The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class

202 Pages·2014·1.27 MB·English

by  Fred Siegel

The Revolt Against the Masses
How Liberalism Has Undermined
the Middle Class
The Revolt Against the Masses
How Liberalism Has Undermined
the Middle Class
Fred Siegel
Encounter Books
New York • London
© 2013 by Fred Siegel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York,
10003.
First American edition published in 2013 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and
Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.
Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Siegel, Frederick F., 1945–
The revolt against the masses : how liberalism has undermined the middle class / by Fred Siegel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59403-699-6 (ebook) 1. Middle class—United States—History—20th century. 2. Liberalism—
United States—History—20th century. 3. United States—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title.
HT684.S54 2013
320.51'30973—dc23
2013007444
Dedicated to the memory of Frank Macchiarola 1941–2012
Catholic Democrat, mensch, great Brooklynite
Contents
Introduction
1. Progenitors
2. 1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism
3. “Randolph Bourne Writing Novels” About Main Street
4. Three Trials
5. Giants in Decline
6. The Red Decade
7. The Passing Glory of the Vital Center
8. How Highbrows Killed Culture and Paved the Path to the 1960s
9. Not a New Left but a New Class
10. From Jim Crow to Crow Jim
11. McGovernized
12. Progressives Against Progress: The Rise of Gentry Liberalism
13. “The Philosophical Crisis of American Liberalism”?
14. The Clinton Interregnum
15. Gentry Liberals and Public-Sector Unions to the Fore
16. “What Are Our Convictions?”
17. Conclusion: Obama Versus Main Street
Acknowledgments
Appendix: John Stuart Mill and the Clerisy
Index
Introduction
T
his short book is not a comprehensive history of American liberalism. A
number of important figures and episodes are merely glossed over. Instead, it
rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think
of liberalism today—the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President
Obama—began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake
of the post–World War I disillusionment with American society. In the
Twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the
hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of
both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism’s founding writers and thinkers
—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and
H.L. Mencken—was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide the
same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism.
Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism was a vanguard
movement born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. Critical
of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the individual
businessman’s pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual’s self-
interested pursuit of success, both of which were made possible by the
lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state.
Snobbery is not new to liberalism. But the actual history of liberalism will be
new to most readers, which is my reason for writing this book. The history of
liberalism as written by liberal historians begins either with the pre-WWI
Progressive movement or, more likely, with the New Deal of the 1930s. In the
plumb-line account usually wholesaled, there is a direct ascent from the
Progressives to the social salvation represented by the New Deal to the Great
Society and on up to the present. The Progressives, it’s said, were the first to
show that big non-constitutional government could be used to solve big
problems. After the yahoos of the 1920s put the country to sleep for a decade,
leading to the stock-market crash, the New Deal rode to the rescue to establish
the beau ideal for future governance. Conservatives tell a similar story, but theirs
is an account of descent, from liberty into “statism.”
But the story isn’t quite true at beginning, middle, or end. The story of
liberalism is more than an account of how the administrative state broke free of
its constitutional bonds. Liberalism, like its rivals, including communism,
fascism, and social democracy, emerged as part of the early twentieth century’s
intellectual response to the newly emergent realities of mass production, mass
politics, and mass culture. Like fascism and communism, liberalism was
strongly influenced by the Nietzschean ideal of a true aristocracy that might
serve as a corrective to the perceived debasements of modern commercial
society shorn of traditional hierarchies. It was liberals’ claim to be an aristocracy
based on talent and sensibility that helped define the 1960s and ’70s. It was then
that highly educated liberals—acting, they said, on behalf of African Americans
—pushed aside the social-democratic trade unionists within the Democratic
Party.
Liberalism was far more intellectually permeable, and far more politically
adaptable, than most of its competitors and more willing than all but the trade-
union-tied social democrats to work through the existing government structures.
These qualities brought it to the forefront of American life. But it nonetheless
represents a distinct ethos, a stylized set of political postures often at odds with
America’s democratic, capitalist, and egalitarian traditions.
The set of cultural and emotional attachments, the political libido of
liberalism, so to speak, coalesced in the wake of WWI in an angry repudiation of
Progressivism and Woodrow Wilson. Modern liberalism preceded the New Deal
by more than a decade. The very term “liberal,” in its modern usage, was coined
by writers and intellectuals who defined themselves by their hostility to the
middle class and the moralistic Progressives who had imposed Prohibition in
1919. As The Revolt Against the Masses will show, liberalism began as a fervent
reaction to wartime Wilsonian Progressivism, and it took its still current cultural
shape in the 1920s well before the Great Depression came crashing down on the
country. It was in the seminal 1920s that the strong strain of snobbery, so
pervasive among today’s gentry liberals, first defined the then nascent ideology
of liberalism.
The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical
leftwing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of
the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both
democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America
a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to
be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an
idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a
future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-
bourgeois, post-democratic world. In the mid-1950s during a brief reconciliation
between liberals and their country, the literary critic Lionel Trilling noted that
“for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is
not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the
world.” This novelty soon passed.
The ideals of the 1920s liberals were, by way of the statist and technocratic
elements of the 1930s, carried forward into the 1960s. It was in the 1960s that
liberals, even more than conservatives, laid siege to the social-solidarity heritage
of the New Deal. In the name of good causes such as opposition to racism and
the war in Vietnam, post–New Deal upper-middle-class liberals looked to
remake America in their own image by enhancing their own power. They
defined middle-class Americans, including those who made it into modest
prosperity through unionized work, as the unenlightened objects of their enmity.
Much of the middle and lower-middle class, subject to liberal experiments in
schooling, crime, and gender relations, reciprocated the animosity. Liberal social
programs to combat poverty and reform the schools, their failures now long
institutionalized, have produced a government whose grasp far exceeds its
competence and whose costs are carried by the private-sector middle class. Like
corrupt Harlem congressman Charley Rangel, who did his best to keep new
businesses out of Harlem so that he could fend off rivals and accumulate anti-
poverty money for his political friends and allies, liberalism has been dedicated
to preserving the problems for which it presents itself as the solution.
In today’s America, those who claim to be morally superior all too often enjoy
both neo-Gilded Age wealth and close ties to government. After the government-
driven failures and excesses of the past forty years, liberalism has become an
ugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social connections. When the editor-
in-chief of the popular liberal website Slate, frustrated with opposition to
Obama’s expansion of the federal government, entitled an article “Down with
the People,” he echoed the assumption that has driven liberalism since its
inception.
Liberalism, as a search for status, is sufficiently adaptable that even in failure,
self-satisfaction trumps self-examination. As the critic Edmund Wilson noted
without irony, the liberal (or “progressive reformer,” in his term) has “evolved a
psychological mechanism which enables him to turn moral judgments against