This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of as liberalism-the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama-began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of WWI, in disillusionment with American society. In the 1920s, the first thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and right. The aim of liberalisms founders-such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken-was to create an American version of the aristocracy long associated with European statism.Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the businessmans pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individuals pursuit of pleasure; and in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself in the scornful critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened the leaders of the New Class, who took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly |