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Home > One of the Most Successful Right-Wing Myths of All Time: 'The
Limousine Liberal'
________________________________________
One of the Most Successful Right-Wing Myths of All Time: 'The Limousine
Liberal'
By Steve Fraser [1] / Basic Books [2]
May 9, 2016
The following is an excerpt from the new book Limousine Liberal [3] by Steve
Fraser (Basic Books, 2016):
Limousine liberalism is the specter haunting American politics. That has
been true and getting truer for the last half century. Nowadays, Hillary
Clinton serves as "exhibit A" of this menace.
She's an odd choice in some ways. As the metaphor vividly suggests, a
thoroughbred limousine liberal should be to the manner born, a patrician of
outsized wealth, socially connected, credentialed by the toniest prep
schools and the Ivy League, raised to rule, who for reasons sometimes
sinister and sometimes of excessive credulity has gone over to the dark
side: a limousine liberal is history's oxymoron, an elitist for revolution,
working to undermine the ancient regime-or at least pretending to do so.
Hillary Clinton was bred instead in far more modest circumstances. Her
father owned a small fabric store outside Chicago. He ran a conservative
home, demanding strict devotion to the frugality and work ethic of the
respectable middle class. His daughter was politically precocious and had
views congruent with her upbringing. Already by age thirteen she was out
canvassing for Richard Nixon's election in 1960. Four years later she
volunteered for the Goldwater campaign, inspired by the fervent
anticommunism of her favorite high school history teacher.
Then everything changed. She went off to Wellesley College and there
encountered the civil rights movement, antiwar outrage, and the iconoclasm
of the counterculture. The rest is history. While immersed in the
antiestablishment upheaval of that era, however, she kept her eye fixed on
the political mainstream. Now she and her husband preside over the
Democratic Party, cultivate their connections to leading centers of global
business and finance, and are worth multiple millions. Yet well before she
announced her latest run for the presidency, she was being vilified for
crying crocodile tears on behalf of the poor while pocketing mega-sums for
her State Department memoirs. She might claim to like beer with a booze
chaser, but she really prefers zinfandel. She flirts with rural folk, but
she actually thinks of them as hicks, rubes, and rednecks.
Hillary Clinton has become, in the eyes of right-wing populists, the
quintessential limousine liberal hypocrite. All the Tea Party favorite
sons-Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Scott Walker-are long
practiced in the art of limousine-liberal baiting. Tea Party bloggers
tirelessly point out that Clinton might talk about sharing prosperity, make
impassioned pleas for greater equality, but really means "that she will
share YOUR prosperity and shared responsibility. . . . [T]hose of [you] who
work hard will bear the burden of responsibility." They calculate that
husband Bill is worth $80 million and that Hillary controls $20 million, and
note that their daughter Chelsea wedded a hedge fund operator who once
worked for Goldman Sachs. "Money. Power. That's what the Clintons are about.
. . . You'll notice that it's always the super-rich who rage on about the
need to share wealth, but they never, ever do. We've had enough hypocrisy
over the last five years to last a lifetime."
When Clinton finally ended the nonsuspense surrounding her 2016 presidential
candidacy, the indictment grew fiercer. Right-wing pundit Charles
Krauthammer noted that "there's something surreal about Hillary Clinton's
Marie Antoinette tour of sampling cakes and commons." Along with many
others, Krauthammer found her so stage-managed and packaged, even beyond the
normal artificial confections that pass for politicians these days, that he
asked, "Who can really believe she suddenly has been seized with a new
passion to champion, as she put it in Iowa, 'the truckers I saw on I-80 as I
was driving here'?" Trying to position herself as a "champion of the little
guy" was no easy sell "when you and your husband have for the last 25 years
made a limo-liberal-Davos-world your home."
While Tea Party partisans and conservative journalists have most
aggressively deployed the limousine liberal stigma, others find it apt as
well. Mainstream media outlet Bloomberg Politics reported that "Hillary
Clinton the Populist Begins Courting the Plutocrats." In a cynical age like
the current one, everyone acknowledges the hypocrisy but most accept it as a
form of realpolitik. Some are more put off. A leftwing journalist greeted
the candidate's newly discovered antipathy toward Wall Street with a gimlet
eye. He observed that the Donald Trump "zeitgeist" had become infectious;
that Hillary was pumping for money and with great success from the financial
sector; that the Clinton Foundation had harvested $5 million from nine
financial institutions that avoided prosecution for financial
transgressions; and that a key campaign aide was an ex-Goldman Sachs
executive.
From the other shore, Republicans who might otherwise shy away from too
close an association with Tea Party zealots nevertheless are on guard
against this loathsome enemy from the elite left. So, for example, when
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont via Brooklyn socialist senator and rival of
Hillary's for the 2016 presidential nomination, spoke in Arlington,
Virginia, in July 2015, the Young Republicans rallied in opposition.
Observing that Sanders was speaking to "one of the most affluent liberal
communities in the nation," these ideologues of the free market and limited
government caustically advised: "We certainly hope he encourages Arlington
limousine liberals and 'Mercedes Marxists' to practice what they preach by
pulling out their checkbooks and writing checks to Uncle Sam during his
presentation."
That neither Clinton nor Sanders hail from pedigreed zip codes is
suggestive. Especially over the last half century you need not have grown up
on the Upper East Side of New York, graduated Harvard Law, run a major
corporation or bank, captained a leading metropolitan newspaper or national
magazine, architected American foreign policy, and at the same time made
common cause with those determined to overturn the country's economic and
racial status quo to get certified as a limousine liberal. How and why the
social boundaries of that tribe have become so elastic is a story about the
political and moral gridlock, the paralyzing cultural and ideological wars
that have left Washington so dysfunctional. Here it is worth noting that had
there been a Bloomberg Politics in 1936 commenting on FDR's re-election
campaign, its headline might have reversed the one about Clinton and said
instead, "Franklin Roosevelt Plutocrat Begins Courting the Populists."
Nowadays, the limousine liberal congregation is more promiscuous. It
embraces insiders and outliers. When Al Gore hopscotches the globe in his
private jet, stopping off here and there to declaim against global warming,
or when he comes home to his Tennessee mansion with its outsized carbon
footprint, he exposes himself as a limousine liberal, a hypocritical,
"dyed-in-the-wool elitist" who can talk the talk but not walk the walk. Or
so his critics say. Gore is "old money" compared to the consummately
ambitious and nouveau riche liability lawyer John Edwards, whose sins were
picturesque, more about lifestyle than abuse of power. Before Edwards
descended into his own private purgatory, when he still was imagining
himself a populist president, his notorious $400 haircut marked him as
someone who "lectures about poverty while living in gated opulence," a bona
fide limousine liberal.
No political metaphor in recent American history-not even potent ones like
silent majority-has enjoyed the longevity of limousine liberal. It remains
part of the lingua franca of our political debates today. It has managed to
mobilize an enduring politics of resentment directed against most of the
major reforms of the last seventy-five years, everything from civil rights
to women's liberation, from urban renewal to the war on poverty, from gay
rights to the welfare state, from affirmative action to environmental
regulation. It remains at the heart of an aggrieved sense felt by millions
that they have been passed over-their material needs ignored, their cultural
preferences treated with contempt-by a cluster of elites that run the
country.
It is impossible to understand the perseverance and passion of right-wing
populist politics in America without coming to grips with this metaphor,
where it originated, how it evolved, why it persists, and where it may be
taking us.
Limousine liberal is also a surpassingly bizarre metaphor. It turns all
previously recorded history upside down.
Conventional wisdom has it that ruling elites are inherently conservative.
There is a ton of historical evidence to support that supposition going back
millennia. Why wouldn't there be? Aristocracies, oligarchies, and
monarchies; feudal lords, slave owners, and sheiks; imperial overlords,
Brahmin castes, and dynastic families; robber barons and Wall Street
bankers-all spend their time defending the existing order of things, fending
off angry insurgencies, building fortresses to preserve their ways of life
and the social order over which they preside. That is to be expected. Yet in
the face of what would seem to be a self-evident instinct to ward off
serious social upheaval, to defend the status quo, the metaphor of the
limousine liberal suggests just the opposite.
One reason the metaphor endures is that the limousine liberal is not pure
paranoid fantasy, but has roots in economic, political, and cultural
reality. The country's economic, social, and racial institutions have indeed
undergone profound upheaval and reform, especially since the advent of the
New Deal. The moral "certainties" that once were taken for granted have for
a long time now been subject to serious amendment, some even overturned
entirely. And there is no question that elite circles have played a decisive
if not the sole role in making all this happen. The limousine liberal
metaphor is compelling in helping to depict what's gone awry.
Steve Fraser is the author of The Age of Acquiescence [4] and Every Man a
Speculator [5] among other books. His latest book is The Limousine Liberal:
How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America [6] (Basic
Books, 2016).
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7]
[8]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/books/one-most-successful-right-wing-myths-all-time-
limousine-liberal
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steve-fraser
[2] http://www.basicbooks.com/
[3]
http://www.amazon.com/Limousine-Liberal-Incendiary-Fractured-America/dp/0465
055664/?tag=alternorg08-20
[4]
http://www.amazon.com/Age-Acquiescence-American-Resistance-Organized/dp/0465
097790/
[5]
http://www.amazon.com/Every-Man-Speculator-History-American/dp/006662049X/
[6]
http://www.amazon.com/Limousine-Liberal-Incendiary-Fractured-America/dp/0465
055664
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on One of the Most
Successful Right-Wing Myths of All Time: 'The Limousine Liberal'
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > One of the Most Successful Right-Wing Myths of All Time: 'The
Limousine Liberal'
One of the Most Successful Right-Wing Myths of All Time: 'The Limousine
Liberal'
By Steve Fraser [1] / Basic Books [2]
May 9, 2016
The following is an excerpt from the new book Limousine Liberal [3] by Steve
Fraser (Basic Books, 2016):
Limousine liberalism is the specter haunting American politics. That has
been true and getting truer for the last half century. Nowadays, Hillary
Clinton serves as "exhibit A" of this menace.
She's an odd choice in some ways. As the metaphor vividly suggests, a
thoroughbred limousine liberal should be to the manner born, a patrician of
outsized wealth, socially connected, credentialed by the toniest prep
schools and the Ivy League, raised to rule, who for reasons sometimes
sinister and sometimes of excessive credulity has gone over to the dark
side: a limousine liberal is history's oxymoron, an elitist for revolution,
working to undermine the ancient regime-or at least pretending to do so.
Hillary Clinton was bred instead in far more modest circumstances. Her
father owned a small fabric store outside Chicago. He ran a conservative
home, demanding strict devotion to the frugality and work ethic of the
respectable middle class. His daughter was politically precocious and had
views congruent with her upbringing. Already by age thirteen she was out
canvassing for Richard Nixon's election in 1960. Four years later she
volunteered for the Goldwater campaign, inspired by the fervent
anticommunism of her favorite high school history teacher.
Then everything changed. She went off to Wellesley College and there
encountered the civil rights movement, antiwar outrage, and the iconoclasm
of the counterculture. The rest is history. While immersed in the
antiestablishment upheaval of that era, however, she kept her eye fixed on
the political mainstream. Now she and her husband preside over the
Democratic Party, cultivate their connections to leading centers of global
business and finance, and are worth multiple millions. Yet well before she
announced her latest run for the presidency, she was being vilified for
crying crocodile tears on behalf of the poor while pocketing mega-sums for
her State Department memoirs. She might claim to like beer with a booze
chaser, but she really prefers zinfandel. She flirts with rural folk, but
she actually thinks of them as hicks, rubes, and rednecks.
Hillary Clinton has become, in the eyes of right-wing populists, the
quintessential limousine liberal hypocrite. All the Tea Party favorite
sons-Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Scott Walker-are long
practiced in the art of limousine-liberal baiting. Tea Party bloggers
tirelessly point out that Clinton might talk about sharing prosperity, make
impassioned pleas for greater equality, but really means "that she will
share YOUR prosperity and shared responsibility. . . . [T]hose of [you] who
work hard will bear the burden of responsibility." They calculate that
husband Bill is worth $80 million and that Hillary controls $20 million, and
note that their daughter Chelsea wedded a hedge fund operator who once
worked for Goldman Sachs. "Money. Power. That's what the Clintons are about.
. . . You'll notice that it's always the super-rich who rage on about the
need to share wealth, but they never, ever do. We've had enough hypocrisy
over the last five years to last a lifetime."
When Clinton finally ended the nonsuspense surrounding her 2016 presidential
candidacy, the indictment grew fiercer. Right-wing pundit Charles
Krauthammer noted that "there's something surreal about Hillary Clinton's
Marie Antoinette tour of sampling cakes and commons." Along with many
others, Krauthammer found her so stage-managed and packaged, even beyond the
normal artificial confections that pass for politicians these days, that he
asked, "Who can really believe she suddenly has been seized with a new
passion to champion, as she put it in Iowa, 'the truckers I saw on I-80 as I
was driving here'?" Trying to position herself as a "champion of the little
guy" was no easy sell "when you and your husband have for the last 25 years
made a limo-liberal-Davos-world your home."
While Tea Party partisans and conservative journalists have most
aggressively deployed the limousine liberal stigma, others find it apt as
well. Mainstream media outlet Bloomberg Politics reported that "Hillary
Clinton the Populist Begins Courting the Plutocrats." In a cynical age like
the current one, everyone acknowledges the hypocrisy but most accept it as a
form of realpolitik. Some are more put off. A leftwing journalist greeted
the candidate's newly discovered antipathy toward Wall Street with a gimlet
eye. He observed that the Donald Trump "zeitgeist" had become infectious;
that Hillary was pumping for money and with great success from the financial
sector; that the Clinton Foundation had harvested $5 million from nine
financial institutions that avoided prosecution for financial
transgressions; and that a key campaign aide was an ex-Goldman Sachs
executive.
From the other shore, Republicans who might otherwise shy away from too
close an association with Tea Party zealots nevertheless are on guard
against this loathsome enemy from the elite left. So, for example, when
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont via Brooklyn socialist senator and rival of
Hillary's for the 2016 presidential nomination, spoke in Arlington,
Virginia, in July 2015, the Young Republicans rallied in opposition.
Observing that Sanders was speaking to "one of the most affluent liberal
communities in the nation," these ideologues of the free market and limited
government caustically advised: "We certainly hope he encourages Arlington
limousine liberals and 'Mercedes Marxists' to practice what they preach by
pulling out their checkbooks and writing checks to Uncle Sam during his
presentation."
That neither Clinton nor Sanders hail from pedigreed zip codes is
suggestive. Especially over the last half century you need not have grown up
on the Upper East Side of New York, graduated Harvard Law, run a major
corporation or bank, captained a leading metropolitan newspaper or national
magazine, architected American foreign policy, and at the same time made
common cause with those determined to overturn the country's economic and
racial status quo to get certified as a limousine liberal. How and why the
social boundaries of that tribe have become so elastic is a story about the
political and moral gridlock, the paralyzing cultural and ideological wars
that have left Washington so dysfunctional. Here it is worth noting that had
there been a Bloomberg Politics in 1936 commenting on FDR's re-election
campaign, its headline might have reversed the one about Clinton and said
instead, "Franklin Roosevelt Plutocrat Begins Courting the Populists."
Nowadays, the limousine liberal congregation is more promiscuous. It
embraces insiders and outliers. When Al Gore hopscotches the globe in his
private jet, stopping off here and there to declaim against global warming,
or when he comes home to his Tennessee mansion with its outsized carbon
footprint, he exposes himself as a limousine liberal, a hypocritical,
"dyed-in-the-wool elitist" who can talk the talk but not walk the walk. Or
so his critics say. Gore is "old money" compared to the consummately
ambitious and nouveau riche liability lawyer John Edwards, whose sins were
picturesque, more about lifestyle than abuse of power. Before Edwards
descended into his own private purgatory, when he still was imagining
himself a populist president, his notorious $400 haircut marked him as
someone who "lectures about poverty while living in gated opulence," a bona
fide limousine liberal.
No political metaphor in recent American history-not even potent ones like
silent majority-has enjoyed the longevity of limousine liberal. It remains
part of the lingua franca of our political debates today. It has managed to
mobilize an enduring politics of resentment directed against most of the
major reforms of the last seventy-five years, everything from civil rights
to women's liberation, from urban renewal to the war on poverty, from gay
rights to the welfare state, from affirmative action to environmental
regulation. It remains at the heart of an aggrieved sense felt by millions
that they have been passed over-their material needs ignored, their cultural
preferences treated with contempt-by a cluster of elites that run the
country.
It is impossible to understand the perseverance and passion of right-wing
populist politics in America without coming to grips with this metaphor,
where it originated, how it evolved, why it persists, and where it may be
taking us.
Limousine liberal is also a surpassingly bizarre metaphor. It turns all
previously recorded history upside down.
Conventional wisdom has it that ruling elites are inherently conservative.
There is a ton of historical evidence to support that supposition going back
millennia. Why wouldn't there be? Aristocracies, oligarchies, and
monarchies; feudal lords, slave owners, and sheiks; imperial overlords,
Brahmin castes, and dynastic families; robber barons and Wall Street
bankers-all spend their time defending the existing order of things, fending
off angry insurgencies, building fortresses to preserve their ways of life
and the social order over which they preside. That is to be expected. Yet in
the face of what would seem to be a self-evident instinct to ward off
serious social upheaval, to defend the status quo, the metaphor of the
limousine liberal suggests just the opposite.
One reason the metaphor endures is that the limousine liberal is not pure
paranoid fantasy, but has roots in economic, political, and cultural
reality. The country's economic, social, and racial institutions have indeed
undergone profound upheaval and reform, especially since the advent of the
New Deal. The moral "certainties" that once were taken for granted have for
a long time now been subject to serious amendment, some even overturned
entirely. And there is no question that elite circles have played a decisive
if not the sole role in making all this happen. The limousine liberal
metaphor is compelling in helping to depict what's gone awry.
Steve Fraser is the author of The Age of Acquiescence [4] and Every Man a
Speculator [5] among other books. His latest book is The Limousine Liberal:
How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America [6] (Basic
Books, 2016).
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[8]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/books/one-most-successful-right-wing-myths-all-time-
limousine-liberal
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steve-fraser
[2] http://www.basicbooks.com/
[3]
http://www.amazon.com/Limousine-Liberal-Incendiary-Fractured-America/dp/0465
055664/?tag=alternorg08-20
[4]
http://www.amazon.com/Age-Acquiescence-American-Resistance-Organized/dp/0465
097790/
[5]
http://www.amazon.com/Every-Man-Speculator-History-American/dp/006662049X/
[6]
http://www.amazon.com/Limousine-Liberal-Incendiary-Fractured-America/dp/0465
055664
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on One of the Most
Successful Right-Wing Myths of All Time: 'The Limousine Liberal'
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B