Yet at the dawning of the new millennium a paradox began to emerge. Liberal society had proved compatible with justice for all and an equal shot at the end zone. Strangely, however, in its ensuing glorious new world, the one Bill Clinton presided over, liberty, justice, and equality all seemed to be on short rations.
If not the liberal order, then something else was spoiling things. After all, the everyday lives of so many ordinary Americans were increasingly constrained by economic anxiety and a vertiginous sense of social freefall. They experienced feelings of being shut out and scorned, of suffering from a hard-to-define political disenfranchisement, of being surveilled at work (if they had it) and probably elsewhere if not, of fearing the future rather than hoping for what it might bring their way.
Brave and audacious as they were, rarely had the rebel movements of the fabled sixties or those that followed explicitly challenged the underlying distribution of property and power in American society. And yet if liberalism had proved compatible enough with liberty, equality, and democracy, capitalism was another matter.
The liberal elite that took credit for opening up that race to the top had also at times presided over a neoliberal capitalism which had, for decades, been damaging the lives of working people of all colors. (Indeed, nowadays Hillary expends a lot of effort trying to live down the legacy of mass incarceration bequeathed by her husband.) But Republicans have more than shared in this; they have, in fact, often taken the lead in implanting a market- and finance-driven economic system that has produced a few "winners" and legions of losers. Both parties heralded a deregulated marketplace, global free trade, the outsourcing of manufacturing and other industries, the privatization of public services, and the shrink-wrapping of the social safety net. All of these together gutted towns and cities as well as whole regions (think: Rust Belt America) and ways of life.
In the process, the New Deal Democratic Party's tradition of resisting economic exploitation and inequality vaporized, while the "new Democrats" of the Clinton era and beyond, as well as many in the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 and in hedge-fund America, continued to champion equal rights for all. They excoriated conservative attempts to rollback protections against racial, gender, and sexual discrimination; but the one thing they didn't do -- none of them -- was disturb the equanimity of the 1%.
And what does freedom and equality amount to in the face of that? For some who could -- thanks to those breakthroughs -- participate in the "race to the top," it amounted to a lot. For many millions more, however, who have either been riding the down escalator or already lived near or at the bottom of society, it has been a mockery, a hollow promise, something (as George Carlin once noted) we still call the American Dream because "you have to be asleep to believe in it."
Given their hand in abetting this painful dilemma, the new Democrats seemed made for the already existing sobriquet -- a kind of curse invented by the populist right -- "limousine liberal." An emblem of hypocrisy, it was conceived and first used in 1969 not by the left but by figures in that then-nascent right-wing movement. The image of a silk-stocking crowd to-the-manner born, bred and educated to rule, networked into the circuits of power and wealth, professing a concern for the downtrodden but not about to surrender any privileges to alleviate their plight (yet prepared to demand that everyone else pony up) has lodged at the heart of American politics ever since. In our time, it has been the magnetic North of right-wing populism.
Class Struggle, American Style
In 1969, President Richard Nixon invoked the "silent majority" to do battle with those who would soon come to be known as "limousine liberals." He hoped to mobilize a broad swath of the white working class and lower middle class for the Republican Party. This group had been the loyalists of the New Deal Democratic Party, but were then feeling increasingly abandoned by it and disturbed by the rebelliousness of the era.
In the decades that followed, the limousine liberal would prove a perfect pià ±ata for absorbing their resentments about racial upheaval, as well as de-industrialization and decline, and their grief over the fading away of the "traditional family" and its supposed moral certitudes. In this way, the Republican Party won a substantial white working-class vote. It's clear enough in retrospect that this confrontation between the silent majority and limousine liberalism was always a form of American class struggle.
Nixon proved something of a political genius and his gambit worked stunningly well... until, of course, in our own moment it didn't. Following his lead, the Republican high command soon understood that waving the red flag of "limousine liberalism" excited passions and elicited votes. They never, however, had the slightest intention of doing anything to truly address the deteriorating circumstances of that silent majority. The party's leading figures were far too committed to defending the interests of corporate America and the upper classes.
Their gestures, the red meat they tossed to their followers in the "culture wars," only increased the passions of the era until, in the aftermath of the 2007 financial meltdown and Great Recession, they exploded in a fashion the Republican elite had no way to deal with. What began as their creature, formed in cynicism and out of the festering jealousies and dark feelings of Nixon himself over the way the liberal establishment had held him in contempt, ended up turning on its fabricators.
A "silent majority" would no longer remain conveniently silent. The Tea Party howled about every kind of political establishment in bed with Wall Street, crony capitalists, cultural and sexual deviants, free-traders who scarcely blinked at the jobs they incinerated, anti-taxers who had never met a tax shelter they didn't love, and decriers of big government who lived off state subsidies. In a zip code far, far away, a privileged sliver of Americans who had gamed the system, who had indeed made gaming the system into the system, looked down on the mass of the previously credulous, now outraged, incredulously.
In the process, the Republican Party was dismembered and it was The Donald who magically rode that Trump Tower escalator down to the ground floor to pick up the pieces. His irreverence for established authority worked. His racist and misogynist phobias worked. His billions worked for millions who had grown infatuated with all the celebrated Wall Street conquistadors of the second Gilded Age. His way of gingerly tiptoeing around Social Security worked with those whose neediness and emotional logic was captured by the person who memorably told a Republican congressman, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Most of all, his muscle-flexing bombast worked for millions fed up with demoralization, paralysis, and powerlessness. They felt The Donald.
In the face-off between right-wing populism and neoliberalism, Tea Party legions and Trumpists now find Fortune 500 CEOs morally obnoxious and an economic threat, grow irate at Federal Reserve bail-outs, and are fired up by the multiple crises set off by global free trade and the treaties that go with it. And underlying such positions is a fantasy of an older capitalism, one friendlier to the way they think America used to be. They might be called anti-capitalists on behalf of capitalism.
Others -- often their neighbors in communities emptying of good jobs and seemingly under assault -- are feeling the Bern. This represents yet another attack on neoliberalism of the limousine variety. Bernie Sanders proudly classifies himself as a socialist, even if his programmatic ideas echo a mildly left version of the New Deal. Yet even to utter the verboten word "socialism" in public, no less insistently run on it and get away with it, exciting the fervent commitment of millions, is stunning -- in fact, beyond imagining in any recent America.
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