Ever since the fall of the former
Soviet Union, symbolized by the destruction of the Berlin Wall in November
1989, those on the left have faced a dilemma: with marxism and, by extension,
socialism discredited, and capitalism reigning unopposed throughout most of the
world, including even in China, the left has no direction. Without socialism as
at least a beacon to which a humane society can aspire, the left has appeared
lost, dazed, and bankrupt of real ideas. Reading Chris Hedges’ recent Death of the Liberal Class (Nation
Books: 2010) has crystallized these thoughts for me and given them a historical
underpinning. For what Hedges does in his book is trace the beginning of the
left’s decline to World War I and its aftermath. Here is what he writes early
on: the liberal era, which had been getting stronger in the early 20th
century with the rise of populism, unions, women’s rights, housing for the
poor, and socialism as a legitimate political movement,
effectively
ended with World War I. The war, which shattered liberal optimism about the
inevitability of human progress, also consolidated state and corporate control
over economic, political, cultural and social affairs. It created mass culture,
fostered through the consumer society the cult of the self, led the nation into
an era of permanent war, and used fear and mass propaganda to cow citizens and
silence independent and radical voices within the liberal class (p. 7).
Hedges goes on to demonstrate with
persuasive detail the sad story of how this happened.
To
begin with, Hedges makes clear that the liberal class—including the media, the
church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions—has,
or should have, an important function in a democracy: it “functions as a safety
valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for
change…It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue” (p. 9). But
when the liberal class is cowed into submission by repression, or is bought off
by corporate money and power, it retreats into narrow specialization, a cult of
the self, and endless discussion. This is exactly what happened, Hedges demonstrates,
in the period during and after World War I. The irony is that the crippling of
liberals was done by one of the arch liberals of the time, President Woodrow
Wilson. Wilson had to find a way, in 1917, to get the American public to favor
joining a war that had already gone on for three bloody years in Europe. It was
a war that over 90% of Americans wanted no part of, seeing it primarily as a
“rich man’s war” promoted mainly by bankers to salvage the loans they’d made to
allied nations and by corporations manufacturing munitions. In order to effect the
massive opinion shift that was needed—i.e. from isolationism to war mania—Wilson
agreed with several advisors to implement, a week after he declared war on
April 6, 1917, a massive public relations campaign: he set up the Committee for
Public Information or CPI, commonly known as the Creel Commission after its
head, George Creel. Creel and his huge committee employed writers, artists,
filmmakers, poster designers, and over 7500 speakers to turn public opinion
against the evil “Huns” and in favor of “saving democracy.” One example of the
Commission’s work was the poster, still famous today, of Uncle Sam pointing his
finger with the words, “I Want You.” Creel himself considered the CPI “a vast
enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.” The
words, from his 1920 memoir, How We
Advertised America, were prophetic, for not only did the Commission succeed
in drumming up massive support for the war and violent hatred towards Germans,
both abroad and in America, but it also prefigured the imminent rise of mass
advertising, mass propaganda, and the consumer culture that has dominated
America ever since. Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, Edward Bernays (nephew
of Sigmund Freud) went straight from his post in the CPI to becoming a major
figure on Madison Avenue, advocating the same mass propaganda tools for commercial advertising that he had used to promote the war. As Bernays noted in his seminal
book, Propaganda (1928), “It was, of
course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the
eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind” (Hedges, p
80; emphasis added).
The
effect of all this propaganda, and its adoption by corporate America, was not
only the emasculation of the liberal class, but its co-optation into accepting
the idea that the proper function of an American was not to be an active
informed citizen, but to consume.
Progress, which liberals had earlier located in the improvement of life for the
disadvantaged and an ever-more direct voice for the masses in government, had
become technological progress: the
steady production of consumer goods allegedly designed to make life easier and
more pleasant. The emotional appeals that had worked so well to move public
opinion about the war were now employed to induce Americans to want what they
did not need, and to consider the satisfying of such created desires the be-all
and end-all of existence. As Hedges summarizes it,
The
war destroyed values and self-perceptions that had once characterized American
life and replaced them with fear, distrust, and the hedonism of the consumer society. The new mass
propaganda… effectively vilified all who did not speak in the language imparted
to the public by corporations and the state. For these reasons, it presaged a
profound cultural and political shift. It snuffed out a brief and robust period
of reform in American history, one that had seen mass movements, enraged at the
abuses of an American oligarchy, sweep across the country and demand profound
change. The rise of mass propaganda, made possible by industrial warfare,
effectively killed populism (p. 62)
From then on, according to Hedges,
with the brief exception of a period of populism during the Depression-era
1930s via such organizations as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the
liberal class became a handmaiden to the power elite. Even the counterculture
of the 1960s, according to Hedges, aside from its mild successes in protesting
the Vietnam war, retreated into the hedonism and disengagement that was
initiated by the Beats, and really goes back to the liberal retreat in World
War I. As Hedges puts it,
The
counterculture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents
inward. It set up the self as the primary center of concern. It, too, offered
affirmative, therapeutic remedies to social problems that embraced vague,
undefined, and utopian campaigns to remake society. There was no political
vision (p. 110).
The churches, the universities, the
unions, and the Democratic Party had and have a similar lack of vision, a similar
preoccupation with the self, a similar impatience with the long hard work of
political change, and a similar tendency to be bought off by power. Induced or
seduced to count on “the state as an agent of change,” they ended up “abetting the
consumer society, the cult of the self, and the ascendancy of the corporate
state” (p. 110).
When
it comes to solutions for us today, Hedges does not hold out much hope. Though
he himself has become one of the more radical activists in the nation, suing
the government recently in a challenge to the National Defense Authorization
Act of 2012 permitting indefinite detention, he refuses on principle to
advocate or engage in violence. Indeed, he is clear that since the flaccid liberal
class lacks both the capacity and the imagination to lead the revolt he sees as
necessary, “revolt…will come from the right, as it did in other eras of bankrupt
liberalism in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Tsarist Russia” (196). Still, for
Hedges, an acceptable, and perhaps sole form of revolt for radicals on the left
remains: refusal and noncooperation. Even knowing that reform of the system as
it now stands is hopeless; even convinced that corporate money has bought off
all the democratic levers of legislation and power, including the current
political operatives up to and including Barack Obama; even so, Hedges still
counsels that those of good conscience must act, rebel, resist, despite the
minimal chances for success:
Acts of resistance are moral acts. They take place
because people of conscience understand the moral, rather than the practical,
imperative of rebellion. They should be carried out not because they are
effective, but because they are right. (205).
This
leads us to the dilemma stated at the beginning. With the actions of states
becoming ever more viciously repressive, with the world on the brink of mass
extinctions, global warming, and a thousand other insults due to the piratic
and exploitative practices of corporate capitalists on a global scale, where
can the left go? What direction can there be for people with vision, with a conscience?
For Hedges, the answer lies not in revolution, which seeks to create a new
power structure (and all revolutions in recent history have proven to be as
corrupt as what they replaced), but in rebellion; rebellion as a continuing
revolt against power. Basically, if I understand him correctly, this means
refusing to submit. It means rebelling to assert, if not our power, at least
our humanity. I have written about this before, as a comment on one of my
favorite literary creations, Melville’s Bartleby
the Scrivener. Bartleby’s inimitable and unforgettable explanation for his
refusal to move out of the office he’d been asked to leave because of his total
noncompliance (he stopped working or leaving after office hours, but would only
sit facing the wall), was: I prefer not to. It is clear that
Melville was using him as an example of someone who simply refuses, without seeking
agreement or mercy or sympathy or anything else, to cooperate with business as
usual. The great contemporary philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, refers to something
similar as ‘Bartleby politics.’ Here is how Hedges puts his version in ending
his cri du coeur:
The indifference to the plight of others and the cult
of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. That state
appeals to pleasure as well as fear, to crush compassion. We will have to
continue to fight the mechanisms of that dominant culture, if for no other
reason than to preserve, through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity…As
distinct and moral beings, we will endure only through these small, sometimes
imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what
mass culture and mass propaganda seeks to eradicate. As long as we are willing
to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for
those who follow. As long as we defy these forces, we remain alive. And, for
now, this is the only victory possible. (217)
Whether others will agree with him
is not at all certain; the incentives to simply ‘cultivate one’s own garden’
are compelling. What everyone must take account of, however, is Chris Hedges’
singular gift for laying out the problems we all face, and his urging to us all
not to yield to either cynicism or false hope, but to rely on that basic human
gift that endures when all else fails: defiance, the ability to say NO. After
all is said and done, it is that which terrifies those in power. It is that
which, if there is to be salvation, will comprise it.
Lawrence DiStasi
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