Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  “[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have Zinn removed from BU. Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding Zinn’s numerous antiwar activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s] efforts for his removal.”

  Zinn and the Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan had traveled together to North Vietnam in January 1968 to bring home three prisoners of war. The trip was closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover sent a coded teletype to the president, the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and the White House situation room about the trip. And later, after Berrigan was imprisoned for destroying draft records, Zinn repeatedly championed the priest’s defense in public rallies, some of which the FBI noted were sparsely attended. The FBI monitored Zinn as he traveled to the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut to visit Berrigan and his brother Philip.

  “Mass murders occur, which is what war is,” Zinn, who was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972, according to the file, “because people are split and don’t think . . . when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn’t deserve to be obeyed. . . . To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government.”

  Zinn testified at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to Zinn and Noam Chomsky. The two academics edited the secret documents on the Vietnam War, sections of which had appeared in the New York Times, into the four volumes that were published in 1971.

  “During the Pentagon Papers jury trial, Zinn stated that the ‘war in Vietnam was a war which involved special interests, and not the defense of the United States,’” his FBI file reads.

  By the end of the file one walks away with a profound respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of our internal security apparatus, to think that things have improved. There are today 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about ten thousand locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000 people, all of whom hold top-secret security clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area, thirty-three building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together, the paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or twenty-two U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet.

  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 revised Clean Air Act, the revisions to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), and the Environmental Council in the White House transformed the political landscape. By 1973, Nader was named the fourth most influential person in the country after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, and AFL-CIO president George Meany.

  “Then something very interesting happened,” Nader told me:

  The pressure of these meetings by the corporations like General Motors, the oil companies, and the drug companies with the editorial people, and probably with the publishers, coincided with the emergence of the most destructive force to the citizen movement mise-en-scène: Abe Rosenthal, the editor of the New York Times. Rosenthal was a right-winger from Canada who hated communism, came here, and hated progressivism. The Times was not doing that well at the time. Rosenthal was commissioned to expand his suburban sections, which required a lot of advertising. He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations, and he did not like me. I would give material to Jack Morris in the Washington bureau, and it would not get in the paper.

  Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Chomsky from being quoted in the paper, decreed that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research. This effectively killed the stories. The Times set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the Times, other major papers and networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations. He found it harder and harder to be heard.

  Much as Mr. Mister of The Cradle Will Rock hires a detective to spy on his enemies, General Motors hired detectives to dig up dirt on Nader’s personal life. They found none. The company had Nader followed in an attempt to blackmail him
. They sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway in a failed bid to seduce him while he was shopping. GM’s campaign was exposed and led to a public apology by the company. Nader was awarded $425,000 in damages, which he used to fund citizen action groups.

  But far from ending the effort to destroy Nader, the defeat in court only spurred corporations to unleash a more sophisticated and well-funded attack. Lewis Powell, who was the general counsel to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and would later be appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote a memo in August 1971 that expressed corporate concern over Nader’s work: “Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.” Powell goes on to recommend: “There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses, and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.

  “Moreover,” Powell went on:

  much of the media—for varying motives and in varying degrees—either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people. One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction .28

  The eight-page memo, entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” became the blueprint for corporate dominance. Powell’s memo led to the establishment of the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and power to direct government policy and mold public opinion. It inspired the activities of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and Accuracy in Academe. The memo detailed ways corporations could shut out those who, in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,” were hostile to corporate interests. Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked government regulation and environmental protection. His memo led to the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics and economists in universities and on the airwaves, as well as drive out those in the public sphere who questioned the rise of unchecked corporate power and deregulation. It saw the establishment of monitoring organizations that pressured the media to report favorably on corporate interests. And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote corporate interests in the courts and press for the appointment of sympathetic judges to the bench.

  Corporations poured hundreds of millions into the assault. They invented bogus disciplines, including cost-benefit and risk-management analysis, all geared to change the debate from health, labor, and safety issues to the rising cost of big government. They ran sophisticated ad campaigns to beguile voters. These corporations wrenched apart, through lavish campaign donations and intensive and shady lobbying, the ties between Nader’s public interest groups and his supporters in the Democratic Party. Washington, by the time they were done, was besieged with twenty-five thousand corporate lobbyists and nine thousand corporate action committees.

  When Reagan, the corporate pitchman, swept into office, he set out to dismantle some thirty governmental regulations, most put into place by Nader and his allies. All of them curbed the activities of corporations. The Reagan White House gutted twenty years of Nader legislation. And Nader, once a fixture on Capitol Hill, was thrust into the wilderness.

  Nader, however, did not give up. He turned to local community organizing, assisting grassroots campaigns around the country, such as the one to remove benzene, known to cause cancer, from paint in GM car plants. But by the time Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office, the corporate state was unassailable. Nader and his citizen committees were frozen out by Democrats as well as Republicans. Clinton and Gore never met with Nader while in office, despite Gore’s reputed concern for the environment.

  “We tried every way to get the Democrats to pick up on issues that really commanded the felt concerns and daily life of millions of Americans,” Nader says in the documentary An Unreasonable Man, “but these were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to, and so when people say, “Why did you [run for president] in 2000, I say, ‘I’m a twenty-year veteran of pursuing the folly of the least worse between the two parties.’”29

  Establishment liberals express a fascinating rage—and rage is the right word—against Nader in An Unreasonable Man. Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman, along with a host of former Nader’s Raiders, attack Nader, a man they profess to have once admired. The most common charge is that Nader is an egomaniac. Their anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They bought into the facile argument of “the least worse” and ignored the deeper, subterranean corporate assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed. The anger they express is the anger of an exposed liberal class.

  It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, which threw the 2000 election to Bush. It was not Nader’s fault. Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of one percent in 2004. All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida—there were about half a dozen—got more votes than the 537 that separated Bush and Gore. Why not go after the other third-party candidates? And what about the ten million Democrats across the country who voted in 2000 for Bush? What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty—he never mentioned global warming—that he could not even carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us “victory” in Iraq?

  Nader argues that there are few—he never said no—differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. And during the Bush administration the Democrats proved him right. They authorized the war in Iraq. They stood by as Bush stacked the judiciary with “Christian” ideologues. They let Bush, in violation of the Constitution, pump hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into faith-based organizations that discriminate based on religious creed and sexual orientation. They permitted American children to get fleeced by No Child Left Behind. They did not protest when federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudoscience about creationism, reproductive rights, and homosexuality. And the Democrats let Bush further dismantle regulatory agencies, strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act and other draconian legislation, and thrust impoverished Americans aside through passage of a corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. And then the Democrats helped transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. It is a stunning record. If the Democratic Party and the liberal class had challenged corporate welfare, corporate crime, the Wall Street bailouts, and issues such as labor law reform, if it stood up to these corporate behemoths on behalf of the working and middle classes, rather than mutter thought-terminating clichés about American greatness, they could rally a disgusted public behind them.

  There are a few former associates who argue that Nader is tarnishing his legacy, and by extension their own. But Nader’s legacy is undiminished. He fights his wars against corporate greed with a remarkable consistency. He knows our democratic state is being hijacked by the same corporate interests that sold us unsafe automobiles and dangerous and shoddy products.

  “I don’t care about my personal legacy,” Nader says in An Unreasonable Man. “I care about how much justice is advanced in America and in our world day after day. I’m willing to sacrifice whatever ‘reputation’ in the cause of that effort. What is my legacy? Are they going to turn around and rip seat belts out of cars, air bags out of ca
rs?

  “It was off to the races,” Nader said to me:

  You could hardly keep count of the number of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks. These think tanks specialized, especially against the tort system. We struggled through the Nixon and early Ford years, when inflation was a big issue. Nixon did things that horrified conservatives. He signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of popular opinion, following the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last Republican president to be afraid of liberals.

  “There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of journalism,” Nader lamented. “We worked with the press to expose corporate abuse on behalf of the public. We saved lives. This is what journalism should be about. It should be about making the world a better and safer place for our families and our children, but then it ended, and we were shut out.

  “We were thrown on the defensive, and once we were on the defensive, it was difficult to recover,” Nader said:

  The break came in 1979, when they deregulated natural gas. Our last national stand was for the Consumer Protection Agency. We put everything we had on that. We would pass it during the 1970s in the House on one year, then the Senate during the next session, then the House later on. It ping-ponged. Each time we would lose ground. We lost it because Carter, although he campaigned on it, did not lift a finger compared to what he did to deregulate natural gas. We lost it by twenty votes in the House, although we had a two-thirds majority in the Senate waiting for it. That was the real beginning of the decline. Then Reagan was elected. We tried to be the watchdog. We put out investigative reports. They would not be covered.