absolutely on point!!! kudos to the author!!

"Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back."

What we had instead was a debilitating emphasis on the language of identity politics - that is to say on feminism and gay rights - which obscured the previously exclusive focus on class questions and caused unnecessary offense to many that had been listening intently right along. This blind spot continues to plague Hedges' eviscerated "liberal class" - and Hedges himself - expressing itself as it usually does in a hatred of religion. One wonders if we would be bereft of class analysis today if we'd then become a little less enamored of self-centered bra burning, kid killing, and marriage hating.

Bleak. Some of us are old enough to have witnessed the brief hurrah of social democratic America. What could be, almost was. But homo economicus, bred on the back of free land after the Civil War and a free hand after WWII, re-birthed a ubiquitous class of consumer-termites that has quickly eaten through the patrimony. Tea Partier or Liberal, we are all termites, and we can't escape our destiny.

National Socialism is on the left. They are responsible for melting together business and government into a nightmarish state. We need to have a separation of business and state. We need more freedom in economic choice.

Fascism was Marxist inspired. Mussolini, a personal friend of Lenin, was not only a statist and corporatist but a hardcore socialist as well. Today, it is the left which supports economic fascism—government-run health care and old age insurance, etc. The right-wing is fascistic when it comes to foreign affairs—invading nations that never attacked us, big military-industrial complex.

@22:08

If those, like Georgi, on the religious right, would actually take the time to read Christian history in general and specifically Roman Catholic history, Georgi would see that a generalized hatred of religion is not just warranted, but intelligent.

Fetus-worship and anti-gay rights has now become the trade-mark of an ever empty and spiritually bereft tradition known generally as "the Christian tradition."

Notice how Georgi, as all good Republicans do, exchange the places of the attacker and the one who is attacked. When gays marry it's the religious right who's attacked. When abortions are performed it's non-equivalent to the type of brutal infanticide that occurred in George Bush's and now Obama's imperialistic wars and who care's about the bearer of the child anyway: can an independent woman's life be considered living, like that of a fetus? Yes, in fact the fetus is not alive at all. Worms wiggle to and when you stick a pin in it it writhes.

In fact, it's the religious right that's full of hate and aggression. They simply project their hate onto their victims and then accuse them of attacking the righters. People like Georgi can write sentences, apparently, but cannot think, or only can think in a box, which is why an appreciation of the great humanity of Hedges goes unnoticed.

I believe you all have read Georgi's comments incorrectly.

Georgi is lamenting the fact that in the 60's the Left became a little too "self-centered" focusing on identity politics instead of focusing on the issue of class of the Old Left. You proved his point, of course, by immediately assuming you were being attacked and only half-reading the post.

"What we had instead was a debilitating emphasis on the language of identity politics - that is to say on feminism and gay rights - which obscured the previously exclusive focus on class questions and caused unnecessary offense to many that had been listening intently right along." Read it again. Still feel attacked? You shouldn't. It many ways this is correct. By the Left becoming so enamored with fuzzy notions of critical theory and identity politics it alienated many of its supporters, not because of prejudice or malice, but due to being forced into an out-group.

2:10 Anonymous,

God forbid, someone caught on.

Truthfully, I don't think the left will ever again produce a mass movement worth the name until it recovers the sense of altruism with which it was imbued in the years before 1950. The present concern with causes narrowly focused on identity rights rather than on questions of community interests must be jettisoned altogether if an authentic mass antidote is ever to be found to government by lobby. And this antidote certainly won't be characterized by an intolerance of and/or a hatred toward religion and religious people. Such hatreds are the end product of an insidious reaction and hardly can be considered progressive in any way. It will be necessary to surpass such contaminants and find avenues pointing to more universal themes.

Sorry, I don't see that individual rights and interests are necessarily antithetical to community interests. When we become part of a community it enlarges us as individuals; we are enlarged and empowered by our shared interests. Individuals shouldn't, and don't need to, subordinate themselves to collective correctness. A collective gathers power and energy from its constituents, rather than the other way around. Bra burning, abortion rights, gay identity, draft resistance, they are not encumbrances to collective advocation and resistance.

Best example of this careful omission of fact.. just before the election i passed by oreilley's face on a monitor, the headline read "worst unemployment in past few months". Never mind job growth was positive, or that there were gains after a year under the right in which there were losses topping half a million jobs a month. When you can't depend on reality, simply cut off and toss out the data which doesn't reinforce your narrative. This is both sophisticated in its execution, and in that explaining why it is wrong will never fit into a sound byte and requires considerable intellectual might to analyze.

Identity politics had its place. It was a way for people to obtain the civil rights long denied them, and along with rights, self-respect. The job is not yet finished, since denial of many rights to Gays (what the hell is wrong with a basic Latin-derived description like "homosexual") and Lesbians is the last hurdle. When people see themselves as valid human beings with equal rights, THEN groups can come together and face and battle the forces that we all must fight to bring equal opportunity and economic rights for all.

As usual, Mr. Hedges cuts to the bone of the deceit that has become American capitalism and our warfare economy. His caution about the rapidly evolving fascist state is valid.

If you haven't already, read his book "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle". In just 200 pages he brings it all together. A hard but essential read for anyone concerned about the fascist plutocracy we are hurtling toward.

The fact that the Democrats and many on the liberal side can't take what is happening and turn it to political reform and gain is just stunning to me. If Obama would have the gumption to go on national TV with some Ross Perot like charts about the theft of the nation's wealth by the upper 1% he could blow open the discussion that needs to happen. He might have tempered the midterm election results if he had truly given us some cause for "hope" that the national dialog could "change". The fact that such an intelligent and politically deft guy like Obama doesn't do that is evidence enough of the abandonment of the poor and shrinking middle class by their supposed political party.

"Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back."

Hedges is right about the role of the Old Left in forcing compromises such as the New Deal.

What Hedges ignores--and the thing that makes his columns so self-dramatizing and useless--is that the working classes, whose existence seems to mean nothing to Hedges if he even acknowledges it, were the leaders in those Far Left movements, not middle-class college boys like Chris H.

The workers, whose bourgeois union leadership drank the Truman-Reagan Kool Aid, now are the majority of the 60% of eligible voters who don't organize, don't vote, and don't particularly give a damn about the outcomes.

Hedges had nothing but scorn for the October 2 One Nation rally, which held out the hope of getting the workers back into politics in an effective way.

That's the sure way to guarantee that the Left never rises again, but that Chris Hedges makes Page One with the obituary.

19:42 — Anonymous,

"How can he say that the rights of half of humanity (plus gays) are "selfish" ...?"

When questions of rights are contextualized as subsets of universal human rights, they have validity. On the other hand, when they are simply envisioned as license, as in the case of so-called abortion "rights", they are wholly self-centered and lack validity. A woman's right to equal pay for equal work, for example, is intrinsic and easily can be seen as valid since all women are human. But one doesn't elect an abortion to serve universal purposes. Rather, one has an abortion to remove what is perceived to be an obstacle to one's very personal aspirations in some respect or other. Therefore, to see a purely individual decision to have an abortion as one carrying species specificity - a decision often couched in phony solemnity as one to be made in private together with one's physician - is to debase and to trivialize the whole notion of rights. If the left is ever to recreate itself as an authentic mass phenomenon, it will need to scrape off the encrustation of abortion.

"Good luck selling that one, Malenkov."

I know, you must have thought that this was the Marketing Department. Should I take a moment to explain to you just how little I'm concerned with whether or not someone agrees with me on this or any other question, dear? Here's a headline for you: There will be no mass movement on the left until the left ditches identity politics and it championing of the self-centered practice of abortion. Absent these, the left will forever remain frozen in its present impotence.

"Rare, but it happens--and it only takes one accidental pregnancy (especially to a poor woman) to mess up a life."

Yeah, that what the murder victim was telling me.