Death of the Liberal Class

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges makes a forceful case that liberal institutions have failed Americans by ceding power to self-serving and elitist corporations

“Uncompromising. . . . Hedges indicts the press, the Church, the arts, labor unions, universities, and the Democratic Party for failing to protect the middle and lower classes.” —The New Yorker

History has shown time and time again that when the liberal class ceases to function, as happened in Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany, and the former Yugoslavia, it opens a Pandora’s box of evils that infect the remnants of a civil society. In this devastating critique, Pulitzer Prize–winner Chris Hedges chronicles the gradual corruption and death of the liberal class, which no longer provides an institutional check to mitigate corporate control of politics, education, labor, the arts, religious institutions, and financial systems.

Although the liberal class was always compromised by its embrace of the power elite, as well as its deep hostility to American radicals, it nevertheless provided a mechanism to make incremental reform possible. But with the rise of the corporate state, it has been rendered impotent by its embrace of unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization, and staggering income inequalities. Consequently, the anger among the working and the middle class is, without a functioning liberal class, being expressed in ideologies that detest democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.