Gentry: people of good social position, specifically (in the UK) the class of people next below the nobility in position and birth, “a member of the landed gentry.”
synonyms: upper classes, privileged classes, elite, high society, haute monde, smart set
Okay, I’ll admit it: I confess I was following a Web link that led to an article in the (wait for it . . .) Washington Examiner, a thoroughly conservative, once-actually-published DC newspaper that is now solely Web-based. It was a pundit’s piece (by Michael Borone) that defined and used a phrase I hadn’t seen before:
“Gentry Liberal”
So my question was: what the f**k is a gentry liberal anyway?
It Isn’t Your Father’s Liberalism, That’s for Sure!
Well, turns out the terminology itself was first used years and years ago in the context of histories of European aristocratic countries (like Russia or England): I found a journal source back in the 1970’s that was talking about “gentry liberals” in Russia in the pre-Communist 1900’s, for example.
But no, for us in the US, the collective, “gentry liberals,” was defined anew in early December of 2007 by Joel Kotlin and Fred Siegel in an L.A. Times piece called “The Gentry Liberals: Their More Concerned with Global Warming and Gay Rights than with Lunch-Pale Joes.” They said that,
After decades on the political sidelines, liberalism is making a comeback. Polls show plunging support for Republicans and their brand of conservatism among young, independent voters and Latinos. But what kind of liberalism is emerging as the dominant voice in the Democratic Party?
Well, it isn’t your father’s liberalism, the ideology that defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes. The old liberalism had its flaws, but it also inspired increased social and economic mobility, strong protections for unions, the funding of a national highway system and a network of public parks, and the development of viable public schools. It also invented Social Security and favored a strong foreign policy.
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.
That brings me to Michael Barone, a conservative pundit who is now writing (and writing and writing) about today’s politics in this country in terms of “gentry liberals.” For example, in a November 13 column which appeared in both the New York Post and the Washington Examiner, Barone says of the just-completed 2014 midterm election . . .
Congressional districts are of basically equal population, and Democrats tend to roll up big margins in densely populated areas.
So while voters have elected at least 244 Republican congressmen and probably will end up with at least 247 — more than in any election since 1928 — the map overstates their dominance.
But it does tell us something about the geographic and cultural isolation of the core groups of the Democratic Party: gentry liberals and blacks. These were the two groups gathered together when Barack Obama had the chance to draw the new lines of his state Senate district after the 2000 Census.
He combined Chicago’s heavily black South Side with Gold Coast gentry liberals north of the Loop. Together, they provided him an overwhelmingly Democratic voter base and access to the Democratic Party’s upper financial and intellectual reaches — and, in short time, the presidency. (source)
Barone does follow through on the distinctions between what he too labels as Gentry Liberals and the new three hundred pound gorilla in the country’s electorate, Hispanics:
Evidence suggests that gentry liberal causes — abortion absolutism, gun control, and opposition to fracking — have been repelling rather than attracting Hispanics. Polls also show they’re more interested in jobs and education — and dissatisfied with Democrats’ performance — than in immigration, on which they are miffed at both parties.
I don’t know what polls he has that show this higher interest in jobs and education, but I’ll let that slide, accepting it as true, and move on to Barone’s final point: Hispanics can’t be counted on by the Dems so quickly as being in their voting column.
As evidence of that, all we have to do is notice the huge end game beginning to play out in DC between Obama and the Congressional Republicans over . . . Immigration. Clearly, the Dems believe they are now forcing the GOP to fall on its own sword. The Republican Shit Fit that will invariably develop in response to Obama’s speech tonight is, the Dems believe, not going to be soon forgotten by the nation’s Hispanic voters. And that may, indeed, be true, but the large bag of moral issue goodies that Republicans are working to place at the feet of Dems and their vocal Gentry Liberals is what we will need to look at down the road.
Global Warming and Gay Rights, Not Lunch-Pale Joe’s Problems
According to Kotkin and Siegel, Gentry Liberals will support, and vote for, issues that aren’t necessarily good for the pocket books of low SES Americans (be they white, black, Hispanic, or yellow)–social hedge issues like abortion, gun control, environmental control, gay rights, affirmative action, etc. In this view, Gentry Liberals aren’t going out of their way to vote for pocket book issues that are so much more vitally important to economically close-to-the-bone blacks, Native American, Hispanics or even a few Asian Americans. Clearly, contentious moral issues are important to the younger, more monied elites who make up the base of the Gentry Liberals in the country. But that doesn’t match the top agenda items of the economically depressed and deflated “underclasses” of the country.
Web Uses of the Phrase “Gentry Liberals”
Just to prove to myself that the phrase “gentry liberals” is a bomb-throwing phrase used only by the conservative chattering class, I did a search for the phrase in Google. Here is what I found:
- Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel, “The Gentry Liberals: Their More Concerned with Global Warming and Gay Rights than with Lunch-Pale Joes,” LA Times, December 02, 2007
- Joel Kotkin, “The Democratic Party Could Face an Internal Civil War,” Wall Street Journal, Feb 28, 2009.
- Joel Kotkin, “The Death of Gentry Liberalism,” Forbes, Jan 26, 2010.
- Eric Raymond, “Who bears the costs of moral vanity?” Armed and Dangerous, Feb 16, 2010.
- Joel Kotkin, “The Crisis of the ‘Gentry Presidency,'” Politico, Sept 14, 2011.
- Walter Russell Mead, “Gentry Liberals and Brass Knuckles: The Case of Maureen Dowd,” The American Interest, April 21, 2013.
- Steve Bartin, “The Monuments of Gentry Liberals in Chicago: White Students Dominate the Test-Admittance Public Schools,” New Geography, April 30, 2014.
- Tom Bethell, “Liberalism Versus the Middle Class,” American Spectator, May, 2014
- Michael Barone, “‘Gentry liberal’ Democrats feel free to oppose Obama trade policy,” Washington Examiner, May 6, 2014.
- Michael Barone, “Is this the political map of the future?” Washington Examiner, November 13, 2014. (Same article appears on the same date in the New York Post under the different title “Democrats are painting the country red.”)
As you can see, they are all written by conservatives and appeared in conservative web sites/publications. Seems Joel Kotkin can be credited with the first use of the phrase in the new sense of referring to Democrats in American politics.
