From organizing workers to preventing war to making the economy more green, journalist Chris Hedges argues that, for decades, liberals have surrendered the good fights to corporations and ruling powers.
In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams five specific groups and institutions ”” the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia ”” for failing Americans and allowing for the creation of a “permanent underclass.”
Hedges says that, for motives ranging from self-preservation to careerism, the “liberal establishment” purged radicals from its own ranks and, as a result, lost its checks on capitalism and corporate power.
“For millions of Americans, including the 15 million unemployed Americans,” Hedges tells NPR’S Neal Conan, “the suffering is becoming acute.”
As a Christian, I feel constrained from calling myself an unfettered free-marketeer capitalist. The “creative destruction” of industries and the “social mobility” of labor do not represent goods for human persons in the light of God. We are called to community and mutual support, and that slows me down from cheering on a system of rapid and radical shifts of people and products to generate the highest possible profit.
With that lengthy caveat: I’m amazed that Hedges can’t even begin to see how the calcified, ossified mindset of modern corporate labor unionism has led to the tragic situation in Camden NJ (his thinking is better summed up in the embedded “trip to Camden” link to a short essay on that city from The Nation than in the book selection beneath the piece). If businesses cannot change manufacturing processes or supply chain connections, and if workers have absolute rights to do what they’ve been doing, and wages become the defining characteristic of a company under union contracts, you condemn your entire industry and the community built around it to an inevitable irrelevance. Sooner or later, events and circumstances will change, and your entire workplace has to be able to change (buggy whip makers, blacksmithies, the harbor at Ephesus silting in, etc.) or it will simply die in place.
Which is why, as a Christian, I get so frustrated with denominational leaders insisting that Trade Unionism is somehow an expression of the Gospel, or even a greater good to which the Gospel must subsume itself. Distributism and subsidarity, anyone? Old G.K. may have had it right all along.
It’s not about enabling your employer to remain competitive and assure jobs for those who come after you. It’s about getting the maximum benefits and pensions for yourself with no thought of others.
Knapsack – I concur. Trade Unions, however became captivated and corrupted themselves, and often don’t actually represent the real interests of workers.
If one listens to the entire NPR interview with Hedges, one will hear Hedges say that the USA has lost touch with 19th century concerns (1) for the necessity in truly democratic society of locally independent printed newspapers – and especially investigative reporting from the field – to keep all levels of government and business accountable and (2) for continual consideration of “moral imperatives” as propounded by religious and philosophical thinkers. I wonder to what extent other commenters here agree or disagree.
Reply to HG (#4.).
Item (1) – The consolidation of local newspapers into a few major corporations that can propagandize ‘at will’ has nullified much of the ‘watch dog’ effectiveness of newspapers being able to ‘properly exploit’ and protect our First Amendment rights. The rise of talk shows and of blogs that are supported by their readership is a modern response to the propaganding by the major news corporations.
Item (2) – Our founding fathers stressed the importance of moral values and the function of religious organizations in perpetuating those values that are absolutely necessary for making our governing covenant, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, work well and survive.
#4 — yes, definitely. The left remains mired in a 19th century frame of mind.
When I was a child just after WWII, the US steel industry had nearly one-third of a million employees and produced something around 60 million tons of steel. It was dangerous, hot, dirty, exhausting, terribly polluting, awful work.
These days there are only about 50,000 steelworkers left. Yet they produce about 100 million tons of steel, using much less energy and creating much less pollution than 60-odd years ago.
That the left laments the loss of jobs in the steel industry is proof of their utter cluelessness. Who other than an academic, a union flunky living well off the dues of others, an ideologue, or an absolute idiot would see those changes as anything other than magnificent progress?
What’s really going on here is that gentry liberals — academics, old-media types, bureaucrats, “community organizers,” the “creatives,” “greens,” grant-sucks, and all their assorted hangers-on — are beginning to realize that the productive classes they have parasitized for so long … are tired of the game.
NPR is their flagship, and its recent treatment of Juan Williams betrays the utter insularity and growing irrelevance of the entire gig.
“Progressive” liberalism — not classic liberalism –has failed, every time and everywhere it has been tried. That liberals persist in proclaiming that their myriad failures are the result of “not trying hard enough” is cogent evidence of tragically childish minds.
If progressive liberalism worked, then Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, DC … and Romania … would be shining examples of success, magnets to the world.
I think #5 answers #4 very well.
It is possible to agree with Hedges about the unhealthy linkage of large corporations, whether businesses or labor unions, to government power, without agreeing about the appropriate solution. The root of the problem is that too much power and too much money are concentrated in Congress and in the federal government. Fallible human nature makes it certain that such a concentration of power and money will draw people trying to get more than others. Businesses and unions push policies which they can turn to their advantage or which will disadvantage their competition. Hedges thinks the solution is more radicals and fewer corporate thinkers (although his solution would by design lead to central planning and control); I believe the solution is a smaller and less intrusive government.
Corporations rely on central planning and control. However, they are accountable to the stakeholders. They can pollute, exploit child labor, and dispose of workers without worry about punishment, because they can afford the best lawyers. The rich are just as mean and entitled as anyone else; and as one commentator noted, full of 26 year olds who simply spend money on hookers and cocaine, because they can get away with it.
Who are productive classes? Teachers? How would Ford build cars without workers? How does any company work without workers? Plenty of people want green companies – but we choose to subsidize oil. Community organizers often want policemen to protect their streets; to hire local workers; and stop sinners from exploiting other people. Bart seems to have an idealistic notion of the productive class – that they are morally better than others. But some of us are morally skeptical of those who are solely motivated by how much is in their bank account, and are less utopian to think that they have the best interests of the public in mind. Like children, sometimes corporations need some boundaries. Otherwise they’ll just take advantage of everyone. Nobody gets rich being empathetic.
Certainly an interesting range of views so far! Quite different beliefs, perhaps, about individual rights and mutual responsibilities implicit in the phrase “liberty and justice for all”?
The wealth and prosperity of our country increased because of major corporations by a relatively small numbers of individuals exercising their options in a free enterprise system.
It is also true that the accumulation of economic power and/or the acquisition of political power in the hands of a relatively small group of unscrupulous/immoral/amoral individuals can lead to serous abuses or even worse.
But a nation which is a democracy, that protects individual liberties and which has a highly productive economy cannot survive in the long run without having strong moral leadership.
And though moral leadership has a dimension that can be found in ‘natural law,’ our nation, the USA, has traditionally looked to its churches to instill and inculcate that sort leadership among its citizens.
Unfortunately our mainline churches are now in a massive disarray and a state of confusion and contradiction regarding their traditional beliefs. Morality has become a secondary consideration to many, including both the clergy and the laity.
There is even a joking adage about this state of affairs that goes some what like
“The new church of the Four Commandments and the Six Options.”
Is every big idea from America’s 19th century to be disdained? What about the various 19th century “grand visions” for ideal society in this world, including the evangelical “awakening” and Catholic revival movements, the abolitionist and temperance movements, the various utopian community movements, the arguments that went back and forth about the establishment of a central national bank and standardized currency, and the arguments that went back and forth into the 20th century about the rights of labor and appropriate regulations for “the trusts” (the oil, steel, and railroad corporations and the banks that financed them)?
I am sad that #8 John Wilkins sees the world in such outdated and class-conscious terms. “Workers,” however defined, also are very concerned for the condition of their checking accounts, and “corporate managers” as a group are not uniformly heartless monsters. The categories merge, in fact, because so many people now have investment accounts for retirement savings. What happens with concentrated power in government is that the government elite choose which groups to favor at the expense of others. In the auto buyout, for instance, they chose to favor union funds which had been chronically ill-managed at the expense of good faith investors whose legal claims were set aside — and a fair number of those investors were union members!
Re #8
[blockquote]Corporations rely on central planning and control.[/blockquote]
Which corporations? What evidence do you have to support this?
All of the corporations I am familiar with have a board that is responsible for overseeing corporate strategy and they are responsible for hiring and firing the CEO. Generally the CEO hires their own staff and the board approves key roles such as the CFO. Planning is usually distributed among the divisions or departments and budgets are negotiated between divisions and corporate management. It is true that upper management has the final say but it is not as unidirectional as you make it sound.
[blockquote]They can pollute, exploit child labor, and dispose of workers without worry about punishment, because they can afford the best lawyers.[/blockquote]
Ha ha, it’s pretty clear that you have never been in a management role!
John W: The productive classes are not “better” than the others, but we do grow your food, provide your lumber, develop your software, make sure you have clean water to drink, fix your toilet when it’s plugged, wire your house so it doesn’t burn down, formulate your house-paint, produce antibiotics and vaccines, find oil, smelt iron, repair your car, catch fish, manufacture pencils, make paper, build furniture. freeze orange juice concentrate, build offices, install more efficient heat pumps, explore for the neodymium your computer needs … and thousands of other things essential to the daily life you have come to enjoy.
Then if those endeavors work out well, we are taxed repeatedly to pay for an administrative and regulatory class that only destroys or redistributes wealth. When we object we are called “greedy,” and “only interested in the bottom line.”
I have news for you, John: if an endeavor is not profitable it is not sustainable. End of discussion.
A corporation cannot hurt me. It cannot tax me. It cannot impose regulations on my business. It cannot tell me I’m using the wrong type of light bulb. It cannot send heavily armed men to seize my goods and property. A corporation cannot force me to do a single thing.
Oil company profits on a gallon of gasoline are about 8 cents. Federal tax is 18 cents. State tax approaches 25 cents. Who’s “greedy”? Who keeps demanding ever more money for teachers, and especially administrators, who haven’t been able to budge student test results in over 45 years? In business that sort of repeated inability to produce results leads to dismissal or even collapse of the entire enterprise.
Our biggest single problem in America today is that we are governed and managed by a largely self-appointed elite; over-educated, over-fed, and never once in their lives having had to produce a thing or make a payroll.
They, and I would add, you John, wish for us to continue to support this entire chattering class in the style of life to which you have become accustomed. To affirm them in their sense of power, and to worship at their altar of utterly detached political philosophy.
That gig is coming to a rapid end. The real workers of this country are beginning to unite, and if the chattering classes of either party do not begin to figure it out, you will discover that last week’s election was only a warm-up exercise.
You do not yet realize the extent to which the entire lot of the self-appointed and utterly non-productive elite classes, particularly on the coasts and most especially in government, academia, media and bureaucracy, are disrespected, distrusted, and absolutely hated across nearly all of America.
I hope you never have to find out, but the current trajectory offers little hope.
Who grows the food, Bart? The workers in the field, or the owner? Where would the owner be without the laborers? Could he do it himself? Who builds the toilets? The owner or the factory worker? Who actually does the work? Without the workers, who is actually in the factories? To the producing class, the workers who do the work are merely commodities: they are expendable.
Where would we be without public investment in infrastructure? Who among us had a fully private school education?
The oil companies are lucky: They have benefited from the government subsidizing motorists through paying for freeways; and they don’t pay very much for poisoning the commons.
I’m sure you are the perfect employer, Bart. But for every one of you, there are employers who screw employees, who defraud the public, who take advantage of the innocent. They can buy lawyers to defend them; the exploited have nothing. It is, finally, an idealistic view of corporations – who have no incentive to care for the public. They care for their short term bottom line.
Take AIG, for example. In most companies, they would have been fired. Instead, they are rewarded.
But even more deeply, are goods the only things worth producing? Is there such a thing as culture? Is all that matters is what sells?
What we need is a society where the workers own the means of production! They could work for themselves. We could actually adopt a slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And we could have a powerful central government and leader to make sure it is run efficiently and fairly. Of course the in the places where this was actually tried it resulted in the most brutal tyrannies known to man.
Or, might we be able to widen our sights broadly and assess the current situation clearly with a commitment to kindness towards all our fellow children of God? We might wish it were not so, but those who are unproductive in the USA – no matter the reason – will not go away. We might believe, like Ebenezer Scrooge, that there is a “surplus population” that can be scorned acceptably enough to somehow disappear. However, what country on earth ever seeks unproductive, unskilled, and/or chronically unfit or ailing new citizens? The least able and laziest and free-loading among us are staying put in this country, whose “green pastures” will also continue to attract more immigrants from other more impoverished lands. Furthermore, those of us who are productive taxpayers have been given much good fortune – by God – in order to have the abilities to think well, get along with other people, and apply our strengths consistently to useful tasks. Also, jails cost more per inmate than entitlement programs and job re-training per recipients.
Hard-heartedness and judgment towards those we feel angry about supporting with our taxes will not only make them go away, but will not deprive any citizen of the Constitutional right to vote. We have no other realistic and humane choice than to get along with one another as members of one inescapable national family. Did Our Lord suffer death on the cross for anything less?
In the first sentence of my last paragraph above, I meant “not only NOT make them go away.”
Brother michael – because there are no alternatives to either Stalinist Russia or Free Market Somalia. Nope. Nothing in between.
Can’t imagine any countries that have both markets and welfare states, with well educated populaces, a happy population and have eliminated poverty. In fact, there would probably be something morally wrong with those countries if they did exist.
From what I hear from Conservatives, the French, Swedes and Canadians live in horribly oppressive regimes, where people are essentially enslaved by their dictatorships. The Norwegian Parliament is probably just run like Cuba’s. Those countries, with strong unions, clearly are living under horrible tyrannies, just like Cuba is.