Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (w/ Catherine Liu) | The Chris Hedges Report

Catherine Liu details how the professional managerial class (PMC) has betrayed workers for seats within the halls of power, all while they wag their fingers at the politically incorrect working class.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The material needs of working class people in America continue to be obscured and co-opted by politicians and people claiming to know what’s best on both sides of the political aisle. While Republicans and right-wingers address some of these needs head on, they do so by luring people through empty rhetoric and culture war distractions. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that also distracts and divides the proletariat from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her new book, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.”

The PMC, as Liu calls it, is a group of courtiers made up of academics, media figures and cultural elites who hover above the working class and dictate the aesthetic direction of “progress,” notably without ever addressing the material needs of the workers it claims to look after. They stifle debate, discourage dissent and issue dire punishments of anyone who dare challenge their rationale. After the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the liberal PMC blame “people who are concerned with bread and butter issues for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by [Democrats,] a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots, they are racist, they're anti-immigrant, they're transphobic, they're homophobic, they're sexist,” Liu tells Hedges.

Liu points to a podcast appearance by Democratic campaign managers and their response to not combating Trump on a simple advertisement because of focus group testing as an example of the PMC’s disconnection from their constituents. “They were in a box. They didn't go outside. They didn't talk to Americans. They didn't talk to people. They don't know people.”

You can follow Catherine’s work at her Substack:

---

---

Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

---

---

Transcript

Chris Hedges

Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, in her book “Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class,” argues that the professional managerial class is engaged in a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes. This professional class, the bulwark of the liberal class and the Democratic Party, demonizes a working class that fails, in its eyes, to behave properly. It abrogates to itself the right to determine who is socially acceptable according to their secularized virtue and who is not.

It reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution, she writes, into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. Its politics is reduced virtue signaling. It engenders moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo politics and hypervigilance. It seeks, she writes, to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. Joining me to discuss her book “Virtue Hoarders” is Professor Catherine Liu.

I love the book. I can't believe you're an academic. It was so well written.

Catherine Liu

[Laughing] Thank you, and I know what you mean. I believe in the craft of writing, unlike most of my colleagues, I have to say.

Chris Hedges

That is so true. They don't even make an effort, you know, it's not hard to write clearly and succinctly. Yeah, I mean this just got played out in the whole election, I think. I mean, we just saw everything you've written in this book on display. But let's talk about this professional managerial class and how it differs from the old class of the robber barons and the capitalists—the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons—because there is a difference. Well, what is the difference?

Catherine Liu

Well, in the era when those big money bags were making their money, there were actual members of my class, academics, who were on the side of the workers. Edward A. Ross, who founded the sociology department at [University of Wisconsin]–Madison, he was fired by Leland Stanford Jr.'s widow from Stanford University, very much on the side of working class. John Dewey was another man who was fighting against the capitalist hyper accumulation at the time and hoping for a kind of public liberal education that would raise up American citizens to be full participants in what he called industrial democracy.

Today, the professoriate or the credentialed elites, from the members of the medical profession to the members of the bar, serve the interests of capital and very directly, by shilling for big pharma or defending the rights of private equity and part of lawyers. But in my profession, like in the liberal humanities or academia writ large, you have these nonprofit organizations which were founded by the Mellons, by the Rockefellers, by the Fords because of their enormous accumulation of wealth.

And these foundations direct the politics of the professional managerial class. And so you have from the nonprofit world to the media world, to the publishing world, it's completely captured by liberal Democrats who are now in total disarray because the majority of Americans have rejected them. And they thought they could lead like “the stupid people” out of their state of iniquity and ignorance into these hyper specialized, hyper individualized, I would say like cultural vanguards that would totally obviate the need for actual policy that would protect American lives, give American workers dignity, produce a kind of polity that encouraged debate, dissent, skepticism, all those high liberal values that I think the kinds of authoritarian, the authoritarian turn that we've seen in the liberal class has shown, it has shown itself to be and has been rejected.

Like in the time since I wrote that book, the liberals have become more authoritarian. They've become more repressive dissent. They think the attitude of skepticism about their positions is fascist, is racist. Like let's just say the whole problem of a technocratic managerial approach to inequality that they imposed on us through diversity, equity and inclusion in the universities was something that we could debate. No, if you debate it, you are racist. And they did that to supporters of Bernie Sanders. I still have these hyper-Democratic friends of mine who are texting me from God knows where saying, you and the Bernie bros, if you hadn't devoted yourself to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, we wouldn't have had Trump.

So they blame a kind of leftism, people who are concerned with bread and butter issues for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots. They are racist, they're anti-immigrant, they're transphobic, they're homophobic, they're sexist, and to some degree this is a legacy that they've inherited from the generation of the ‘68ers. I'm just younger than that generation and I watch this generation take over academia, destroy any kind of intellectual life and give themselves to the latest fads. Be it—right now, it's artificial intelligence. You know, last year was DEI. So in 2020, it was DEI. So these people who are supposed to be protecting our abilities to reason, research, develop knowledge that will enhance our understanding of politics, history, culture, and the American nation, they have completely abdicated their responsibility and yet they want to lead us.

So I'm being bullied. Members of my family who are DNC Bundlers were just using bullying tactics like, if you don't do this, this will be the apocalypse. They speak like apocalyptic, charismatic Southern Baptist preachers, but they despise those people at the same time. Sorry. I'm so angry right now about the situation.

Chris Hedges

Well, you saw it in the postmortems after the election. I mean, as frightening as the vapid, celebrity-infused, issue-less campaign that the Democrats ran, but you saw it afterwards. They proved utterly incapable of any kind of self-criticism, self-examination at all. Everything became an external force, along with, as you write throughout your book, this demonization of the American working class, which in the system, the neoliberal system they supported, 30 million Americans lost stable jobs in mass layoffs.

Catherine Liu

You know, the thing that really struck me was watching Pod Save America's post-election debrief with David Plouffe, who had been the campaign manager for Obama, and [principal deputy campaign manager of the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign] Quentin Fulks, and they were discussing the trans ad that played during the World Series. I mean, we watched it, religiously, because we're in Southern California where Trump says Kamala is with they/them, Trump is for us or with us. And the Pod Save America guys asked Plouffe, why didn't you respond? Why didn't you respond more forcefully? You know what he said? He goes, well, we focus grouped and tested it and that ad didn't move the needle. Like they were in a box. They didn't go outside. They didn't talk to Americans. They didn't talk to people. They don't know people.

We are more working people, blue collar people. We are in the most class segregated version of American society that has ever existed. And they were just in a box looking at their numbers, looking at focus groups, looking at polls. I don't know who they were paying to do those polls, but they burned a billion dollars on them. And they thought, well, if we counterpunch, it won't move the needle. That's how they were making their decisions. That's how empty their politics are. They are not committed to people of diverse genders or sexualities. They were not committed to articulating a universal program that would have guaranteed people's safety, people's healthcare. You could have punched back with, you know, he's distracting you from the fact that he's with the fat cats. I could have come up with like 500 things like he's with Elon or he's with Gates. People don't love billionaires. We're Americans. We don't love the rich. You know, there's a grassroots populist anger against us. He's with Big Pharma.

You know, they're trying to make him out as like this people's hero now because the Democrats let him do that. They let the GOP do that. Look, they could have said, he's with your landlord. Democrats are with us or whatever, Harris or the—but they have so little political sense of the suffering of average wage workers and what they could do to alleviate that on a very, very basic level, by raising the minimum wage, by outlawing, I think, insurance companies. But there's no political will to do that because they just want to win by a thousand votes. They want to win swing states by a thousand votes. They don't care about the polity and the people felt it. 71 million Americans understood this. And the other thing is Ezra Klein's debrief, saying when he had a dialogue with Faiz Shakir, the former campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, and they're in dialogue with each other and Klein is saying, I just don't understand why people are so angry. I don't understand what this populism is.

And Shakir would go through and say, this is what happened with NAFTA. This is what happened with TPP. This is what happened with pillaging of homeowner's assets in 2008, 2009. This is what didn't happen for the Democratic Party. And you know what Klein would go, he'd go, I just don't understand. I just don't understand. He doesn't want to understand because he was standing right next to Obama during the reform of American healthcare saying universal single payer can't happen, can't happen. And he was part of American Prospect, he was part of lobbying groups, he was supported with every single sinecure and fellowship a Democratic pundit could have received and he was able to say next to Obama and say, single payer, not going to work. We have to have the marketplace. We have to have the ACA. So he's responsible. So this is what I'm thinking, Chris, is when the magnitude of your error is so huge, there is no way you can have even reach self criticism. If I made a mistake in my research, if you made a mistake in your research, you’d say, I'm sorry, the Shah wasn't in Berlin, but I still stand by my idea that the people of Iran hated him. I don't know, something like we could correct, but their error is galactic. They can't admit they were wrong.

Chris Hedges

Well, they're trapped in an echo chamber of which the media plays a very significant role. Thomas Friedman gets $40,000 a lecture because he flies off to corporate weekends and tells the corporatists exactly what they want to hear. How many times has Thomas Friedman been wrong on, frankly, just about everything? But it's so self-referential, yeah, that in a way...

Catherine Liu

Doesn't matter.

Chris Hedges

And you're right. They live in their own kind of version, especially the upper levels, they live—a New Yorker writer called it “Richestan.” They don't fly commercial jets. They've utterly severed themselves from society, which is why they're so clueless and why the moment's so dangerous and why, of course, Trump won and why they're so hated as they should be hated. I mean, they're pretty repugnant figures scolding the rest of us constantly, as you point out in the book. You said,

“When the tide turned against American workers, the professional managerial class preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below, while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised. The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the professional managerial class able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.”

Talk about that split, that moment. I think you actually give it a year, 1972 or something, but talk about that split.

Catherine Liu

I think it really had to do with the fact that the Vietnam War was seen by college educated liberal elites and radicals as being something that they condemned on their own and that there were these—and that the American people or the blue collar college uneducated workers were all for that war. In the wake of this, in the 70s, in the wake of the 70s, I think it was Barbara Ehrenreich who actually wrote about this in “Fear of Falling.” People did studies about income levels, education levels, and attitudes towards the Vietnam War. And it turned out that the wealthy and the college educated were actually much more for the Vietnam War because it's geared towards the Republicans. And the blue collar people, people who did not have college educations actually had to send their sons to war.

And that in terms of population and demographics, they actually skewed more against the war than the college educated wealthy elites. But in the mind of the liberal professors and the pseudo-radicals who came out of ‘68 thinking, you know, they did yoga and they were cosmopolitan and the working people of America were benighted, they took their cosmopolitanism, their anti-war position, as a sign of their superiority and that they would have to lead the American people out of the darkness. So it was at this moment, also, that the rate of profit and capital goes down and the US government decides to punish American workers with a kind of massive industrialization of East Asia as a bulwark against China and the offshoring of industrial jobs begins then. It's in Jim English's book about prestige and the prestige economy that he writes that in 1972, the weight of things produced in America starts to go down.

And so the immaterial economy like Hollywood, the press, finance, insurance, real estate, the things you can't touch, the economic activity of things that have no weight goes up and like ball bearings, cars, forks, desks, these things that were once made, blankets, that were once manufactured in America, the weight of these things actually starts to decline. So it's actually an inflection point and decisions were made by policymakers that we're going to industrialize East Asia at the expense of the American worker. And, you know, my family sort of benefited from it because my grandmother's family was in Taiwan. Taiwan is a first world country now. So in that sense, good, it was great for Taiwan. But in the end, this logic just extends into globalization in the 2000s, 2010s and you could say, well, I'm Chinese, right? This kind of deindustrialization benefits China. It does benefit China, but at what cost? And could it have been managed differently so that we don't have a devastated rust belt? We don't have U.S. steel completely collapsing under the weight of global competition?

There was a concerted effort to punish the American working class because, actually, there was enormous, in the counter-cultural foment, we only hear about Chicago and the hippies and the yippies demonstrating against the war during the Democratic National Convention. We hear about Kent State. We hear about the free speech movement. We hear about Summer of Love. But in every factory, in the Midwest, there were wildcat strikes, walkouts, sit downs, what people call quiet quitting. I mean, the Chevy [inaudible] factories were notorious for—GM was like increasing the rate of production. The American worker was refusing that kind of intensified tailorization. And you know what the bosses said? They said, you know what? You guys are too much trouble. We can't handle it. We're going to go somewhere else. We're going to move this factory somewhere else. We're going to extend the logistics lines and we're going to punish you because you want too much.

And the level of the American working class lives had been raised. Expectations were raised. We had our 30 years of redistribution from the top down since the Second World War. And then people at the top were like, you guys have too much. We're going to take it away. And we have an intermediate class of managers and professionals who oversaw this. I'm going to give you a really specific example of how the credentialed elites sell out the interests of their own class and wage workers to the bosses, to the capitalists. The UC system is a 10 campus system, a public university, and we have a Board of Regents who is appointed by the governor. You appoint a Board of Regents who are extremely wealthy people who will donate to the university because the university is being starved by budget cut after budget cut and the California tax revolt. So recently we've had a lot of campus unrest, as you know, with faculty and students protesting on behalf of Palestine and against the genocide of their people and the destruction of Gaza.

The Board of Regents met yesterday. They want people to be punished. And they were speaking to our provost, Katherine Newman from Berkeley, who is a professor. And they said to her, three of the regents, big fat cat money guys, we want to be able to move to punish faculty. We don't like faculty governance. It's too slow. It is not working. And this woman, this high level manager, who probably makes like 500 to 800 thousand dollars a year, twice, three times, four times, five times what professors make because in this, we are the wage workers here. She's our manager and then you have the bosses or the regents. She said, yes, yes, we're going to get on it and we are going to make a committee. And she goes we can do something by July. They're like, no, no, because they're all fucking CEOs and C-suite guys. So they're like, no, it has to be May. This is not working. Faculty governance is not working. It's the pride of the UC system that we have a faculty senate instead of a union who is supposed to represent the interests of the professors with regard to the administrators, the chancellors, and now increasingly the donors in the regions.

And we have a woman, Katherine Newman, who is selected to be the highest level under the chancellor, under the president, Michael Drake, and she is rolling over. She's basically saying, okay, okay, you're right, you're right, we need to move faster. July's too late, let's try to do something. Her interests are to please the regents, not to protect academic freedom, not to protect the faculty that she manages, not to protect the integrity of the university. So we have seen this university be destroyed by the interests of the capitalists. And [Gavin] Newsom is totally responsible because he appointed those people. They are philistines. They hate the university and they hate the idea that there are people who they can't fire. So they're basically like Democratic versions of Trump and they have a lot more hypocritical attitudes about culture and about how they love the humanities. So I can totally vibe, understand the average American going, you know what? I would prefer the real thing, red blood, red meat, hate workers, but speak my anger guy, then those of you who are telling me I'm inferior, who tell me that my life choices are terrible and who are going to punish me anyway.

I'd rather be punished by the big orange baby than by the, you know, Ozempic-shooting Hollywood liberal mogul. You know, the fact that I would say this now, it could be a breach of academic propriety on their part. They want to decide who they can fire. They don't want to have tenure or peer review or anything, be intermediates or process, due process. All of that is going too slow. It's not working. They said this, it's not working. And so it's very clear that they have a handmaiden in this woman who's going to execute their will who said she was going to execute their will, who didn't give them a single word of pushback when they said faculty governance is not working, everything should be on the table. This means they should be able to fire professors at will.

Chris Hedges

Well, that's been true at universities across the country. They coordinated all summer to impose all these draconian rules to create these academic gulags. You can't flyer. You can't—forget encampments. A few handful of professors and then the students, they're on probation. Up the street at Princeton, Ruha Benjamin's teaching on probation. So that's hardly limited to Irvine.

Catherine Liu

Or the UC, this is Berkeley, this is the entire UC system, right? They are coordinated. They're talking to each other. They're talking to each other. They've decided to bring down the hammer, sorry.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, yeah, completely. I want to talk about what this professional managerial class, because it's worse than, of course, virtue signaling and demonizing the ungrateful working class—my mother's family is from Maine. They come out of the working class, as I've seen what's happened up there. It's awful. So you write,

“They've hollowed out public goods. They've degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility.”

I think it's I think one of the things that leads to— I'm just going to read another great passage you wrote,

“Trump never promised to be virtuous. His id-driven politics and lack of self control form the core of his appeal to those who felt scorned by the liberal super ego to defeat reactionary politics masquerading as populism. We need an anti-professional managerial class struggle from the left not more identity politics, which has become just another vehicle of professional managerial class virtue signaling.”

I mean my argument and I think it's yours is that the creation of Trump and the rise of these Christian fascists is totally at the fault of this professional managerial class and the Democratic Party and these liberals that all of the hatred that has been leveled at them they deserve.

Catherine Liu

Yeah, I agree. I agree. I totally agree. I mean, we have to agree. You know, the thing is that I feel that, on the left, we shouldn't be single issue people with regard to Israel and Palestine. But since they've made this litmus test, now we all have to gather around and defend the people's right to protest this. The longer term issue for me is how can we return to bread and butter issues, to undoing private equity’s hold on real estate, on health, on education? And I don't see the Democrats having any path forward on this. And, you know, I don't see, this is what makes me really, really pessimistic, is that as you said, you opened up with the idea that they don't have any capacity for self-criticism.

I don't see that this defeat is an educational one for them at all. And that's what's really appalling. I wrote that around Trump I, but Trump II is all of this even more intensified with the Bernie Sanders moment receding in memory. Because there was a moment when Trump was elected in 2016 when I felt that the Democratic Party thought that it had to attend to Bernie Sanders' concerns. But when they replaced Sanders with Biden, the other old white guy, they felt that they could sort of Frankenstein together kind of good old boy and woke politics, protecting capital at the end. And the Bernie Sanders concerns got more marginalized after Biden was elected because they were like, okay, you guys, you assholes, so you can't elect your guy. We've got our guy. But between 2016 and 2020, there was strangely an openness to talking about economic redistribution. And then that kind of closed down when they were telling us that, you know, Biden was the best president for labor since FDR.

The American Recovery Act was, you know, Inflation Reduction Act was fantastic. It really helped people a lot. It was building American infrastructure and American capacity. But for some reason, none of those policies stuck. And you know, there are people on the left who say that, you know, not even left, people's economists say, and I mean, some leftists do, that the Inflation Reduction Act actually produced more inflation, and we have so much inflation, then the incumbent party will definitely lose. So why isn't there an articulation of what it means, of how inflation has been used to punish working class people? And how can we fight inflation with the government on our side? There was no articulation of a collective project. They took the Inflation Reduction Act and started using it like, you know, we've done all these great things. And the reality is that young people today have very little hope. When they come out of college, the jobs are not there for them. They're in debt. And then working class people have even less hope.

And then working class people have even less hope of actually finding a way of living with dignity that was cemented into this promise of post-war America, which had to do with social mobility and certain things like vacation time or an eight-hour day. Now we all have to like be hustle culture 16-hour days, seven days a week. And take it for granted. And there was no vision of a better society that we could be building. Biden did not provide that. I mean, and as his faculties declined, it got worse and worse, but his proxies and the people under him were using the culture wars to cement the new Democratic majority, which has completely fallen apart. Because if you cannot provide for people at a very basic level, you can lecture them all you want about how great the Obamacare is.

Obamacare might cover more people than before it existed. But for a family of four, people are paying thousands of dollars a month with a deductible of $5,000 still. So it didn't really alleviate the pressure of healthcare on working and middle class people. Very, very poor people might be able to do Medi-Cal or Medicare, but in the middle, a wage worker is being punished from every single level of healthcare. They're not serious people. They did not take this issue seriously. If they had focused on one serious issue like this, I would have given them all their identity politics. If they had just said, let's do single-payer. But they couldn't. They kept adjusting, tuning the buttons.

Chris Hedges

Well, what do mean? They got Liz Fowler to block single payer. That was Obama's legacy. And everyone was forced to buy their defective product, which boosted the profits of the insurance industries and everyone else. It's just one betrayal after another. You may know I worked for Ralph Nader. I was his speechwriter. But Ralph finally ran for president because he said at this point he used to write legislation and have liberals like Fulbright or others push it through. They were all pushed out. They were all gone, especially by the time Clinton came around, they all became corporatized. Clinton did tremendous damage, destroyed welfare, 70% of the original recipients were children.

I want to talk about the left. And you've been very critical, I think correctly, of the left and how it has essentially cannibalized itself and left us in a very frightening position because of course if we go back to the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, it was a strong militant left, the old CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations], the Communist Party that saved us from fascism which was ran like an undercurrent here as it did in Europe. But that left is gone partly because labor unions have been destroyed. That's been, you went back to when we talked about that period in the ‘60s or the ‘50s when you had a rising income and I think we got up to about 36% unionized workers were empowered economically and to a certain extent politically.

The Democratic Party certainly had to take them into consideration. And of course that frightened the capitalist class, that was part of the backlash. But now we really are completely disempowered—11% of the workforce is unionized. I think 6% of them are public sector. Many of them cannot strike. We saw that with Biden shutting down the railroad freight workers and their work conditions are just awful. These skeleton crews and very dangerous. Let's talk about the left. What's happened to the left?

Catherine Liu

Well, what left are you talking about? Are you talking about like DSA? Are you talking about, Dissent Magazine? I just feel like there is no left.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, there is no left. The phantom left. Let's talk about the phantom left. Let's talk about what happened. There used to be a left in this country. I mean, go back to the eve of World War I. [Eugene] Debs, the socialists, the Wobblies [Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)]. And, you know, there's been just a steady assault against the left. I mean, the Red Scare and Ellen Schrecker wrote great work on this. I mean, we are at a very, I think, very dangerous moment where those of us who care about some kind of equality and fairness and distribution of wealth and all that, we're completely disempowered.

Catherine Liu

Yep. I mean, the thing is that the left—so the right confuses the liberals and the left, right? And the liberals actually hate the left. What they imagine is left. I just read the Liberal Patriot that, Substack, where he said, you know, it's the leftists who are willing to die on all these hills of identity politics and of Palestine, and we have to ignore them. We have to go back to the center. And there's this boogeyman that is powerful in doing these things. The Phantom left. And I feel that most left organizations or media that have some kind of power like Dissent [Magazine] or The Nation or even Jacobin [Magazine], they've been totally appropriated by liberals. They don't really have a strong materialist edge any longer. Because the thing is that the politics of identity have become so pitched that nobody wants to criticize what has happened with the Democratic Party and human resources appropriation of identity politics to divide us and make us ignore the material questions that really should be preoccupying us.

Every day we should be talking about private equity, but if we're talking about DEI and we're talking about underrepresented minorities and we're talking about equity and not equality, we're not going to be talking about what private equity is actually doing to every single sector of the American economy. And I think that even like the left journals who have been representative of certain more materialist point of view, it's been very, hard to get traction with that because immediately if you criticize the identity politics aspect of liberal politics, you're called a racist, you're called a transphobe, you're called, you know, a nationalist. So there's no traction to create a liberal left dialogue that can actually produce an alliance like the Tea Party and the mainstream GOP that moved the Republicans to the right over the past 25 years. If you can't have that productive antagonism and you have one side saying, you guys are all just demonic because you criticize our positions and identity and the left can say—like people like me or people like you who take the risk to say, you know, these DEI policies, they destroy solidarity.

They destroy any kind of class solidarity or class feeling. They are designed to manage difference rather than produce equality and justice. We systematically get marginalized by the left powers that be. I'm never going to get a grant from Guggenheim, Mellon or MacArthur. I don't fucking care. But they really do control what can be said in a professional sphere because we're in the media, we're in academia. I'm happy to go on Fox. I'm happy to go on CNN. I'm happy to go and tell people that there are people in the world who identify as the left, who don't like this culture wars thing, who do feel like we have gotten far, far away from the values of the working class, which should be about bread and butter material issues. Why isn't that voice out there? It should just be out there. Something that we don't demonize, that we feel like we have to contend with. The class issue and also the question of whether or not we can have a strong left without a strong industrial base. And that strong industrial base has been destroyed. And how do you actually rebuild that? And we should be asking this question too. Is a white-collar union as good as a blue-collar union? I would say no, but it's still a union, right?

But we should be talking about these things. And the other thing about it is class is not a moral category. I don't use it to demonize people when I go, this is a PMC [professional managerial class] position. People are like, my god, you have a degree from an Ivy League school, you're a professor. It is not a moral position, it is a social position. And as a social position, its political valence can change depending upon the social situation. So there are people who believe that the professional managerial class can become a progressive force. I do not, but we can have this discussion. We can air this, we can air it out. I don't believe that we should lead with vanguard identity positions. When I suggested this on Twitter in the middle of the pandemic, my erstwhile friend, Doug Henwood, led a Twitter mob on me who excoriated my position, said I was a transphobe, told me to kill myself. And this was immediately silenced. Like people were in my DMs going—they scared the shit out of me because I thought I was just saying like, maybe DSA shouldn't start the meetings with what I called the pronoun ritual.

And it just, and the attacks on me were insane. And all I had said was, I told an anecdote about a friend of mine who had brought a group of union workers, hotel workers to a DSA meeting and these women left quietly before the introductions were done because they took so long with the pronouns. People said, have you ever been misgendered? You're a transphobe. I was thinking about my aunt who is a member of Unite Here 11. She barely speaks English. She loves her union. If she was brought to a DSA meeting and people are introducing themselves with pronouns, she'd be thinking she's getting an English lesson after work and she would want to go home and spend that time with her husband and make dinner for her daughter, right? What is the political meaning of that?

Every single Chinese person I know is constantly misgendering everyone because we only have a neutral, third person pronoun, right? So what does that mean to her? What does a DSA meeting mean to her if people are using this strange ritual that has nothing to do with what she thinks of as the benefits of her union? She loves her union. She doesn't need DSA. So you see right there, DSA is playing this liberal vanguard position and making it impossible for immigrant women like my aunt to even understand that unionism and leftism might actually have something to do with each other because DSA is already playing vanguard identity politics. And people called me the worst names possible. And I'm just, and I was just saying, and I challenged them. I challenged them to tell me if they have a fucking family member in the Unite Here 11.

Chris Hedges

Well, you know, Ralph [Nader] used to say, what we have to do is organize unions at Walmart. And it doesn't really matter whether anyone's voting for Trump or how politically correct they are. And he said, not only is that what we have to be doing, but that in itself is educational and it teaches them where the centers of power are. Which is like with the Walton family that makes what, $11,000 an hour for doing nothing or something.

Catherine Liu

Right, and it's not about your adaptation to a new identity. You can have a different view of that. You can have a different view of immigration, but you can still be allied with each other in your struggle to strip away more profits from the Walton family.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, but it's a diversion from confronting centers of power. Confronting centers of power is hard and difficult and identity politics is…

Catherine Liu

And capital is extremely—capital is complicated. Capital, there are fewer capitalists than there are workers, but capital is kind of improvisational. It's organized and it's extremely powerful. I don't even know why we have to say things like this, but these distractions really minimize the complexity of the battles ahead.

Chris Hedges

I gotta ask you about this chapter, “The professional managerial class has sex.” You write,

“The sexual revolutionary to whom we owe many of our progressive ideals about sex is Marquis de Sade, an aristocratic class traitor and a hopeless sexual deviant. He was a supporter of the French Revolution who spent much of his life in miserable prison cells writing pornography.”

I mean, I totally agree with you. I wrote about kink.com in one of my books, I went out to the video news convention where the porn industry was for another, that was “Empire of Illusion.” But anyway, talk about that. I'm totally on board.

Catherine Liu

Well from this enlightenment moment when Marquis de Sade was actually a really smart guy and he said if there is no God then of course everything is permitted and we can use other people for our pleasure, the beginning of sadism. This was a vanguard position deviant anti-social vanguard position in the during the French Revolution, which is why after the revolution he was locked up again. But he was thinking about how every form of perversion should be permitted and therefore the French Revolution should liberate us from any belief in sin in the Catholic Church and power and pleasure would become part of everyone's field of activity.

And strangely enough, this kind of logic is part of the logic of the counterculture, where it believed that it had invented new forms of sexual relation designed to tread the edges of what was humanly permissible. You the most extreme forms of academic sexual identities say that we can be transhuman, we're not human, there are different combinations of human machine, human animal, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, I'm talking about the most parodic exaggerations, but during the ‘60s and ‘70s, sexual liberation, I think, became a question of another professional manager class managed, rationalized set of activities where the PMC believed that you could read books and then have the best sex ever. And that fulfillment, sexual fulfillment, as it comes from the Enlightenment, comes from this kind of sexual liberation.

The fact of the matter is that working-class people, normal people, you know what people on the internet call trad people, traditional people, but traditional ideas of partnership and family include a notion of sacrifice and honor. And this is out of the picture for the counter-culturalists and the hippies where everything is just about fulfillment. And you can see it's parodic and elaboration in a figure like Elon Musk, and all the billionaire oligarchs who are moving from wife one, two, three, four, five, because there's something about sexual fulfillment for them that is made available through power. And the whole idea, and this is what a lot of my radical liberal colleagues would find really normative and horrible for me, but the whole idea that human beings were limited in our expressions and should be limited by social responsibilities, domestic responsibilities, and that this idea of sacrificing fulfillment and expression is a highly social thing to be engaged in, even in the absence of God.

This idea has been completely lost to the PMC who want to be radical. And one of the things that, one of the biggest ads that you see on social media targeting middle-aged men is all of these Viagra-like products now, you know, that you should be virile till the end of your life, satisfy your woman. There is no limit to pleasure and expressivity and fulfillment. And I really feel like their ancestor is the Marquis de Sade because that's the limitless idea of pleasure in the absence of God, this kind of anti-social deviance that can produce personal fulfillment. This is like the ironic legacy, and I think Sade was clever enough to be ironic about this, of a kind of pure emancipation of the sexual drives. And there's obviously enormous amounts of discontent in marriages, there's patriarchy and everything that comes with it.

But I was also really directing this at Second Wave Feminism, which was so focused on sexual fulfillment and expressivity for white collar college educated professional manager class women. I mean, literally Betty Friedan said, we have all these women at home discontented in their in their suburban homes in 1959, if only they could be liberated to compete with men on the job market, if only they could be liberated to realize themselves sexually on the sexual market comes next after that. Sorry, that was a very long answer to your question.

Chris Hedges

Well, it's also the way that they've redefined—I mean Hillary Clinton did this—they redefined the notion of feminism where feminism becomes about becoming a CEO of a big company, not about empowering working women. I’ll go back to Andrea Dworkin. But again, it's that kind of inversion of values where it's breaking a glass ceiling for a privileged, empowered woman rather than empowering a group.

Catherine Liu

Or rather than seeing in your struggles the struggles of other people and your success is not a political thing. It's not a political achievement for other women. And I don't understand why people could promote themselves like this except that they were so identified with professional success.

Chris Hedges

I just want to ask, I am totally with you on the inability of the Democratic Party to reform itself. I don't think they want to. They're a creature of corporate money. These figures, [Nancy] Pelosi, [Chuck] Schumer, who wants them, [Kamala] Harris, they wouldn't be there if they didn't, what'd she get? What was their campaign, over a billion dollars? They wouldn't be there without that money. So they'd lose political power. I think they'd rather have a first class cabin while the ship goes down than give that up. But we are in big trouble in a very anemic dysfunctional democracy.

I spent a long time writing a book on the Christian right, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War in America.” And I'm a divinity school graduate. These people are very frightening, theocratic monsters. I mean, they're going to the UN, Mike Huckabee, and they essentially have adopted the language of these radical messianic Zionists, Judea and Samaria, everything. We're not headed in a good place. And what do we do? I mean, the liberal class is imploding or dysfunctional, hated with good reason. The left is tearing itself apart with boutique activism and culture wars. What's the exit? How do we get out of this?

Catherine Liu

I wish I had a better answer for that. I'm so sorry. I wish I had a good answer for that. But what I can say is that on a geopolitical level, the decline of empires is very, very ugly. And from within Chinese history, the end of dynasties always produces millenarism and cultishness. When you have this kind of cultishness on the left, millenarism on the right, there is no functioning democracy. There is no possibility of reasonable debate or reason in politics. However, I do feel like there's, I know this sounds crazy, but the liberals have been so powerful and so hegemonic within all of the institutions that we've described earlier, but they were repudiated. And I do have some hope that there is a kind of baseline American sense of anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism that will emerge when Trump's excesses become too obvious.

And I think that we have to speak to the anti-authoritarian, egalitarian leanings of the country that we live in, not pretend that we live in another country, not try to flee from this country, not try to reinvent this country from the ground up. But there is, I find, a craving among my students, among the people who read the book, who've been reaching out to me, a craving for a kind of left-driven community that takes the social issues seriously, that wants to channel this anger for social ends, not for the enrichment of others. I think that the more we see of the oligarchs, the more hideous they will become, and we have to be there, ready to organize that anger, or at least to give voice to it and to listen to it. Because I guess I'm very frightened, but I also have like a typically American-like optimism within me that the populist repudiation of liberal hegemony, even though it does give birth to these kinds of right-wing extremism and aberrations, I don't think it can be reduced to that. I think there's a rejection of the Democrats. There was a rejection of the Democrats more than an absolute embrace of the GOP in the last election. So that gives me some kind of hope.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, I think that's right. Thanks, Catherine. We were discussing Catherine Liu's book, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.” I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

---

Photos

(Thumbnail) Screenshot from Stephen Colbert Show “Senator Kamala Harris Has Her Eyes Set On Wakanda”

YouTube

(Thumbnail) TOPSHOT-US-WEATHER-FIRE

TOPSHOT - A brush fire burns near homes in Pacific Palisades, California on January 7, 2025. (Photo by David Swanson / AFP) (Photo by DAVID SWANSON/AFP via Getty Images)

American sociologist and eugenicist Edward Alsworth Ross (1866-1951)

From Wikimedia Commons

John Dewey, Portrait

John Dewey, Portrait photograph, Shoulders up, Three-quarter view, c 87 years of age, 1946. (Photo by JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images)

Late Night with Seth Meyers - Season 4

LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS -- Episode 578 -- Pictured: (l-r) Journalist Ezra Klein talks with host Seth Meyers during an interview on September 14, 2017 -- (Photo by: Lloyd Bishop/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

Vox Interviews President Obama on Affordable Care Act

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: (AFP OUT) U.S. President Barack Obama, right, is interviewed by Ezra Klein, center, and Sarah Kliff, left, on Vox at the Blair House on January 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. During the course of the interview he defended the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and challenged the GOP-led Congress to come up with a better plan. (Photo by Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)

US Infantry, Vietnam

The US 173rd Airborne are supported by helicopters during the Iron Triangle assault. (Photo by © Tim Page/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

2006 Summer TCA Day 18

PASADENA, CA - JULY 27: (L-R) VP American Documentary Cynthia Lopez, journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich and Director/Producer Roger Weisberg from P.O.V. "Waging a Living" speak onstage during the 2006 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour for PBS held at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel on July 27, 2006 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Jerry Rubin Burns Mayor Daley's Riot Report

Yippie leader Jerry Rubin burns a newspaper copy of Mayor Richard Daley's report on the riots, 9/9, entitled "The Strategy of Confrontation." The Mayor said his office had received 16,000 letters from around the country supporting the action of the police against the anti-war demonstrators, and only 4,000 criticizing them.

National Guardsmen Tear Gas Kent State U

(Original Caption) KENT, OHIO: Masked national guardsmen fire barrage of tear gas into crowd of demonstrators on campus of Kent State University May 4th. When the gas dissipated, four students lay dead and several others injured. Hundreds of University students staged the demonstration in protest against the Nixon administration's expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia.

UMass Boston Interim Chancellor Katherine Newman...

BOSTON, MA - MAY 31: UMass Boston Interim Chancellor Katherine Newman poses for a portrait in Boston on May 31, 2018. (Photo by Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-US-VOTE-DEMOCRAT-SANDERS

TOPSHOT - US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gestures during a primary night rally in Concord, New Hampshire, on February 9, 2016. (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD / AFP) (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images)

Ralph Nader, American Political & Consumer Rights Activist

American political and consumer rights activist Ralph Nader addresses the Senate Operations subcommittee investigating the roles of advisory committees in the federal government, in Washington, DC, 11th October 1971. Nader accused President Nixon of undermining the constitution with his new economic policies. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Eugene Debs Delivering Speech

(Original Caption) 6/16/1918-Canton, Ohio: Eugene Debs delivers an anti-war speech. He is shown on a small platform, surrounded by seated men, women and children. A flag-banner hangs in the background.

Doug Henwood

Boston Review: https://www.bostonreview.net/authors/doug-henwood/

Sam Walton Receiving Award

(Original Caption) Sam Walton remarks after receiving presidential Medal of Freedom award today from President Bush. Walton is founder of Wal-Mart Inc. headquartered in Bentonville.

Marquis de Sade, Schriftsteller, Frankreich - im gefängnis

(Eingeschränkte Rechte für bestimmte redaktionelle Kunden in Deutschland. Limited rights for specific editorial clients in Germany.) Donatien Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade *02.06.1740-02.12.1814+Schriftsteller, Frankreich- im Gefängnis, an Ketten- undatiert (nach 1777) (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

President-Elect Donald Trump Holds Meetings At His Trump Tower Residence In New York

NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 18: Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee leaves Trump Tower on November 18, 2016 in New York City. it has been rumored than Huckabee is President-elect Donald Trump's pick for ambassador to Israel. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)