The Revolt Against the Masses explains how this came to be and why liberals continue to insist they act on behalf of the best interests of the middle class, even if the damned fools don't know it.įred 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. Today's brand of Barack Obama liberalism has gone further, displacing the old Main Street middle class with public sector workers, crony capitalists, and those elite arbiters of style and taste Siegel calls the liberal gentry. It was then in the seminal 1920s, that the strong strain of snobbery and contempt for the middle class, so pervasive today in the Hamptons, the New Yorker, HBO, and the Sierra Club, first defined liberalism. These liberals sought to establish a true aristocracy that would serve as a counterpoint to the debasements of modern society. Mencken-who despised the new worlds of mass production, mass politics, mass culture. The Revolt Against the Masses explores the inner life of American liberalism over the past 90 years, beginning with liberalism's foundational writers and thinkers-such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Giuliani subsequently wrought many changes, and I am sure Fred was satisfied with his influence.What we think of as 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. I refused to participate but in hindsight, I should have stayed and “hung” the jury. When I was called up for jury duty, I discovered they were railroading young kids for selling crack cocaine to Rikers Island for three years.
Giuliani also continued the policies of removing the homeless from the streets with the help of Police Commissioner William Bratton and his theory of no broken windows. He also converted city buses to natural gas from diesel. He locked up the squeegee guys who fell upon cars as they came out of the Lincoln Tunnel.
Giuliani brought real change to the city.
It did, however, resonate with Mayor Giuliani, whom Fred advised. I was enthralled with New York City, so it didn’t resonate with me. His 1993 book, The Future Once Happened Here: The Fate of American Big Cities, blamed the radicalism of the 1960s for the decline of New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.
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