Now available from Telos Press Publishing: The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, by Fred Siegel. Order your copy today in our online store and save 20% off the list price. Also available in Kindle ebook format.
The Crisis of Liberalism
Prelude to Trump
by Fred Siegel
With a Foreword by Joel Kotkin
In The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, Fred Siegel leverages New York City to uncover the key political conflicts and social contradictions in American liberalism over the last century. This wide-ranging collection of essays critically recounts how passionate intellectual debates over how to realize “the good life” in the modern city emerged from the writings of early progressive “thought leaders,” who envisioned a new educated elite capable of enlightened democratic governance. The flaws in this approach, as Siegel shows, expressed themselves most floridly in John Lindsay’s New York, whose flashy limousine liberals were a preview of today’s politically correct gentry liberalism. Its cultural programs over the past half-century repeatedly failed the downtrodden underclass and alienated middle-class New Yorkers trapped in economic stagnation. By neglecting voters’ real concerns over illegal immigration and China’s emerging threats, globalist technocratic liberals ultimately set the stage for Donald Trump’s angry nationalist demand to put “America First.”
Fred Siegel on the Telos Press Podcast
In the inaugural episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan and Russell Berman talk with Fred Siegel about The Crisis of Liberalism. Siegel discusses the growth of the administrative state, the similarities between former New York City mayor John Lindsay and Barack Obama, the Black Lives Matter movement, the echoes of the 1960s in today’s politics, and the rise of left-wing fascism. Listen:
Praise for Fred Siegel’s The Crisis of Liberalism
“Whether Siegel is writing about New York politics, the impact of rioting on cities, the origins of the ‘top-down’ political coalition created by ‘gentry liberals,’ or the roots of liberals’ disdain for the middle class, these essays are deeply relevant to understanding the turbulence and divisions that plague our nation today.”
—Vincent J. Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York
“Taken together, this collection of Fred Siegel’s best essays and articles is a magisterial overview of the radical impulses and feckless politics that upended so much of American life in the 1960s and 1970s—only to emerge in toxic new forms today. If history doesn’t repeat itself, Siegel’s work shows us how it rhymes.”
—E. J. McMahon, Senior Fellow, Empire Center for Public Policy
“In this beautifully written book, Fred Siegel shows how limousine liberals have come to treat good governance by elite experts as superior to self-government by the voters they call deplorable, and he traces how liberalism has come to this impasse through his astute analyses and insightful prose.”
—Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University
About the Author
Fred Siegel is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor. He is a professor emeritus of history at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and since his retirement he has been a scholar-in-residence at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn. Siegel is the author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (1984), The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (1997), The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life (2005), and, most recently, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class (2014). His articles and commentary have appeared in the Atlantic, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, New Criterion, the New Republic, the New York Times, Public Interest, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard.
ISBN 978-0-914386-77-3 (paperback) • 978-0-914386-78-0 (ebook)
Pub. Date: October 1, 2020 (paperback) • September 15, 2020 (ebook)
