the revolt against the masses by fred siegel

The cultural problem for liberals, according to Mr. Its most recent vintage was aired during the presidency of George W. This specter has been the constant refrain of liberals ever since. This thesis was given its most colorful expression by Lewis, who warned that an American fascism would grow out of the small-town conformity found at the Rotary Club. The alternative to liberal control would be the emergence of fascism from the ranks of the small-town middle class. Over the past century, liberals have often been caught saying some variant of “oppression by the right people brings liberty,” as Lionel Trilling put it. Only this new “aristocracy of thought and feeling” (Wells), could save America from its “appalling slovenliness” (Bourne) and lead it to a more refined stage of civilization (McDonald). In addition, with a new cadre of scientist-poets at the helm, the common man would be liberated from his grasping materialism and benighted bourgeois stupor.

As a 1932 manifesto signed by a who’s who of the then-liberal intelligentsia, put it, “we too, the intellectual workers, are of the oppressed.” Only then could the smart set be sufficiently appreciated by their inferiors and freed to lead eccentric lives shorn of stale Victorian values and the “blind, compressing forces of conventionality” represented by Sinclair Lewis’ fictional character George Babbitt. The situation was so dire that it required nothing less than scientific experts freed from constitutional strictures to run the government and the elevation of intellectuals and artists to the status of a new cultural clerisy. They were responsible for “racism at home, imperialism abroad, repression in the bedroom” and indifference to art and learning. Liberal thinkers have often seen the middle class - or the “booboisie” in Mencken’s coinage - as a bunch of vulgar, vapid and provincial philistines. He distills liberalism’s mental ticks, emotional impulses and sentimental attachments, and he traces them through Dwight McDonald, Susan Sontag and other critics up to the present. Siegel argues that liberalism had its origins in an aesthetic reaction against common-man capitalism and mass culture, which were said to produce a consumerist dystopia ripe for the emergence of fascism. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Van Wyck Brooks and H.G.

In short, claims that America was a “sick society” and calls for a cultural revolution long predate the 1960s.Īnalyzing writers such as Randolf Bourne, H.L. He finds a welter of evidence that liberals have been scorned by the middle class. Siegel locates the origin of liberalism in the overlooked 1920s and focuses on liberalism’s cultural proclivities.

The revolt against the masses by fred siegel