Temporarily waylaid by the heroism of the WWII generation, liberalism expressed itself in the 1950s as a critique of popular culture. Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the individual businessman’s pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual’s pursuit of pleasure, both of which were made possible by the lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state. Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism was born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L Mencken-was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide the sense of hierarchy and order that had long been associated with European statism. The aim of liberalism’s founding writers and thinkers-such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. 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. 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. This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism.
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