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Frederick F. Siegel

The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class Hardcover – January 28, 2014

by Fred Siegel (Author)

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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.

Temporarily waylaid by the heroism of the WWII generation, in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself as a critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of elevating middle class culture that frightened foppish characters like Dwight Macdonald and Aldous Huxley, crucial influences on what was mistakenly called the New Left. There was no New Left in the 1960s, but there was a New Class which in the midst of Vietnam and race riots took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights

The neo-Mathusianism which emerged from the 60s was, unlike its eugenicist precursors, aimed not at the breeding habits of the lower classes but rather the buying habits of the middle class.

Today’s Barack Obama liberalism has displaced the old Main Street private sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of style and taste.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The roots of American liberalism are not compassion but snobbery. So argues historian Fred Siegel in The Revolt Against the Masses. Siegel traces the development of liberalism from the cultural critics of the post WWI years to the gentry liberals today, and he shows how the common thread is scorn for middle-class Americans and for America itself. This is a stunningly original—and convincing—book.”

— Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics

“Fred Siegel’s superb The Revolt Against the Masses should be required reading for those who wonder how liberal elites came to dominate our culture, overriding the will of the people. Siegel’s book is history at its best and most relevant.”

— Roger L. Simon, Academy Award–nominated screenwriter, author, and founder of PJ Media

“In The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel reveals the intellectual underpinnings of today’s ascendant gentry liberalism, which leaves old-fashioned liberals, including, I suspect, Siegel himself, politically homeless. The increasingly anti-democratic character of liberalism also undermines much of the reason we became progressives in the first place, which was to help the middle and working classes. The gentry’s stridency and hypocrisy—what’s OK for them is not for everyone else—is utterly transforming liberalism today. The progressives portrayed in this book are not so much the heirs of Jefferson or Jackson or even Roosevelt, as they are the American heirs of the worst high-toned Tories.”

— Joel Kotkin, author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

About the Author

Fred Siegel is the author, most recently, of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life (2005), which received the cover review in the New York Times Book Review. His previous book, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, was named by Peter Jennings as one of the 100 most important books about the U.S. in the twentieth century. He has written widely on American and European politics and was described as “the historian of the American city” in a November 2011 profile in the Wall Street Journal.

The former editor of City Journal, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Commentary, The New Republic, Dissent, and many other publications. He has also appeared widely on TV and radio.

A former senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., Mr. Siegel is currently a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Product details

Publisher : Encounter Books (January 28, 2014)
Language : English
Hardcover : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 1594036985
ISBN-13 : 978-1594036989
Item Weight : 1.13 pounds
Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #919,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,611 in Sociology of Class
- #1,922 in Democracy (Books)
- #2,943 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism

Customer Reviews:
234 ratings

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Martin J. Adams

Disappointingly impenetrable language

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020

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I was having trouble understanding why I was not understanding anything while reading the first few pages. If you have several PhDs and read at a level far above most educated folks, you might not notice the impossible language of this book, but I got nothing from it. So I put it down and picked up Guilty by Reason of Insanity - Why the Democrats Must not Win by David Limbaugh (Rush's brother), and it was like a cool breeze - he writes like people talk. It was effortless reading. The Revolt, by contrast, is so impenetrable I will not go back to it. Two stars is generous.

7 people found this helpful

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PaulR

Liberalism is Complex

Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2015

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I have long wondered why modern liberals think and act the way they do. Quick explanations - level the playing field, make the rich pay their fair share, protect the weak, etc., etc. - have never satisfied my curiosity. In this book Fred Siegel does not explain it all, but certainly sheds new light on the subject for me. I agree with him that the common view today is "progressive" is synonymous with "liberal", but through a rather deep recounting of thinkers, writers, and politicians from the late 19th century through recent days he shows that things are much more complex. The notion that progressivism began with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, hit a dry spell through Harding/Coolidge/Hoover, rebounded and flourished with FDR, and hit its heights with Barack Obama, is much too simplistic. Siegel shows that the progressive movement was never monolithic and suffered major fracturing after Wilson and WWI. I was especially fascinated by his descriptions of how individuals such as Herbert Croly, H. G. Wells, Ralph Bourne, H. L. Mencken, and many others shaped the thinking and culture of the USA and how liberal US presidents variously studied and reacted to them. For the political science educated reader all this may be ho-hum, but for me it was a great read and an eye-opener.

20 people found this helpful

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Sophies Mom

It’s really snobbery at its finest

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2020

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The progressive ideology and liberal policies are simply about divisiveness and snobbery. They really don’t like anything they can’t control. And the middle class get trounced.

5 people found this helpful

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Mark Sutter

What Makes Liberals Tick

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2016

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This book illustrates the evolution (some might say the devolution) of the democrat party over the last 100 years. You will see the basis of Barak Obama's ideology and how it differs from mainstream America. According to the author, liberals right after World War I shared a common enemy -- America's middle-class business civilization. Liberals at that time were highly influenced by Marx and they had a belief that they possessed a priestly knowledge which entitled them to govern the degraded masses. You can decide if this is similar to Obama always thinking he is the smartest person in the room -- no matter who else is in the room.

I picked out a paragraph that might give you a flavor of the contents of this book:
With the election of 2012, America has taken a giant step closer to the European model the original liberals of 1919 so ardently admired. But European social democracy, like blue-state America, is imperiled by its sheer costs. "Europe got the American president it wanted -- the one who would present no threat to its own delusions," explained the British writer Janet Daley in November 2012. "The United States is now officially one of us: an Old World country complete with class hatred, ethnic Balkanization, bourgeois guilt, and a paternalist ruling elite. And it is locked into the same death spiral of high public spending and self-defeating wealth redistribution as we are."

If you are looking for an explanation of the basis of modern liberal thinking, I highly recommend this book.

19 people found this helpful

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johnw

Read It and Weep

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2015

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Fred Siegel is a recovering liberal, which means he knows his subject matter from the inside. What we see developing in the US and the West in general is what Marx described as "feudal socialism", a perverse and evil utopia. Fred Siegel understands the arrogance and snobbery of our decadent Ruling Class as exemplified in both political parties. To have any hope of returning the US back into a Constitutional Republic, we need to understand the mentality of our rulers. This is a great primer for all us rubes out here in flyover country.

18 people found this helpful

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David P.

Word power

Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2020

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Ok. I'm a conservative republican so the title and summary caught my attention. However, I am a college graduate,albeit a retired engineer, and not an English major, journalist, or poet. I'm a fairly good technical writer. But this book was UNREADABLE. This pompous,self absorbed, jackass of an author seems to want to show everybody his command of language, rather than making any kind of contiguous point. I literally threw the book away in disgust at his word-power games. Apparently his university liberalism hasn't completely worn off. This book is about as far from a middle class read as one can get.

One person found this helpful

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How they became Revenge People

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2016

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Progressives against Progress.

It begins with superiority... smugness.
It becomes contempt... disdain.

Progressives proceed from demanding to be obeyed to a full repudiation of the public. This is how the political left has become engaged in an active struggle against morality.

Fred Siegel demonstrates the effects of Radical Chic: embracing crime, embracing the vulgar, embracing violence, embracing chaos : when angering whites equals cultural authenticity. This part of the book was very well done.

Democrats have become the party of The State. Violent minority democrat voters are the enforcers of compliance. Progressives rule by fear and decree, not by law. Worming deep within public bureaucracies, leftists are an entrenched self-interest group, pitted against the people. The only real enemy they have is regular Americans. This section of the book is worth a read, as a standalone - good for high school students and soon-to-be-voters. (pp 163 - 176, and continuing on to p. ~190)

Siegel continually cycles back to the roots, H.G. Wells and Mencken. He even ties in the Obama era: President Obama's War on Jobs, the policy and electoral failures, the moral preening.

This book is a very very slow read. Next up: "A Conservative Hostory of the American Left" by Daniel J. Flynn

11 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Cam

I hate forced reviews

Reviewed in Canada on August 8, 2020

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Arrived as described and on time

Max Layton

Great Book!

Reviewed in Canada on May 3, 2014

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Insightful, informative, well-written, devastating critique of "liberal" thought -- and the totalitarian impulse behind it -- over the past 100 years. Impeccably researched and full of fascinating nuggets of information. I would recommend this book to any liberal who is not afraid to see himself in a very unflattering mirror...

2 people found this helpful

Mr. Richard Kneller

A frightening story

Reviewed in Canada on February 26, 2014

Verified Purchase

A true and frightening story of one man's escape from a North Korean labor camp. An essential book if one wishes to understand
the hermit kingdom and it's inner hell.

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