During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama let slip his disdain for the middle-class when he explained his lack of traction among such voters. \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising then,\u201d Obama said, \u201cthat they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade![\"482px-Presidentwoodrowwilson\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/482px-Presidentwoodrowwilson.jpeg?resize=241%2C300&ssl=1\")
sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.\u201d More recently, U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Braley mocked his opponent incumbent Chuck Grassley as \u201ca farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.\u201d The liberal disdain for ordinary Americans has been around for a long time. Beneath the populist rhetoric and concern for the middle class that lace the campaign speeches of most liberal politicians, there lurks a palpable disgust, and often contempt, for the denizens of \u201cflyover country,\u201d that land of God, guns, religion, and traditional beliefs.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0Revolt Against the Masses<\/em>, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow and\u00a0New York Post\u00a0<\/em>columnist Fred Siegel presents a clearly written and engaging historical narrative of how nearly a century ago this strain of illiberal liberalism began to take over the Democratic Party. Along the way he also provides an excellent political history of the period that illuminates the \u201cugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social-connections\u201d lying at the heart of liberalism today.<\/p>\n Siegel begins with a valuable survey of the \u201cprogenitors,\u201d the early twentieth-century thinkers and writers whose ideas shaped the liberal ideology. Those who know English writer H. G. Wells only as an early pioneer of science-fiction novels may be surprised to find how popular and widely read in America his philosophical and political writings were in the first few decades of the century. Wells\u2019s 1901\u00a0Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought<\/em>\u00a0laid out the argument for a quasi-aristocratic elite of technocrats free of traditional values such as \u201cmonogamy, faith in God & respectability,\u201d all of which Wells\u2019s book \u201cwas designed to undermine and destroy,\u201d as he frankly admitted. Applying Darwinism to social, political, and economic life, Wells envisioned, as Siegel explains, \u201cscientist-poets and engineers\u201d who would \u201cseize the reins in the Darwinian struggle,\u201d so that instead of \u201cdescending into savagery, we would follow their lead toward new and higher ground.\u201d In Wells\u2019s work we see the melding of attacks on traditional authority and middle-class morality, with the scientistic faith in technocratic elites that still characterizes modern liberalism.<\/p>\n Wells\u2019s kindred American spirit was Progressive theorist Herbert Croly, whose 1901\u00a0The Promise of American Life<\/em>Siegel calls the \u201cfirst political manifesto of modern American liberalism.\u201d Croly \u201crejected American tradition, with its faith in the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts, and argued for rebuilding America\u2019s foundation on higher spiritual and political principles that would transcend traditional ideas of democracy and self-government.\u201d<\/p>\n As much as Wells, or for that matter Mussolini and Lenin, Croly \u201cwanted the collective power of society put \u2018at the service of its ablest members,\u2019 who would take the lead roles in the drama of social re-creation.\u201d Similarly, leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne wondered \u201cwhether there aren\u2019t advantages in having administration of the State taken care of by a scientific body of men with social sense.\u201d Bourne seasoned his antidemocratic elitism with a romantic idealization of \u201cYouth,\u201d which was a time when the ideals \u201cwill be the highest\u2026the insight the clearest, the ideas the most stimulating,\u201d an early example of the worship of adolescents that exploded in the 1960s and is still felt in our culture today. And perhaps most famously, journalist H.L. Mencken serially displayed his contempt for the American people, whom he called a \u201crabble of ignorant peasants.\u201d<\/p>\n In Siegel\u2019s reading, modern liberalism was midwifed in the 1920s by the break with Progressivism over Woodrow Wilson\u2019s decision to take the United States into World War I, and the \u201cwartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, Prohibition, and the overwrought fears of Bolshevism in America.\u201d The scorn of patriotism and the American masses, brutally described by Mencken as a \u201ctimorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob,\u201d became the default sensibility of litterateurs, journalists, and intellectuals alike, who viewed \u201cAmerican society and democracy\u201d as \u201cagents of repression,\u201d sentiments that \u201cdeepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.\u201d The influential literary manifestation of this prejudice remains Sinclair Lewis\u2019s 1920 bestseller\u00a0Main Street<\/em>, which along with\u00a0Babbitt\u00a0<\/em>two years later fixed the caricature of Middle America uncritically endorsed by liberals nearly a century later.<\/p>\n Siegel moves briskly through the subsequent events and developments that seemingly legitimized liberal bigotry against the middle class as objective history. The 1925 Scopes \u201cMonkey\u201d Trial, a \u201ccontrivance from the start,\u201d as Siegel writes, and immortalized in the historically challenged 1955 Broadway hit\u00a0Inherit the Wind<\/em>, established the meme of the brave and noble man of \u201cscience\u201d battling slack-jawed, oppressive Christian fundamentalists. This clich\u00e9 predictably surfaces in liberal commentary on issues ranging from teaching Darwinian evolution, to the validity of global warming. In the 1930s idolizing the Soviet Union and communism, a reflex of liberal disdain for capitalism and its d\u00e9class\u00e9 obsession with getting and spending, began its long march through American culture and education.<\/p>\n A corollary to this admiration has been the fervent liberal belief that America is to some degree \u201cfascist,\u201d and in imminent danger of becoming a fascist state, a preposterous notion made famous by Sinclair Lewis\u2019s 1935 novel\u00a0It Can\u2019t Happen Here<\/em>. This hoary received wisdom has managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, which established beyond doubt that Communist subversion and infiltration of America\u2019s institutions were in fact by far a greater threat to democracy than a fascist takeover. Despite that history, in 2004 Philip Roth published\u00a0The Plot Against America<\/em>, which indulged to high praise the same long-exploded fantasy.<\/p>\n Particularly valuable are Siegel\u2019s brief portraits of once prominent liberal commentators and critics like Arthur Schlesinger, whose influence lives in the \u201caristocratic aping of professional liberals who expect, given their putative expertise, to be obeyed.\u201d They refined and perpetuated the old caricature of Americanism \u201cas the mass pursuit of prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them,\u201d enslaved to \u201ctheir futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator.\u201d In the 1950s, the liberal critic Dwight Macdonald groused of a America blessed with \u201cmoney, leisure and knowledge\u201d that had merely given the average American \u201cmasscult\u201d and \u201cmidcult,\u201d the vulgar \u201cAmerican culture of the cheap newspaper, the movies, the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile,\u201d fit fare for the \u201chordes of men and women without a spiritual country . . . without taste, without standards but those of the mob.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet as Siegel points out, this same period saw an explosion in the numbers of average people studying and experiencing the artistic and literary masterpieces of Western civilization. Local symphony orchestras increased by 250 percent between 1940 and 1955, and in that same year \u201c35 million paid to attend classical-music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera\u2019s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million,\u201d almost 10 percent of the population. Fifty million televisions viewers watched Laurence Olivier in\u00a0Richard III<\/em>, book-sales doubled, and paperback versions of highbrow novels like Saul Bellow\u2019s\u00a0The Adventures of Augie March<\/em>\u00a0or non-fiction works like anthropologist Ruth Benedict\u2019s\u00a0Patterns of Culture<\/em>\u00a0became bestsellers. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins introduced the pricey Great Books series, which by 1951 was being purchased by 50,000 Americans a year, who met in 2,500 Great Books groups to talk about the classics of Western civilization. As Siegel mordantly observes, \u201cThis<\/em>\u00a0was the danger against which critics of mass culture, inflamed with indignation, arrayed themselves against.\u201d<\/p>\n Siegel\u2019s survey ends with the presidency of Barack Obama. As\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Revolt Against the Masses<\/em>\u00a0comes to a close, the policies and philosophy of Obama\u2019s administration\u2013\u2013best represented by the Affordable Care Act\u2013\u2013 will strike the reader as the inevitable culmination of the ideological development Siegel has skillfully traced. The liberal elite\u2019s disdain for a middle America of businessmen and churchgoers, which has always been linked to an uncritical admiration for Europe, has with Obama\u2019s reelection created a political order teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse: \u201c[Liberalism\u2019s] sustained assault on the private-sector middle class and the ideals of self-restraint and self-government have, particularly in the blue states, succeeded all too well in achieving the dream of the 1920s literary Bolsheviks: an increasingly Europeanized class structure for America.\u201d<\/p>\n One might argue with Siegel\u2019s assertion of the \u201csharp break\u201d between Progressivism and liberalism. On foreign policy this disagreement is obvious, and the liberals\u2019 endorsement of illiberal identity politics in the 1960s would have horrified old-school Progressives, who were Darwinian eugenicists anxious over being swamped by the inferior races. The Progressives, even more than the liberals, disdained the masses, viewing them as an abstract collectivist \u201cpeople,\u201d Woodrow Wilson\u2019s ideal \u201csingle community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.\u201d This conception of the \u201cpeople\u201d ignored the great variety of regional, sectional, and religious identities, Madisonian factions, and clashing interests comprising flesh-and-blood Americans.<\/p>\n Progressives, moreover, like liberals homogenized and nationalized those various interests and aims as these were defined and chosen by techno-political elites. One hears H. G. Wells\u2019s and Randolph Bourne\u2019s impatience with democratic self-rule and preference for a managerial elite in Wilson\u2019s call to \u201copen for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration,\u201d comprising the \u201chundreds who are wise\u201d empowered to guide the \u201cthousands\u201d who are \u201cselfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.\u201d What liberalism shares with the Progressives\u2013\u2013the \u201cliving\u201d Constitution, big government, regulation of the economy, and the redistribution of property to achieve \u201csocial justice\u201d\u2013\u2013far outweighs their differences.<\/p>\n The Revolt Against the Masses<\/em>\u00a0is an important book, a first-rate intellectual history that clearly and crisply explains much of the political and cultural dysfunctions roiling the United States today. Siegel\u2019s well-researched analysis of the liberal abandonment of self-government and individual freedom\u2013\u2013 a betrayal of the Constitutional order justified in the main by social prejudice, class snobbery, and bad Continental philosophy\u2013\u2013is a brilliant exposition of a century of bad ideas that have led to today\u2019s bloated Leviathan state, these days on track to bankrupt the treasury and diminish our freedom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The left’s disdain for ordinary Americans has deep historical roots. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama let slip his disdain for the middle-class when he explained his lack of traction among such voters. \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising then,\u201d Obama said, \u201cthat they get bitter, they cling to guns or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,187],"tags":[217,308,882,63,693,527],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1S6","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":772,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stupid-party\/","url_meta":{"origin":7198,"position":0},"title":"The Stupid Party","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thronton FrontPage Magazine The presidency of Barack Obama has established once and for all that modern liberalism is now the stupid party. Very little of liberal thought these days represents anything fresh or new, but rather comprises what Lionel Trilling once reduced conservatism to: \u201cirritable mental gestures\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3308,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-unexamined-president-and-his-media-enablers\/","url_meta":{"origin":7198,"position":1},"title":"The Unexamined President and His Media Enablers","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump reminds us that \u201cclass warfare\u201d is an eternal constant of democracies, for as Plato said, every city is in fact two cities, \u201cone the city of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/rdf-500x281.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7166,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry\/","url_meta":{"origin":7198,"position":3},"title":"The Race-Hacks Defend Their Industry","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The race-hack usual subjects recently attacked Congressman Paul Ryan for stating that the problems plaguing the poor\u2013\u2013incarceration, fatherless children, drug abuse, rampant violence, and welfare-dependence\u2013\u2013 are a consequence of a dysfunctional culture that scorns marriage, parenthood, education, work, and virtues like self-control. Given that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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