Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [62]
Macdonald argued that any movement that did not pay fealty to the nonhistorical values of truth, justice, and love inevitably collapsed. Once any class bowed to the practical dictates required by effective statecraft and legislation, or the call to protect the nation, it lost its voice. The naïve belief in human progress through science, technology, and mass production further eroded these nonhistorical values. The choice was between serving human beings and serving history, between thinking ethically and thinking strategically. Macdonald criticized Marxists for the same reason he criticized the liberal class: both subordinated ethics to another goal. By serving history and power, the liberal class, like the Marxists, surrendered their power and moral authority to the state. The capitulation of the liberal class, as Irving Howe noted, has bleached out all political tendencies: “It becomes a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.5
In Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley argues, like Macdonald and Howe, that the cultural and religious reformers of the early twentieth century unwittingly laid the foundations for their own dissolution. By extolling the power of the state as an agent of change, by accepting that increased comfort and consumption were the defining measures of human progress, they abetted the consumer society and the cult of the self, as well as the ascendancy of the corporate state. The trust in the beneficence of the state, which led most of these liberal reformers naïvely to back the war effort, ceded uncontested power to the state during the war, especially the power to shape and mold public perceptions. The state, once it held these powers, never gave them up.
The liberal class had placed its faith in the inevitability of human progress and abandoned the values, as Macdonald pointed out, that should have remained at the core of its activism. Mass culture, and the state—the repository of the hopes and dreams of the liberal class—should have been seen as the enemy. The breach between the liberal class and the radical social and political movements it once supported or sympathized with was total. This rupture has left the liberal class without a repository of new ideas.6
A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York illustrated the difference between an artistic movement that was, on one hand, integrated into social democracy and sought to eradicate the barriers between craftspeople and artists, and on the other, an artis- tic movement that served its elitist needs. The former was illustrated by Bauhaus at the MOMA, a huge retrospective of the German art movement. The latter was illustrated just a few floors below the Bauhaus exhibit, by MOMA’s permanent collection of (mostly) American postwar art, a dreary example of flat, sterile, and self-referential junk. The iron control of the arts is vital to the power elite, as important as control of the political and economic process, the universities, the media, the labor movement, and the church. Art gives people a language by which they can understand themselves and their society. And the corporate power structure was determined to make sure artists spoke in a language that did not threaten their entitlement.
The liberal class, especially its most elitist and snobbish elements, was used to help distance art from the masses, portrayed as too unsophisticated and uneducated to appreciate or understand authentic artistic expression. Museums and their arrogant