At times a rant, at times insightful, but always interesting, though depressing.

This book was interesting. My biggest complaint about books like this is I am not sure what the alternative for members of the liberal class is. Hedges seems to be making the argument that people who need to work for a salary end up participating in a system that is ultimately exploitive. I am not sure what people should do instead- like just not work? Live outside of the system, not paying taxes? At the end of the day, people have to trade their labor for capital to survive- Hedges seems to think that we'd be better off if we did that trade in some other way? I concede that I am kind of dumb when it comes to a lot of these more abstract ideas. I just had a hard time understanding what he thinks is a better approach given the system that is currently in place.

In the book, author argues that the liberal class has failed to confront the rise of the corporate state and has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges asserts that the liberal class has declined due to corporate political dominance, and that it has become increasingly ineffectual1.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, “Resistance,” begins with a sympathetic profile of an impoverished Libertarian Party activist, Ernest Logan Bell. Hedges then discusses how Bell and the interests of many working Americans like him have been abandoned by a liberal class that championed deindustrialization, financial deregulation, and unmitigated outsourcing.

The second part, “Permanent War,” posits that one of the core weaknesses in the power of the liberal class is its history of supporting war efforts in the United States. Hedges argues that political theater and moral posturing have replaced meaningful agitation for reform, and charges that the liberal class has turned into a class of apologists for the corporate interests that killed them.

The third part, “Dismantling the Liberal Class,” places the beginning of widespread institutional decay of the liberal class near its inception during World War I with the founding of the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel, which effectively killed the populist pacifism movement through war propaganda.

Read book in 2024, 14 years after publication, and much of what was predicted has occurred. Depressing but very insightful book.

2.5

Like 90-95% of this was fantastic. The rest was, at the very least, a perspective to consider.