August 16, 2006
On Limousine Liberals Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:10 AM EST I shall feebly try to restore some of the bipartisan comity Josh Zeitz thinks is lapsing. I was just re-reading John Steele Gordon’s post of August 12 on his aborted career and other matters. I, too, am pleased that John Steele Gordon wound up writing history rather than press releases. I never did that job, but I once wrote freelance ad copy, four-sided brochures for book clubs. Most of the work was for an astrophysics book club, and it caused no great moral pangs; since I didn’t understand the books I was reading, I would simply retype and rephrase bits of text and hope for the best. By contrast, writing ad copy for a history book felt strange. It meant suspending all critical faculties in the interest of selling the product, and clashed with what I took to be the ethos of the profession for which I was then training (I was in grad school, studying history). In retrospect, that may sound priggish, but a similar feeling seems to explain why John Steele Gordon feels no regrets about giving up that fabulous prospective career in P.R.
Okay, comity-restoration mode muted, and on to Mario Procaccino coinage, “limousine liberals,” denoting people John Steele Gordon deprecates in that same post, and who reappear in his most recent post rebranded as “liberal elites.” I remember being greatly annoyed by the phrase “limousine liberals,” in part because I was a liberal with no limousine, and almost all of the liberals I knew were similarly limousine-less. The phrase seemed bizarrely dishonest. In 1969 I do not think too many of my acquaintances, liberal or otherwise, had even seen a limousine outside of a movie. This was before stretch limos proliferated in the 1980s, so in 1969 the word did not evoke a bunch of young bankers out on the town, it evoked Daddy Warbucks in a Depression-era cartoon.
But with the passage of a few years, I realized that the phrase meant something real, which is why it was for a time an effective rhetorical weapon. John Steele Gordon suggests that a limousine liberal was someone who knew nothing about the poor in whose name he presumed to speak, but it also and more pointedly meant something else. “Limousine liberals” originally denoted prosperous people who advocated what they took to be a just end via a policy which would have real costs for other, less prosperous people, with few or none of those costs being borne by the richer folk doing the advocating. Like any effective caricature, the picture was distorted, but it was recognizable.
Busing was one example. In that case, the phrase denoted people with children in private or all-white suburban schools who believed that other people’s schools should be integrated in ways many of those other people found threatening. Busing may or may not have been an effective policy, but the very effective rhetorical point was that some of the people advocating it did not have to live with any of its costs. Another example: affirmative action in one of the forms it originally operated, when it meant altering the importance of seniority and civil-service exam scores for hiring and promotion in police and fire departments, in other civil service jobs, and in the building trades, in the wake of findings that access to those jobs had previously been restricted on racial grounds. In that case, too, prosperous people were unlikely to be applying for those jobs. The costs of justice would be borne only by others. A third and less perfect example: policies on crime. If you were “soft on crime,” it meant you wanted to advance the rights of suspects and prisoners at a perceived cost in public safety. If you lived in a neighborhood or town that was still insulated from the rising crime rate, that, too, looked like a form of justice demanded only at someone else’s expense. Here’s a fourth (although very local) example: open admissions at CUNY, the public university in my city, then advocated by some people whose children wouldn’t have been caught dead at CUNY.
Why did the phrase “limousine liberal” disappear? Reconsider the examples cited above: the kind of busing people most detested has been to some degree abandoned, while more and more people have bailed out of the public schools. The issue is more or less politically dead. How about affirmative action? It no longer applies only to working-class jobs; it also affects admissions to the Ivies and very good jobs. It has to some degree become less controversial—in the recent Supreme Court case preserving affirmative action, a decisive amicus brief seems to have been filed by the Armed Forces, who passionately defend affirmative action. The policy has been progressively modified by the courts, and, (reportedly) on account of a fear of being perceived as racist, the Republican party itself seems to be chary of advocating its abandonment; if the policy is overturned, it will die at the hands of the courts. In any case, the people who advocated the policy now share some of its perceived costs. How about “soft on crime”? As more and more people came to feel threatened by rising crime, support for suspects’ and prisoners’ rights diminished accordingly, and over the long haul crime fell dramatically. First there were fewer people who looked to be grandstanding at no personal cost, then the problem diminished very strikingly. How about open admissions? It has been abolished. So no one is still talking about limousine liberals, because there aren’t very many to be seen. Instead, we hear a lot about “liberal elites.” More on that in another post.
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