saving liberals from chris hedges

8/3/2019 Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges

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Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges (2010)

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, inDeath of the Liberal Class, ostensibly isnt wishing the liberal

class to die hes simply demarcating it as deceased, or so he argues but he

certainly doesnt have much good to say about it either, and as a DeMausian

psychohistorian, Im 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 personalout. And

this would mean full disrespect of the remarkable truth that patriarchy, though

indeed now retrograde, was once significant psychogenic evolutionpeople

moving up the scale. It would mean implicitly slighting the fact that evolution of

the old kind, gradual betterment of people through time, isreal, 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 didnt just give us the support we needed but likely determined exactly

what were 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

olderpsychoclass innovation. It would mean betraying what I ought to love,

degrading myself, ostensiblytoo, from heights to lows, knight to accomplice, elf

to forlorn orc. Nevertheless, if I am true to what Ive either learned or confirmed


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from exploring DeMausian psychohistory, Im 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: HEDGESS 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 its never going to be made a utopiafor

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 degradationpeople 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


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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 20thcentury 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, werent fallen but ratherprogressedfrom 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 youbutonly until you

become familiar with what all succeeded it. The changed liberals Hedges

deplores were no-doubt members of a superiorpsychoclass, who stopped seeing

strife and division as necessarily a good thing1for 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 ones 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

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 wasnt 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.


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that he deems as only wholly regrettable mass lapsing to base drives, wasnt 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 didnt

have it all figured out. But still what they sought out in life was far from vile, andoverall 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 offidelity to the larger publics 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 goodthe former leadto 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 publics 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


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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 everyonefeeling that some great mountain-world of happiness had been earned to partake

in by the giantsacrifices endured through the Second World War and the two

decades of dreariness previous to it. Three decadesuntil 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.4And 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 wasnt always here, though, that before as an employee of

theNew 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

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 didnt let itself be quite segregated enough.


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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 Timesbadges he wears and prouds around in hisbook 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-hero5 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 martyrs

path: this is the truth he will cling to, and you are not to question it! If you

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 doesnt stop showing them to people, and put them downfor 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).


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indeedquestioned 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 hed probably ask you when the last

time was youd volunteered in a soup kitchen? And after debasing you bysuggesting how reluctant you are to do the least bit to close with the suffering

and note, it wouldnt have mattered if you could recall a recent timeyou had, for

he would understand it as merely show, an anxiety-ward, a boutique gesture

hed 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 hed quickly slide past you for knowing for not simply assenting to

him, guaranteed, youre 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. Youre one of those hes

encountered time and time again whove 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

7

Specifically, that executioners should properly be understood here really as patsies upon which ones ownmartyrdom 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 readthis book and judge any different.

9 About the liberal establishments 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).


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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 oftheirquotes, 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 wellfor they wouldbedelighted 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 theyre his heroes, I judge this simply not so with

depression-hefted Hedges, wholl Ill 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, wouldnt be abused into

mere opportunity to cement a rigid coursesomething 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 Chomskys and Naders, youd still have to be really skilled to draw

him to doubt, for each of these men believe theyve 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 youve 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

10 Presuming higher discourse than the like hed encounter on Fox News, after having previously been

asked by Kevin OLeary if he was a left-wing nutbar on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company)interview show, the Lange & OLeary Exchange (Oct. 6, 2011), a disgusted Hedges snorted, itll be thelast time, after at the end being thanked for appearing. One wonders how less offensive Hedges ownscornful 3-word encapsulation of the liberal class would be and if something likely, like fetid, cowardly,sycophants, if this would be something hed hesitate to say on a respected stage?


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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 possibilityin fullits simplyto 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, asbeing noble,

that their overalldegradation as human beings cant be seen. Hedges and the

multiple of leaders that will emerge during this depression will draw us so very

close to the peoples 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 Theyll 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

Wont 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 dont think theyare, 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 Hedges righteous thunder and implo[sions] (140) does,

11 Though Hedges sees Steinbeck as noteworthy for raising a nations moral reach by balking mean

stereotypes through his capacity to empathize, show skepticism, and his startling willingness to verify whatwas really going on amongst the destitute showing in detail what was happening to them in materialterms (138) I agree with Morris Dicksteins assessment of him inDancing in the Dark(Norton, 2009) asinstead someone who helped homogenize people into homo economicus, who played to preferences at theprice of the real, who couldnt empathize with those he closed in with enough to not mistake them forpossessing inner resources sufficient to power heroic endurancesimply impossible for people so stricken tobe able to possess (140), and who cursed a Depression generation by helping cement it with an apotheosisof the real, the material, with [a] [. . .] grave suspicion of the imagination (107).


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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 Hedges 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 magazineSalon,

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 studiesright

now. Liberals havent 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.

saving liberals from chris hedges

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