Illinois Needs to get Wise to Gentry Liberalism - Avoid the California Rush to Ruin

Back in 2007 Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel coined the phrase Gentry Liberalism. The Main Stream Media has avoided this term; this condition that afflicts America.

Gentry Liberalism -Today's ascendant liberalism has a much different agenda. Call it "gentry liberalism." It's not driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy -- though it does pay lip service to them.

Rather, gentry liberalism reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the "financialization" of the economy. Its strongholds are the tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and West Los Angeles.

These are folks who have nothing to lose - jobs, income, health. Needless to say they feel great - about themselves, but the rest of us? Not so hot. We tend to be fatter, have many more children, remain married, cling to religion
, work and pay taxes. We are Helots and they are Progressive Olympians - not the athletes the folks on that big hill in Greece.

Gentry Liberalism loves Advocacy Politics ( Gay, Black, Hispanic ( whatever the Hell that is), Abortion Happy/Women & etc.) and Marxist PACS SEIU/ACORN & etc. You know - like every time Ralph Martire opens his yap? More taxes.

Gentry Liberalism means Taxes for Helots.

Illinois needs to get wise to Gentry Liberalism - Progressive Political Olympians.

We can start by getting wise to Kotkin and Seigel. Click my post title.

Obama's problems stem primarily from gentry liberalism's class contradictions. Focused on ultra-affluent greens, the media, Wall Street and the public sector, gentry liberalism generally gives short shrift to upward mobility, the basic aspiration of the middle class.

Scott Brown's shocking victory in Massachusetts--like earlier GOP triumphs in Virginia and New Jersey--can be explained best by class. Analysis by demographer Wendell Cox, among others, shows that Brown won his margin in largely middle- and working-class suburbs, where many backed Obama in 2008. He lost by almost 2-to-1 among poor voters and also among those earning over $85,000 a year. He also won a slight margin among union members--remarkable given the lockstep support of their organizations for Brown's Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley.

Geography played a role, of course, but class proved the divider. Coakley did well in the wealthiest suburbs largely north and northwest of Boston. But Brown's edge in the more middle- and working-class suburbs proved insurmountable.