Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [97]
We are amassing unprecedented volumes of secret files, and carrying out extensive surveillance and harassment, as stupid and useless as those that were directed against Zinn. And a few decades from now maybe we will be able to examine the work of the latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of thousands. Did any of the agents who followed Zinn ever realize how they wasted their time? Do those following us around comprehend how manipulated they are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but discredit and destroy social movements as well as protect the elite from those who would expose them?
Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth. He found that challenging these myths, even as a historian, turned one into a pariah.
The descent of Ralph Nader, from being one of the most respected and powerful public figures in the country to being an outcast, illustrates perhaps better than any other narrative the totality of our corporate coup and the complicity of the liberal class in our disempowerment. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. The corporations, which grew tired of Nader’s activism, mounted a campaign to destroy him. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies, who had once belonged to the Democratic Party and the liberal class, enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud, and domination. And by the time he was shut out of the media and the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was firmly in the hands of corporations.
“The press discovered citizen investigators around the mid-1960s,” Nader told me when we spoke one afternoon in Princeton:26 I was one of them. I would go down with the press releases, the findings, the story suggestions, and the internal documents and give it to a variety of reporters. I would go to Congress and generate hearings. Oftentimes, I would be the lead witness. What was interesting was the novelty. The press gravitates to novelty. They achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the newsworthy material. They covered it. The legislation passed. Regulations were issued. Lives were saved. Other civic movements began to flower.
“Ralph Nader came along and did serious journalism. That is what his early stuff was, such as Unsafe at Any Speed,” the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me:The big books they put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, “We see how you do this. You gather material, you get people who are articulate, you hone how you present this.” And the corporations copycatted him with one big difference: they had no regard for the truth. Nader may have had a consumer ideology, but he was not trying to sell you a product. He is trying to tell the truth as best as he can determine it. It does not mean it is the truth. It means it is the truth as best as he and his people can determine the truth. And he told you where he was coming from.27
Between 1966 and 1973, Congress passed twenty-five pieces of consumer legislation, nearly all of which Nader had a hand in authoring. The auto and highway safety laws, the meat and poultry inspection laws, the oil pipeline safety laws, the product safety laws, the updated flammable fabric laws, the