Book of the week: The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel

(Encounter, $24)

“Ever wonder why Barack Obama seems more suited to a European coffee shop than the Oval Office?” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. Fred Siegel’s “brilliantly argued, well-timed” new book offers a history of American liberalism in which our current president represents the apotheosis of a political movement that Siegel contends has its roots in intellectual disdain for the middle class, not empathy for the poor. Liberals like to think their movement began with the expansion of government engineered by the progressives a century ago, said Michael Barone in WashingtonExaminer.com. But in Siegel’s view, it was shaped by 1920s writers like Sinclair Lewis, H.G. Wells, and H.L. Mencken—all of whom had been horrified by the consumer greed of middle-class Americans for automobiles, refrigerators, and other goods. It was Mencken who called the middle class the “booboisie,’’ and Siegel documents how this disdain has persisted through the decades.

Siegel should be embarrassed, said Noah Millman in The New York Times. An accomplished historian, the former editor of City Journal has this time written a book “designed not to educate but to stoke the resentments of conservative readers.” Siegel selectively quotes from his targeted authors to fashion a simplistic, “sweeping left-wing indictment,’’ salting it with ideological diatribes; the entire New Deal was a waste of time, he says, since the Great Depression would have resolved itself had government just stayed out of it. Actually, Siegel does give liberals some credit, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. He acknowledges that liberalism played a crucial role in ending state-sanctioned racial segregation, for instance: “The very alienation of liberals from the mainstream of American life,” he writes, “made them far more sensitive to the injustices of racism.”

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“Siegel loses focus a bit when he gets to recent political history,” said Vincent J. Cannato in The Weekly Standard. He doesn’t seem to understand that Obama took the White House by cobbling together a classic liberal alliance of “upscale whites” and “lower-income minorities.” He also fails to account for the surviving strain of populism evident in some Democrats’ response to 2008’s financial crisis. Republicans tempted to ridicule liberal snobbery might want to look in the mirror themselves, said Gerald J. Russello in National Review. “Although the Republicans pay rhetorical heed to middle-class values, most Republican politicians have become just as attuned to big government and elitism as the Democrats have.” It’s time both parties changed their ways.