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

by Fred Siegel

Overview

What we think of as 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-WWI disillusionment with American society.

The Revolt Against the Masses explores the inner life of American liberalism over the past 90 years, beginning with liberalism’s foundational writers and thinkers—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken—who despised the new worlds of mass production, mass politics, mass culture. These liberals sought to establish a true aristocracy that would serve as a counterpoint to the debasements of modern society. It was then in the seminal 1920s, that the strong strain of snobbery and contempt for the middle class, so pervasive today in the Hamptons, the New Yorker, HBO, and the Sierra Club, first defined liberalism.

Today’s brand of Barack Obama liberalism has gone further, displacing the old Main Street middle class with public sector workers, crony capitalists, and those elite arbiters of style and taste Siegel calls the liberal gentry. The Revolt Against the Masses explains how this came to be and why liberals continue to insist they act on behalf of the best interests of the middle class, even if the damned fools don’t know it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594037955
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	04/06/2015
Edition description:	Updated
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	664,143
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Fred Siegel is the author, most recently, of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life (2005), which received the cover review in the New York Times Book Review. His previous book, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, was named by Peter Jennings as one of the 100 most important books about the U.S. in the twentieth century. He has written widely on American and European politics and was described as “the historian of the American city” in a November 2011 profile in the Wall Street Journal.

The former editor of City Journal, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Commentary, The New Republic, Dissent, and many other publications. He has also appeared widely on TV and radio.

A former senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., Mr. Siegel is currently a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

1 Progenitors 1

2 1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modem Liberalism 27

3 "Randolph Bourne Writing Novels" About Main Street 43

4 Three Trials 51

5 Giants in Decline 63

6 The Red Decade 71

7 The Passing Glory of the Vital Center 93

8 How Highbrows Killed Culture and Paved the Path to the 1960s 105

9 Not a New Left but a New Class 117

10 From Jim Crow to Crow Jim 129

11 McGovernized 145

12 Progressives Against Progress: The Rise of Gentry Liberalism 163

13 "The Philosophical Crisis of American Liberalism"? 171

14 The Clinton Interregnum 181

15 Gentry Liberals and Public-Sector Unions to the Fore 185

16 "What Are Our Convictions?" 189

17 Conclusion: Obama Versus Main Street 195

Acknowledgments 205

Appendix: John Stuart Mill and the Clerisy 207

Index 213

Editorial Reviews

The roots of American liberalism are not compassion but snobbery. So argues historian Fred Siegel in The Revolt Against the Masses. Siegel traces the development of liberalism from the cultural critics of the post WWI years to the gentry liberals today, and he shows how the common thread is scorn for middle-class Americans and for America itself. This is a stunningly original—and convincing—book.”

— Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics

“Fred Siegel’s superb The Revolt Against the Masses should be required reading for those who wonder how liberal elites came to dominate our culture, overriding the will of the people. Siegel’s book is history at its best and most relevant.”

— Roger L. Simon, Academy Award–nominated screenwriter, author, and founder of PJ Media

“In The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel reveals the intellectual underpinnings of today’s ascendant gentry liberalism, which leaves old-fashioned liberals, including, I suspect, Siegel himself, politically homeless. The increasingly anti-democratic character of liberalism also undermines much of the reason we became progressives in the first place, which was to help the middle and working classes. The gentry’s stridency and hypocrisy—what’s OK for them is not for everyone else—is utterly transforming liberalism today. The progressives portrayed in this book are not so much the heirs of Jefferson or Jackson or even Roosevelt, as they are the American heirs of the worst high-toned Tories.”

— Joel Kotkin, author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

From the Publisher