The Status Anxiety of Liberal Elites
Remember when any self-respecting liberal thought the 1950s was an era of blatant social injustice, mind-numbing conformity, obsessive anti-communism, systemic racism, sexism and harrowing sexual repression? Michael Barone (subscription required) is just the latest right-of-center pundit to notice how fondly liberals suddenly remember the 1950s. In case you haven't noticed, they're now being remembered as the "golden years“ when "[i]ncome distribution was significantly more egalitarian than it is today” and liberalism was a vibrantly democratic movement because “Americans had far more confidence in big government” than they do today. Barone brings this all up to remind us that, like all nostalgia, liberal nostalgia is the product of selective memory.

If anything, he understates how selective. Could any level-headed liberal really prefer the political economy of the 1950s and early 60s to our own? If the social distribution of benefits and burdens in the 1950s was so great, why did liberals need to wage the War on Poverty in the sixties?...

...Permit me a little armchair social psychology. You’ll notice that the testimonials to political economy of the 1950s aren’t coming from rank-and-file Democrats, most of whom probably can’t imagine living without their air-conditioners, micro-computers, ATM cards and cell phones. They’re coming from liberal intellectuals, like Paul Krugman, whose 2007 book Conscience of a Liberal (“CoL”) is arguably the locus classicus of highbrow liberal nostalgia....

...Notice that Krugman’s burnished memories have as much to do with the social status of liberal ideologues as with the realization of substantive liberal values. ...