Podcast • December 14, 2010

Chris Hedges: We’re Missing Our Safety Valve

Chris Hedges, among those anxious prophets to whom attention must be paid, is a sort of George Carlin without the laugh lines. Grim obituarist of our empire, democracy and culture, the ex-New York Times war ...

Chris Hedges, among those anxious prophets to whom attention must be paid, is a sort of George Carlin without the laugh lines. Grim obituarist of our empire, democracy and culture, the ex-New York Times war reporter is gabbing with us here about the smothered conscience of power: the Death of the Liberal Class, in the title of his new book.

A minister’s kid in New England, then a literature student at Colgate and Harvard, Chris Hedges came to see his fellow liberals running a fool’s errand. The job was to represent — in churches, media, labor unions, universities and the arts — as much virtue as was viable in an aggressively commercial, unequal and unjust world. At best the liberals worked a narrow zone of correction and commentary. In a new century, imperial excess, permanent war and the sharp polarizations of wealth, power and income seem to have driven everybody off the island, one way or the other.

We’re talking about Tom Friedman of the New York Times, for example, and Judge Richard Goldstone, two classic liberals. Friedman walked off the island to marry George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. His hideous claim for the war on the Charlie Rose Show in 2003 — his “suck on this” rationale that sodomy-rape of Iraq by American troops was an appropriate way to pop a “terrorism bubble” — was dredged from the darkest, least speakable of Rumsfeld-Cheney dreams. But Friedman is still an opinion monger at the New York Times, and people who read him casually keep telling me he’s a “liberal.” Richard Goldstone, on the contrary, was frog-marched off the island precisely for staying in character — as a fearless fact-finder and judge in human-rights cases in his native South Africa, also in Rwanda and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Goldstone was a world-standard of conscience and the law until the UN council he chaired found that Israel had executed “a deliberately disproportionate attack” on Gaza at the end of 2008, “designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population…” It was a judgment that made Goldstone a pariah, first among establishment liberals.

Perhaps it was never graceful or quite respectable to be a liberal. The only good liberals, it seems in this conversation, are dead liberals who kept their distance from power: Orwell, supremely; Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; the pacifist Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker soup-kitchens; the independent journalist I. F. Stone; Julian Benda, the French writer whose Treason of the Intellectuals anathematized the thinkers between the World Wars who adopted the politics of class, party and tribe. But Chris Hedges is rueful, too, about a world with fewer and fewer engaged and half-way trusted rationalists in the public square. He’s missing those late, unloveable but maybe indispensable liberals. Not least he mourns journalism, for all its faults: “With the death of newsprint,” he is telling us, “we’re losing a whole cadre of people who are trained to go out, report stories, have them fact-checked, publish them. The end result was to build a public discussion around verifiable fact. When we lose those skills of reporting, all discussion becomes — from the left, from the right — emotionally driven. Verifiable fact no longer becomes the foundation of public discourse.”

Podcast • March 23, 2010

Healthcare: in the post-game booth with James Morone

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Morone. (42 minutes, 26 mb mp3) “Show him a poltical near-death experience, and this guy rallies!” James Morone has been telling us all along that healthcare politics ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Morone. (42 minutes, 26 mb mp3)

“Show him a poltical near-death experience, and this guy rallies!”

James Morone has been telling us all along that healthcare politics was peculiarly personal — this business of medicine and presidents and policy, starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s polio and Dwight Eisenhower’s heart crises and JFK’s many brushes with death. Each of their adventures in healthcare legislation reflected their medical records, and shaped the narrative of their terms in office. And now the dazzling Obama bounce marks a second chance, a sort of second inauguration, a fresh start of the age still struggling to be born.

Jim Morone’s exuberant post-game commentary makes a variety of uncommon points, among them:

(1) The healthcare victory should be framed as the end of the 30-year Age of Reagan. It is a moment for Barack Obama to reintroduce himself as the child of a refugee from the British Empire in Kenya, and the visionary of an old American dream of both opportunity and community.

(2) It may be time to do something about Congress. “We can’t have a legislature that’s this broken,” Morone says. “I think the world has had a year-long seminar on why America doesn’t have health insurance. Why? The one word answer is: Congress.” After Harry Truman’s election in 1948, on a health insurance pledge, “if we’d been playing by English or Canadian or Australian or German parliamentary rules, we’d have had national health insurance in 1949 — two or three years after the Brits, eleven or twelve years before the Canadians. We didn’t get it because Congress laughed at Truman… It’s not that the public wouldn’t vote for it, or that Americans hate Socialism. It’s because we have a legislative process designed by the founders to break the democratic will and one that has multiplied its checks and balances until now, I think, it’s the broken branch of government.”

3. It might be time to try real representative democracy in America. Let the Left sit down with the Right and agree: “Here’s the deal. When we’re in power, we get to do what we promised the people. When you’re in power, you get to do what you promised the people… Put aside all those checks and balances that make elections kind of wild dumb puppet shows about all kinds of extraneous issues, and really make it about the kind of legislation we’re going to pass. It’s called democracy, and we might try it one year.”

4. We all — starting with the news commentariat — need a political scorecard tuned more to the perspectives of history, less to short-term electoral swings. The great monuments of Lyndon Johnson’s domestic record, in retrospect, were the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, too, in 1965. Democrats paid heavily for those victories in huge losses in the mid-term Congressional elections of 1966, and then in Hubert Humphrey’s crushing defeat by the combination of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. But the election returns were not the measure of LBJ’s achievement. And neither will the 2010 House and Senate races — up or down — be the best judgment on Barack Obama’s young, still developing presidency.