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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.
Each of Siegel's three urban portraits--New York, Washington, D.C.,
and Los Angeles, -- shows the desperate remedies undertaken by
cities searching for a lifeline back to the future whose promise
they once seemed to embody. In a narrative that acknowledges the
large historical forces that have remade the face of America over
the last three decades, but insists that social policies are not
merely foregone conclusions waiting to happen, Siegel holds up a
mirror to our urban naure and tells us much about the way we live
now.
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