It is no secret that liberalism has fallen on hard times. The usual explanation of this development—the explanation offered by liberals themselves—attributes it to a violent "backlash" against the civil rights movement, the student radicalism of the sixties, and the policies of the New Frontier and the Great Society. This explanation simply updates the critique of "working-class authoritarianism" advanced by liberals in the fifties and sixties. White ethnics have allegedly deserted the Democrats, their former benefactors, because they are now prosperous enough to resent high taxes and welfare programs but still insecure in their middle-class status. Status anxiety reinforces their racism and makes them irrationally jealous of the racial minorities currently favored by liberal policy. In 1980, the New York Times explained that

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