The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America

by Steve Fraser

No political image in recent American history has enjoyed the impact of the "limousine liberal." It has managed to mobilize an enduring politics of resentment directed against everything from civil rights to women's liberation, from the war on poverty to environmental regulation. Coined in 1969 by New York City mayoralty candidate Mario Procaccino, the term took aim at what he and his largely white lower middle class and blue collar following considered the repellent hypocrisy of well-heeled types who championed the cause of the poor, especially the black poor, but who had no intention of bearing the costs of their plight. The metaphor zeroed in on liberal elites who preferred to upset rather than defend the status quo not only in race relations, but in the sexual, moral, and religious order and had little interest in looking after the needs of working people.

In The Limousine Liberal , the acclaimed historian Steve Fraser argues that it is impossible to understand American politics without coming to grips with this image, where it originated, why it persists, and where it may be taking us. He reveals that the limousine liberal had existed in all but name long before Procaccino gave it one. From Henry Ford decrying an improbable alliance of Jews, bankers, and Bolsheviks in the 1920s to the Tea Party's vehement hatred of Hillary Clinton, the fear of the limousine liberal has stoked right-wing populism for nearly a century. Today it fuses together disparate elements of the conservative movement. Sunbelt entrepreneurs on the rise, blue collar ethnics and middle classes in decline, heartland evangelicals, and billionaire business dynasts have found common cause, despite their real differences, in shared opposition to liberal elites.

The Limousine Liberal tells an extraordinary story of why the most privileged and powerful elements of American society were indicted as subversives and reveals the reality that undergirds that myth. It goes to the heart of the great political transformation of the postwar the rise of the conservative right and the unmaking of the liberal consensus.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, American History

304 pages, Hardcover

Published May 10, 2016

About the author

Steve Fraser is an author, an editor, and a historian whose many publications include the award-winning books Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor and Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. He is senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of the American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the American Prospect.

Reviews

[Athan Tolis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tremendous nine page conclusion preceded by a 237 page catalog of mini-profiles of American limousine liberals and their critics from the time of the Civil War all the way to 2015.

The catalog is, frankly, tedious. There must be some two hundred people profiled here. If you did not know them before you are extremely unlikely to remember them after you’re done with the book. The author would have done ten times better if he had picked, dunno, twenty of these guys (they are mostly guys), ten from each side, and actually brought them to life, rather than list where they were born, where they went to college, where they lived and with whom they sparred.

On the other hand, I did pick up a couple things here about characters I’d already heard of. So, for example, I’m on my fourth Ford car at the moment and I had no idea what kind of bigot the man was. (Then again, my previous car was a Renault –executed post WWII as a collaborator—and the one before that a Volkswagen, commissioned by you-know-who, so perhaps I ought to relax about all that)

The conclusion is reached that the limousine liberals are alright: they are looking for “what’s next,” so to speak. Their critics, on the other hand, are accused of wanting to restore some past that actually never really existed.

Again, the author would have made that message much more convincingly if he did not lose the reader with the hundreds of profiles.

I don’t think I’ve read a book before where the most valuable contribution is actually the index. Basically, next time I hear about some intellectual fight that took place in the US in the past 150 years, I’ll look up the main characters in the index of this book and I’ll get a couple paragraphs of wisdom about them.

Or I could look them up in Wikipedia, of course…

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I saw this book on the new book shelf at the local public library I thought "Humm, perhaps this one can enlighten me about the difference between a Do-Gooder and a Good Doer." No such luck. No help with describing the difference. Indeed, though the book offers no hint of a dissimilarity, curiosity did prompt me to Google the words and there I found my wanted clarifications. Author mentions a wide variety of politicians and celebrities who could be called Limousine Liberals (FDR, Martin Sheen, Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, etc.) as well as populists who seem to have no relationship to the subject (Huey Long, Jerry Falwall, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, etc.). Overall this book is shallow in content and lacks insight and analysis. Mostly I just skimmed it. What I did NOT find in the book but did interpret from Google is this: A Limousine Liberal, a.k.a. Do-Gooder, mostly stands off from involving herself or himself directly in energetic social action. Both are derogatory terms. A Good Doer, in contrast, actively engages herself or himself in the nitty-gritty.

[Reza Amiri Praramadhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to the author, Limousine Liberals are the people who claimed that they are fighting for equality, while riding on their limousine, and generally having much better lives than the ones that they are 'advocating'. It's fascinating that this image managed to unite various groups from the right, as diverse as Family capitalists such as Henry Ford, Southern Racists like George C. Wallace, Evangelical Priests like Pat Robertson, and other groups such as the Tea Party. These motley, ragtag, band of the right are the populists, who claimed that they are fighting for the 'little men', against the decadent social engineering, the overreaching government, and everything that they're accusing on.

After all, it is fascinating to see the evolution of both the limousine liberals and the right-wing populists. An adequate book to get to know from where all the fights in America today came from.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entire book written about a single epithet. It is actually rather impression how much mileage the author was about to get out of it.

A better title for this book would have been "The Cyclical History of the Populist Right in the United States." The author is an excellent rhetorician. I might borrow a few of the phrases he uses.

Minor downside: like many, the author couldn't have foreseen the rise of Trump and thought that Glenn Beck and the Tea Party were the latest itineration of American right-wing populism (though this could be forgiven).

[Ben Micheal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank You for sharing really awesome article. would like to visit again. Limousine service in Virginia

[Cyrus Douglas Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. An analysis of a political trope that would have fit better in an article than an entire book.

[Adam Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great book by Fraser, who here traces the origins and mutation of the image of the "limousine liberal," as the major invective opposed by the political Right in the United States since the New Deal. Great insights into the various developments of the New Right that emerged since 1970.

[Pang]

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