The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America by Steve Frasor (review)

In 1969, amid a political realignment often associated with the erosion of the New Deal Democratic coalition and the ascendancy of the New Right, Mario Procaccino, a Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, criticized his opponent, Mayor John Lindsay, for being a “limousine liberal.” Portraying himself as a populist defender of oppressed working-class citizens, Procaccino introduced what historian Steve Frasor argues has been a remarkably malleable and persistent “specter haunting American politics” since the Sixties (1). In Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America, Frasor chronicles the origins and enduring impact of mythical images of subversive economic and cultural elites threatening the lives of ordinary Americans.

Frasor contextualizes the right-wing populist use of the term within a long history of resistance to the social changes of the Progressive Era and the New Deal that includes Henry Ford, Huey Long, and Father Coughlin, as well as the cultural conflicts associated with the Scopes Monkey Trial and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Such politics of resentment informed the rise of McCarthyism during the Cold War, as well as the appeal of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Phyllis Schlafly in later decades. While Frasor’s narrative will be familiar to most readers, the value of Limousine Liberal lies in its ability to link this genealogy to far more recent developments, such as the popularity of conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the impact of right-wing donors such as Charles and David Koch, and the recent political defeat of Hillary Clinton. Although class conflict may have a long history in American political culture, Frasor stresses the crucial transformation of earlier economic populism to, after the Sixties, an increased emphasis on social and cultural issues such as religion, guns, gender, and sexuality. The transformation enabled “Sunbelt rebels,” a new class of conservative economic elites centered far from the Northeast to harness class conflict while promoting neoliberal economic policies that threaten organized labor, the public sector, and the welfare state (127).

While Frasor’s “history of an epithet” (247) demonstrates the persistence of the metaphor, his synthesis of published accounts of political and intellectual elites often fails to distinguish between the deep ideological roots of an idea and the political manipulation of the term for sheer “tactical convenience” (94). Frasor leaves readers wondering exactly who “retrofitted” (130) American populism and precisely who was the “vanguard” (223) against limousine liberals. The author provides little sense of the shifting perspectives and political behavior of voters who resented the image of the limousine liberal or, just as importantly, the larger number of Americans who rejected the stereotype.

For decades political liberals, perhaps to their detriment, have dismissed much of right-wing populism as thinly-veiled racism. Although Limousine Liberal acknowledges the historical importance of racism, Frasor, in an attempt to illustrate the complexity of American conservatism, emphasizes the economic and cultural components of the metaphor at the expense of race. However, the contested nature of American race relations is embedded in most controversial issues that dominate postwar America. Procaccino’s grievances in the 1969 mayoral election that gave birth to the epithet focused on issues of poverty, crime, public schools, and the impact of the growing welfare system on neighborhoods and taxes. Elsewhere, Frasor’s survey points to the importance of numerous issues often viewed through a racial lens, such as unemployment, affirmative action, immigration, crime, urban renewal, and school busing. Moreover, Fraser references “mainstream American culture,” (151) “blue collar America,” (170) “insular working class worlds,” (171) and “Christian populism” (179) without acknowledging that these terms reflected powerful racial assumptions about American society. George Wallace’s effective defense of the “little man” (130) in the South and beyond was always limited to whites, regardless of region, and yet the author never confronts the reality that African Americans, despite having arguably the strongest claims of exploitation by economic, political, and...