[Vision2020] Chris Hedges' New Book "Death of the Liberal Class": Obama is "Poster Child for the Death of the Liberal Class"

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Tue Dec 21 10:11:46 PST 2010


Chris Hedges was interviewed on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now"
yesterday.  The interview should be viewable online at website below:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/20/chris_hedges_obama_is_a_poster
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Information on Chris Hedges book "Death of the Liberal Class" below:

http://www.nationbooks.org/book/217/Death%20of%20the%20Liberal%20Class

Death of the Liberal Class

Chris Hedges
October 2010     ISBN: 1568586442

For decades the liberal class was a defense against the worst excesses
of power. But the pillars of this class—the press, the universities,
trade unions, the Democrats, and the liberal church—have collapsed as
effective counterweights to the corporate state. In its absence the
needs of the poor, the working class, and even the middle class no
longer have a champion. The death of the liberal class has permitted
the rise of a new and terrifying political configuration. In his
devastating new book, Chris Hedges chronicles the gradual corruption
and decline of the liberal class, which no longer provides an
institutional check to mitigate corporate control of politics,
education, labor, the arts, religious institutions, or financial
systems. Without any impediments, the corporate state is dismantling
the last vestiges of protection for ordinary citizens once put into
place by the liberal class.

A lucid and disturbing look inside America's fallen liberal
institutions, Hedges tells of his own experiences, especially of his
role as a journalist for the New York Times. Although the liberal
class was always compromised by its embrace of the power elite, as
well as its deep hostility to American radicals who questioned the
assumptions and the structures of the elite, it nevertheless provided
a mechanism that made incremental reform possible. But with the rise
of the corporate state, the liberal class has been forced to distort
its basic belief systems to support unfettered capitalism, the
national security state, globalization, and staggering income
inequalities. It relinquished it moral authority to become courtier
and apologist for a system of power that despises liberal values.

The anger among the working and the middle class is, without a
functioning liberal class, being expressed in ideologies that detest
democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The
death of the liberal class is creating a power vacuum that
speculators, war profiteers, and gangsters, often led by charismatic
demagogues, are beginning to fill. Totalitarian and proto-fascists,
from militias to Tea Party movements, ridicule and taunt the liberal
class and its democratic values. The promises of these movements are
fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class
are grounded in a disturbing truth. History has shown time and again
that when the liberal class ceases to function, as happened in Tsarist
Russia, Weimar Germany, and the former Yugoslavia, it always opens a
Pandora's Box of evils that infect the remnants of civil society.

See Chris on his book tour this November and December!

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, is the former Middle East
Bureau Chief of The New York Times, and a Senior Fellow at The Nation
Institute. He is the author of several books, including War is a Force
That Gives Us Meaning, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10
Commandments in America, I Don't Believe in Atheists, and American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He lives in
Princeton, New Jersey.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett



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