Steve Fraser - The limousine liberal: how an incendiary image united the right and fractured America

ALSO BY STEVE FRASER

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

Wall Street: Americas Dream Palace

Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life

Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor

Copyright 2016 by Steve Fraser

Published by Basic Books,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fraser, Steve, 1945 author.

Title: The limousine liberal: how an incendiary image united the right and fractured America / Steve Fraser.

Description: New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045391 (print) | LCCN 2015047652 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465097661 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: LiberalismUnited StatesHistory. | Political cultureUnited StatesHistory. | Right and left (Political scienceUnited StatesHistory. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Conservatism & Liberalism.

Classification: LCC JC574.2.U6 F73 2016 (print) | LCC JC574.2.U6 (ebook) |

DDC 320.51/30973dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045391

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Jill, Max, Emma, Elena, Jon, and Marco

Table of Contents

Contents

L imousine 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.

Shes 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 historys oxymoron, an elitist for revolution, working to undermine the ancient regimeor 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 Nixons 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 sonsTed Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Scott Walkerare 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. Thats what the Clintons are about.... Youll notice that its always the super-rich who rage on about the need to share wealth, but they never, ever do. Weve 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 theres something surreal about Hillary Clintons 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 left-wing journalist greeted the candidates 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 exGoldman 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 Hillarys 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.