JackRiddler wrote:.
I love Brother West, and I thought the speech he made to set off all the criticism was righteous. And I love Brother Hedges, but I don't make much of his general liberal-bashing for sport.
Who are these liberals? His article doesn't mention any by name, and he'll be hard put to find too many among his targets who are willing to call themselves by that name. The people who do freely identify as "liberal" on principle may be really good people, and very likely undeserving of Hedges's critique. In fact, they're probably just like Hedges.
After all, it all depends on who is using the word and how it is defined, and for the most part this word is never defined; it's only muddied. Most of the "liberals" in this society are ascribed, not self-described. They're "liberals" because some media or expert authority pinned the label on them, usually as an attack term. And that's what Brother Hedges is doing here. He's talking about Democratic Party apparatchiks, most of them indistinguishable from the Republicans on issues such as "national security," "crime" or "economic freedom." He's talking about pundits who are paid to play-act the ostensible left on television or in think-tank rounds: spin doctors, media whores, people who do not have convictions but are hired to represent opinions in predigested talking points, calcified shadow beings whose most important job in psychological terms is never to surprise themselves. He's also talking about corporate management echelons who have learned a false lingo of tolerance and diversity, who are not remotely liberal in philosophy, whose treatment of the "human resources" is still dictated by what the spreadsheets say. He's talking about a few billionaires or bankers who picked up some of their language from hippies and are celebrated as "liberal" visionaries or philanthropists. He's talking about technocrats who want to define every social problem as a deviance disorder, treat people for their bad habits, stamp out vice. He's also angry at a larger demographic of fearful middle-class conformists who tend to avoid politics and seek whatever is perceived as a centrist or moderate position. People who hope to feel good about themselves by endorsing the same milquetoast ideals of tolerance and diversity.
If these are his "liberals," then bash away.
But again, who's calling them that? It's the right wing (the self-described conservatives) generally who get to define who are the "liberal" politicians, the "liberal" academics and lawyers. It is organs of the corporate media itself that present the fantasy of "the liberal media." The same reigning mentality, the one that defines politics as a polarity between false and often flexible definitions of "liberal" and "conservative," doesn't even allow for Hedges's position to exist, except as something "liberal." What do you think the punditry are likeliest to call Hedges, when he's not specifically attacking "liberals"? He'd be a "hard-left liberal extremist." Don't tell me the latter phrase is a contradiction in terms; my point is that it's a contradiction in terms, but in this article Hedges isn't deconstructing the confusionist ideology, he's accepting its labels.
"Liberal" has been rendered derogatory since the 1980s or really the 1970s. Back in 1988 Bush feigned that he couldn't even say the dirty word, he turned it into the "l-word," and a threshold was signalled by the failure of Dukakis to respond, to say, "If liberal means [this or that good thing], then hell yeah I'm a liberal, and that's American damn it!" Since then the only thing liberal about the Democratic Party leadership has been that this is the word FOXNEWS and the Washington Post stick on them. The more Clinton or Obama pursue the same policies or continue the same wars as their Bush predecessors, the more we are told that they are "the most liberal" this or that in history, or socialists, or agents of Marxism. The term usually receives no definition beyond that it's vaguely Eastern, urban, educated, unionized, pro-Black, European, gay, unpatriotic, supposedly voting for the Democrats and looking down on down-home, Christian, flag-waving gun-owning meat-eating Americans who are proud to serve. It's a rhetorical dodge, a means of removing politics and leaving only identities that can be divided and ruled over. At the same time, "conservative" is defined by a series of hysterias about threats to life, property or some nostalgic male white heteronormative identity, but always tied to the kicker: policy proscriptions that are radically plutocratic. This is no longer "conservative" by a dictionary definition. The ideology of the right has become confusionism. All reality is inverted in the language; the labels consist in funhouse projections of the unacknowledged self on to the designated-enemy other. The most ardent supporters of a repressive surveillance state decry big government!
You can chalk it up as a victory for the old liberals and New Left of the 1960s that the once-fresh language of empowerment, grassroots, reform, and revolution was taken up and detourned by the perpetually "new" right that has called most of the shots since (perpetually new because every couple of years they're recycled and repackaged as a surprise rebellion from nowhere, as with the Tea Party). Hedges is about 50 years too late in discerning the death of the liberal class. It died in the 1960s and 1970s. It died when its leaders were shot dead in public assassinations, and the nearest followers were cowed enough to become not just believers but champions of the cover stories.
Later came 9/11 and a renewed hysteria: are you with us or against us? Are you watching what you say? Are you avoiding the thoughts that will identify you as insane and pariah to good company? It wasn't so much that you had to feel the fear personally, but you had best acquiesce in accepting its legitimacy as the new crux point of policy.
And these are far from the first waves of cultural repression, as justdrew points out. You people act like the postwar era did not start with possibly the biggest mass hysteria of all, the search for "communists" accompanied by a countrywide purge of tens of thousands of possible "communist sympathizers" from government, journalism, teaching, arts and the professions (vulnerability extended potentially to anyone who was not rabidly parroting the fairy tales of the Cold War). The modern form of this country was born with everyone already fearing they may be charged with thoughtcrime. The 1960s saw a brief opening but the culture in this country since has been managed, mostly with success, in rendering institutions of democracy and republic mostly irrelevant, and in keeping the people in a series of hysterias and general ignorance about their own government, policies, and real circumstances.
How productive is it really to pretend that these liberals of right-wing hysteria actually exist, and should be bashed from the left? This is not the acid trip the country needs, wherein all false labels and false identities and self-deceptions melt away into a helpless, cleansing laughter over, and liberation from, our own false self-images.
Bump, since it is one of the best posts I've ever read here...
