three decades of liberal government and New Deal policies had created what C. Wright Mills in his 1956 book, The Power Elite, called the “new class”: lawyers, journalists, university professors, the experts who flocked to government beginning in the 1930s. This new class was predominantly liberal, since such professions depended on liberalism to survive. The rise of the new class to positions of power in the economy and political system strengthened an increasingly liberal trend in government, politics, and society. As Daniel Bell put it in 1962, the New Deal had “rewoven” the very “fabric of
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