The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
of liberalism.
The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing 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 himself into moral judgments against society.”
This is a book about the inner life of American liberalism over the past ninety years and its love affair with its own ambitions and emotional impulses. Liberals believe that they deserve more power because they act on behalf of people’s best interests—even if the darn fools don’t know it.
Modern liberalism has often been defined as the experimental method applied to politics and as the mentality that insists that culture, not nature, puts the future of humanity in its own hands. In terms of American history, modern liberalism is conventionally presented as an adaptation of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal individualism to the growth of big business, and as an updated expression of Jacksonian animus to vested interests. There is something substantial in all of these definitions, but, even taken together, they leave out a great deal.
American liberals don’t like to compare themselves with other twentieth-century ideologues. But, like all the ideologies that emerged in the early twentieth century—from communism and fascism to socialism, social democracy, and its first cousin, British Fabianism—liberalism was created by intellectuals and writers who were rebelling against the failings of the rising middle class. They had a quarrel with the industry, immigration, and economic growth that produced unprecedented prosperity in the United States. They recoiled at what they saw as the ugly bustling cacophony of the urban masses loudly staking their claim to capitalism’s bounty.
In America, the founding fathers of liberalism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, looking both backward to the more orderly virtues of pre-industrial society and forward to the promise of a future that would use science to transcend the crass culture created by a largely unregulated capitalism. At a time when millions were reaping the benefits of a stunning array of new inventions—the telephone, motion pictures, the washing machine, the gramophone—America seemed ripe for reshaping. Autos, airplanes, and radios were altering received notions of time and space. On the one hand, we were reveling in the new: the most dynamic economy in the world that was generating vast national oligopolies. On the other, we were mired in the old: a provincial political culture rooted in practices that had taken hold well before the Civil War. The disparity was striking.
The politics of the countryside were organized around courthouse cliques pursuing petty preferences and ethnic squabbles, while urban centers were ravished by the “pigs at the trough” character of the big-city political machines, which replaced the rule of law with the politics of patronage. By European standards, there was no central government in America to speak of. Most social and economic policy originated in the states, where the political parties (organized around ethnic, cultural, and regional issues) dominated government. Nationally, the president spent as much time on patronage as policy, and he competed with Congress for control of the departments of the Treasury, Agriculture, and the Interior. Far from regal, presidents in this era were known to answer the White House doorbell. Shortly after the famed British author H.G. Wells visited the U.S. in 1905, he described the American federal government as “marooned, twisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently stranded.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, anti-slavery journalists and intellectuals felt besmirched by the “great barbecue” of getting and spending unleashed by the breakneck expansion of the economy. James Russell Lowell’s 1876 “Ode for the Fourth of July” captured the sense of displacement:
And if the nobler passions wane,
Distorted to base use, if the near goal
Of insubstantial gain
Tempt from the proper race-course of the soul…
Is this the country we dreamed in youth,
Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight…?
E.L. Godkin, the founding editor of The Nation and a forerunner of liberalism, similarly complained about ignoble Americans: “A gaudy stream of bespangled, belaced, and beruffled barbarians” were flocking to New York to spend their recently acquired fortunes. “Who knows how to be rich in America?” he asked. “Plenty of people know how to get money; but…to be rich properly is indeed a fine art. It requires culture, imagination, and character.” Godkin and his allies, hoping for leaders of superior intelligence and virtue, looked to Charles Francis Adams Jr. as a possible leader. He was the grandson of president John Adams and the son of President John Quincy Adams, and, like Godkin, he thought that businessmen lacked the temperament to govern; what we needed in office were aristocrats like him.
It was Charles Francis Adams’s brother Henry who, through his book The Education of Henry Adams (first published privately in 1907), became an inspiration to liberals. The Education described Henry Adams’s disappointment with an American society that did not pay him due deference. Adams’s disaffection created the model for much of what became left-wing intellectual life. Adams turned his sour complaints of being bypassed and his sense of himself as a failure into a judgment against the American