The Defining Difference Between a Liberal and a Progressive

Book Cover: Death of the Liberal Class
(Image by Chris Hedges)   Details   DMCA

A progressive might vote for Hillary once there was no longer any hope. But a real progressive will hold his or her nose and vote for Hillary knowing that Hillary is definitely the lesser of two evils, while Bernie is not an evil. People further to the left will see Bernie as a problem as well, because he doesn't meet their criteria on anti-war and is not pro-Palestinean enough.

That's my take. This means that we are at a time where the liberals are clearly separated from the progressives. Those who shift to Hillary now, while there's a chance Bernie can still get the nomination are liberals. Frankly, ever since Chris Hedges wrote Death of the Liberal Class, (my podcast interview of him, discussing it, is here) my opinion of liberals has not been very high.

A few days after the 2012 election was over, Chris Hedges wrote a new article,Once Again-- Death of The Liberal Class, which I excerpt, below. I think it applies, already to this election.

"The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piece-meal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents.

Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves -- the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman's right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation -- using an isolated act of justice to define one's self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state -- is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.

"The American Dream has run out of gas," wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. "The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now. ..."

Liberals have assured us that after the election they will build a movement to hold the president accountable -- although how or when or what this movement will look like they cannot say. They didn't hold him accountable during his first term. They won't during his second. They have played their appointed roles in the bankrupt political theater that passes for electoral politics. They have wrung their hands, sung like a Greek chorus about the evils of the perfidious opponent, assured us that there is no other viable option, and now they will exit the stage. They will carp and whine in the wings until they are trotted out again to assume their role in the next political propaganda campaign of disempowerment and fear. They will, in the meantime, become the butt of ridicule and derision by the very politicians they supported.

The ineffectiveness of the liberal class, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as was true in Weimar Germany, perpetuates a dangerous political paralysis. The longer the paralysis continues, the longer systems of power are unable to address the suffering and grievances of the masses, the more the formal mechanisms of power are reviled. The liberal establishment's inability to defy corporate power, to stand up for its supposed liberal beliefs, means its inevitable disappearance, along with the disappearance of traditional liberal values. This, as history has amply pointed out, is the road to despotism. And we are further down that road than many care to admit.

Any mass movement that arises -- and I believe one is coming -- will be fueled, like the Occupy movement, by radicals who have as deep a revulsion for Democrats as they do for Republicans."