Death
of the Liberal Class,
Chris Hedges (2010)
Reviewed by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston
- - - - -
Chris Hedges,
in Death of the Liberal Class,
ostensibly isn’t wishing the liberal class to die – he’s simply demarcating it
as deceased, or so he argues – but he certainly doesn’t have much good to say
about it either, and as a DeMausian psychohistorian, I’m probably normally not
much in mind to defend it myself.
He describes it, the liberal class – a composite of left-leaning
artists, journalists, and academics:
lefty intellectuals – as if it entrance to it now requires abdicating
anything that meaningfully defined liberals as liberal in the first place. You have to agree to no longer serve, to betray, the people, their best
interests, and effectively end up sycophants to the mandarin corporate ruling
class. And to see my sort of
psychohistory at all accepted within academia right now, I would likely have to
see it especially emphasize the destructive aspects of patriarchy, how it
afflicts women; I would have to see it value all periods of history, applauding
any acute psychohistorical study, whether it concern Ancient Greeks or modern
times; and I would have to see it adopt the academic tone and focus tightly on
subject matter, thanking friends and loving support “for making our work
possible” but otherwise keeping our personal life, and the personal—out. And this would mean full disrespect of
the remarkable truth that patriarchy, though indeed now retrograde, was once
significant psychogenic evolution—people moving up the scale. It would
mean implicitly slighting the fact that evolution of the old kind, gradual
betterment of people through time, is
real, that the further you go into
the past the more primitive the people you are dealing with are, making deeper
descent into history an increasingly more harrowing descent that at some point
must stop you into bluntly asking yourself why you were so eager to climb down in the first place? It would mean betraying our awareness
that our families didn’t just give us the support we needed but likely
determined exactly what we’re up to in this reified realm of scholarship, and
that the measured, neutral, reason-clearly-in-charge-here voice usually shows
signs of its being an older
psychoclass innovation. It would
mean betraying what I ought to love, degrading myself, ostensibly too, from heights to lows, knight to
accomplice, elf to forlorn orc.
Nevertheless, if I am true to what I’ve either learned or confirmed from
exploring DeMausian psychohistory, I’m not about to judge Hedges my peer; and am
in fact trying to use the book to help keep faith in the same liberal
establishment which treats the sort of psychological ideas so precious to us so
very warily.
THE LIBERALS’ STORY:
HEDGES’S TAKE
Hedges holds
that those who believe in human perfectibility are ruinous to the maintenance
of the best that human beings can actually hope to achieve. His sort of liberals – the classic ones
– born in the 17th century and who experienced their heyday in the late 19th
and early 20th, were perfectly clear-headed, however, in that they had a
skeptical attitude towards human beings, believed that though conditions on
earth could be improved it’s never going to be made a utopia—for people are
constituted so that they cannot be made all good. They guarded against parts running rampant over wholes, in
particular, private interests and self-serving passions over – respectively – the
structuring of society and overall bent of mind. The mind was best constituted with reason checking passions;
and society, with multifarious interests and independent viewpoints having to
contend, indeed, often highly combatively, with one another. The high-times of American society –
still mostly decentralized, with regions and interests fruitfully engaged yet
still clearly separate – had this, but was sundered of it rapidly once
independence of mind, independence in
general, was made to seem injurious, traitorous, to hope of victory in the
First World War, and with liberals coming to see a fractious society as
inconsistent with their new view of human beings as perfectible and society as
potentially harmonious. The state
concentrated, opinion concentrated and “narrowed,” at the same time as liberals
came to see concentrated power as necessary to disseminate their message of
human perfectibility and the subconscious-targeted manipulations required to
unleash it in the mass (62-63, 101-103).
The end result, according to Hedges, was of course not perfection en masse,
but rather mass degradation—people lost much of their Puritan inner
guardedness, of guilt, and let themselves be ruled by their passions (101-103). And from the 1980s on, liberals
full-scale abandoned the public they had, with two notable exceptions, spent
their time annihilating much of the dignity of, to competitively compete with
one another for corporate support—only corporations, now having the public they
always wanted, and apparently feeling less the need to keep liberals afloat “as
a prop to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive” (25), soon started
abandoning the-now-useless them to
their death knell. What follows
for all of us is surely the chaos of hypermasculine response to widespread
powerlessness, unless somehow some
brave someone sounds a clarion call
that draws fallen liberals back amongst the people.
THE LIBERALS’ STORY:
THE DEMAUSIAN TAKE
The DeMausian
take on liberals in the 20th century can be reached simply by
inversing everything Hedges says.
The altered liberals, the ones that came to genuinely hope for the
elimination of all strife and who thought they saw its realization in the near
future, weren’t fallen but rather progressed
from their classic predecessors. The classic liberals were notable, for
being an advancement beyond their medieval/renaissance predecessors, and for
representing a belief in what human beings were capable of (and deserved) that
lead to considerable social reforms, but only, really, in the now very
qualified way that patriarchy was an advancement over matriarchy: It should look good to you—but only until you become familiar with what
all succeeded it. The changed
liberals Hedges deplores were no-doubt members of a superior psychoclass, who stopped seeing strife and division as
necessarily a good thing[1]
for having experienced the truly better things issuing from out of their less
divided, less “intrapsychically” stricken minds (DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, Creative Roots, 1982, 238).[2]
That they saw within human grasp,
utopia, speaks strongly to their credit:
because it was only with this psychogenic advance in ambition that the
inequalities and cruelties the classic liberals understood as not just ineradicable
but, in full honesty, as actually desirable – for it well communicating the
fact of human imperfectability and the limit of their potentially hubristic
highest accomplishments – could in fact begin to be eradicated. It would mean the reduction in
size of a handy class of people to project all one’s anxiety-arousing desires
into; but they were better prepared to handle this great but daunting leap
forward as well.
WHO REALLY BETRAYED WHOM?
The “growth”
Hedges believes liberals sadly ended up leading the public into, and that he
deems as only wholly regrettable mass lapsing to base drives, wasn’t on the contrary simply a beautiful
thing. The socializing-psychoclass
dominated 20th century, with its erotic materialism, its “my soul would be
quiet if only everyone could buy endless material goods” (DeMause, 237),
certainly didn’t have it all figured out.
But still what they sought out in life was far from vile, and overall
represented true growth in human
ambition. Indeed, it could at
times simply be about joy in living, playful experimentation and expansion of
self, not simply the quieting of the disquieted soul, one of the two periods
Hedges applauds liberal participants within partook of in a variety of
ways. In fact, it was really
generous true display of fidelity to
the larger public’s best interests displayed by postwar liberals during the 60s
and 70s that lead the public to, in
effect, shortchange, to betray, its further fruition in the 80s. Hedges regrets that, unlike their 30s
ostensible counterparts, 60s liberals were of two parts when they would have
been best served if composed of but one.
They were, wonderfully!, truly with the people and for conflict, for
fighting vested interests in way of common cause and social improvement; but
they were also, so sadly!, so ultimately doomingly!, for urging everyone to
realize the American Dream – the spread of hedonism (even Martin Luther King,
who, Hedges believes, compares poorly with his counterpart, Malcolm X [184-185])
– as well. But the truth is that
it was because they were so full of hedonistic impulse, or rather, of genuine,
untainted love of themselves and the possibilities of life, that we know their
social reforms were moved out of good—the former lead to the firm expectation of the other. If reform was moved by a more staid,
more degraded impulse it might have lead to the results of reform efforts in
the 30s, which may in fact, if what reformers then mostly worked to do was
confirm a public’s substitution of bland, mundane aspirations for previous
exciting Jazz Age ones, have been about cementing the neutering of dreams than
their partial realization, defining them and shutting them down until new life
could begin after the war. It
would have made the 60s liberals their opposites, and only now kin to those who thrived in the 30s, their ostensible
counterparts, when group phase had regressed gaspingly to Depressed from
thrillingly Innovative.
HEDGES’ GROWTH PANIC
DeMausians
appreciate that if 80s on liberals actually came to despise ordinary people,
this was, though still unfortunate, understandable, for ordinary people were responsible
for the creation of an environment which would objectively make them seem less
and less appealing. For three
decades, they, the ordinary people, those of lesser psychoclasses, were mostly
in-sync with the less ordinary, the members of higher ones. They permitted and engaged with the
reforms, the expansions of experience, of pleasure, the more loved and evolved
amongst them lead them onto, were allowed to lead them onto, owing to pretty
much everyone feeling that some great mountain-world of happiness had been
earned to partake in by the giant
sacrifices endured through the Second World War and the two decades of
dreariness previous to it. Three
decades—until the more regressed psychoclasses experienced in a way that could
not temporarily be abated through war or recession but only through the more
total sort of renouncement involved in what we understand as historical group phase
change, their maternal alters chastising them for pleasing themselves too much,
threatening upon them abandonment which spoke to them as death.[3] Truly good things began to look mostly
sinful, and bland things, more appropriate, if not exactly desirable, for the
former speaking louder of guilty self-pleasure and the latter of its
forsaking. And they “decided” to
help more fully demarcate themselves from those with self-respect by bonding
themselves to the likes of sludge-pile Limbaugh while innovation-prone liberals
sought out refinement on the coasts, with Prada, with Armani.[4] And what happened to the 80s psychoclasses
that finally succumbed should be understood as incurring upon Chris Hedges
right now.
Hedges
is now fully with the people. He
announces this fact, entrenchs it so
that it is sunk into his every thereafter-moment in the text, by beginning his
book with a vivid personal account of one suffering owing his being criminally
forsaken: people like him –
specifically, one Ernest Logan Bell – are not only always on his mind but much
closer than any time previous, his near proximity. He makes clear he wasn’t always “here,” though, that before
as an employee of the New York Times
he existed within a highly seductive culture, daily-exposed to voices that
baldly tempted sin but also heights fully and thrillingly aloof from pedestrian
morality. Exposed to the same, he
lets Doug McGill, an employee of the Times
for ten years, recount its essence:
“[I]f you keep writing good stories you will keep getting access to the
CEO plus perks like lunches and home telephone numbers for future stories” (133);
“I was beginning to get too used to having mayors and governors and CEOs call
me up, as if I were a friend, and pay for my dinners and give me their press
releases and have me describe them in glowing terms” (134). But he, Hedges, found way to stick to
his principles, something that ultimately lead to his being loudly booed at
universities and coldly dismissed from the Times—badges
he wears and prouds around in his book that serve, like warriors’ wounds, to
announce his commitment away from himself, apart from his previous life which
he had come to essentialize as soul-claiming and self-indulgent for so baldly
proclaiming that it might be okay to claim something all for yourself, without
even any tinge of morality to buttress or qualify it. Given that all such are described as having to go through
the same humiliations – and be clear, the humiliation rites he describes are not really to be understood as descriptions
of what happens to those who balk establishment expectations but as markers
required to delineate one as martyr-hero[5]
– it leads to him being counted in his own mind within the same class of those,
the real greats, who, for speaking inconvenient truths, incur sharp
miniaturization in status and subsequent near-empty-cupboard levels of
financial compensations. It could
us draw us to think of him along the lines of Chomsky, who comes up frequently
in the text to serve as the lone hero who braved balking establishment consent
we should all try to emulate, or of Michael Moore, who got booed and jeered at
the Oscars for speaking off message, or of Ralph Nader, who drew upon himself a
whole chatter-classes’ animosity for presuming the same could be
institutionalized and perhaps one day even the norm; but perhaps because it is
difficult to talk of these renowned figures and simply conjure up feelings of
disavowal, to delineate the fate of those who speak truth to power he
temporarily delimits our attention to the sad fate of mostly-unknown-to-us
Finkelstein, who for “refus[ing] to back down” and “demolishing myths surrounding
Israel” (151) incurred a life sentence of marginalization and a frozen income
level of $15, 000 to $18, 000 a year.[6]
Whatever
actually develops with him, the-now-ever-increasingly-renown Hedges, he made
his choices assuming they meant his following the martyr’s path: this is the truth he will cling to, and you are not to question it! If you indeed questioned how much his principled stand was mostly egoism,
hoping to prompt him to question if his description of martyrs, with it
involving “defiance and execution [that] condemns [the] [. . .] executioners” (206),
likely had an aspect of relish to it that told the truer tale,[7]
he’d probably ask you when the last time was you’d volunteered in a soup
kitchen? And after debasing you by
suggesting how reluctant you are to do the least bit to close with the
suffering – and note, it wouldn’t have mattered if you could recall a recent
time you had, for he would understand
it as merely show, an anxiety-ward, a “boutique” gesture – he’d follow through
with more thunderous humiliation by asking you when the last time was you
risked loss of life or career termination for a cause you believed in?[8] Then he’d quickly slide past you for
knowing for not simply assenting to him, guaranteed, you’re part of the amalgam
of outraged left who seek to bring down people like him simply for the crime of
showing up their own emptiness,[9]
and are a complete waste of his further time. You’re one of those he’s encountered time and time again
who’ve left him with remembrances that have piled up in his mind so readily and
appropriately as simply more heaps onto an already comically massive pile of
degrade, it might draw him to laugh.
That is, one who “engage[s] in useless moral posturing that requires no
sacrifice or commitment” (156),” is “childish” (194), has been “rendered
impotent” (19), who has “nothing to offer but empty rhetoric” (9), possesses an
“irrational lust for power and money that is leading to collective suicide” (194),
is “passive” and only encourages “rot” (200), who “wallow[s] in the arcane
world of departmental intrigue and academic gibberish” (126), is beholden to
those “not endowed with decency or human compassion” (204), is “seduced by
careerism” (142), is damningly “complicit in the rise of [. . .] oligarchy” (142),
who “hide[s] [his] cowardice behind [his] cynicism” (205), who would applaud
the aghast act of “shoving a health care bill down our throats” (27), who is
“smarmy,” “fatuous,” oily,” “buffoonish, “ignorant,” a “parasite” and a
“courtier” (190), and so on.[10]
WHAT THE TRUTH HAS TO FACE
I realize I
could make either Chomsky or Nader (or even maybe my foremost hero, Paul
Krugman) look bad through a selective massing of their quotes, but with them I would be sure to suggest, probably
through an equally large counter, that they are still warm men who mean most
everyone well—for they would be
delighted if through their efforts more people became happier; I feel it in
them, these hubristic leaders permitted to rise and draw us closer to the ideal
during our last growth phase, through all the disgust and other-evisceration,
however aplenty. But though
they’re his heroes, I judge this simply not so with depression-hefted Hedges,
who’ll I’ll let be understood by these actually-not-so-selective quotations without
attenuation for being someone who to me will only be satisfied when most people
count amongst the humbled, not the
happy. I feel I might possibly get
through to Chomsky or Nader in a way I never could with him; for with these two
counter-evidence, proof of errors of observation or presumption, that could
lead to more self-awareness, wouldn’t be abused into mere opportunity to cement
a rigid course—something they were evidently primed to cripple and then
assimilate within a pre-existing schema.
If Hedges, clearly under the rule of his maternal alter, obsessed as he
is in seeing the neglectful and self-centered punished, let in information that
unmistakably communicated to his subconscious fidelity to truth, at all times, truly above anything else, his alter
would immediately understand the implications of it and remind him why he
installed it in as his protector, his super-ego, in the first place.
Even if his disposition,
his emotional well being, his psychoclass, was equivalent to Chomsky’s and
Nader’s, you’d still have to be really skilled to draw him to doubt, for each
of these men believe they’ve already fully delineated what is unreal in this
world and possess as heightened a sense of raw pure truth as is possible to
achieve. To us psychohistorians it
may seem ritualistic, a bit too apropos, pre-determined, childishly simple and
binary, that once you’ve come to be able to acutely diagnose the mistruths of
those who hold power you end up inevitably finding such great virtue in those
most afflicted by them, but nevertheless ordinary people cannot be understood
by these men as other than noble-hearted John Bulls. Perhaps one of the reasons for this incredible inability to
consider them differently, more skeptically, is that they probably believe they
have been so abundantly induced to think of them as ignoble by scorning liberal
brethren, that surely long ago they
engaged with its possibility in full—it’s
simply to be presumed, and its simply on to long overdue redemption. But with Hedges, at least, the primary
explanation actually lies in his so coming to see suffering people as doing,
simply with their suffering, something noble, as being noble, that their overall
degradation as human beings can’t be seen. Hedges and the multiple of leaders that will emerge during
this depression will draw us so very close to the people’s suffering for the
same reason “heroes” allowed to emerge in the Great Depression, such as John
Steinbeck, did: to confirm that
people are doing as directed and making much of the rest of their lives about
withering for previously having made it for so long about self-enrichment.[11] They’ll weave romance around brutal
suffering, cast a chilly spell that fully obfuscates but suffices to calm: “All we expect ‘is’ the absolute
basics, and for this we submit—Won’t Mother now you just let us be?”
THE DEMAUSIAN FIX
I understand
that my analysis looks, with its identification of Hedges as someone who has
come to hate anything that smacks of true growth, to be aggressing to view the
group he despises, contemporary liberals, as golden. I don’t think they are, and so my start of the costs larger
acceptance amongst them would currently require for DeMausians. But I think more than just that their
helping bulwark a society of “mak[ing] more money, meet[ing] new quotas,
consum[ing] more products, and advanc[ing] careers” (200) is preferable to the
payback and full-stop Hedges wants to get behind and the cleansed society he
wants to help put in place, more than just that the “specialist[’]s master[y]
[of] narrow, arcane subjects and disciplines” (115) sounds like far better
bedding for the next growth phase to arise in than Hedge’s “righteous thunder”
and “implo[sions]” (140) does, more than just their ostensibly typical belief
that “if our repressions can be removed – by confessing them to a Freudian
psychologist – then we can adjust ourselves to any situation” (Malcolm Crowley,
quoted in Hedges, 101) sounds better for the future of psychohistory than
Hedge’s disdain for self-esteem movements, for psychoanalysis proper, and the
“preoccupation with the self” (111) does.
I think that as many of the highest psychoclass liberals watch their
peers rapidly start sounding like Hedges (the online liberal magazine Salon, frequently accused of being too
lifestyle focused and pointless, has, for example, recently relaunched itself
as aggressively populist, encouraging readers to support its abandonment of
fluff for the righteous fight by becoming “core” members), regressing into
conflict-obsessed warriors akin to him, they will from being disturbed, rattled
and alienated by their alien thunder become more cognizant of who truly are their natural peers, and
psychohistorians will find themselves gifted through the mechanism of
psychoclass migration and realignment with some very talented people to further
their own studies—right now. Liberals haven’t exactly been golden,
but fidelity to them may help gift us with another golden age of
psychohistorical studies, way before it was in fact due.
[1]
No doubt, also, a strong centralized state was less offensive to them owing to their
experiencing more abatement of early placental smothering from their less
needy, better assuaging, more-your-own-needs-concerned themselves-better-loved
psychoclass mothers.
[2]
This is not to say that unification during the period Hedges speaks of it
largely arising – the First World War – wasn’t actually mostly for a short time
simply a truly regrettable regression into growth panic-spurred group think,
but that its ongoing continuation should be seen as owing to psychoclass
innovation.
[3]
For the degree to which “death” is infused with feelings of annihilation
incurred from maternal rejection, see of course Joseph Rheingolds’ The Mother, Anxiety, and Death (Little
Brown, 1967).
[4]
The 80s-on mass concentration of liberals to the coastal cities should be
understood as a wisely informed psychoclass migration; unfortunately one that
didn’t let itself be quite segregated enough.
[5]
Or rather, hard-to-acquire prizes, that sparkle forth as if giant gushing
gem-stones, which could draw upon him a charge of vanity that might stick if he
doesn’t stop showing them to people, and put them down for awhile.
[6]
As opposed to those professors we remember Hedges delineating for us at the
beginning of the text, the ones apt to earn $180, 000, not $18 000, “so long as
they refrain[ed] from overt political critiques” (10).
[7]
Specifically, that executioners should properly be understood here really as
patsies upon which one’s own martyrdom is exultantly executed.
[8]
For, yes, to Hedges, what happened when he spoke unpopular truths on campuses
make him, in essence, the soldier who
took bullets for the crowd (he refers to himself as someone “inflicted [with]
career wounds” [127])—showing each other their wounds, neither in his mind
would trump the other: I dare you
to read this book and judge any different.
[9]
About the liberal establishment’s reaction to Chomsky, Hedges writes, “He has
consistently exposed their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this
is why he is hated” (35-36).
[10]
Presuming higher discourse than the like he’d encounter on Fox News, after
having previously been asked by Kevin O’Leary if he was a “left-wing nutbar” on
CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) interview show, the “Lange & O’Leary
Exchange” (Oct. 6, 2011), a disgusted Hedges snorted, “it’ll be the last time,”
after at the end being thanked for appearing. One wonders how less offensive Hedges’ own scornful 3-word
encapsulation of the liberal class would be – and if something likely, like
“fetid, cowardly, sycophants,” if this would be something he’d hesitate to say
on a respected stage?
[11]
Though Hedges sees Steinbeck as noteworthy for raising a nation’s moral reach
by balking mean stereotypes through his capacity to empathize, show skepticism,
and his startling willingness to verify what was really going on amongst the
destitute – showing in detail what was happening to them in material terms
(138) – I agree with Morris Dickstein’s assessment of him in Dancing in the Dark (Norton, 2009) as instead
someone who helped homogenize people into homo
economicus, who played to preferences at the price of the real, who
couldn’t empathize with those he closed in with enough to not mistake them for
possessing inner resources sufficient to power heroic endurance simply impossible for people so stricken
to be able to possess (140), and who cursed a Depression generation by helping
cement it with an “apotheosis of the real, the material, with [a] [. . .] grave
suspicion of the imagination” (107).
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