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.”