A reader sent us this interesting piece. It it against my religion to read sociologists, but even if the Prof is just making it all up, it's thoughful. I think his thesis about class is wrong, but sociologists tend to think along those lines. If it's from a book, I can't find it on Amazon, or I would reference it for the Prof:
“What Went Wrong with Liberalism?” by Douglas S. Massey, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University:
Liberal pundits are asking why middle class Americans so often vote against their own economic interests. Mostly they look outside the liberal movement for answers. If they are being charitable, they chalk it up to the pervasiveness of “traditional values.” If they are being less charitable, they portray voters as dim-witted dupes of lying right-wing politicians. Often they just throw their hands up in exasperation
and wail, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Yet survey data do not show a fundamental cleavage of values among Americans; and constantly asking people “what’s wrong with you?” is unlikely to win elections. Maybe it’s about time liberals looked to themselves and ask what they have done to drive so many people away from a party it is in their material interests to support.
Liberals often point to race as the wedge issue that broke apart the New Deal coalition, and of course they are right. As important as race is to understanding
the collapse of liberalism, however, it is only half the story. Opposition to civil rights was only partly based on race. As paradoxical as it may seem, resistance was also based on class, for by the 1970s the ruling elites of the Democratic party had grown
arrogant, self-righteous, and callous toward the sensibilities of the working class.
More on continuation page below:
As the civil rights movement shifted out of the south, liberal democrats naturally encountered resistance from entrenched social and political interests in
northern cities. Rather than acknowledging the sacrifices that were being asked of working class whites and their political bosses, and attempting to reach a political accommodation that offered benefits to counterbalance them, liberal elites treated lower class opponents as racist obstructionists to be squelched using the powers of government. Rather than outlining a political argument to explain why desegregation was in their interests and providing money to ease the pain of transition, liberals turned to the courts and executive branch to force working class whites and local political bosses to accept whatever changes they mandated from above
The arrogance and self-righteousness of liberal elites manifested themselves in yet another way. The same liberal architects who promoted civil rights and social welfare also prosecuted a costly foreign war on the basis of lies, deception, and subterfuges that callously abused the faith and trust of the working class. As subsequent tapes and archives have clearly shown, liberals in the Johnson administration—including the president himself—manufactured an attack on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin to secure congressional authorization for military intervention in Viet Nam. Then they
systematically lied to voters about the costs and consequences of that engagement and its ultimate prospects for success.
The Vietnam War forcefully underscored the fact that liberal elites made the decisions while working class whites paid the price, thus reinforcing a politics of class resentment manipulated so effectively by conservative Republicans. The soldiers who fought and died in Vietnam were disproportionately drawn from the America’s working and lower classes. The sons and daughters of upper middle class professionals—the
people who held power, influence, and prestige in the Great Society—by and large did not serve in Vietnam. They avoided military service through a combination
of student deferments, personal connections, and a skillful use of medical disabilities. Tellingly, once the system of student deferments was abandoned and the children of the upper middle class faced the real risk of being drafted through random assignment, direct U.S. participation in the war quickly ended.
To blue collar workers in the north and poor whites in
the south it looked like liberal lawmakers favored the
war as long as someone else’s children were serving
and dying as soldiers, but as soon as their precious
offspring were put at risk, they quickly ignored the
sacrifices of the working classes, forgot about the
60,000 dead, and abandoned hundreds of POWs and MIAs
in their haste to leave Vietnam. The ultimate result
was the evolution of a working class mythology of
sellout by unpatriotic liberal elites (“America
haters”), epitomized cinematically by the movies and
roles of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Clint
Eastwood, whose tag lines were appropriated to great
political effect by Ronald Reagan.
Aside from the betrayal of public trust, the Vietnam
War also contributed to the demise of liberalism
through fiscal means after 1968. Economically,
Johnson’s attempt to support guns and butter without
raising taxes laid the foundation for inflationary
spirals and stagflation in the 1970s. The 1973 oil
boycott would have dealt a serious blow to the U.S.
economy under any circumstances, but the fiscal excess
of the Great Society combined with the Vietnam War
turned what in Europe and Japan were severe but
manageable recessions to a disastrous brew of
inflation, unemployment, and long-term recession in
the United States.
A particular challenge to liberals stemmed from the
fact that high rates of inflation in the 1970s
produced rising nominal wages but declining spending
power in real terms, causing a serious problem of
“bracket creep” in the federal tax system. In the
course of the 1970s, more and more Americans were
pushed by inflation into income tax brackets that were
originally intended to apply only to the very
affluent. Middle income Americans were working harder
for less money in real terms, but were being taxed at
higher and higher rates.
High inflation also brought about an escalation in the
value of real assets, particularly housing. Families
with modest incomes suddenly found themselves owning
homes—and paying real estate taxes—far above what they
could really afford. Rather than sympathizing with
the plight of middle class families struggling to pay
taxes in an era of stagflation, however, liberals
viewed rising tax revenues as a source of easy money.
Bracket creep and asset inflation offered liberal
legislators a seemingly costless way to raise taxes
steadily without ever voting to do so.
But there were costs. The unwillingness of Democratic
legislators to adjust tax brackets or accommodate the
inflation of housing prices set the stage for a middle
class tax revolt. As is often the case, the
revolution began in California. By a large majority,
voters in that state passed Proposition 13 to cap
property taxes permanently at unrealistically low
levels. Riding the wave of middle class anger and
resentment, won a landslide victory over the hapless
Jimmy Carter in 1980, and one of his first acts was to
cut tax rates sharply and to reduce their
progressivity. When combined with a massive increase
in defense spending, these actions shut off the flow
of money that had financed the expansion of
liberalism. Following a path that led from
intervention in Vietnam to hyperinflation to bracket
creep, liberal Democrats, through a remarkable
combination of arrogance and self-righteousness, dug
their own graves in the 1970s and created the
political conditions whereby conservatives could
achieve their cherished goal of “de-funding” the New
Deal.
During the 1980s and 1990s, as liberal Democrats began
to be driven from the public sphere by the politics of
race, combined with their own self-righteous blindness
and arrogance, they responded in unproductive ways.
Liberals retreated to the confines of academia, where
under the banner of postmodernism, deconstructionism,
critical theory, or more popularly, “political
correctness,” they prosecuted what became known as the
“culture wars.” In the course of this new campaign,
liberalism on campus became an Orwellian parody of
itself, suppressing free expression to ensure liberal
orthodoxy and seeking to instill through
indoctrination what it could not achieve politically
at the polls.
To the delight of conservatives everywhere, liberals
often ended up in attacking each other—seeking to
unmask a white male as a closet racist, and ferreting
out the last vestiges of racism, sexism, classism, and
ageism wherever they might remain, even in the
nation’s most liberal quarters. Authors such as
Dinesh D’ Souza, Alan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Robert
Bork had a field day lampooning the tortured logic,
breathless rhetoric, and impenetrable jargon offered
up by the priesthood of postmodernism, further
alienating liberals from their base among the poor and
working classes. Anyone who has ever tried to digest
a postmodern tract quickly realizes that contempt for
the uninformed and un-elect is built into the corpus
of critical social theory.
Although liberals accomplished great things during the
first three quarters of the 20th century, thereafter
they stumbled badly. When they encountered resistance
to black civil rights among poor and working class
whites—some of it racially motivated some of it
not—rather than dealing with the resistance
politically, liberal elites sought to impose solutions
from above by taking advantage of their privileged
access to judicial and executive power. Then, rather
than telling Americans honestly about the likely costs
and consequences of a military intervention in
Southeast Asia and trust them to make the correct
decisions, they used lies and deception to trick
voters into supporting an unwinnable war that was
fought mostly by the poor and working classes; and
when the war came too close to home, they quickly
forgot about the lower class combatants and their
sacrifices they had made. Then after liberals’
attempt to support guns and butter set off
hyperinflation to erode the real value of wages, they
callously thought up new ways to spend the windfall of
tax revenue rather than adjust tax brackets to relieve
the unsustainable burden on the middle class.
Finally, when faced with political revolt because of
these misguided policies, they retreated into arcane
ideologies to wage a rearguard cultural insurgency
from the safety of the ivory tower. Is it any wonder
that liberals lost the public trust?
From Return of the "L" Word: A Liberal Vision for the
New Century.
