Getting that "Place at the Table"

To A Friend Questioning the Relevance of Hedges' Critique of Liberalism

As I see it, he is saying something relatively straightforward. That is, the values of the liberal consensus forged, in fits and starts from 1932 to 1970, and which created the Middle class (or more ) lifestyle that many of us were able to enjoy--and with it, a sense that the system "worked" for honest people of all good work habits and good will--is broken.

And it is broken because when it came under a concerted attack from the right beginning in the late seventies, the people who had benefitted from it most (people who in many cases became middle class--and sometimes more than that--thanks, in large part because of liberal ideas turned into social policy, refused to go out on the battle field and fight for the Ideals which undergirded all that they had enjoyed.

Our generation took it to the next level: that of the high art of cynicism. (the guild of academics are especially egregious offenders in this regard.) We would all mouth liberal values while putting up with, and often embracing as daily praxis, ever more nasty illiberal values in our workplaces and civic spaces.

We told, and continue to tell, ourselves all sorts of stories about how we needed "a place at the table of power" in order to change the world. But what we really were, and are, doing was all cutting the best deal we could for ourselves in a time of incipient plutocracy. Few of these self-annointed "chess players of liberal power" did anything to stop the steady slide in quality of life those who didn't have the advantages we had.

And none of these less advantaged people believes us one bit when we tell them we really care for their plight. They have been watching us too closely to buy into that crap.

This hasn't stopped us from continuing to tell self-aggrandizing stories of our liberal goodness. We seem not to have noticed that we ourselves are the only people interested in hearing these fairy tales.

This is the narcissistic fraud of Obama in a nutshell. And as Hedges rightly suggests, he and the people that still buy his schtick deserve nothing but derision and ridicule from the many millions of people who have been left behind. He like most "liberals" allergic to the language of social class (well-trained by those righties they pretend to take on) have nothing to offer.