The transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century is nowhere more apparent than in the disputes now roiling a relatively obscure section of upstate New York. In 1965, as part of his “war on poverty,” President Lyndon Johnson created the Appalachian Regional Commission. Among the areas to be served by the commission were the Southern Tier counties of New York state, including Broome, Tioga and Chemung. The commission’s central aim was to “Increase job opportunities and per capita income in Appalachia to reach parity with the nation.”

Like so many Great Society antipoverty programs, the effort largely failed. The Southern Tier counties remain much as they appeared in the 1960s, pocked by deserted farms and abandoned businesses, largely untouched by the prosperity that blessed much of America over the past five decades.

Beginning about a dozen years ago, remarkable improvements in natural-gas drilling by means of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, seemed to promise a way out of poverty. The massive Marcellus Shale Formation under New York and Pennsylvania has proved to be “the most lucrative natural gas play in the U.S.,” Business Week recently noted, because the shale produces high-quality gas and is easily shipped to New York and Philadelphia.

In Pennsylvania, a state long familiar with carbon production through oil drilling and coal mining, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell backed fracking during his tenure from 2003-11, and the state has experienced a boom in jobs and income. Between 2007 and 2011, in Pennsylvania counties with more than 200 fracking wells, per capita income rose 19%, compared with an 8% increase in counties with no wells, as petroleum analyst Gregg Laskoski wrote for U.S. News & World Report in August.

In New York, the potential natural-gas bonanza has been stillborn. Political support for fracking came largely from Southern Tier landowners scratching out a living on land much of which has been left fallow. These supporters sometimes referred to the environmental benefits of natural gas as opposed to coal. But their core argument was that fracking offered the only chance to rescue a dying region. Many landowners were being crushed by the heavy burden of New York’s high taxes—among the highest property taxes in the nation—and by regulation that made it hard to eke out a living from small dairy herds.

The landowners have been no match for an antifracking coalition that drew on the liberal well-to-do and celebrities, including Yoko Ono and Richard Plunz, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, whose primary residences are in New York City but who also own second homes upstate. These better-known opponents have been joined by other progressives, often from Manhattan, in alliance with the liberal gentry of upstate university towns such as Ithaca, Binghamton and Oneonta. Fracking is occurring in 31 states and has been approved for California and Illinois. But in New York, the antifrackers turned opposition to fracking into a litmus test for liberals.

The antifracking movement has taken on something of the anti-industrial Tory ethos of mid-19th-century England. The romantic sentiments underlying the antifracking movement have been expressed by Adelaide Gomer, the Duncan Hines heiress, who directs the Park Foundation of Ithaca. The foundation finances much of the antifracking movement. “Hydrofracking,” Ms. Gomer wrote in a 2010 petition, “will turn our area into an industrial site. It will ruin the ambience, the beauty of the region. But, moreover, it will poison our aquifers. We can live without gas, but we cannot live without water.”

Fracking supporters know that the process occurs far below aquifers and is not a danger to water supplies—which in any event proponents would have no interest in poisoning. These advocates are, in the standard sense, conservationists concerned with preserving the land even as they use it. The antifrackers, by contrast, seem most interested in maintaining the upstate region as a pristine setting for gracious living and tourism. Unlike the 19th-century British Tories, who felt a paternal obligation to look after the well-being of the peasants they governed, today’s liberal gentry operates on a narrowly self-interested basis.

In 2008, the administration of New York’s Gov. David Paterson seemed generally positive about fracking, even while emphasizing the need for updated regulations to protect the environment. But while Mr. Paterson was considering the problem, HBO presented “Gaslands,” an agitprop film that depicted Pennsylvania as “getting fracked to hell.” The film sensationally portrayed water coming out of kitchen water taps being ignited with a flame—the result of fracking, we were told, though the phenomenon was the result of naturally occurring methane.

“Gaslands” had an enormous impact, and it was buttressed by a series of articles in the New York Times NYT -2.86% New York Times Co. Cl A U.S.: NYSE ^$12.89 -0.38 -2.86% Nov. 7, 2013 4:04 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 952,544 AFTER HOURS ^$12.89 0.00 0.00% Nov. 7, 2013 4:31 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 17,746 P/E Ratio 14.08 Market Cap $1.98 Billion Dividend Yield 1.24% Rev. per Employee $352,201 13.4013.2013.0012.8010a11a12p1p2p3p4p 11/07/13 AT&T Acknowledges Charging Gov… 10/31/13 Newspapers’ Circulation Measur… 10/31/13 New York Times Reports Loss More quote details and news » NYT in Your Value Your Change Short position so biased against fracking that the newspaper’s public editor twice apologized for them. The media’s antifracking message meshed well with the Park Foundation’s subsidies of protests around the region and in Albany. Faced with a surge of antifracking sentiment, the state in 2008 imposed a moratorium.

Five years later, the supposedly temporary ban to allow the study of health and regulatory considerations remains in place. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who took office in 2010, last year floated a compromise. The areas near the reservoirs for New York and Syracuse, the liberal gentry of Ithaca and the wealthy retirees of Cooperstown would be able to maintain the status quo. The 100 towns that had passed local bans on fracking would have their wishes respected. Mr. Cuomo would have confined fracking areas to sections of the Southern Tier Counties of Broome, Chemung, Chenango, Steuben and Tioga. In those areas, the shale is deep within the earth and there are no aquifers—even antifracking activists would have a hard time finding a threat to the water table.

The proposed compromise might have seemed reasonable. But the antifrackers who had demonized the gas industry responded with a resounding, no. At a rally earlier this year, actor Mark Ruffalo, another antifracking celebrity, warned the politically ambitious Mr. Cuomo: “We’ll cream you if you open New York state to fracking.” On Wednesday last week in Albany, the state capital, actress Debra Winger was a prominent speaker at an antifracking protest.

Dick Downey, a retired teacher and fracking supporter living in Otego, N.Y., wrote in his local paper, the Daily Star, in 2011 that “the class divide in the argument over drilling in New York is the elephant in the living room. Everyone’s aware of it but no one is talking about it. It pits generational farmers against the newly arrived, well-to-do pensioners against those just hanging on.”

Poverty and social class don’t seem significant issues for the residents of Ithaca, the center of the antifracking movement. Perched on the edge of beautiful Lake Cayuga, one of New York’s Finger Lakes, Ithaca is home to Cornell University, Ithaca College and the Park Foundation. Ithaca claims to have more restaurants per capita than New York City. In the 2000 presidential election, more residents voted for Ralph Nader than for George W. Bush.

Great Society liberalism had, for all its faults, an ideal of inclusiveness. The environmental anti-industrial liberalism is implicitly organized around exclusion. Environmentalism, with its powerful not-in-my-backyard and not-in-your-backyard currents in upstate New York, has become an ideological cover for the pursuit of self-interest. New York’s liberals are fighting to preserve the status quo, poverty and all.

Mr. Siegel is a scholar in residence at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Civic Innovation. This essay is adapted from an article that will be published next spring in Society magazine.