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

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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....