First Paragraph

This short book is not a comprehensive history of American liberalism. A number of important figures and episodes are merely glossed over. Instead, it rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of liberalism today - the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-World War I disillusionment with American society. In the Twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism's founding writers and thinkers - such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken - was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide the same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism. 

- From The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel (2015)