The Failure of Obama's Aristocracy of Merit
By Michael Barone
TownHall.com
The roots of American liberalism are not
compassion, but snobbery. That's the thesis of Fred
Siegel's revealing new book, "The Revolt Against the
Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle
Class."
The standard account from liberal historians over
the years, and more recently in bestsellers by Glenn
Beck, is a linear story: Government expansion starts
with the Progressives of a hundred years ago,
accelerates through the New Deal and the Great
Society, and is followed up by the Obama stimulus
and Obamacare.
Siegel says it's more complicated than that. And he
argues that literary figures contributed as much to
the liberal mindset -- maybe more -- than public
policy wonks.
He depicts the Progressives as Protestant reformers,
determined to professionalize institutions and tame
the immigrant and industrial masses. Progressive
projects included women's suffrage and prohibition
of alcohol.
But the many pro-German Progressives were appalled
when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and
by Wilson's brutal suppression of civil liberties.
Progressivism was repudiated in the landslide
election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point
disenchanted liberal thinkers turned their ire
against middle-class Americans who, in the "roaring
'20s," were happily buying automobiles,
refrigerators, radios and tickets to the movies.
The novels of Sinclair Lewis, the journalism of H.L.
Mencken and the literary criticism of Van Wyck
Brooks heaped scorn on the vast and supposedly
mindless Americans who worked hard at their jobs and
joined civic groups -- Mencken's "booboisie."
These 1920s liberals idealized the "noble
aspiration" and "fine aristocratic pride" in an
imaginary Europe, and considered Americans, in the
words of a Lewis character, "a savorless people,
gulping tasteless food," and "listening to
mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the
excellence of Ford automobiles and viewing
themselves as the greatest race in the world."
This contempt for ordinary Americans mostly
persisted in changing political environments. During
the Great Depression, many liberals became
Communists, proclaiming themselves tribunes of a
virtuous oppressed proletariat that would have an
enlightened rule.
For a moment, idealization of the working man, but
not the middle-class striver, came into vogue. But
in the postwar years, what Siegel calls "the
political and cultural snobbery" of liberals
returned.
He recounts the derision of historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., and economist John Kenneth
Galbraith -- Cambridge neighbors after the war --
for Harry Truman, the onetime haberdasher and member
of veterans' groups and service clubs.
They failed to note that Truman was a serious reader
of history and had, in supposedly backward
Independence, Mo., studied piano under a teacher who
had studied under Ignacy Paderewski.
The supposedly mindless 1950s, Siegel recalls, were
actually a time of elevated culture, with thousands
of Great Books discussion groups across the nation
and high TV ratings for programs such as
Shakespeare's "Richard III," staring Laurence
Olivier.
Liberals since the 1920s have claimed to be guided
by the laws of science. But often it was crackpot
science, like the eugenics movement that sought
forced sterilizations.
Other social science theories proved unreliable in
practice. Keynesian economics crashed and burned in
the stagflation of the 1980s.
Predictions that the world would run out of food and
resources turned out to be wrong. In the 1970s,
people were told global cooling was inevitable. Now
it's global warming.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an artist among social
scientists, pointed out, social scientists didn't
really know how to eliminate poverty or crime.
Policies based on middle-class instincts often
worked better than those of elite liberals.
Some Democratic politicians learned lessons from
this. Bill Clinton pursued welfare reform and
honored, in rhetoric if not always behavior, people
who work hard and play by the rules.
Barack Obama, in contrast, has built a
top-and-bottom coalition -- academics and gentry
liberals, blacks and Hispanics, with funding and
organizational backing from taxpayer-funded
public-sector unions. In 2008, Obama carried those
with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000, and
lost those in-between.
The Obama Democrats passed a stimulus package tilted
toward public-sector unions and financial regulation
propping up the big banks. Those at the top got paid
off.
Less has gone to those at the bottom. Those in the
middle have seen their health insurance canceled by
Obamacare and sit waiting for healthcare.gov to
function.
Suddenly, this "aristocracy based on talent and
sensibility," in Siegel's words, seems to be
discrediting its own policies -- and its conceit
that it is uniquely fit to govern.