Hedges is a pseudo-radical egotist who would rather see the deluge after him than admit that he is not at the center of everything.

The Stewart rally in DC taken together with the labor-based (and much depreciated rally) that preceded it, show beyond a shadow of doubt that a potential left-wing constituency not only exists in this country. but probably represents the single largest group of the politically aware population.

The task of radicals is to get those two groups synchronized behind a coherent movement and a powerful set of demands. If this can happen, the Left has an enormous future here--as indeed it seems to have elsewhere in our hemisphere.

What we don't need is avant-garde pop psychology, French or otherwise, and an attitude of fashionable defeatism such as Hedges displays in everything he writes.

Once again Hedges nails it. I especially appreciate the reference to Debord.

Sadly Hedges is throwing bricks down a well. The snipe hunt against the phantom left will continue unabated through the ash heap that America is becoming. The ship of state appears to tack left then right, but always travels straight towards its goal of corporate autocracy run by vorocrats.

The american left died long ago with the dual attacks that were brought into existence by the co-oping of the old CPUSA for the purposes of furthering Russian foreign policy and the domestic cheap attacks via McCarthy et al et seq.

However, it is reasonable to expect a re-birth, no? Perhaps this time the left will avoid the errors,,,

i am no fan of moderation in the face of the extreme conditions currently facing citizens of the world - unjust wars, wanton destruction of the environment, governments owned and run by corporations for the benefit of the wealthy, etc. etc. the fact of the matter is that "sanity rally" was not meant for those on the extreme left - nor did it serve as a death knell for "the liberal class". jon stewart's comment about marxists subverting the constitution was extremely unfortunate, and his speeches limp - but he wasn't speaking to us. he was speaking to the many who know something's wrong, but may have yet to channel that uneasy sensation into action. you and i may happen to have our thoughts and plans of action completely worked out - but why belittle those who are just starting to figure it out? yes, this was entertainment - but with a potentially powerful side effect. while folks were out having a good time on a beautiful fall day they looked around and may have realized that they are not alone - for those 250,000 people on the mall and many of those lurking on the sidelines, the rally did not serve as "a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization" - rather, it provided a sense of community, camaraderie, and connectedness that is so severely lacking in american culture. no, toning it down is not going to help causes on the left - but neither is constant bitterness and doomsaying, without offering any solutions.

I was at the rally because I'd like to see the vitriol toned down in the current debate. Readers of this website could learn a bit about that themselves. Just look at any article on TO that mentions Israel, or even a Jewish person, and sooner or later in the comments you'll probably see the kind of old-school Judeophobia that should be anathema to the left surfacing.

And technically there are some neo-cons who still retain some of their Social Democrat and Trotskyite beliefs. Grover Norquist reportedly has a portrait of Lenin hanging in this living room. But that's probably not what Stewart was thinking about.

As the grandson of Hitler's Krupp Works told me long ago; there are to be only two kinds of people in this world, rich and poor. The middle class must always be destabilized. It is just as Chris alludes, Left and Right are useful distractions, tools perhaps, changing the focus and frame so we are encouraged to shadow box with ourselves. Any real and stable middle class will undermine a the elites foundational control because a REAL middle class will want to and occasionally be able to pull pull the the sheets. All primary controls in governance operate hiding. The steady accumulation of power and wealth by the global elite has for many centuries has always been via the foundational law of the INVISIBLE CONTROLLING THE VISIBLE. Look past the spectacle and base your actions on the reality not the theater.

The liberal class is not liberal, they are apathetic and pathetic. The radical left makes the best noise, but is villified even worse than the liberals. America is not waking up, it is sleeping in the gutter waiting to be washed down the drain. Where did the jobs go? Republican outsourcing. Those jobs are not coming back and we are likely to lose millions more and more foreclosures. The Bush administration put the bootheel on the neck of the middle class. So now millions of Americans are going to go out to vote to make it worse by letting the Republicants take back the house. It's disgusting.

"the rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content"

It reminded me of Obama's presidential campaign rallies. And I sensed those in attendance could easily be duped into supporting another corporate sponsored messiah.

Hedges is on point about the liberal intelligentsia.

Chris, you are correct about the phantom left, but you seem to have missed the point of the rally. It was sponsored by a comedy channel. As a counter weight to the Beck rally, I thought it was perfect. If there is a real left out there and it can't get its act together, why blame Stewart?

@14:21........."the core of actual liberal activism"

the NAACP is just a name brand these days & lost relevance decades ago, just like je$$e.

the larger unions stopped representing member interests decades ago. they've become just another layer of management ripping off members for the benefit of its "leaders."

anti war organization suspended operations in 2004 & 2008 to protect pro war democratic party candidates.

the list of sellouts by the liberal class is seemingly endless. Hedges speaks the truth.

The Left in America was broken by assassinations in the 1960s, especially 1968. Obama has never claimed to be a leftist, but my feeling is that he would also be assassinated if he tried moving left. He may well be anyway, despite trying to play nice with the right.

The Left is vilified all over the world, despite the fact that leftist policies would help most of the planet's life forms. It's very dangerous to be a leftist. There is much truth in what you write, but is it a good enough reason to re-enact the charge of the Light Brigade? Let's laugh to keep from crying and live to fight another day.

You just offer more defeatist rhetoric, 17:48. You vilify everyone, forgetting that it takes majorities to win in a democracy. This kind of "purism" is simply a recipe for defeat. Forget the blame game and work to build the bridges that will win the imperfect victories we need. Obama, the intellectual pragmatist, has been spot on when he says: "Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good." He understands the necessities of democracy and the present moment far better than the far left does--which is why he's in the White House.

True liberals and progressives are routinely censored and/or made out to be crazy, irrational wingnuts. Blue Dog propaganda parrots like Hedges propagates the myth that we don't exist.

But there was a MSM censored labor rally this past Saturday, and labor unions are now refusing to support Blue Dogs, regardless of election outcomes. It makes little difference if a Blue Dog or a Republican wins an election, so why waste any money on any Blue Dog?

The liberal/progressive base is alive and well. It's just they refuse to prop up Blue Dogs, and that is why they will stay home on Tuesday.

The Republicans will win the House but not the Senate. Obama will be impeached, and like Clinton, will not be removed from office. After being completely discredited, he will not run for office in 2012.

That will leave the door open for true liberal/progressives like Kucinich and Dean to take the Democratic Presidential Candidate Nomination in 2012.

I still call myself a “liberal,” and, if the televised Rally to Restore Sanity were any indication, there are a lot of concerned people like me out there (“CBS, which hired professional crowd-counters, put the number at 215,000“), despite the efforts of some to write the event off as mere “entertainment.” Every good teacher knows that education works best when it’s “entertaining” — as the MythBusters specifically demonstrated.

I explain it all here: http://www.kalilily.net/weblog/2010/11/01/123511.html

F*ck this "spam" filter.

How many posts have been lost and how much time wasted because TO can't get it's f*cking act together.

"So you can rally, and make up cute signs, and bitch and moan all you want too . . . because none of this will actually do anything. Except, perhaps, make you feel like you are "doing your part" safely."

I didn't go to the rally because I'm deluded into thinking it would create some mass movement, or change anything, or whatever. I went because it allowed me to see a solidarity between myself and a LOT of other people who are fed up and frustrated, but wanted to vent their feelings in a kinder, gentler way (for the most part, barring a few of the more vitriolic signs, which were still rather few).

I went because Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are funny. I went because I like going on fun adventures outside of my little town. I went for a lot of reasons, and I'm extremely glad I went.

I'm also going to vote tomorrow.

But make no mistake...

"Our government, the government that makes our laws, works exclusively for the wealthy elite who pay their bribes. They are not stupid. Anything that threatens the ongoing redistribution of wealth our politicians are payed to protect has long since been made illegal as a simple first defense."

I know.

this is crazy it is virtually impossible that someone could have stated what I did in a response that could in any way be seen as aduplicate response!!

woow I was a bit critical of Hedges the other day when i heard the debate on the death of the liberal class but he captures exactly how I feel about this circus show on the national mall which brought the idiocy of American political life to the new level... the only thing I would argue with are the reason for the sorry state of the radical left... it is not enough to say that the radical left has been haunted down... there are deeper structural reasons for the decline of the leftist political philosophy along with liberalism... and the left has failed to come to terms with this development... As C. Wrigth Mills wrote in his letter to the New Left: "If there is to be a politics of a New Left, what needs to be analyzed is the structure of institutions, the foundations of policies. In this sense, both in its criticisms and in its proposals, our work is necessarily structural — and so, for us, just now — utopian." Unfortunately the new left has not developed new orienting theories of history and society for the 20th and 21th century. The only such theories on the left are the marxist ones adjusted for our times like Wallerstein's but since they try to prove Marx's 19th century hypothesis about the impending proletarian revolution, in light of history since then, they are utterly ambiguous and unconvincing....

Actually the assassinations are sort of encouraging, in a troubling sort of way. The dark forces evidently felt that they had no options other than murder - lack of options means desperation and and reveals their strategic vulnerability. The murders also invite reply-in-kind...

In-kind replies would, in my opinion, be a strategic error, but that doesn't change the invitation, does it? Those murders cost the dark forces, cost plenty!

And "coup de grace" - signaling the death of the ahmurkin left - may be a premature usage. Shall we posit that the left is, for the monent, a crypto-left?

Me? I am watching the Bolivarian Revolution, peaceful but armed, advancing north - and recalling that about 1/3rd of the usa is really northern mexico... There are how many of the elite? And how many millions in the crypto-left?

Interesting commentary on the Hedges article. While I agree with most of what he wrote, I would like to have seen from him and from both the critical and the congratulatory commentators, more in the way of an "action plan" for the present times. Rallies are all fine and good, and do, indeed, provide people with a sense that they are not alone in their dismay at the current crappy state of affairs.

But rallies don't equal political action. For most of us, of necessity perhaps more concerned with survival of ourselves and our families, concerted political action seems pretty much out of reach and futile as well. Fragmentation/alienation of different left-leaning factions in America are not so much the result, as one poster would have it, of "identity politics." It is a significant part of concerted efforts over the span of our nation's existence by the oligarchs/plutocrats to de-legitimize any movement that could jeopardize their political and economic hegemony. Read Lewis F. Powell's 1971 memo to the head of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. It lays out the more modern blueprint that essentially has been followed to bring us to where we are.

mr. hedges please, for all of your moral vigor and rightous indignation please allow that stewart and colbert, with michael moore and a few others... do on many occasions speak truth to power. the only areas of the media left where thats possible, and it is of course a corporate capitalist media, are the colbert and stewart shows and the film documentary. stop the battle for left "purity" and join forces with those who have at least shown some intelligence in a media world so dumbed down its almost impossible to parody.

Krokodil

The basic thesis is dead right, and I've been saying it for a long time. There is no "left" in this country, really, not by a long shot, not compared to the advanced nations of the world. Any nation that widely considers MSNBC to be a "liberal" network, and where half the population considers Obama a "socialist," is so far off the rails to the right that it's completely lost its way.

BillyDoc summarizes what he sees as Hedges' underlying point: "If your method for effecting change is legal, it isn't going to work." I'm pretty sure he's making a valid statement, whether or not it's one Hedges actually set out to make.

with stephen f, on the other hand, I don't see room for debate. He and Hedges are dead on: "There is no 'left' in this country, really, not by a long shot, not compared to the advanced nations of the world. Any nation that widely considers MSNBC to be a 'liberal' network, and where half the population considers Obama a 'socialist,' is so far off the rails to the right that it's completely lost its way."

This veer to the right is nothing something that just happened to happen. It was done to us, and has continued to be done to us, over such a long period of time that it's either deliberate or self-sustaining. I, for one, prefer to believe it was deliberate, because believing it's self-sustaining would require me to finally, irrevocably concede that there's no intelligent life on Earth and the kindest thing we could do would involve wiping ourselves out before we infect civilized planets.

Hedges always falls back on corporations as the destructive institution ( like Nader and so many progressives) yet hesitates to mention the other C word, capitalism.

In fact I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in these comments. Having this much discussion about the "left" without using the word capitalism speaks volumes about our true problem.

Capitalism and democracy are antithetical.

That Bernard Weiner Truthout reference din't come through in my post. Lemme try again with less crap in the address: www.truth-out.org/come-revolution-are-we-there-yet62055

17:48, what if the "unemployed, foreclosed upon worker" you mention happens to be female, pregnant, and needs reproductive choice just the same as the "feminist law professor" does? Trivializing women's rights by supposed left wingers in the past was what turned left-wing women's energy toward feminism in the first place!

The mere fact that two comedians held a rally in rebuttal to the Beck rally makes a loud statement about the Left. Hedges is right, but where does that leave us? When Bill Clinton went for "concensus" I thought, how brilliant. Then he handed us NAFTA. When Obama was campaigning, I thought this guy will really kick &%^@*. But he is in reality a "moderate" who goes down the center or at least talks that walk. What we need is a dynamic, truth-teller like Kucinich or Dean. Poo-poo to the political handlers. Let the Left Lead Now.

As it is and has been for more than 20 years, there is no left in the US. The Democratic party has abandoned causes they once stood and fought for in a pathetic effort to be Republican Lite. No wonder they keep losing elections. It's time to get a bit bolshie. People want someone to fight their cause and to put their feelings into words that isn't border-line fascist. Enough of the rich getting richer and the poor and middle classes getting bread and circuses.

I read through this and although I agree with Hedges on many points, I still see further comment discussions regarding electoral politics aligning with the Democrats. How's that been working for us? Apparently not from my point of view. I do see some comments about "staying home" and not supporting "Blue Dogs". That's part of the divorce that needs to happen but I suggest taking the next step. Keep voting but quit voting defensively hoping the democrats can be "reformed" or hold some "line" and start voting offensively. I'd suggest aligning with the Greens instead which currently by far have the broadest potential and are not only winning local level races but are also establishing some ballot lines. If you going to engage in electoral politics find somewhere else to go besides the dems.

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