Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [57]
Artistic expression soon became devoid of social purpose. It created, as Cowley wrote, “the religion of art” that “inevitably led into blind alleys.” Abstract painting emerged as the artistic expression of this sterile form of rebellion, an outgrowth of the apolitical absurdist and Dada movements. There was no longer, as Cowley wrote, “any psychic basis common to all humanity. There was no emotion shared by all men, no law to which all were subject; there was not even a sure means of communication between one man and another.”42 Irving Howe noted that it was primarily Yiddish intellectuals who remained honest and connected to those they wrote and sang about because they were “too poor to venture on the programmatic poverty of Bohemia. . . . These intellectuals were thrown in with the masses of their people, sharing their poverty, their work, their tenements.”43 But the rest of the intellectual and artistic class were welcomed into the embrace of consumer culture, rushing out once large book advances were negotiated to buy the same consumer products that mesmerized the rest of society.
The liberal class was seduced by the ideology of progress—attained through technology and the amassing of national wealth, material goods, and comforts—and intimidated into supporting the capitalist destruction of reformist and radical movements. As long as the liberal class did not seriously challenge capitalism, it was permitted a place in the churches, the universities, the unions, the press, the arts, and the Democratic Party. Minimal reform, as well as an open disdain for Puritanism, was acceptable. A challenge to the sanctity of the capitalist system was not. Those who continued to attack these structures of capitalism, to engage in class warfare, were banished from the liberal cloisters.
The final purges of radicals included the blacklisting of writers, actors, directors, journalists, union leaders, politicians such as Henry Wallace, government employees, teachers, artists, and producers in the American film industry, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The purge was done with the collaboration of the liberal class. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), for example, backed the witch hunts. These purges proved useful to the most ambitious, and often most morally suspect, people within liberal institutions, especially those who wanted to dispose of rivals. “In the course of this battle liberals attacked liberals with more venom than they had ever directed at any economic royalist,” observed an ADA supporter.44 Henry Wallace, who ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1947 and 1948 and had been Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, was subjected to a vicious assault by the press and the liberal establishment. Wallace was discredited and finally exiled from political life as a communist sympathizer. The complicity of the liberal class was, in part, a product of insecurity, especially since many reformers and liberals had flirted with communism during the Depression, given the breakdown of capitalism in those years. But it was also the product of a craven careerism and desire for prestige and comfort.
The scurrilous newsletter Counterattack, published by a group of right-wing misfits, denounced what it called communist front groups including the Progressive Citizens of America, which it called the “biggest communist front,” the Methodist Federation for Social Action, the Consumers Union, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Allied Labor News. The publication promised to expose “communist” labor unions. It published a book, called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, which listed the alleged communist affiliations of 151 actors, writers, musicians, and other radio and television entertainers. The newsletter and book were published by American Business Consultants, a group established in 1947 by three former FBI agents who were bankrolled by