Berrigan said. “She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and war-making. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and war-making.”

  Berrigan’s relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton’s “great contribution to the religious left,” Berrigan said, “was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, ‘Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline, and these are your strengths.’

  “He could be very tough,” Berrigan noted of Merton. “He said, ‘You are not going to survive America unless you are faithful to your discipline and tradition.’ ” Merton’s death at fifty-three—a few weeks after Berrigan’s trial—left Berrigan “deaf and dumb.”

  “I could not talk or write about him for ten years,” he said. “He was with me when I was shipped out of the country, and he was with me in jail. He was with his friend.”

  The distractions of the world are for Berrigan just that: distractions. The presidential election campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain, under way when we spoke, did not preoccupy him, and when I asked him about it, he quoted his brother, Philip, who said that “if voting made any difference it would be illegal.” He was critical of the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical nuns and priests like the Berrigans, “introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church,” including “anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny, and secrecy, and the placing of company men into positions of great power.” He estimated that “it is going to take at least a generation to undo appointments of John Paul II.”

  Berrigan despaired of universities, especially Boston College’s decision to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and to invite then-attorney general Michael Mukasey to address the law school. “It is a portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored,” he said. And he has little time for secular radicals or the liberal class who stood with him forty years ago but who have now “disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline.”

  “The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life,” he said. “It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual basis of some kind.”

  While all empires rise and fall, Berrigan said, it is the religious and moral values, and the nonhistorical values, of compassion, simplicity, love, and justice that endure and alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human civilizations, although, he said ruefully, “the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”

  Berrigan argued that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

  Berrigan is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith, and his religious community. No resistance movement can survive without a vigorous, disciplined spiritual core:

  The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living—the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet—was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place. We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation.

  The decline of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations, and liberal Jewish synagogues, institutions that once had a place for radicals from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Heschel to Dorothy Day to the Berrigans, was a body blow to the liberal class. These religious institutions, which purged radicals as ruthlessly as their secular counterparts, became as useless as the other pillars of the liberal establishment.

  “The Unitarians represented the far fringe of the Social Gospel movement, and make it easy to see its fundamental flaw,” the Rev. Davidson Loehr, a Unitarian-Universalist minister in Austin, Texas, told me:

  In the late 1970s, Unitarians started saying that the trouble was that their children didn’t know what to tell their friends they believed. When I heard it in grad school at The University of Chicago, I thought no, the trouble is that neither the adults nor the ministers knew what mattered. The U.U.’s then took a fatal turn. They essentially conducted a poll, to find what members and attendees of the churches happened to believe—in other words, what beliefs had they brought in with them? From this weird process the Seven Principles were born, as “What U.U.’s Believe.” Yet looking through them, they’re simply the generic beliefs shared by all cultural liberals, whether they were religious or not. They had projected their beliefs onto a platform, then worshiped them. So they collapsed into a narcissism that has grown weaker and more desperate since they adopted those Seven Dwarfs in 1985. It became and is even worse.

  The Unitarians, like all white moderate-to-liberal Christians and Jews, have seen their role as speaking up for the downtrodden. It’s fair to say that the early civil-rights movement would not have succeeded without the white liberal support. But this changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X didn’t want white folks speaking for them, and had far more charismatic speakers themselves. Same with the women’s movement. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer were miles ahead, and wanted to speak for themselves. After Stonewall, the gays also spoke for themselves. This left white liberals with no useful role in society. They were welcome to follow the black, women, gay leaders, but not to speak for them. When they could no longer speak for anybody, they—and by they I mean the faculties of good humanities divisions and women’s studies—started the political correctness movement. The inane brilliance of this was that, by inventing disadvantaged groups, nobody could say they didn’t have the right to speak for them.14

  “By bringing ‘heaven’ down to earth with the Social Gospel, religious and political liberals lost any framework that could critique the things they happened
to believe,” Loehr said. “Individual rights have to be balanced by our responsibility to the larger wholes. But why? In the name of what? Few seem to know or care. Cowardice has become one of the identifying traits of moderate-to-liberal religions.

  “Even in the Middle Ages, theologians knew the difference between wisdom and knowledge,” Loehr said:

  They wrote often of the categorical distinction between sapientia and scientia. Sapientia is the Latin word for wisdom, as in our self-flattering species name, homo sapiens. Seven centuries ago, theologians taught that the only knowledge that really mattered was the kind of knowledge that leads to wisdom, that tells us who we most deeply are and how we should live, the demands of love, and the nature of allegiance and responsibility. Even the ancient Greek word filosofia, the love of wisdom, was about the wisdom that leads to a fulfilling life—not factoids and syllogisms.

  People have always ascribed human qualities to God. We say things like “God says” and “God tells us,” as though God were a humanoid who spoke only through the mouths of priests, prophets and shamans. But now, in our newspapers and on television every day, we hear people saying, “Science says” and “Science tells us.” Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as science spelled with a capital S. There are many sciences, and many scientists. Scientists say things and don’t always agree. But when we construct a sentence that begins with the words Science says, we have created a humanoid fiction, named it Science, and begun to trust it in the way we once trusted God. Once capitalized, both words are linguistic idols.