Interesting new book

An interesting new book is Christopher Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class. Here is one example of Hedges' concerns:

"Anger and a sense of betrayal: these are what Ernest Logan Bell and tens of millions of other disenfranchised workers express. These emotions spring from the failure of the liberal class over the past three decades to protect the minimal interests of the working and middle class as corporations dismantled the democratic state, decimated the manufacturing sector, looted the U.S. treasury, waged imperial wars that can neither be afforded or won, and gutted the basic laws that protected the interests of ordinary citizens. Yet the liberal class continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues. It refuses to defy the corporate assault. A virulent right wing, for this reason, captures and expresses the legitimate rage articulated by the disenfranchised. And the liberal class has become obsolete even as it clings to its positions of privilege within liberal institutions."

While I might disagree that this phenomenon is only three decades old, I have no problem with Hedges' take on today's "liberals." For an illustration that these people are as Hedges describes them, it is only necessary to read the New York Times and what passes these days for political analysis. An especially revealing piece was published today, Nov. 15, 2010, dealing with Obama's troubles with a Congress that is, allegedly, unpredictable. But what emerges from the article is that what is going to happen is, actually, fairly predictable. The election, that is, the show is over and now it is time for the two parties to resume their collusion meant to secure their prominence in our political order.