liberalism once meant "helping the Irish and Italian families who were still mired in the lower working class" but that it now meant "helping poor blacks and other racial minorities"—something the "more prosperous" beneficiaries of an earlier liberalism could not seem to understand. The "deepest issue" in the controversies over busing and affirmative action, which had split the liberal coalition, was "racial." White ethnics simply could not see that dark-skinned people needed the same kind of help they themselves had received from the New Deal.

"White backlash" was already a lively topic in the late sixties. In a study of the student movement, The Radical Probe (1971), Michael Miles argued that the student revolt had generated a "counter-revolt," the object of which was "to suppress a radical movement which by its nature poses a threat to the status quo. " Ethnic minorities loathed the new youth culture because it offended "their petit-bourgeois sensibilities." Blue-collar workers recently promoted to middle-class status, resentful of the advantages enjoyed as their birthright by upper-middle-class students—advantages for which they themselves had to struggle and save—took out their frustration in an ill-tempered "politics of morality." They had "learned property values from the suburban life," but even though "their social integration [was] ensured for the immediate future by economic growth and general prosperity," they remained culturally "insecure" and therefore full of envy and racial hatred.

These explanations of the revolt against liberalism exaggerate the economic security enjoyed by the working class and lower middle class. These classes have always had to "struggle to keep even," in the words of an antibusing activist, and they have begun to lose ground in recent years. Much of their discontent with liberalism has nothing to do with racial issues. Some of it represents a reaction against the kind of unthinking paternalism that makes liberals see themselves as "helpers" of the needy. Some of it grows out of a determination to defend "family values," which many liberals treat with contempt. Some of it rests on the perception that although liberals often flaunt their cultural superiority, they have not shown that it leads to moral understanding or political insight. To people who have become the objects of liberal contempt, these cultural pretensions look more like social snobbery.

Racial issues themselves, finally, are far more complex than the formula of "white racism" would suggest. They look simple only to those who

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