Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  “The press in the 1980s would say, ‘Why should we cover you?’” Nader continued:

  “Who is your base in Congress?” I used to be known as someone who could trigger a Congressional hearing pretty fast in the House and Senate. They started looking towards the neoliberals and neo-cons and the deregulation mania. We put out two reports on the benefits of regulation, and they, too, disappeared. They did not get covered at all. This was about the same time that Tony Coelho taught the Democrats, starting in 1979 when he was head of the House Campaign Finance Committee, to start raising big-time money from corporate interests. And they did. It had a magical influence. It is the best example I have of the impact of money. The more money they raised, the less interested they were in any of these popular issues. They made more money when they screwed up the tax system. There were a few little gains here and there. We got the Freedom of Information [Act] through in 1974. And even in the 1980s we would get some things done, [the General Services Administration] buying airbag-equipped cars, the drive for standardized air bags. We would defeat some things here and there, block a tax loophole and defeat a deregulatory move. We were successful in staunching some of the deregulatory efforts.

  Nader, locked out of the legislative process, decided to send a message to the Democrats, who were now beholden to corporate donors. He went to New Hampshire and Massachusetts during the 1992 primaries and ran as “None of the above.” In 1996 he allowed the Green Party to put his name on the ballot before running hard in 2000 in an effort that spooked the Democratic Party. The Democrats, fearful of his grassroots campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an attack that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the sound bites of television news.

  Nader’s status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked assault on the working class by corporations and their tacit allies in the liberal class. Long-term unemployment, millions of foreclosures, crippling personal debts and bankruptcies, the evaporation of savings and retirement accounts, and the crumbling of the country’s infrastructure are taking place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses, and compensation are doled out to corporate overlords. The drug and health-insurance companies, subsidized with billions in taxpayer funds, will soon legally force us to buy their defective products while remaining free to raise co-payments and premiums, especially if we get seriously ill. The oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power companies have made a mockery of Barack Obama’s promises to promote clean, renewable energy. We are rapidly becoming a third-world country, cannibalized by corporations, with two-thirds of the population facing severe financial difficulty and poverty.

  “You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Nader said:

  The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a “least-worst” voter, you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the antiwar demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of the Nation and the Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and the movement of jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point, you do not have a moral compass.

  The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of our democracy, and the best of the liberal class, was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, it took only nine months for the Federal Government to regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Three years after the collapse of Bear Sterns, however, there is still no adequate financial reform. The large hedge funds and banks, from Citibank to Goldman Sachs, are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to engage once again in the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate media, which abet our vast historical amnesia, do nothing to remind us how we got here. They speak in the empty slogans handed to them by public relations firms, corporate paymasters, and the sound-bite society.

  “If you organize one percent of the people in this country along progressive lines, you can turn the country around, as long as you give them infrastructure,” Nader said:

  They represent a large percentage of the population. Take all the conservatives who work in Wal-Mart. How many would be against a living wage? Take all the conservatives who have preexisting conditions. How many would be for single-payer, not-for-profit health insurance? When you get down to the concrete, when you have an active movement that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.

  “The real tragedy is that citizens’ movements should not have to rely on the commercial media, and public television and radio are disgraceful. If anything, they are worse,” Nader said:

  In thirty-some years, [Bill] Moyers has had me on twice. We can’t rely on the public media. We do what we can with Amy [Goodman] on Democracy Now! and Pacifica stations. When I go to local areas, I get very good press, TV, and newspapers, but that doesn’t have the impact, even locally. The national press has enormous impact on the issues. It is not pleasant having to say this. You don’t want to telegraph that you have been blacked out, but on the other hand you can’t keep it quiet. The right wing has won through intimidation.

  This intimidation works especially well in a culture of permanent war. In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, there were many credible critics, including former U.N. inspectors such as Hans Blix, who questioned the lies used to justify the invasion and occupation, but the media refused to include independent voices. The case for war, any war, is almost always presented without significant comment or criticism from the liberal class. Liberals are reduced to arguing over tactics.

  The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, published a front-page analysis the day after Hans Blix undermined President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s plans to demand a U.N. Security Council war resolution. Blix had reported that the U.N. inspection teams were making progress. The Inquirer responded by writing: “President Bush now faces an unpleasant choice. He must decide whether to launch a final round of diplomacy aimed at repairing the breach with many U.S. allies and thus winning broader backing for war, or to abandon the United Nations, ignore global opinion, and launch an invasion with whatever allies will follow.”30 The third choice, not going to war at all, was never raised.

  Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual that seeks to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day that allows us to pat ourselves on the back for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers are sanitized for mainstream public consumption after their deaths, and turned into harmless props of American glory. King was not only a socialist but also fiercely opposed to American militarism. He was aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce.

  “King’s words have been appropriated by the people who rejected him in the 1960s,” said James Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York and is the author of Martin & Malcolm & America:

  So by making his birthday a national holiday, everybody claims him even though they opposed him while he was alive. They have frozen King in 1963 with his “I Have a Dream” speech. That is the one that can best be manipulated and misinterpreted. King also said, shortly after t
he Selma march and the riots in Watts, “They have turned my dream into a nightmare.”

  “Mainstream culture appeals to King’s accent on love, as if it can be separated from justice,” Cone said:

  For King, justice defines love. It can’t be separated. They are intricately locked together. This is why he talked about agape love and not some sentimental love. For King, love was militant. He saw direct action and civil disobedience in the face of injustice as a political expression of love because it was healing the society. It exposed its wounds and its hurt. This accent on justice for the poor is what mainstream society wants to separate from King’s understanding of love. But for King, justice and love belong together.31

  Malcolm X, who could never be an establishment icon because of his refusal to appeal to the white ruling class and the liberal elite, converged with King’s teachings in the last months of his life. But it would be wrong to look at this convergence as a domestication of Malcolm X. Malcolm influenced King as deeply as King influenced Malcolm. At the end of their lives, each saw the many faces of racism and realized that the issue was not simply sitting at a lunch counter with whites—blacks in the North could in theory do this—but rather being able to afford the lunch. King and Malcolm were both deeply informed by their faith. They adhered to belief systems, one Christian and the other Muslim, that demanded strict moral imperatives and justice.

  King, when he began his calls for integration, argued that hard work and perseverance could make the American dream available for rich and poor, white and black. This is the staple message and mythology embraced by the liberal class. King grew up in the black middle class. He was well educated and comfortable in the cultural and social circles of the liberal class. He admitted that until his early twenties, life had been wrapped up for him like “a Christmas present.” He naïvely thought that integration was the answer. He trusted, ultimately, in the liberal, white power structure to recognize the need for justice for all of its citizens. Like most college-educated blacks, he shared the same value system and preoccupation with success as the liberal whites with whom he sought to integrate.

  But this was not Malcolm’s America. Malcolm grew up in urban poverty in Detroit, dropped out of school in eighth grade, was shuttled between foster homes, was abused, hustled on city streets, and eventually ended up in prison. There was no evidence in his hard life of a political order that acknowledged his humanity or dignity. The white people he knew did not exhibit a conscience or compassion. And in the ghetto, where survival was a daily battle, nonviolence was not a credible option.

  “No, I’m not an American,” Malcolm said:

  I’m one of 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the . . . victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I! I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare!32

  King came to appreciate Malcolm’s insights, especially after he confronted the insidious racism in Chicago. A visit to the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, two days after riots there, shook King, as did a dialogue with residents, in which they informed him that from their viewpoint, the vote was nice, but jobs would be better. As King said on the second anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, “any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood.”33

  “King began to see that Malcolm was right in what he was saying about white people,” Cone explains. “Malcolm saw that white people did not have a conscience that could be appealed to to bring justice for African Americans. King realized that near the end of his life. He began to call most whites ‘unconscious racists.’ ”

  The crude racist rhetoric of the past has now been replaced by a refined, polite variety. We pretend there is equality and equal opportunity while ignoring the institutional and economic racism that infects our inner cities and fills our prisons, where a staggering one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated. There are more African American men behind bars than in college. “The cell block,” the poet Yusef Komunyakaa, told me, “has replaced the auction block.”

  The fact that prisons and urban ghettos are populated primarily with people of color is not an accident. It is a calculated decision by those who wield economic and political control. For the bottom third of African Americans, many of whom live in segregated enclaves in cities such as Detroit or Baltimore, little has changed over the past few decades. Life, in fact, has often gotten worse. But this is not a narrative acceptable to the liberal class, which speaks of a postracial America. The liberal class continues to insist that hard work is the route to a better life.

  In the last months of his life, King began to adopt Malcolm’s language, reminding listeners that the ghetto was a “system of internal colonialism.”

  “The purpose of the slum,” King said in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, “is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness. . . . The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn.” Coming close to a teaching Malcolm had long espoused, King concluded that the chief problem is economic, and the solution is to restructure the whole society.

  “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was, as King and Malcolm knew, a meaningless slogan if there was no possibility of a decent education, a safe neighborhood, a job, or a living wage. King and Malcolm were also acutely aware that the permanent war economy was directly linked to the perpetuation of racism and poverty at home and abroad.

  In a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” given at Riverside Church a year before his assassination, King called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” That quote doesn’t make it into many Martin Luther King Day celebrations. The New York Times, expressing the indignation of the liberal class, attacked King for his antiwar message. King’s stance on the Vietnam War and demands for economic justice at the end of his life caused many in the liberal class, including members of his own staff, and allies within the white political power structure, to turn against him. King and Malcolm, in the final days of their lives, were solitary prophets.

  “There are many ways in which Malcolm’s message is more relevant today,” said Cone, who also wrote A Black Theology of Liberation:

  King’s message is almost entirely dependent on white people responding to his appeals for nonviolence, love, and integration. He depends on a positive response. Malcolm spoke to black people empowering themselves. He said to black people, “You may not be responsible for getting yourself into the situation you are in, but if want to get out, you will have to get yourself out. The people who put you in there are not going to get you out.” King was appealing to whites to help black people. But King gradually began to realize that African Americans could not depend on whites as much as he had thought.

  “King did not speak to black self-hate, and Malcolm did,” Cone explained:

  King was a political revolutionary. He transformed the social and political life of America. You would not have Barack Obama today if it had not been for King. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. He did not change the social or political structures, but he changed how black people thought about themselves. He transformed black thinking. He made blacks love themselves at a time when they hated themselves. The movement from being Negro and colored to being black, that’s Malcolm. Black studies in the universities and black caucuses, that’s Malcolm. King never would have done black studies. He taught a course at Morehouse on social and political philosophers and did not include a black person. He didn’t have W.E.B. Du Bois or Frederick Douglass. None of them. He had all the white figures like Plato and Arist
otle. Malcolm helped black people to love themselves.

  King and Malcolm would have excoriated a nation that spends $3 trillion waging imperial wars in the Middle East and trillions more to fill the accounts of Wall Street banks while abandoning its poor. They would have denounced liberals who mouth platitudes about justice while supporting a party that slavishly serves the moneyed elite. These men spoke on behalf of people who had nothing left with which to compromise. And for this reason they did not compromise.

  “You don’t stick a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress,” Malcolm said.34

  “I’ve decided what I’m going to do,” King preached at one of his last sermons at Ebenezer Baptist Church:

  I ain’t going to kill nobody in Mississippi . . . [or] in Vietnam. I ain’t going to study war no more. And you know what? I don’t care who doesn’t like what I say about it. I don’t care who criticizes me in an editorial. I don’t care what white person or Negro criticizes me. I’m going to stick with the best. On some positions, cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when a true follower of Jesus Christ must take a stand that’s neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take that stand because it is right. Every now and then we sing about it, “If you are right, God will fight your battle.” I’m going to stick by the best during these evil times.35