<![CDATA[Bobologie: On a trouvé pourquoi les riches ne votent plus à droite ! (Party of the people: What happened to the Hamptons ?)]]>

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan, 320 pp., $27)I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already, by Roger L. Simon (Encounter, 224 pp., $25.99)The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left, by Kim R. Holmes (Encounter, 312 pp., $25.99)Two hundred and forty years ago, Americans fought the English aristocracy to secure their liberties. Today, as our bicoastal elites have achieved political dominance, we’ve succumbed to the powers of a new aristocracy. Three informative new books all deal with the politics of our ruling class.

Thomas Frank, who wrote the bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), admonishes the Democratic party for its residual moderation, and Roger L. Simon, a playwright and novelist and one of the founders of PJ Media, writes from a conservative perspective. They come at the issue from different angles but reach surprisingly congruent conclusions. “Today,” notes Frank, “liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of toil” but of the winners in the “knowledge economy”: “Silicon Valley chieftains, the big university systems, and the Wall Street titans who gave so much to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.” Similarly, Simon shows how “moral narcissism has allowed the Democratic party to become a hidden party of the rich, thus wounding the middle class.”

Frank traces the origins of today’s liberal elitism back to the McGovern years and the influential arguments of Washington lobbyist Fred Dutton. Dutton’s book The Changing Sources of Power (1971) showed that the professional upper middle class, once a mainstay of the GOP, had in the Nixon years migrated to the anti-war wing of the Democratic party. Contemptuous of blue-collar America, the upper-end professionals wanted to become the party of the “aristocrats — en masse.” Likewise, Simon reflects on the ways in which liberal “compassion” became a “masquerade for selfishness, a way for elites to feel good about themselves” while insulating themselves from accountability.

Simon describes this masquerade as a form of narcissism in which “what you believe, or claim to believe or say you believe — not what you do or how you act or what the results of your actions may be — [determine] how your life will be judged.” Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation, in his new book, describes the same disconnect, in which words are judged independently of actions, but he calls it “postmodernism.” “The postmodernist Left,” he writes, “is radically subjective, arguing that all truth is merely a matter of interpretation.” And liberals, because they hold largely uncontested power in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and most of the media, generally get to decide which interpretation shall prevail.

Liberalism’s dreams of an American aristocracy, as I explained in my 2014 book The Revolt against the Masses, were integral to the modern ideology from its very inception in the aftermath of World War I. High-toned New Deal liberals looked down on Harry Truman, the Kansas City haberdasher, but liberal social snobbery emerged with full force in the Kennedyites’ open disdain for Lyndon Johnson. LBJ biographer Robert Caro described the denizens of Camelot as people who were “in love with their own sophistication”: They were “such an in-group, and they let you know they were in, and you were not.” “Think of the snotty arrogance displayed,” Caro continued, “as these people laughed at LBJ’s accent, his mispronunciations, his clothes, his wife.”

In the years since Kennedy, liberal politics has been driven by an alliance of the top and the bottom, the over-credentialed and the under-credentialed, against the middle. Liberals, notes the American-born British journalist Janet Daley, have taken on the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene. Rather than face up to the failures of the Great Society to fully incorporate African Americans into the general American prosperity, liberals have lost interest in social mobility: The aim now is to make the marginal more comfortable. (The problem is not solely with liberals: Social snobbery blinded most politicians to the rumblings that emerged as Trumpism.)

Bill Clinton, explains Kim Holmes, was strongly influenced by the political philosophy of John Rawls. When President Clinton criticized the welfare system as “trapping” people in poverty, he was, says Holmes, “trying to find a balance,” as Rawls did, “between liberty and the welfare state.” Thomas Frank will have none of it: Against those Democratic-party moderates who found Clinton preferable to the Republicans, he thunders: “Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils. . . . He was the greater of the two.” Frank denounces both the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform as perfidious acts, without providing empirical evidence to support his assertions.

Holmes points out that, in recent years, liberals have jettisoned any affection for the evidence-based arguments of the Clinton years and adopted instead an “epistemic relativism” that assumes that “all knowledge is expedient and politicized.” Holmes describes postmodern liberalism as “schizophrenic”: In the name of an identity politics advancing the interest of putative victims, it marries epistemological skepticism and the absolute certainties of politically correct posturing. Obama exemplifies this double game. Obama the cultural relativist, who is not a Muslim but has a strong affinity for Islam, insists that the Islam he encountered as a young boy in Indonesia was a religion of peace (even as he asserts that Western civilization should still be doing penance for the Crusades). At the same time, notes Roger Simon, Obama can say with great confidence that ISIS — the Islamic State — is not Islamic.

Frank has a point when he notes that the incestuous relationships among Hollywood, Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley that define the Obama years had already blossomed in the Clinton era. Frank quotes journalist Jacob Weisberg, who, as long ago as 1993, noted the “increasingly cozy relationship between the press, law, academia, and government.” “There’s rarely been a time,” wrote Weisberg in an article presciently subtitled “Washington’s New Ruling Class,” “when the governing elites were made up of such a tight, hermetic, and incestuous clique.”

But with Obama, the ties have grown even tighter. Ninety percent of the first Obama administration’s staffers had a professional degree of some kind; some 25 percent had either graduated from Harvard or taught there. The situation Frank describes is a government of, by, and for the increasingly self-interested professionals. When the Russians recently invaded parts of Syria, the worst thing the Obama administration could think to say about them was that their actions were “unprofessional.”

Clinton’s critics rightly bemoaned his close ties to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, formerly of Citibank, whose allegiance to the bond market was unrivaled. But something similar has happened under Obama, without receiving nearly as much notice. The current president speaks often of inequality, but he is exacerbating it with his misguided monetary policy. The near-zero interest rates imposed by Obama’s Fed have pushed profit seekers into Wall Street stocks, which have soared even as the Main Street economy has stalled because credit has become harder to come by. Parsimonious middle-class families and small businesses have been the losers in Obamanomics. In the midst of Obama’s moralizing about inequality, his presidency has actually produced a record-low level of new-business creation, while thrifty families facing retirement find that their savings earn them barely 1 percent.

“Nothing,” writes Thomas Frank, “is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness.” The liberals’ need to repeatedly signal their virtue has become ever more tortured, as with the “civil rights” struggle for gender-neutral bathrooms. Roger L. Simon concurs, explaining that “purity of thought — mental cleansing of all possible bias — is demanded of the populace.” “We were living,” he writes, “in a form of dictatorship without knowing it . . . a dictatorship of elite moral narcissists who decided between right and wrong . . . before we could even begin to evaluate the facts for ourselves.” I think “dictatorship” is too strong a word, but the arguments laid out in these three books strongly suggest that our constitutional republic is imperiled as never before.

– Mr. Siegel is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a scholar in residence at Brooklyn’s St. Francis College.

Voir encore:

Behind all of this nasty fun is a serious political critique. Echoing the historian Lily Geismer, Frank argues that the Democratic Party — once “the Party of the People” — now caters to the interests of a “professional-managerial class” consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class. In the book, Frank points to the Democrats’ neglect of organized labor and support for Nafta as examples of this sensibility, in which “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.” In more recent columns, he has linked this neglect to the rise of a figure like Sanders, who says forthrightly what the party leadership might prefer to obscure: Current approaches aren’t working — and unless something dramatic happens, Americans are heading for a society in which a tiny elite controls most of the wealth, resources and decision-making power.

The problem, in Frank’s view, is not simply that mainstream Democrats have failed to address growing inequality. Instead, he suggests something more sinister: Today’s leading Democrats actually don’t want to reduce inequality because they believe that inequality is the normal and righteous order of things. As proof, he points to the famously impolitic Larry Summers, whose background as a former president of Harvard, former Treasury secretary and former chief economist of the World Bank embodies all that Frank abhors about modern Democrats. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated,” Summers commented early in the Obama administration.

“Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this,” Frank writes. From this mind-set stems everything that the Democrats have done to betray the masses, from Bill Clinton’s crime bill and welfare reform policies to Obama’s failure to rein in Wall Street, according to Frank. No surprise, under the circumstances, that the working class might look elsewhere for satisfying political options.

Frank is hardly the first critic to remark upon a disconnect between the lives of wealthy liberals and the grittier constituencies they supposedly serve. As the historian Steve Fraser demonstrates in his wide-ranging new book, the idea of the “limousine liberal” has a long and messy history all its own. The term originated during the 1969 New York mayoral campaign, when the Democratic candidate Mario Procaccino charged the highborn Liberal Party incumbent John Lindsay, formerly a Republican, with acts unbecoming to his social class. Procaccino’s accusation differed slightly from Frank’s: Procaccino believed that Lindsay genuinely sought ambitious programs to empower the poor and the black and the disenfranchised. The problem was that Lindsay did it all from the “silk-stocking district” of the Upper East Side, where his wealth insulated him from the dire consequences of his actions.

Though Procaccino lost the mayoral election, his biting phrase went on to have an illustrious political career of its own. “Nowadays,” Fraser writes wryly, “Hillary Clinton serves as ‘Exhibit A’ of this menace,” “the quintessential limousine liberal hypocrite.” Despite its title, however, Fraser’s book is not really about liberals and their supposed foibles. Instead, he seeks to describe how “right-wing populists” have insulted, vilified, mocked and analyzed those liberals in both the present and the past.

According to Fraser, suspicion of highborn reformers extends back at least to the Progressive Era, when the idea of an activist government administered by well-educated experts began to take hold. Since then, these villains of American consciousness have labored under a variety of epithets: “parlor pinks,” “Mercedes Marxists,” “men in striped pants.” In each iteration, what seems to drive the attacks is not only the tincture of hypocrisy but the unrestrained confidence with which such liberals express their expert views. In that sense, Frank’s fuming at the smug knowledge workers of Boston might have come straight from the pages of National Review, circa either 1955 or 2015.

Fraser does not deny a certain reality behind the “limousine liberal” image. “Limousine liberalism was never a myth,” he writes, however “absurd and scurrilous” the political rhetoric may have been. Something did change beginning in the early 20th century, as the complexities of modern society began to demand new forms of expertise and new institutions to coordinate them. Resentment of “limousine liberals” is nothing less than a reaction to the modern condition, Fraser argues, though some politicians have more effectively navigated its challenges than others. Franklin Roosevelt managed to transcend his patrician upbringing to emerge as a genuine champion of the “little man” — and to become enormously popular while doing it.

Fraser agrees with Frank that the Democratic Party can no longer reasonably claim to be the party of the working class or the “little man.” Instead, he argues, the Republican and Democratic parties now represent two different elite constituencies, each with its own culture and interests and modes of thought. Fraser describes today’s Republicans as the party of “family capitalism,” encompassing everyone from the mom-and-pop business owner on up to “entrepreneurial maestros” such as the Koch brothers, Linda McMahon and Donald Trump. The Democrats, by contrast, represent the managerial world spawned by modernity, including the big universities and government bureaucracies as well as “techno frontiersmen” like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. These are two different ways of relating to the world — one cosmopolitan and interconnected, the other patriarchal and hierarchical. Neither one, however, offers much to working-class voters.

One liberal whose reputation still seems to be up for grabs is Barack Obama, now on his way out of office and into the history books. Frank gives Obama a middling-to-poor grade — something in the D range, let’s say — for what he deems to be the president’s vague and rambling answer to the “social question.” Frank compares Obama unfavorably with Franklin Roosevelt, another Democratic president who inherited an economic crisis from his Republican predecessor. Roosevelt took advantage of the Great Depression to reshape American society in fundamental ways, introducing social welfare and labor protections that shifted real power into the hands of the middle and working classes. (Frank largely gives Roosevelt a pass on the New Deal’s own structural inequalities, including its exclusions of women and nonwhite workers.) Obama, by contrast, let the crisis go “to waste,” according to Frank, tweaking around the regulatory edges without doing anything significant to change the economic balance of power. “Our economy has been reliving the 1930s,” Frank mourns. “Why hasn’t our politics?”

Part of the answer may be that our economy did not, in fact, relive the 1930s. By the time Roosevelt won his first presidential election, the economy had been in free-fall for more than three years and the stock market had lost nearly 90 percent of its value. Three years into the Great Recession, the stock market had begun its climb toward record highs, though that prosperity failed to trickle down to the middle and working classes. Frank sees this uneven recovery as a tragedy rather than a triumph, in which Obama “saved a bankrupt system that by all rights should have met its end.” He says little, however, about what sort of system might have replaced it, or about what working-class voters themselves might say that they want or need. In a book urging Democrats to pay attention to working-class concerns, there are decidedly few interviews with working people, and a lot of time spent on tech conferences and think tanks and fancy universities.

Perhaps as a result, Frank’s book ends on a pessimistic note. After two decades of pleading with liberals to think seriously about inequality, to honor what was best about the New Deal, Frank has concluded that things will probably continue to get worse. “The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way,” he writes. “There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor.”

But this conclusion, too, may rest on a faulty analogy with the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt did not suddenly decide on his own to enact Social Security or grant union rights. Those ideas came up from below, through decades of frustration and struggle and conflict. If Americans want something different from their politicians, there is no alternative to this kind of exhausting and uncertain hard work. In the end, it is the only way that liberals — or conservatives — will listen.

LISTEN, LIBERAL

Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

By Thomas Frank

305 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $27.

THE LIMOUSINE LIBERAL

How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America

By Steve Fraser

291 pp. Basic Books. $27.50.

Pour généraliser, en gros, vous pouvez placer la moitié des partisans de Trump dans ce que j’appelle le panier des pitoyables. Les racistes, sexistes, homophobes, xénophobes, islamophobes. A vous de choisir. Hillary Clinton

J’entends les voix apeurées qui nous appellent à construire des murs. Plutôt que des murs, nous voulons aider les gens à construire des ponts. Mark Zuckerberg

We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like. A near-term future in which you don’t forget anything, because the computer remembers. You’re never lost. Eric Schmidt (Google)

One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated. Larry Summers

Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness.” The liberals’ need to repeatedly signal their virtue has become ever more tortured, as with the “civil rights” struggle for gender-neutral bathrooms. Thomas Frank

I really do hate to denigrate strippers and porn stars by comparing any of them to Jim Comey. But there really is no other way to describe the political peep show going on in America right now. Charles Hurt