Death of the Liberal Class Read Online Free

virtue and goodness provided by the liberal class. The collapse of past constitutional states, whether in Weimar Germany or the former Yugoslavia, was also presaged by the death of the liberal class. The loss of the liberal class creates a power vacuum filled by speculators, war profiteers, gangsters, and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues. It opens the door to totalitarian movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class and the values it claims to champion. The promises of these totalitarian movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.
     
    Liberals have also historically discredited radicals within American society who have defied corporate capitalism and continued to speak the language of class warfare. The fate of the liberal class is tragic. It has been annihilated by the corporate state it supported, while it willingly silenced radical thinkers and iconoclasts who could have rescued it. By refusing to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization, and by condemning those who did, the liberal class severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, from the only forces that could have prevented it from being subsumed completely by the power elite. It was at once betrayed and betrayed itself.
     
    The death of the liberal class means a new and terrifying political configuration. It permits the corporate state to demolish, without impediment, the last vestiges of protection put into place by the liberal class. Employees in public-sector unions—one of the last havens from the onslaught of the corporate state—are denounced for holding “Cadillac health plans” and generous retirement benefits. Teachers’ unions in California and New Jersey are attacked by corporate pundits and politicians who portray teachers as parasites thriving at taxpayer expense. The establishment of charter schools will help hasten the extinction of these unions. The increasing restrictions imposed on public-sector employees, despite their ostensible union protection, are draconian and illustrate the corporate state’s final attack on unionized workers. In turn, labor organizations (for the diminishing number of workers who still have unions) facilitate the disempowerment and impoverishment of workers. In April 2009, teachers at the Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, New York, saw lawmakers cut their budgets by some $600,000 a year. Union representatives not only were powerless to halt the ruling, but also failed to warn the teachers about it. A contract passed in the West Contra Costa Unified School District in Richmond, California, in December 2009 summarily increased class sizes, froze teachers’ wages, and cut health-care benefits. The concessions were accepted by the United Teachers of Richmond, even though teachers in the district voted overwhelmingly for a strike, which the union refused to call.
     
    The liberal class cannot reform itself. It does not hold within its ranks the rebels and iconoclasts with the moral or physical courage to defy the corporate state and power elite. The corporate forces that sustain the media, unions, universities, religious institutions, the arts, and the Democratic Party oversaw the removal of all who challenged the corporatism and unfettered capitalism. By the 1980s, political philosophers, such as Sheldon Wolin, who attacked the rise of the corporate state, were no longer printed in publications such as the New York Review of Books or the New York Times . Radical clerics, such as Father Daniel Berrigan, spent the later part of their careers harassed by church authorities. Economists, such as Michael Hudson, who attacked the financial bubble and system of casino capitalism, had difficulty finding academic employment. Those left in these institutions lack the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free-market ideologies. They have no ideological