Once Again, Death of the Liberal Class

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. The quote in the article:

The historian Fritz Stern in “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, warns repeatedly of the danger of a bankrupt liberalism. Stern, who sees the same dark, irrational forces at work today that he watched as a boy in Nazi Germany, argues that the spiritually and politically alienated are the prime recruits for a politics centered around cultural hatreds and personal resentments.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

The strange thing is that, back in 2005, Hedges was quoting Stern as a defender of liberalism, not "warn(ing) repeatedly of the danger of a bankrupt liberalism":

"Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he said of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas."
...
"There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented," he said. "There was a longing for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although also significant differences."

HE warns of the danger in an open society of "mass manipulation of public opinion, often mixed with mendacity and forms of intimidation." He is a passionate defender of liberalism as "manifested in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the early years of the American republic."

"The radical right and the radical left see liberalism's appeal to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology," he said. "Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7643.htm

Of course, Hedges spends a fair amount of time attacking atheists, writing books about it. You'd think he wouldn't be so quick to do so if he had listened to Stern on the subject of religion.

More on Stern, and how misleading the claim by Hedges that he "warns repeatedly of the danger of a bankrupt liberalism":

I recalled that brief if unsatisfying exchange while reading Fritz Stern’s compelling book. During the anti-liberal Age of Reaganism he had written a N.Y. Times Op Ed in defense of liberalism, then and now under bitter assault by everyone from the Bush-Cheney administration to their army of liberal-haters. For Stern, the liberal path has been one of “America’s noblest traditions” [which] created “the American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Not to mention Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, et.al. (Which is not to say that liberals have not committed memorable self-inflicted and unforgivable wounds, most significantly Vietnam).

Today, Stern remains an outspoken liberal, tolerant in the face of intolerance on and off the campus, his life forever marked by the destruction of the liberal if flawed Weimar Republic in his native Germany. Five Germanys includes analyses of Weimar, the Third Reich, West and East Germany and united Germany and is a valuable recognition of the absolute necessity for democratic societies to accept and welcome open debate and the questioning of authority. Stern only hints at the possible similarity with the current breed of American policy and opinion makers who have created so much damage at home and abroad, though he is quite serious about their incompetence and intolerance, characteristics his family witnessed in the destruction of the short-lived democratic, if flawed Weimar Republic.

http://hnn.us/node/32206

Stern is a defender of liberalism; he doesn't think it's 'bankrupt'. That's Hedges putting his own views in Stern's mouth. I think Hedges is part of the radical left that Stern also warns about.