ANATOMY OF LIMOUSINE LIBERALISM

Steve Fraser, The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the right and Fractured America (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "The Limousine Liberal tells an extraordinary story of why the most privileged and powerful elements of American society were indicted as subversives and reveals the reality that undergrads that myth. It goes to the heart of the great political transformation of the postwar era: the rise of the conservative right and the unmaking of the liberal consensus."  From the text: "[F]amily capitalism and racial populism did not inhabit the same political space, nor did they pursue the same objectives. Family capitalism, rooted in the proprietary pride, old-fashioned morality, and provincial customs of its patriarchs, chafed at the preeminence and political agnosticism of those faceless managerial bureaucrats running the nation's Fortune 500 and wielding so much influence over both major political parties. Yet middling sorts from the ethnic barrios of metropolitan America cared less about that than they did about how liberal elites dismissed every grievance voiced by the white working class as a form of disguised racism. No common language linked these two worlds of the discontented." "Limousine liberalism served as that bilingual translator. It is impossible to understand the perseverance and passion of right-wing populist politics in America without coming to grips with this metaphor, where it originated, how it evolved, why it persists, and where it may be taking us." Id. at 8. "Limousine liberalism surfaced as a particularly striking metaphor and epithet (if not the first one) to register the hostility of idling classes to this alarming new social reality. It is the unwanted stepchild of the political capitalism that supplanted its lassie-faire predecessor. Millions have been mobilized by it lush imagery, its self-righteousness, its manly bravado, its devotional commitment to a familial homeland writ large, and its faith in the liberationist metaphysics of the free market. They relish exposing the real and imputed hypocrisies of privileged sophisticates. But in the end, they are reacting both to the successes and the failures of what the modern capitalist order has wrought. Neither suit them yet the are ensnared in both, hence the logic behind the illogical demand that the government keep its hands off Medicare. Consumerism delights but also demoralizes. Racial prejudice lives but in shame. Shrines are erected to the patriarchal family even as it dissolves where it is most worshipped." Id. at 242-243. The book contains brief discussions, and from historical perspectives, of anti-Semisitsm, anti-immigration, America's racial caste system, etc. In short, most of the fracturing of in the twenty-first century is not new. There is also a reference to the German novelist Hans Falluda's 1930s novel, Little Man What Now? The title "was intended to capture the confusion and anxiety experienced by Germans of meager means and precarious social position caught in the maelstrom of the Great Depression and tossed to and fro by the mobilized armies of communism, socialism, and Nazism. Many such people looked only for a way of retreating into the recesses of some private safe haven. But that was hard to find. So some enlisted in movements that simultaneously voiced anger at those bigger and littler than they. They inveighed against the big shots, who always seemed to prevail and even prosper on the misery of those beneath them, but then again, made sure to keep their distance from and stigmatize the lower orders (proletarians, the unemployed, immigrant aliens), whether to better defend their own material well-being or as a compensation for their own existential insecurities, or both. This might be called the 'politics of the little man.'" Id. at 129. Query: Are Americans in the mist of little-man politics?).