the revolt against the masses by fred siegel

His early chapters chart the end of the early “Progressives” of the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Teddy Roosevelt, whom Tim Stanley of the London Telegraph describes today as a “Racist, imperialist, power-hungry megalomaniac,” and Woodrow Wilson, the man who was a big fan of the Klan ( and vice versa). Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left, you will certainly enjoy Siegel’s new book. If you enjoyed Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, and Daniel J. Ninety years later, and as this self-mocking Salon article titled “Let’s nationalize Fox News” highlights, very little has changed amongst that portion of the left’s goals. “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. 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.Įxplains 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.The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.

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. These liberals sought to establish a true aristocracy that would serve as a counterpoint to the debasements of modern society.

Mencken-who despised the new worlds of mass production, mass politics, mass culture. 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.Įxplores 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.

The revolt against the masses by fred siegel