The Revolt Against the Masses by Fred Siegel

Many today will acknowledge that liberals have a problem with working-class support, and they are not all that keen on democracy when it produces a ‘wrong’ result (like Trump). Sean Collins: In Revolt Against the Masses you write that certain features of liberalism today – including looking down at the masses, scepticism towards democracy and a questioning of the merits of the American way of life – have been ‘an integral and enduring element of American liberalism’ since the 1920s. So Sean Collins decided to catch up with Siegel, who is also a journalist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a scholar in residence at St Francis College in Brooklyn, and find out what he makes of the state of American liberalism today, shocked as its proponents seem to be by Trump, and what appears to be a revolt of the masses. The Revolt captured the emergence and triumph of something like a liberal clerisy – an elite that ruled American political life while wilfully estranging many Americans in the process.īut that was 2014, and a lot has happened since then. So liberalism, from that moment, was seeded with a strong elitist sentiment, a sentiment that easily turned into distaste for the masses: a distaste for their economic aspirations a distaste for their political proclivities and a distaste for the ‘culture industry’, which was said to hold them in thrall. He recast liberalism, long seen as the product of the New Deal and Progressivism, as the product of an intense postwar disillusionment with American mainstream society. Indeed, it was nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the history of American liberalism. But his 2014 book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, worked on a far broader canvas.

The Revolt Against the Masses by Fred Siegel