http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/02/02/interview-fred-siegel/
In the wake of World War I, there was a “tremendous intellectual upheaval,” Fred Siegel tells me, talking about his new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. American intellectuals, led by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and heavily influenced by H.G. Wells, came to see “the American middle class as their enemy.” It’s “the beginning of the Europeanization of American politics. And what these writers want, they want to be more like Europe. They want a more stratified, more hierarchical society. They dislike American small-d-democracy. And they talk about this at great length. This is not a conjecture.”
But it’s been largely forgotten, since in both academia and the media, the left has largely written the story of American history of the 20th century. Fortunately, Fred has done yeoman archeological work, bringing the early history of the American left to light once again, in a book that anyone who was enlightened by Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism will also find absolutely intriguing.
During our interview, we’ll discuss:
● The largely forgotten racism of H.G. Wells and Woodrow Wilson.
● Sinclair Lewis’s absurd yet highly influential It Can’t Happen Here, and its paranoid vision of American fascism rising up from the benign members of the all-American Rotary Clubs and Elks and Moose Lodges.
● When did “Progressivism” become “Liberalism,” and why?