Nov 04 2010
The Death of the Liberal Class
In light of the mid-term election results and the loss of control of the House by Democrats, many people are struggling to understand what happened. Why, when Americans are hurting so deeply economically, did they turn around and vote in the very people who are promising rewards to corporations and threatening social safeguards. It is either a testament to widespread ignorance of the corporate backers of Tea Party candidates, or the power of Fox News’ reality-skewing bullhorn. Or both. But perhaps it is also a testament to the lack of any real progressive or left movement. In a pre-election analysis author and veteran journalist Chris Hedges explains how the American left is a phantom “conjured up by the Right Wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy.”
Chris Hedges is a weekly columnist for Truthdig.com. He was a foreign correspondent for nearly 20 years in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Last year the LA Press Club named him the Online Journalist of the Year for his Truthdig columns and this year he won the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay “One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.” Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.
In his latest book, The Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges described how American liberalism is dying. The progressive institutions that have largely represented the interests of the poor, the working class, and the middle class—universities, the press, trade unions and the liberal Church—are being dismantled. Hedges brings home an analogy to Tsarist Russia, Germany and Yugoslavia as he points out the enormous consequences that the fall of the middle class could have on the rest of American society.
Read Hedges’ work online at www.truthdig.com.
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