The Hate Is Baked In

And It's Been In The Oven So Long It's Rock Hard

For the past five years or more we’ve been treated to an outpouring of hate, the like of which is perhaps unparalleled in our history. All directed by the Left at the bitter clingers and deplorables—and now at the unvaxxed. Anyone who dissents from the Left’s CW, anyone who clings to normal human nature as a lodestar for their life, as opposed to “transgressive reform.” Moving on from yesterday’s examination of the origins of the Liberal/Prog mindset, I think we can also say that this outpouring of hatred is responsible to a great degree for the sense that Scott Adams expresses that many people feel they’ve finally run into a wall—the inescapable realization that this really is a tipping point that we’ve reached.

Today I’d like to provide some more historical background that confirms or supports this general sense, but which also demonstrates that the hatred for the middle classes is baked into the Left’s DNA—it can be traced back at least a 100 years in America. The excerpts I’ll provide below also orient that hatred within the policy matrix that we see playing out before our eyes.

The first excerpt (h/t commenter kaishaku) is from a 2018 interview of Fred Siegel. Siegel—what used to be called a center leftist, I suppose—is the author of the book that I always recommend as an introduction to the history of liberalism in America. It’s not complete in a genealogical sense, but it’s a great place to start because Siegel—without really flaunting it—is writing as an insider: 

The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class

The book itself was published in 2014, while the interview dates to February, 2018. Much had transpired in just those four years, from Siegel’s standpoint, and of course much has transpired in the three and a half years since the interview. I’d personally love to see another interview like this, in view of what we’re seeing now.

What I’m going to do is edit the interview and paste the remains in below. My goal is to present what amounts to a summary of the book in Siegel’s own words. The interview itself is more far ranging than the excerpts will indicate, but Siegel’s discussion of the Obama years and Trump are not in much depth, so the historical aspect will suffice for our purposes:

The revolt against the masses

Fred Siegel on the long history of liberal elitism.

2nd February 2018

…

[Fred Siegel’s] 2014 book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, [is] nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the history of American liberalism. [In the book he] recast liberalism, long seen as the product of the New Deal and Progressivism, as the product of an intense postwar disillusionment with American mainstream society. So liberalism, from that moment, was seeded with a strong elitist sentiment, a sentiment that easily turned into distaste for the masses: a distaste for their economic aspirations; a distaste for their political proclivities; and a distaste for the ‘culture industry’, which was said to hold them in thrall. It was a powerful narrative. The Revolt captured the emergence and triumph of something like a liberal clerisy – an elite that ruled American political life while wilfully estranging many Americans in the process.

This intro resonates with me personally. To give you some idea of where I’m coming from, my father was a huge fan of Adlai Stevenson II, but my father split with the Dems in 1968. I grew up in a house in which the elitist aspirations of liberals and there right to rule were taken largely for granted—Ike was ridiculed as obtuse, as opposed to the “intellectual” Adlai. The high water mark for my father was probably the 1960 election—he was totally cock-a-whoop at the installation of JFK (I, a ten year old, had privately nourished doubts in favor of Tricky Dick). The contempt for non-intellectuals was pervasive. The contempt of that day focused on the new suburbs, in which the jumped up ‘Booboisie’ middle class (in liberal eyes) sought to find a new independence for themselves and their families, a way of life previously reserved for their betters. It’s interesting to see in the new Urban Planning orthodoxy the attempt of the elites to shove the middle class back into the urban maelstrom, huddling in high rise tenements and riding bicycles rather than driving cars.

Sean Collins: In Revolt Against the Masses you write that certain features of liberalism today – including looking down at the masses, scepticism towards democracy and a questioning of the merits of the American way of life – have been ‘an integral and enduring element of American liberalism’ since the 1920s. ... people might be surprised to learn from your book that these aspects of liberalism have a long history. Why do you think this anti-masses and anti-democratic strain – which you see as a feature, not a bug of liberalism – is so essential to defining liberalism?

Fred Siegel: People assume that modern American liberalism begins with the New Deal. Or sometimes they say it begins with Woodrow Wilson’s wartime governance. Neither is true. Liberalism begins as a reaction, from a sense among liberals that they have been betrayed by Wilson. People who called themselves progressives would end up calling themselves liberals because they see Wilson’s wartime behaviour, in which he allowed anti-war opinion to be mercilessly suppressed, as contrary to their beliefs. The initial creation of liberalism comes with the creation of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in 1920. This, to me, places liberals on the side of the angels.

But then a second element emerges in the formation of liberalism, and that’s the role of HL Mencken. People are stunned to learn that Mencken was the most important liberal of the 1920s. It’s not that Mencken defined himself as a liberal, but he became the hero of college students and others who called themselves liberal. Liberal thinkers had nothing but praise for Mencken in the 1920s (however, by the 1930s, when Mencken opposed Roosevelt, he was attacked by liberals). The key point taken from Mencken is his view of the masses as stupid, as the ‘Booboisie’. Liberalism becomes more than anything else defined by hostility to the middle class, and that includes small-business people as well as the working class. When the 1930s come, the masses are redeemed temporarily in the eyes of liberals, because they are now in good hands, they are in the hands of approved left-wingers like FDR, and therefore not as problematic. But by the late 1940s and early 1950s, the middle class is back in ill-repute among liberals.

... In addition to Mencken, the most influential thinker (who was not much of a thinker) was the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Main Street hits liberal America like a bombshell. Here is guy who lays out the philistinism of America. What’s needed, say Mencken and Lewis, is an American elite (in the case of Mencken it’s explicitly an aristocracy) to redeem America from its philistine ways. It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ book about how fascism supposedly comes to America, is still reprinted today. It’s almost a century old, and it’s reprinted again and again and again. The last edition I saw, from the 1990s, has an introduction that talks about the coming of fascism. It’s always coming and never arriving.

The irony here is deep. The great bugaboo of the Left is the threat of a Rightist Fascism, despite the fact that it was FDR who openly flirted with Mussolini’s brand of Fascism. Today the contrast of Trump’s scrupulous adherence to law with the lawless authoritarianism of the Obama (and now) Baidan regimes is striking—to all but liberals.

There’s very little of what we think of today as identity politics that wasn’t there in embryonic form in 1972.

...

Obama was a child of the 1960s. He represented the institutionalisation of a liberalism that had gone off the rails – and he further pushed it off the rails.

...

This is 100 years ago. None of this is entirely new. What’s new is how it has come to fruition. If you speak to people on a college campus today, you simply get these ideas presented to you as if they are newly minted.

Ignorance of history is pretty much a prerequisite for any authoritarian putsch.

... Something happens in the 1990s. The elites of Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles meld together. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington and Wall Street all come together, and for the first time you have something like the British establishment. ...

So this elite comes together, it looks across the Atlantic, it looks across the Pacific, but it doesn’t look at the heartland. The rest of the country recognises that. Whatever you want to say about Trump, he was the only candidate in either party who recognised that globalisation and immigration are the burning issues for much of America. ...

...

I think Trump is better compared with Nixon than with Reagan. Reagan was a free-trader, he had ideas about immigration that Trump wouldn’t agree with. But the hard edge of Nixon in denouncing George McGovern, with McGovern said to be representing ‘acid, amnesty and abortion’, that’s something you could hear from Trump. The elements of what we think of as Trumpism were coming for a long time. They were there in the 1992 Perot campaign, where he campaigned against free trade. ...

Identity politics has risen twice in this country. It rose to an apex in the early 1990s, but then it was diminished by a series of scandals. ...

But then identity politics fades. ...

Liberalism has taken on a religious aspect. It’s a belief system, and not a system that represents political interests. Liberalism is seen as a source of grace, in religious terms. It is hard to talk to people, when you are effectively suggesting they are not among the blessed (or, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, the ‘anointed’), that they are in fact mistaken. ...

...

On the contrary, liberals’ idea is to push forward. One of the elements of liberalism is environmentalism. ... Environmentalism is increasingly a way to undercut the middle class – and in that sense it fits perfectly within liberalism. As one writer has pointed out, the environmentalists in Oregon have undercut the jobs traditionally filled by less-educated white males – ranching, lumber, fishing. These industries have been essentially regulated out of existence. ...

...

The continuity is quite stunning. The same arguments, the same dispositions. But the difference today is the geographic dimension, and the number of people who are part of the liberal axis. Liberals have created a top and bottom alliance: the upper middle class, much of the well-to-do, and the subsidised poor and immigrants, legal and illegal, are all pulled into liberalism. In places like New York and California, this is a very powerful coalition. ...

...

Millennials who are so crazy about Corbyn and Sanders are the dumbest generation. They know nothing. History began the day they were born. The collapse of our educational system has political consequences. ...

So there’s the history and theory behind the hatred we experience (correctly) as directed at us. Now we shift gears and move forward from the 2018 date of the Siegel interview and, with the help of Wayne Root, look at how that deep antipathy for the middle classes has translated into the current attempt—much like the passage of Obamacare—to transform America over the heads of a citizenry in near revolt. That the policies we’re seeing today are intimately tied to the basic genealogy of liberalism in the hatred for the middle class should be immediately clear. And that includes the attempt to submerge middle class in a wave or invasion across our borders.

WAYNE ROOT: The Great Vaccine Mandate Scam

This is the “Great Vaccine Mandate Scam.” Biden is using the vaccine mandate (and vaccine passport to come) as a “Trojan Horse.” In other words, it looks like he’s trying to protect America and save lives, when in reality he’s using this vaccine mandate as a cover story to destroy the U.S. economy, capitalism, and the great American middle class all at once.

...

Remember, when any Democrat politician gets up in the morning, they automatically have about 45% of the vote locked up. That represents everyone in America who lives on government handouts- welfare checks, food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare and 1000 other government giveaways.

So, 36% support for Biden means that pretty much every working Joe and Jane in America has now turned against Biden. The entire middle class hates Biden’s guts. That’s why they chant “F—ck Joe Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon” at sporting events.

But Biden and his communist cabal don’t care. They are using a secret weapon to wipe out their middle class opposition: the vaccine mandates.

These mandates are squarely aimed only at working Americans. If you have a job, you’re being threatened with losing your job, your income and your pension. Biden is threatening to destroy your life, to make you homeless.

But if you’re a lazy bum, sitting home watching Dr. Phil and waiting for your EBT card to arrive in the mail, you’re safe. Biden isn’t taking a dime away from you. Only Americans with jobs are being persecuted.

Why not lose your welfare if you’re unvaccinated? Why not lose your food stamps? Why not lose your Medicaid or Obamacare?

Why is it only middle-class Americans, who work for a living, who pay taxes, who bust their butts, who have families to support, who are being persecuted over this vaccine mandate?

Because the great American middle class, and anyone who works for a living, and pays taxes into the system, is overwhelmingly Republican-conservative.

This is how you destroy an economy, make tens of millions of middle-class people unemployed and dependent on government, kill off capitalism, and turn the USA into a socialist nation.

Who will speak for the middle class?