The fifties as the seedbed of change

I saw an excerpt and went to read this interview with Fred Siegel in The Revolt Against the Masses. The book, published a couple of years ago is The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel. The book's thesis is

This short book 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-WWI 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 foundational 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 a sense of hierarchy and order associated with European statism.

Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism, critical of both capitalism and democracy, was born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. They despised both the individual businessman's pursuit of profit and the conventional individual's pursuit of pleasure, both of which were made possible by the lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state.

I read a couple of reviews at the time but it seemed overly polemical. Reading this interview changes my view. Whether I might agree with Siegel or not, he is clearly incredibly erudite and there is plenty of insight to be gained from his thinking.

The original teaser I saw for the interview was this.

In the chapters on the 1950s, I make the point that the whole idea that American life was characterised by conformity and mediocrity was just nonsense. The 1950s were the high point of American popular culture, when most people are listening to symphonies and buying thoughtful books. It’s an extraordinary period of intellectual life among the middle class. I am a child of the 1950s, and the people I grew up around all had wonderful paperbacks. They would read Thomas Mann and Andre Schwarz-Bart (The Last of the Just). The idea that people were just marching along like penguins was just bizarre.

I think that's right. We love to airbrush history and stereotype eras in order to deal with crisp little nuggets of knowledge without having to manage the messy details. The fifties has been kind of an ignored decade, treated as kind of white bread and mayonnaise. I regard it as far more pivotal than we acknowledge. There were dramatic changes in technology, social organization, social class, education, civil rights, etc. We think of all the dramatic legislation of the mid 1960s as a product of the 1960s but the roots and all the early battlefield preparation for those successes lay in the 1950s.

It only takes one point of agreement to start an intellectual conversation. It makes you want to find out what other points of agreement you might have with someone you intellectually respect.

The next part of the conversation strikes a chord as well. A slightly different chord, but in the same song.

Collins: Do you think the liberal elite today see themselves self-consciously as the ruling class of one nation, as Americans primarily, or do you think they see themselves as distinct from other Americans, maybe feeling they have more in common with the global elite? Are they almost embarrassed by their own society?

Siegel: Very much so. Something happens in the 1990s. The elites of Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles meld together. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington and Wall Street all come together, and for the first time you have something like the British establishment. The British establishment could organise itself more easily because it was centred on London. For decades the American elite was divided among different coastal cities, plus the ‘third coast’ of Chicago, and it wasn’t until space collapses due to technology that you have the creation of this unified American elite. That unified elite is overwhelmingly liberal. Three hundred people who work for Google were part of the Obama administration at one time or another.

So this elite comes together, it looks across the Atlantic, it looks across the Pacific, but it doesn’t look at the heartland. The rest of the country recognises that.

I would extend the thought beyond the US. In the 1990s and early 2000s I worked as senior executive for a global services company in postings across Asia Pacific and Europe. It was very striking to me that my fellow executives - in the firm, among my competitors and among my clients - all had more in common with one another than in the countries in which we were based, or even from the countries from which we haled. As individuals we came from countries all over the world, from different cultures and religions, from different origin stories. There were blue bloods and aristocrats but there were people who had grown up in one room homes and dirt floors.

Despite all the apparent differences, every single one was high IQ, high achievement, deeply and broadly experienced, high accountability/high responsibility, high income, highly cultured, highly adaptable, highly educated, and usually their capstone education being from among some fifty universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Tokyo U., Oxbridge, les Grandes écoles, etc.

Race, color, and culture were stripped away as relevant factors and it was all about ability.

Great. Except that a powerful elite unrooted in any moral or ethical tradition or community is kind of a recipe for disaster.

Other points made in the interview:

People assume that modern American liberalism begins with the New Deal. Or sometimes they say it begins with Woodrow Wilson’s wartime governance. Neither is true. Liberalism begins as a reaction, from a sense among liberals that they have been betrayed by Wilson. People who called themselves progressives would end up calling themselves liberals because they see Wilson’s wartime behaviour, in which he allowed anti-war opinion to be mercilessly suppressed, as contrary to their beliefs. The initial creation of liberalism comes with the creation of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in 1920. This, to me, places liberals on the side of the angels.

But then a second element emerges in the formation of liberalism, and that’s the role of HL Mencken. People are stunned to learn that Mencken was the most important liberal of the 1920s. It’s not that Mencken defined himself as a liberal, but he became the hero of college students and others who called themselves liberal. Liberal thinkers had nothing but praise for Mencken in the 1920s (however, by the 1930s, when Mencken opposed Roosevelt, he was attacked by liberals). The key point taken from Mencken is his view of the masses as stupid, as the ‘Booboisie’. Liberalism becomes more than anything else defined by hostility to the middle class, and that includes small-business people as well as the working class.

I have never considered Mencken liberal but obviously Siegel has researched this to a far greater degree than I have and I see his argument. I accept the characterization conditionally, but if accepted, his thesis is an interesting one.

Siegel: In addition to Mencken, the most influential thinker (who was not much of a thinker) was the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Main Street hits liberal America like a bombshell. Here is guy who lays out the philistinism of America. What’s needed, say Mencken and Lewis, is an American elite (in the case of Mencken it’s explicitly an aristocracy) to redeem America from its philistine ways. It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ book about how fascism supposedly comes to America, is still reprinted today. It’s almost a century old, and it’s reprinted again and again and again. The last edition I saw, from the 1990s, has an introduction that talks about the coming of fascism. It’s always coming and never arriving.

Collins: How important do you think the New Left and 1960s/early 1970s liberalism was for the character of the liberalism we see today, in particular identity politics? I was struck by how you described the 1960s movement as directed against the social-solidarity heritage of the New Deal. In the name of fighting racism, sexism and so on, liberals seemed to blame the unenlightened masses, including, in some cases, unionised workers, for social problems. Then, as you write, the workers reciprocate the animosity and start to leave the Democratic Party. Your narrative certainly goes against the typical story of liberalism’s unbroken continuity with the New Deal.

Siegel: There’s very little of what we think of today as identity politics that wasn’t there in embryonic form in 1972. Senator George McGovern, who I knew personally at the time, wrote the rules for the 1972 Democratic Party National Convention, which divided the delegates up by identity – by blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. And so the fragmentation into voting blocs is already there in 1972. The story of how identity politics captures more and more of the Democratic Party is the story of modern American politics since the 1970s.

I see the 1990s as the tipping point when social justice, postmodernism, critical theory, etc. (all rooted in division, racism/classism, authoritarianism, and antithetical to Classical Liberalism) finally became the dominant language and mindset of universities and the media. Siegel is interesting around the origins leading up to that tipping point.

At this point in the interview, the discussion becomes more contemporary and muddied by seemingly partisan positions. Seemingly, because Siegel has been involved with both sides of the aisle.

Collins: Did you see continuity between Obama and Hillary Clinton’s campaign? If you were trying to make a case that your thesis about the liberal hostility towards the middle class remains relevant, Hillary’s comment about the ‘irredeemable deplorables’ would seem to be Exhibit A.

Siegel: Yes, you’re absolutely right. But there were also specific problems with Hillary’s campaign. I worked for the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s. I got to spend a fair amount of time around the Clintons. Hillary Clinton is intelligent, in the way that thousands of people we know are intelligent. Bill Clinton is a whole other matter: he’s just fantastically bright. Bill Clinton tried to tell the Hillary campaign that the upper Midwest was where the election was going to be won. The Hillary people decided that Big Data was key to the election, key to political strategy, and their data maps told them they didn’t need to campaign in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan. That’s where they lost the election. So, this was a kind of revenge against the technocrats. They made fools of themselves.

I didn’t think Trump would win, but I saw him coming. Like many others, I find Trump’s vulgarity offensive. But he moved into the office with a lot of low-hanging fruit available. This past weekend I spent time with cousins, terrific people. But also strong supporters of Obama. When we talked, they said the economy was doing well, and that’s all Obama’s doing, he created all of this. What I didn’t say to them was, Obama and the people around him said two per cent growth was the new normal. Nothing more could be done. Okay, you want to take credit for it now, but you have to explain how this is happening if two per cent is the new normal. But you can only say so much in that situation. California is loopy, what can I tell you.

[snip]

In New York, you can at least talk to people. But in California you can’t. Like last year, when I tried to talk to people about the high rate of poverty in California, people would denounce me, shouting at me at the dinner table, ‘No, you’re lying, that’s not true’. They do not discuss it, politics is off the table. Trump’s villainy is simply beyond debate.

Coming from New York, I am used to people being hostile to Trump. Feel free, I say, I didn’t vote for him (I didn’t vote for anyone for president). What strikes me about California is how people (including some I have been friends with for 40 years), who previously had no interest in politics whatsoever, have now declared themselves part of the ‘Resistance’. They don’t understand the difference between resistance as if they were in wartime France and opposition, where you’re trying to manoeuvre politically the best you can under specific circumstances.

The latter is an interesting observation. It is the difference between intellectual engagement that drives improvement versus intellectual isolationism which is always destructive.

Echoing Jonathan Haidt:

Siegel: Liberalism has taken on a religious aspect. It’s a belief system, and not a system that represents political interests. Liberalism is seen as a source of grace, in religious terms. It is hard to talk to people, when you are effectively suggesting they are not among the blessed (or, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, the ‘anointed’), that they are in fact mistaken. Trump is wrong about many things, but you can argue with Trumpism. But it is very hard to argue with contemporary liberalism, especially in its West Coast incarnation.

This next observation is one which I have found fascinating since the election.

Collins: You write in the book how, at different times, the liberal elites express fears that the masses are going to turn to right-wing populism or fascism. We talked about Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. Do you see any similarities in today’s liberal response to Trump, viewing the Trump voter as problematic?

Siegel: The continuity is quite stunning. The same arguments, the same dispositions. But the difference today is the geographic dimension, and the number of people who are part of the liberal axis. Liberals have created a top and bottom alliance: the upper middle class, much of the well-to-do, and the subsidised poor and immigrants, legal and illegal, are all pulled into liberalism. In places like New York and California, this is a very powerful coalition. It’s interesting that when people say that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary, which he did, what’s not noted is that the entire popular vote loss came from two places – New York City and Los Angeles.

Two elements that are intriguing. The number of people who make this argument about the difference between the electoral college outcome and the popular vote is astonishing. It alarms me how many of them are genuine in the confidence that they are making a strong point. The point that comes across to me is that they have no understanding of the difference between a direct democracy and a republic, they have no understanding of the relative differences between the two and they have no apparent awareness that these issues were all central in the deliberations at the time of the construction of the Constitution. Its as if they are not aware of the Federalist Papers. These are all college educated people. Astonishing.

The second aspect is what Siegel is pointing out. In the months after the election, through all the manufactured hysteria of racists whites who switched from Obama to Trump, and Russian collusion, etc., among more settled thinkers it seems like there was an acceptance of a new conceptual model. Democrats get the cities and Republicans get everyone else. Each speaks to the interests of their constituents and the jousting arises because city interests are not the same as country, town, suburban interests.

I think there is broad merit to that simplification and I think Democratic think-tankers have been taking solace in that model. "If we can just keep our coalition of city identities together, we can still win." Perhaps.

I think Siegel's point is highly relevant though. New York and Los Angeles are demographically huge and swing weight greater than many states. But if the entirety of the difference in the popular vote margin resides in those two behemoths, then the Democratic position in all the other cities in the US is more fragile than the simplified city/other model suggests.

I found the whole interview intellectually stimulating.