This is a Democratic civil war: The Hillary/Bernie rift cuts to the essence of the party’s soul

SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2016 09:29 AM EDT

This is a Democratic civil war: The Hillary/Bernie rift cuts to the essence of the party’s soul

Are the Democrats a modern corporate party, or one for the people? The "limousine liberal" debate still matters

STEVE FRASER

Trying in vain to derail the Donald Trump locomotive, his Republican Party opponents tarred him with the most toxic political metaphor of the last half century: he was, they claimed, a limousine liberal.

Hillary Clinton has borne that stigma through a good part of her political career. She will undoubtedly confront that charge again in the fall should she be the Democratic nominee. Even socialist Bernie Sanders has been depicted as the voice of well-heeled “limousine liberals and Mercedes Marxists.” How to sort this out?

Nowadays we assume that a limousine liberal is almost by definition a Democrat, so why did Trump hear the criticism? Actually, however, the first politician to suffer that sobriquet was a Republican. Back in 1969 the then-comptroller of New York City, a long-since forgotten Democratic Party apparatchik named Mario Procaccino, was running against the city’s sitting Republican mayor, John Lindsay. Procaccino called out Lindsay as a “limousine liberal.” He meant that Lindsay was to the manor born, raised on Park Avenue, tutored at the toniest preparatory schools, a graduate of Yale, formerly employed by a white-shoe law firm, and a past congressman from the nation’s richest congressional district, known as the “silk stocking district” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Despite these credentials — which normally would have constituted the résumé of a staunch defender of the status quo — Lindsay belonged instead to a breed of subversive elitists, determined to undermine the traditional order of things. They championed the civil rights revolution, advocated a war on poverty, undermined the war on communism abroad, disrespected the mores and moral strictures governing the family, sexual relations and cultural propriety in general, and could care less about the dilemmas facing white working and lower middle-class Americans, Procaccino’s people from the outer boroughs. While these purported reformers pretended to succor the poorest, they really meant for working people to bear the costs, while they remained insulated from any real contact with poverty, crime and the everyday struggle to get by, living in their exclusive neighborhoods, sending their children to private prep schools, sheltering their capital gains and dividends from the taxman, and getting around town in limousines, not subway cars.

more: http://www.salon.com/2016/05/21/this_is_a_democratic_civil_war_the_hillarybernie_rift_cuts_to_the_essence_of_the_partys_soul/

Cross posted to GDP here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512026315
and to Good Reads here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016157679