Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Cooper Union professor emeritus Fred Siegel’s new The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, a collection of his essays dating back to the early 1980s, helpfully lays out a century’s worth of instances in which liberalism’s elite experts have failed the citizenry. These failures have almost always resulted from the arrogance of those elites, who’ve thought their understanding and management of public policy to be superior to any exercise of self-government by their lessers. Many of those elites, too many, reside in philanthropy.
