The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
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
18. Postscript
Acknowledgments
Appendix I: John Stuart Mill and the Clerisy
Appendix II: 2015 The Many Misunderstandings of Richard Hofstadter
Index
Preface to the Paperback Edition
In that sense, Marcuse shared with the victims of Sinclair Lewis the fallacy that the middle class was in control, that it did in fact shape its own political and moral ends.
—RONALD BERMAN, 1975
Barack Obama’s first term in office was the culmination of the hopes that the original liberals of the early 1920s, writers and intellectuals enthralled by Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, placed in a political transformation that could marginalize the middle class. “The ’20s,” explained literary critic Granville Hicks, “asked what a man was against, not what he was for.” That was the spirit that preceded and prepared the way for Barack Obama’s rise to power.
In 2008, the many failings of George W. Bush’s big-government Republicanism—accompanied by the adoration of Obama, by a press best described as political operatives with bylines—obscured the substantial changes that accompanied the new president into office. When Obama spoke of his “transformative” presidency, he was announcing that for the first time a new top-and-bottom coalition was taking power. By the 1960s, the middle class had ceased to be able to “shape its own political and moral ends.” But while the middle class had been weakened, its influence was still consequential, and for a time President Clinton drew the middle class back into the fold of an increasingly liberal Democratic Party.
Obama, however, reversed Clinton’s course. Obama represented the liberal faith that holds that no matter what the malady, and despite the evidence, a more powerful, more costly central government, paid for by middle-income taxpayers, is the cure. The Revolt Against the Masses describes how the seeds of Obama’s failings were planted in the years immediately after World War I when contemporary liberalism first took root.
This 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