Fred Siegel – författare

"In The Future Once Happened Here, Fred Siegel tells an incredible story about the fate of America’s most influential cities: New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Standing as metaphors for America’s urban life because of their stature as nerve centers of the nation, these three cities—once celebrated for their excitement and creativity as well as their ability to incorporate immigrants and solve the nation’s problems—were all caught up in the social policies born in the ’60s and ’70s and, as a consequence, faltered badly in dealing with the politics of race and the quality of their residents’ lives in the ’80s and ’90s.Each of Siegel’s three urban portraits shows the desperate remedies undertaken by cities searching for a lifeline back to the future whose promise they once seemed to embody. In a narrative that acknowledges the large historical forces that have remade the face of America over the last three decades, but insists that social policies are not merely foregone conclusions waiting to happen, Siegel holds up a mirror to our urban naure and tells us much about the way we live now."

This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. 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. 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. The aim of liberalism’s founding writers and thinkers—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. 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.Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism was born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. 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.Temporarily waylaid by the heroism of the WWII generation, liberalism expressed itself in the 1950s as a critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened foppish characters such as Dwight Macdonald and Aldous Huxley, crucial influences on what was mistakenly called the New Left. There was no New Left in the 1960s, but there was a New Class that in the midst of Vietnam and race riots took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rightsThe neo-Malthusianism that emerged from the 1960s did not aim to control the breeding habits of the lower classes, as its eugenicist precursors had done, but to mock and restrain the buying habits of the middle class.Today’s Barack Obama brand of liberalism has displaced the old Main Street private-sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public-sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of style and taste.

What we think of as 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. The Revolt Against the Masses explores the inner life of American liberalism over the past 90 years, beginning with liberalism's foundational writers and thinkers--such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken--who despised the new worlds of mass production, mass politics, mass culture. These liberals sought to establish a true aristocracy that would serve as a counterpoint to the debasements of modern society. It was then in the seminal 1920s, that the strong strain of snobbery and contempt for the middle class, so pervasive today in the Hamptons, the New Yorker, HBO, and the Sierra Club, first defined liberalism. Today's brand of Barack Obama liberalism has gone further, displacing the old Main Street middle class with public sector workers, crony capitalists, and those elite arbiters of style and taste Siegel calls the liberal gentry.The Revolt Against the Masses explains how this came to be and why liberals continue to insist they act on behalf of the best interests of the middle class, even if the damned fools don't know it.

This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of as liberalism—the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama—began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of WWI, in disillusionment with American society. In the 1920s, the first thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and right. The aim of liberalism’s founders—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken—was to create an American version of the aristocracy long associated with European statism.Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the businessman’s pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual’s pursuit of pleasure; and in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself in the scornful critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened the leaders of the New Class, who took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights.The neo-Malthusianism that emerged from the 1960s did not aim to control the breeding habits of the lower classes, as its eugenicist precursors had done, but to mock and restrain the buying habits of the middle class.Today’s brand of liberalism, led by Barack Obama, has displaced the old Main Street private-sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public-sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of elite style and taste.

Each of Siegel's three urban portraits--New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles,-- shows the desperate remedies undertaken by cities searching for a lifeline back to the future whose promise they once seemed to embody. In a narrative that acknowledges the large historical forces that have remade the face of America over the last three decades, but insists that social policies are not merely foregone conclusions waiting to happen, Siegel holds up a mirror to our urban naure and tells us much about the way we live now.

The Prince of the City is at once a fascinating character study of one of America's most charismatic public figures, a history of New York over the last forty years, and a classic inquiry into the issue of how cities thrive or die. Siegel's story culminates with a dramatic account of September 11, 2001, revealing how Giuliani's s eight years in office had prepared him and the city to rise to this tragic occasion and how in the aftermath of the attack he became America's Mayor. Siegel concludes with a look at how Guiliani's successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has handled his legacy and at what lies in Guiliani's political future.