Chris Hedges is a unique commentator on the challenges we face. His honesty is exceptional, his writing outstanding, and his perspective insistent.

His two most recent books, Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion painfully brought into focus the deep-rooted problems in our society and the failings of American liberals and progressives that Hedges says we must acknowledge. Death of the Liberal Class easily made its way onto my list of the top 10 books in 2010 .

Wikipedia tells me the following about Hedges, a fellow Vermonter:

• He is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent and reported from more than fifty countries in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans
• He has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times , where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years.
• He was, in 2002, part of the team of New York Times reporters who were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.
• He was dismissed from the Times in 2005 for expressing a point of view that the paper judged inconsistent with the “objective” perspective required of journalists.
• He is the best-selling author of 2002’s War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
• He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and the F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Visitor in American Studies at the Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.
• He writes a weekly column on Mondays for Truthdig.

That’s a pretty incredible resumé, but what’s really impressive is his writing:

“In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite.”

“The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.”

I am pretty sure I’m a member of the liberal class. I am more comfortable than most and have access to some influence. I am able to travel and have sent three children to private school. I read my wife’s copy of The New Yorker. Most of my friends, the organizations I belong and donate to, the papers I read, the movies I watch, the Democratic Party I support, and the arts I see and listen to are all to a greater or lesser extent part of the liberal class, too.

While my Dad was a Republican, my Mom was not. She was an actress, a bohemian, a free spirit, and a solid member of the liberal class. Chris Hedges grabs the liberalism she taught me by the throat. He challenges everything about it I have always thought was good. And he challenges much if not most about myself that I thought was good.

“Years spent in seminary or rabbinical schools, years devoted to the study of ethics, justice, and morality, prove useless when it comes time to stand up to corporate forces that usurp religious and moral language for financial and political gain.”

“The liberal class refuses to recognize the obvious because it does not want to lose its comfortable and often well-paid perch. Churches and universities—in elite schools such as Princeton, professors can earn $180,000 a year—enjoy tax-exempt status as long as they refrain from overt political critiques. Labor leaders make lavish salaries and are considered junior partners within corporate capitalism as long as they do not speak in the language of class struggle. Politicians, like generals, are loyal to the demands of the corporate state in power and retire to become millionaires as lobbyists or corporate managers. Artists who use their talents to foster the myths and illusions that bombard our society live comfortably in the Hollywood Hills.” — From Death of the Liberal Class

Hedges has harsh words for us. Words we’d rather not hear and ideas we’d rather not contemplate. He paints a picture of a society whose creation we’d rather not admit we have helped orchestrate. Few are as willing as Hedges to take us to task, but how much more evidence do we need that the path we have taken has failed to create a just and equitable society?

In Tunis and Cairo — not to mention London and Paris — people take to the streets to protest the erosion of a civil society. But what happens In America when elected officials vote for a tax policy that ensures the wealthiest 1 percent, who already control 90 percent of the country’s wealth, get even more? What happens when the Supreme Court lets businesses open up their corporate treasuries and pour them into electoral politics to drown out the voices of individual voters and destroy civil society?

Nothing but a deafening silence.