EPIGRAPH
GEORGE ORWELL, “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
I / Resistance
7 JOHN GRAY “[Classical liberalism has] four principle features, or perspectives, which give it a recognizable identity: it is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against any collectivity; egalitarian, in that it confers on all human beings the same basic moral status; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the species; and meliorist, in that it asserts the open-ended improvability, by use of critical reason, of human life.”
7 “[World War I] shattered liberal optimism about the inevitability of human progress, [and] 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. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, put in place only when the capitalist system collapsed, was the final political gasp of classical liberalism in the United States. The New Deal reforms, however, were systematically dismantled in the years after World War II, often with the assistance of the liberal class.”
10 “The liberal class refuses to recognize the obvious because it does not want to lose its comfortable and often well-paid perch. Churches and universities—in elite schools such as Princeton, professors can earn $180,000 a year—enjoy tax-exempt status as long as they refrain from overt political critiques. Labor leaders make lavish salaries and are considered junior partners within corporate capitalism as long as they do not speak in the language of class struggle. Politicians, like generals, are loyal to the demands of the corporate state in power and retire to become millionaires as lobbyists or corporate managers. Artists who use their talents to foster the myths and illusions that bombard our society live comfortably in the Hollywood Hills.
The media, the church, the university, the Democratic party, the arts, and labor unions—the pillars of the liberal class—have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda”
11 “Commercial artists peddle the mythical narrative, one propagated by corporations, self-help gurus, Oprah and the Christian Right, that if we dig deep enough within ourselves, focus on happiness, find our inner strength, or believe in miracles, we can have everything we desire.
Such magical thinking, a staple of the entertainment industry, blinds citizens to corporate structures that have made it impossible for families to lift themselves out of poverty or live with dignity.”
14 – 15 RUSSELL JACOBY “The left once dismissed the market as exploitative. It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”
16 – 17 IRVING HOWE “[The] idea of the intellectual vocation, the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization, has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout. […] whenever [intellectuals] become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals”
II / Permanent War
19 REINHOLD NIEBUHR “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
19 “Permanent war is the most effective mechanism used by the power elite to stifle reform and muzzle dissent. A state of war demands greater secrecy, constant vigilance and suspicion. It generates distrust and fear, especially in culture and art, often reducing it to silence or nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media. It wrecks the economy. It nullifies public opinion. And it forces liberal institutions to sacrifice their beliefs for a holy crusade, a kind of surrogate religion, whether it is against the Hun, the Bolshevik, the fascist, the communist, or the Islamic terrorist. The liberal class in a state of permanent war is rendered impotent.”
20 RANDOLPH BOURNE “War is the health of the state.”
21 “The corridors of liberal institutions are filled with Underground men and women. They decry the social chaos for which they bear responsibility, but do nothing. They nurse an internal bitterness and mounting distaste for the wider society. And, because of their self-righteousness, elitism, and hypocrisy, they are despised. The institutional church, when it does speak, mutters pious non-statements. It seeks to protect its vision of itself as a moral voice and yet avoids genuine confrontations with the power elite.”
22 FRITZ STERN “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.”
23 “Societies that do not reincorporate the unemployed and the poor into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, become subject to the hysterical mass quest for ecstatic deliverance in unreason.”
24 “Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new, revolutionary structures. They do not import new symbols and iconography. They do not offer a radical alternative. Corporate power purports, in inverted totalitarianism, to honor electoral politics, freedom, and the Constitution. But these corporate forces so corrupt and manipulate power as to make democracy impossible.”
32 – 33 NOAM CHOMSKY “There’s much excited talk these days about a great global shift of power, with speculation about whether, or when, China might displace the U.S. As the dominant global power, along with India, which, if it happened, would mean that the global system would be returning to something like what it was before the European conquests. And indeed their recent GDP growth has been spectacular. But there’s a lot more to say about it. So if you take a look at the U.N. human development index, basic measure of the health of the society, it turns out that India retains its place near the bottom. It’s now 134th, slightly above Cambodia, below Laos and Tajikistan. Actually, it’s dropped since the reforms began. China rants ninety-second, a bit above Jordan, below Dominican Republic and Iran. By comparison, Cuba, which has been under harsh U.S. attack for fifty years, is ranked fifty-second. It’s the highest in Central America and the Caribbean, barely below the richest societies in South America. India and China also suffer from extremely high inequality, so well over a billion of their inhabitants fall far lower in the scale. Furthermore, an accurate accounting would go beyond conventional measures to include serious costs that China and India can’t ignore for long: ecological, resource depletion, many others.”
35 NOAM CHOMSKY “The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration, and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
35 “genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive.”
36 NORMAN FINKELSTEIN “There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice, it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.”
42 “There are eighteen military and civilian intelligence agencies, and seventy percent of their combined budgets is outsourced to corporations, who use the experience and expertise gained on these projects to provide similar services to other corporations, as well as foreign governments. The Pentagon has privatized sixty-nine percent of its workforce.”
44 “War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society.”
54 “[War] mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals, such as the imposition of Western-style democracy or the liberation of women.”
56 “Public manifestations of gratitude are reserved for veterans who dutifully read from the script handed to them by the state. The veterans trotted out for viewing are those who are compliant and palatable, those we can stand to look at without horror, those willing to go along with the lie that war is the highest form of patriotism. “Thank you for your service,” we are supposed to say. These soldiers are used to perpetuate the myth. We are supposed to honor it.”
III / Dismantling the Liberal Class
62 – 63 “The rise of mass propaganda signaled the primacy of Freud, who had discovered that the manipulation of powerful myths and images, playing to subconscious fears and desires, could lead men and women to embrace their own subjugation and even self-destruction. What Freud and the great investigators of mass psychology realized was that the emotions were not subordinate to reason. If anything, it was the reverse. Prior to World War I, much current American thinking, following post-Enlightenment European thought, relied on the assumption that reason could rule, that debate in the public sphere was driven most powerfully and effectively by strong, rational underpinnings. The dream was of a “pure dialectic,” embodied in data, facts, postulates, deduction, or induction, stripped of emotion and conditioning. What Freud and the mass psychologists, and in turn, their godchildren, the mass propagandists, had rediscovered was a deep psychological truth grasped first and perhaps best by the philosophers and rhetoricians of Classical Greece. Greek philosophers did celebrate reason as nous, as a reflection of divine truth enacted in the human mind. But the Greek philosophers were trained in rhetoric before dialectics. Logical argumentation had to have a rhetorical, emotional resonance if it were to sway and shape public opinion. On the Pynx of Athens and later in the Forum of Rome, rhetors exercised powers of persuasion that appealed to emotions, alongside the appeal to reason and fact. Many Classical philosophers, beginning with Plato, warned that the appeal to emotion was only as good as the man making the appeal. But in twentieth-century mass propaganda, this warning was cast aside. The idea was to sway, and to use any means to do it. The moral aspect of public persuasion was pushed aside in pursuit of the targeted arousal of mass emotions. As the Greeks already knew, and Freud and his followers rediscovered, the illusion of “pure dialectic” was just that—an illusion.”
63 “Twelve thousand people, roused by German attacks on American cargo vessels and fiery denunciations in the press, rallied on March 22, 1917, in Madison Square Garden to call for war at a mass meeting organized by the American Rights Committee. William English Walling, Charles Edward Russell, Upton Sinclair, and nearly all other intellectual leaders in the Socialist Party, abandoning their opposition, issued a call for war the next day. The antiwar movement crumbled, with widespread defections”
65 “Progressive politics had enjoyed an upsurge before the war, bringing on a golden era of American journalism and social reform, but that was now ended. Progressivism would flicker to life again in the 1930s with the Great Depression and then be crushed in the next war. Progressives in World War I shifted from the role of social critics to that of propagandists. They did this seamlessly. The crusades undertaken for the working poor in mill towns and urban slums were transformed into an abstract crusade to remake the world through violence, a war to end all wars.”
70 “No other president in American history did more to damage the independence and freedom of the press, or set back the cause of social reform, than Wilson.”
74 “the tactic used by ExxonMobil to use $16 million to fund a network of forty-three “grassroots” organizations opposed to the science of climate change, recruit scientists to publish non-peer-reviewed articles challenging the scientific evidence, and repeated placement of these “experts” on the national airwaves to manufacture public confusion.”
74 STUART EWEN “In 1909-19010, 58 percent of American cities had a press that was varied both in ownership and perspective. By 1920, the same percentage represented those cities in which the press was controlled by an information monopoly. By 1930, 80 percent of American cities had given way to a press monopoly. The role and influence of advertising revenues multiplied thirteen-fold (from $200 million to $2.6 billion), and it was the periodicals, both the dailies and others, which acted as a major vehicle for this growth.”
76 GEORGE CREEL “It was the fight for the minds of men, for the “conquest of their convictions,” and the battle-line ran through every home in every country.
It was in this recognition of Public Opinion as a major force that the Great War differed most essentially from all previous conflicts. The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies of armed men, but between opposed ideals, and moral verdicts took on all the value of military decisions. . . . In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”
77 “[The Committee for Public Information] established a speaker’s bureau thanks to which speakers, known as “four-minute men,” would get up in crowded movie houses, in churches, at civic functions, or even on the street to deliver pro-war messages and raise money for Liberty Loan drives. By war’s end Creel had some seventy-five thousand speakers who gave four-minute talks on topics prepared for them by the committee.”
79 WASHINGTON POST “in spite of the excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening of the interior of the country.”
80 JANE ADDAMS “a distinct aftermath of the war was the dominance of the mass over the individual to such an extent that it constituted a veritable revolution in our social relationships.”
81 EDWARD BERNAYS “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. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.”
84 “Classical liberalism, while it embraced the goals of the Enlightenment, was colored by a healthy dose of skepticism about human perfectibility and acutely aware of the nature and potency of evil. Modern liberalism lost this awareness. Human institutions and government were seen as mechanisms that, under the right control, would inevitably better humankind.”
88 DWIGHT MACDONALD “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach.”
93 “The kind of commercial censorship imposed on The Cradle Will Rock has been the favored tool, briefly disrupted by the Federal Theatre Project, used to dominate the theater and arts since the era of World War I and the rise of the corporate state. Money, as in the rest of the liberal establishment, rewarded those who behaved and did not write or speak from the bottom up. For its four years, the Federal Theatre Project drew huge segments of the population, for whom the arts were often seen as elitist and inaccessible, into new and empowering forms of self-expression. But the power of art to shape and explain reality was something the power elite did not intend to extend to the working class.”
95 KAREN MALPEDE [The House Un-American Activities Committee] terrorized and split the artistic community, and, worse, it led to the self-imposed censorship among American theater workers who, for the sake of their careers, largely fostered and accepted the notion that politics and art don’t mix, that ipso facto, any play that was politically relevant had to be bad art.”
98 “Art is an individual experience. It forces us to examine ourselves. It broadens perspective. Entertainment masquerading as art, by contrast, hers viewers and audiences into the collective. It limits perspective to that experienced by the mass.”
98 KAREN MALPEDE “With the effective disempowering of artists, and with artists’ collusion in their own disempowerment, the theater now serves no meaningful function. It seldom startles, enlivens, enrages, or encourages its audience to become more fiercely aware of their own or of others’ humanity.”
100 “[Malcolm] Cowley questioned Max Weber’s contention that the Puritan ethic—restraint, asceticism, guilt—was the primary value system demanded by capitalism. He argued that the “production ethic,” which demanded “industry, foresight, thrift” was, in fact, the value system cherished by a now-lost machine age. The new corporate capitalism and mass production sustained themselves through the promotion of a new ethic that promoted leisure, self-indulgence, and wasteful consumption, activities that called for traits such as charm, a pleasant appearance, and likability. Consumption was more important than production. Cowley observed that after the war, artists, too, became devoted to self-expression, political cynicism, and hedonism, including the cult of the body. These values were embraced in the name of the counterculture, but they were also the core qualities corporate capitalism sought to inculcate in the public. This cult of the self was central, Cowley wrote, to the Bohemians and later the Beats.”
101 – 102 “The new ethic of the liberal class, Cowley wrote, was one that embraced “the idea of salvation by the child,” which proposed a new educational system “by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation.” It championed self-expression so that the individual can “realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.” It fostered the cult of paganism, the idea that “the body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love.” It called for living for the moment, to “dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering.” It defied all forms of Puritanism and demanded that “every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished.” It supported female equality. It embraced the therapeutic culture, the belief that “if our individual repressions can be removed—by confessing them to a Freudian psychologist—then we can adjust ourselves to any situation, and be happy in it.” The environment no longer needed to be altered, and “that explains why most radicals who became converted to psychoanalysis or glands or Gurdjieff [a popular mystic] gradually abandoned their political activism.”
Cowley noted that self-expression and paganism, however, only encouraged a demand for new products, from furniture to beach pajamas. The call to live in the moment, he argued, led people impulsively to purchase consumer goods, from automobiles to radios. Female equality was used to double the consumption of products such as cigarettes. The restlessness and fondness for self-imposed exile, embraced by Bohemians, intellectuals and artists, gave an allure to foreign objects and turned exotic locations into tourist destinations.”
103 “As long as the liberal class did not seriously challenge capitalism, it was permitted a place in the churches, the universities, the unions, the press, the arts, and the Democratic Party.”
103 “The final purges of radicals included the blacklisting of writers, actors, directors, journalists, union leaders, politicians such as Henry Wallace, government employees, teachers, artists, and producers in the American film industry, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The purge was done with the collaboration of the liberal class.”
IV / Politics as Spectacle
110 SHARON SMITH “With few exceptions, New Left radicals regarded the working class in the heart of the imperialist beast as a [big] part of the problem, and they looked elsewhere for allies.”
110 “Radicals turned to Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. And with that came an embrace of armed revolution. The Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and the Weather Underground Organization, severed from the daily concerns of the working class, became as infected with the lust for violence, quest for ideological purity, crippling paranoia, self-exaltation, and internal repression as the state system they defied.”
110 – 111 “Protest in the 1960s found its ideological roots in the disengagement championed earlier by Beats such [as] Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It was a movement that, while it incorporated a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, focused again on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment. […] The counterculture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set [.] the self up as the primary center of concern. It, too, offered affirmative, therapeutic remedies to social problems. […] It shared commercial culture’s hedonism, love of spectacle, and preoccupation with the self.”
112 IRVING HOWE “to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.”
114 NEAL GABLER “the most important art movement of the twentieth century wasn’t cubism or surrealism or fauvism or minimalism or op or pop, to which [Warhol] himself nominally belonged. No, the most important art movement was celebrity. Eventually, no matter who the artist was and no matter what school he belonged to, the entertainment society made his fame his achievement and not his achievement his fame. The visual art, like so much else in American life, was a macguffin for the artist. It was just a means to celebrity, which was the real artwork.”
115 CAROL BECKER “in our public school system, [.] art is marginalized almost as some sort of leisure activity. [Art] is relegated to a place of nostalgic longing, high culture, or entertainment.”
115 “Universities, by demanding that professors attain doctorates, almost always written on narrow and obscure specializations approved by faculty committees, replenish their ranks with the timid and the mediocre.”
118 ALAN MAGEE “Tenderness and empathy had been banished from “important” art. They were not good for business. Today’s sanctified works of art are essentially financial vehicles—stripped of burdensome humanity. […] a once-vital avenue of human connection is clogged with things that rebuke the notion of connection.”
120 ROB SHETTERLY “I often think of the music of the 1960s—Phil Ochs, Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta, Peter, Paul & Mary, etc. That music about civil rights and the illegitimacy of the Vietnam War was everywhere. The corporate media had not yet learned that simply by not playing that music they could severely limit the spread of ideas. Millions of young people were radicalized to act for political causes, not by reading essays and taking courses, but by the spurring of art. Art told them their consciences were right. […] It’s not censorship. The artists are free to speak and produce. But not many people will know about it. And, because the corporate media, our sanctified free press, is now clearly part of the mechanism of propaganda for the military-industrial-congressional complex, artists have to attack the press as much as the war profiteers and elected liars, and thus have even less likelihood of being reported on. The media hates to have its biases exposed.”
123 “the traditional Democratic establishment not only colluded with Richard Nixon to crush McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, but also swiftly rewrote party nominating rules so a [Eugene] McCarthy or a McGovern would never again be able to get the nomination.”
124 “Marxists now became culture and literary critics. These theorists invested their energy in multiculturalism, with branches such as feminist studies, queer studies, and African American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriched the university. But multiculturalism, rather than leading to a critique of structures and systems that consciously excluded and impoverished the poor and the marginal, became an end in itself.”
124 RUSSEL JACOBY “Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity. With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multiculturalism, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology.”
125 “While it seems on the surface to be a movement for social change, the campaign for cultural diversity, does little to perturb the power elite. It does not challenge economic or political structures that are rapidly disempowering the working class. Making sure people of diverse races or sexual orientations appear on television shows or in advertisements merely widens the circle of new consumers. Multiculturalism is an appeal that pleads with the corporate power structure for inclusion.”
126 “Universities hire by committee. It is not scholarship or ideas but collegiality and conformity committees prize most. And those who do receive tenure, after an average of seven years, long enough to integrate into the dominant culture, are rewarded for being conformists, not iconoclasts.”
126 – 127 “Tenured academics are going the way of unionized steel workers. There are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs—only about thirty-five percent of current academic positions offer tenure—and this percentage is declining. The scramble by desperate academics to placate the demands of college administrators and university presses that will publish their work so they can get tenure, has only grown as the number of secure jobs diminishes. The majority of academics are itinerants who may teach in a series of schools over a career, or at two or three schools at a time, with no job security. Adjuncts are usually hired on contracts of a year or less. They are considered part-time employees and are ineligible for benefits. Many earn as little as $1,000 a course. The lack of job security further inhibits any propensity to write or speak about topics that have political or social relevance. It is better for one’s career to stay away from politics and wallow in the arcane world of departmental intrigue and academic gibberish.
The media, like the university, are required to stay aloof from the issues of the day. The media, too, must assume the role of disinterested and impartial observers. This was, for those of us reporting on the wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans, an impossibility. It is difficult to witness human suffering and not feel. But to express these emotions in the newsroom, to express outrage at the atrocities committed by Salvadoran death squads, the killings by Bosnian Serbs, or especially the brutality of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, was to risk being reassigned or pushed aside by editors who demanded emotional disengagement. Those who feel in newsrooms are viewed as lacking impartiality and objectivity. They cannot be trusted. And the game I and others played was to mask our emotions and pretend that, no matter how horrible the crime, we were only clinical observers.”
129 REINHOLD NEIBUHR “Modern western civilization may perish because it falsely worshiped technology as a final good.”
129 “Once you master a people by force, you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes. Fear engenders cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis.”
130 – 131 “The public statements of support for the invasion of Iraq by fellow reporter John Burns did not see him ousted from the paper. The approved mythic narrative is “neutral” and “apolitical” because it serves the empowered classes. Those who honor these myths remain valued members of the liberal class. Those who do not are banished.”
131 “The media are as plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism, and careerism as the academy, the unions, the arts, the Democratic Party, and religious institutions. The media, like the academy, hold up false ideals of impartiality and objectivity to mask their complicity with power. They posit the absurd idea that knowledge and understanding are attainable exclusively through vision, that we should all be mere spectators of life. The pernicious reduction of the public to the role of spectators denies the media, and the public they serve, a political role. As John Dewey has pointed out, public opinion is not formed when individuals possess correct representations of the government, even if such representations were possible. It is formed through discourse and discussion. But the reduction of the media and the public to the role of passive spectators cuts off the possibility of a conversation.”
131 JAMES W. CAREY “The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda. [It has also] disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed.”
132 “The commercial media […] also help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don’t run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities—those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame, and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in “need creation,” prompting consumers to want things they don’t need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to “actualize” themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle.”
139 “My anger is not directed against these institutions so much as those within them that failed when we needed their voices. These liberal principles were egregiously betrayed to protect careers, to preserve access to the powerful. Liberals conceded too much to the power elite. The tragedy of the liberal class and the institutions it controls is that it succumbed to opportunism and finally to fear. It abrogated its moral role. It did not defy corporate abuse when it had the chance. It exiled those within its ranks who did. And the defanging of the liberal class not only removed all barriers to neofeudalism and corporate abuse but also ensured that the liberal class will, in its turn, be swept aside.”
140 “The creed of “impartiality” and “objectivity” that has infected the liberal class teaches, ultimately, the importance of not offending the status quo. The “professionalism” demanded in the classroom, in newsprint, in the arts or in political discourse is code for moral disengagement.”
V \ Liberal Defectors
141 KARL POPPER “But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e., those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type. Of course, the authorities will always remain convinced of their ability to detect initiative. But what they mean by this is only a quick grasp of their intentions, and they will remain for ever incapable of seeing the difference.”
143 LESLIE GELB “My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”
143 “Independent thought, as Gelb and many of those who backed the war understood, is an instant career killer. Doors shut. No longer are you invited on the television talk shows, given grants, feted in the university, interviewed on CNN, invited to the Council on Foreign Relations, given tenure, or asked to write op-ed pieces in the New York Times. There is no cost to being wrong if the policies of the power elite are lauded. There is, however, a tremendous cost to being defiant, even if that defiance is prescient and correct. The liberal class, seeking personal and financial advancement as well as continued entrée into the inner circles of power, is not concerned with the moral but the practical.”
152 – 153 “Liberals are expected by the power elite to police their own. […] The liberal class is expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses while studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures. When dissidents step outside these boundaries, they become pariahs. Specific actions can be criticized, but motives, intentions, and the moral probity of the power elite cannot be questioned.”
153 “The failure by the liberal class to adjust to the harsh, new reality of corporate power and the permanent war economy, to acknowledge its own powerlessness, has left the liberal class isolated and despised.”
153 “The inability of liberals and the power elite to address our reality leaves the disenfranchised open to manipulation by the demagogues.”
154 – 155 “A confused culture disdains the empathy and compassion espoused by traditional liberalism. This cruelty runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, where contestants endure pain and humiliation while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless world of competition. […] Friendship, trust, solidarity, honesty, and compassion are banished for the unadulterated world of competition.
This hypermasculinity, the core of pornography, fuses violence and eroticism, as well as the physical and emotional degradation of women. It is the language employed by the corporate state. Human beings are reduced to commodities. […] a militarized culture attacks all that is culturally defined as the feminine, including love, gentleness, compassion, and acceptance of difference. It sees any sexual ambiguity as a threat to male “hardness” and the clearly defined roles required by the militarized state. The elevation of military values as the highest good sustains the perverted ethic, rigid social roles, and emotional numbness […] It is a moral cancer that the liberal class once struggled against. […] And once the remnants of the liberal class adopt the heartless language of sexual violence, they assent, consciously or not, to the rule of corporate greed and violence.”
156 “the fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but also for the bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is exposed as a lie, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic façade exists, liberals can engage in a useless moral posturing that requires no sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate, vindicated by their pathetic cries of protest.”
156 – 157 “The best opportunities for radical social change exist among the poor, the homeless, the working class, and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our only hope is to connect ourselves with the daily injustices visited upon the weak and the outcast. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. We must hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly abandoned on city sidewalks, take their medication. We must go back into America’s segregated schools and prisons. We must protest, learn to live simply and begin, in an age of material and imperial decline, to speak with a new humility. It is in the tangible, mundane, and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back, that we will articulate an alternative.”
160 DANIEL BERRIGAN “the good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere.”
161 DANIEL BERRIGAN “[Pope John Paul II] introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church, [including] anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny, and secrecy, and the placing of company men into positions of great power.”
166 “In an appendix of a State Department white paper meant to justify an expansion of the war, [I. F. Stone] found that in the months between June 1962 and January 1964 only 179 of approximately 7,500 weapons captured from the Vietcong had come from the Soviet bloc. The remainder, ninety-five percent, came from U.S. Arms provided to the South Vietnamese.”
167 – 168 I. F. STONE “Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party lines. Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.”
173 “There are today 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about ten thousand locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000 people, all of whom hold top-secret security clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area, thirty-three building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together, the paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or twenty-two U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet.”
173 “a few decades from now maybe we will be able to examine the work of the latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of thousands. […] Do those following us around comprehend how manipulated they are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but discredit and destroy social movements as well as protect the elite from those who would expose them?” 173 “if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged.”
175 “Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Chomsky from being quoted in the paper, decreed that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research. This effectively killed the stories. The Times set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the Times, other major papers and networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations.”
177 “[Corporations] invented bogus disciplines, including cost-benefit and risk-management analysis, all geared to change the debate from health, labor, and safety issues to the rising cost of big government. They ran sophisticated ad campaigns to beguile voters. These corporations wrenched apart, through lavish campaign donations and intensive and shady lobbying, the ties between Nader’s public interest groups and his supporters in the Democratic Party. Washington, by the time they were done, was besieged with twenty-five thousand corporate lobbyists and nine thousand corporate action committees. […] by the time Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office, the corporate state was unassailable. Nader and his citizen committees were frozen out by Democrats as well as Republicans. Clinton and Gore never met with Nader while in office, despite Gore’s reputed concern for the environment.”
181 “Nader’s status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked assault on the working class by corporations and their tacit allies in the liberal class. Long-term unemployment, millions of foreclosures, crippling personal debts and bankruptcies, the evaporation of savings and retirement accounts, and the crumbling of the country’s infrastructure are taking place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses, and compensation are doled out to corporate overlords. The drug and health-insurance companies, subsidized with billions in taxpayer funds, will soon legally force us to buy their defective products while remaining free to raise co-payments and premiums, especially if we get seriously ill.”
182 RALPH NADER “The problem is that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.”
183 RALPH NADER “It is not pleasant having to say this. You don’t want to telegraph that you have been blacked out, but on the other hand you can’t keep it quiet. The right wing has won through intimidation.”
184 “Most of our great social reformers are sanitized for mainstream public consumption after their deaths, and turned into harmless props of American glory. King was not only a socialist but also fiercely opposed to American militarism. He was aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce.”
184 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR “They have turned my dream into a nightmare.”
184 JAMES CONE “Mainstream culture appeals to King’s accent on love, as if it can be separated from justice. For King, justice defines love. It can’t be separated. They are intricately locked together. This is why he talked about agape love and not some sentimental love. For King, love was militant. He saw direct action and civil disobedience in the face of injustice as a political expression of love because it was healing the society. It exposed its wounds and its hurt. This accent on justice for the poor is what mainstream society wants to separate from King’s understanding of love. But for King, justice and love belong together.”
185 “King, when he began his calls for integration, argued that hard work and preserverance could make the American dream available for rich and poor, white and black. This is the staple message and mythology embraced by the liberal class. King grew up in the black middle class. He was well educated and comfortable in the cultural and social circles of the liberal class. He admitted that until his early twenties, life had been wrapped up for him like “a Christmas present.” He naïvely thought that integration was the answer. He trusted, ultimately, in the liberal, white power structure to recognize the need for justice for all of its citizens. Like most college-educated blacks, he shared the same value system and preoccupation with success as the liberal whites with whom he sought to integrate.
But this was not Malcolm’s America. Malcolm grew up in urban poverty in Detroit, dropped out of school in eighth grade, was shuttled between foster homes, was abused, hustled on city streets, and eventually ended up in prison. There was no evidence in his hard life of a political order that acknowledged his humanity or dignity. The white people he knew did not exhibit a conscience or compassion. And in the ghetto, where survival was a daily battle, nonviolence was not a credible option.”
186 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR “any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood.”
186 YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA “The cell block has replaced the auction block.”
187 – 188 JAMES CONE “King did not speak to black self-hate, and Malcolm did. King was a political revolutionary. He transformed the social and political life of America. You would not have Barack Obama today if it had not been for King. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. He did not change the social or political structures, but he changed how black people thought about themselves. He transformed black thinking. He made blacks love themselves at a time when they hated themselves. The movement from being Negro and colored to bring black, that’s Malcolm. Black studies in the universities and black caucuses, that’s Malcolm. King never would have done black studies. He taught a course at Morehouse on social and political philosophers and did not include a black person. He didn’t have W.E.B. Du Bois or Frederick Douglass. None of them. He had all the white figures like Plato and Aristotle. Malcolm helped black people to love themselves.”
188 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR “I ain’t going to kill nobody in Mississippi . . . [or] in Vietnam. I ain’t going to study war no more. And you know what? I don’t care who doesn’t like what I say about it. I don’t care who criticizes me in an editorial. I don’t care what white person or Negro criticizes me. I’m going to stick with the best. On some positions, cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when a true follower of Jesus Christ must take a stand that’s neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take that stand because it is right. Every now and then we sing about it, “If you are right, God will fight your battle.” I’m going to stick by the best during these evil times.”
190 “Our destitute working class now understands that the cloying feel-your-pain language of the liberal class is a lie. The liberal class is not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, or jobs from being exported. The gap between stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities, fatuous academic and financial experts, oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are often willing to listen to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is becoming synonymous with right-wing populism.”
VI / Rebellion
193 “All resistance must recognize that the corporate coup d’état is complete. We must not waste our energy trying to reform or appeal to systems of power. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance.”
194 “Our environment is being dramatically transformed in ways that soon will make it difficult for the human species to survive. We must direct our energies toward building sustainable, local communities to whether the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.”
194 “American society, although it continues to use traditional and sentimental iconography and language to describe itself, has in fact been so radically transformed by liberal gullibility and unchecked corporatism that it bears no resemblance to its self-image. Corporate forces, whether in Copenhagen or the U.S. Congress, ignore the needs and desires of citizens. Corporate interests have seized all mechanisms of power, from government to mass propaganda. They will not be defeated through elections or influenced through popular movements.”
196 “It is imperative that, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, communities nurture the intellectual and artistic traditions that make possible a civil society, humanism, and the common good. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount.”
197 “As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images by the organs of mass propaganda that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty, and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that—a fantasy.”
198 “When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms, and perverts you.
Violence is also a drug. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force. And killers rise to the surface of all armed movements, even those that could be defined as just, and contaminate them with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the capacity to kill and destroy. […]
Those who resist with force cannot hope to defeat the corporate state. They will not sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. Armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them. […] Violence must be avoided, although finally not at the expense of our own survival. Nonviolent acts of disobedience and the breaking of laws to disrupt the corporate assault on human life and the ecosystem will keep us whole. Once we use violence against violence, we enter a moral void.”
199 “We mistook style and ethnicity—an advertising tactic pioneered by Calvin Klein and Benetton—for progressive politics and genuine change. The goal of a branded Obama, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience. And this is why Obama was named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year in 2008, beating out Apple and Zappos.”
199 CHRIS ROJEK “Celebrity culture is a culture of faux ecstasy, since the passions it generates derive from staged authenticity rather than genuine forms of recognition and belonging […] The cult of distraction, then, is both a means of concealing the meaninglessness of modern life and of reinforcing the power of commodity culture.”
200 “The belief that we can make things happen through positive thoughts, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength, or by understanding that we are truly exceptional, is peddled to us by all aspects of the culture, from Oprah to the Christian Right. It is magical thinking. […] This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. It permits societies to transfer their emotional allegiance to the absurd—whether embodied in professional sports or in celebrity culture—and ignore real problems.”
201 “The ideology of globalization, like all “inevitable” utopian visions, has imploded. The power elite, perplexed and confused, clings to the utopian dreams and outdated language of globalization to mask the political and economic vacuum.”
204 “We face a terrible political truth. Those who hold power will not act with the urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem. Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands or moral and intellectual trolls such as BP’s former chairman Tony Hayward.”
207 “Language, as a cultural critic Neil Postman pointed out, “makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or a listener is deprived of what was said before and after.” Images, while giving the appearance of reality, distort it. The image dismembers reality. It “recreates the world in a series of idiosyncratic events.” And it will be difficult to communicate with those within a culture that are fed hefty doses of emotionally charged images and words taken out of context. Reality, once it is disconnected from print, is no longer placed in context. This will leave dissidents speaking in a language that will often be unintelligible to the wider society.”
208 “Internet traffic is dominated by a few principal corporate sites, Yahoo, Bing and Google, which aggregate and reproduce existing journalism and creative work. The goal, of course, is profit. The Web efficiently disseminates content, but it does not protect intellectual property rights. And this means financial ruin for journalists, academics, musicians, and artists. Creative work is released for free to Web providers who use it as bait for corporate advertising. And those create reap little or nothing.”
208 “The Internet is only accelerating our division into antagonistic clans, where we are sucked into virtual tribal groups that chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies. The Web, like the cable news outlets, forms anonymous crowds to vent collective rage, intolerance, and bigotry.”
209 “Privacy, honesty, and self-reflection are obliterated in favor of image.”
209 “Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual-reality technology […] says that one of the biggest mistakes he and other early computer scientists made while developing the Internet was allowing those whose works are displayed on the Internet to go unpaid. He says this decision has made it more difficult for those who create intellectual or artistic works to make a living or receive credit for their work. It has furthered the cultural rout against individual expression.
Twenty music tracks are downloaded illegally for every one bought online. It is a similar story for films and photographs. Pirated versions of newly released movies are available along with last week’s New York Times bestsellers. Journalists, once able to sell articles to publications overseas, now see their work flash around the globe without hope of compensation. We are starving our professional critics and artists.”
209 – 210 “The only journalism and art that will endure will be that which draws advertising. Cultural and artistic expression will be replaced by the tawdry, banal, and often idiotic distractions that draw huge numbers of YouTube hits or public-relations-created propaganda. And any work that cannot gain corporate sponsorship or attract advertising dollars will be ignored.”
210 MARK KURLANSKY “All of a sudden people have lost sight of the fact that people need to be paid for the work […] The public has this attitude that this is above money. It is not a coincidence that the only successful print medium left economically is financial journalism. It is a world that worships money. You pay your money, and you get your story.”
210 – 211 “The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion and the orchestration of celebrity. But, as Lanier points out, this turns all culture into a form of advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation, for the art of seduction, is valued more than truth, beauty, or intellect. Writers, musicians, artists, journalists, and filmmakers must transform themselves into celebrities to earn money, or vanish from public consciousness.”
214 “The media, the arts, scholarship, and political and social movements must become conduits for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. We must defy systems, and even laws, that permit corporations to strangle our culture and natural world.”
216 PINDAR “Oh my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
217 “The dispassionate, objective creed of the liberal class, which made them mere photographers of human reality, is useless to the rebel. It is an ideology that serves those we must defy.”
217 “[Cicero] was as despised by the crowd as he was by the power elite. When his severed head and hands were mounted on the podium in the Colosseum, and his executioner Mark Anthony announced that Cicero would speak and write no more, the tens of thousands of spectators roared their approval. Tyranny in an age of chaos is often greeted with palpable relief. There often is no public outcry. The rebel must, for this reason, also expect to become the enemy, even of those he or she is attempting to protect. 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.”