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WHAT DO GLENN BECK, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Spiro Agnew have in common? They are or were all warriors in a peculiarly American version of the class struggle. A motley crew otherwise - a TV and radio shock jock, a midwestern carmaker, a Detroit priest, an alcoholic senator from Wisconsin, a "maverick" senator from Arizona, a southern demagogue, a dishonored and deposed vice president - each in his own way took up arms against the ruling class. For the last half century or so the representative figure ofthat ruling class has been widely recognized under a memorable alias: the "limousine liberal."
When the New Deal order first began to fall apart at the seams, a New York City political apparatchik from Brooklyn named Mario Procaccino won the Democratic Party's nomination for mayor in 1969 after a nasty primary campaign. His foe, running on the Liberal Party line, was the sitting mayor, John Lindsay, once upon a time a congressman representing the "silk stocking district" on Manhattan's wealthy East Side. Procaccino coined the term "limousine liberal" to characterize what he and his largely white ethnic following from the city's "outer boroughs" considered the repellent hypocrisy of elitists like Lindsay: well-heeled types who championed the cause of the poor, especially the black poor, but who had no intention of bearing the cost of doing anything about their plight. They were insulated from any real contact with poverty, crime, and the everyday struggle to get by, living in their exclusive neighborhoods, sending their kids to private schools, sheltering their capital gains and dividends from the taxman, and getting around town in limousines, not subway cars. Not about to change the way they lived, they wanted everybody else to change, to have their kids bused to school, to shoulder the tax burden of an expanding welfare system, to watch the racial and social makeup of their neighborhoods turned upside down. These self-righteous rich folk couldn't care less, Procaccino declaimed, about the "small shopkeeper, the homeowner. . . .They preach the politics of confrontation and condone violent upheaval." Limousine liberals have been with us ever since. In fact they were part of the political landscape decades before Procaccino came up with his bon...