Frank is hardly the first critic to remark upon a disconnect between the lives of wealthy liberals and the grittier constituencies they supposedly serve. As the historian Steve Fraser demonstrates in his wide-ranging new book, the idea of the “limousine liberal” has a long and messy history all its own. The term originated during the 1969 New York mayoral campaign, when the Democratic candidate Mario Procaccino charged the highborn Liberal Party incumbent John Lindsay, formerly a Republican, with acts unbecoming to his social class. Procaccino’s accusation differed slightly from Frank’s: Procaccino believed that Lindsay genuinely sought ambitious programs to empower the poor and the black and the disenfranchised. The problem was that Lindsay did it all from the “silk-stocking district” of the Upper East Side, where his wealth insulated him from the dire consequences of his actions.

Though Procaccino lost the mayoral election, his biting phrase went on to have an illustrious political career of its own. “Nowadays,” Fraser writes wryly, “Hillary Clinton serves as ‘Exhibit A’ of this menace,” “the quintessential limousine liberal hypocrite.” Despite its title, however, Fraser’s book is not really about liberals and their supposed foibles. Instead, he seeks to describe how “right-wing populists” have insulted, vilified, mocked and analyzed those liberals in both the present and the past.

According to Fraser, suspicion of highborn reformers extends back at least to the Progressive Era, when the idea of an activist government administered by well-educated experts began to take hold. Since then, these villains of American consciousness have labored under a variety of epithets: “parlor pinks,” “Mercedes Marxists,” “men in striped pants.” In each iteration, what seems to drive the attacks is not only the tincture of hypocrisy but the unrestrained confidence with which such liberals express their expert views. In that sense, Frank’s fuming at the smug knowledge workers of Boston might have come straight from the pages of National Review, circa either 1955 or 2015.

Fraser does not deny a certain reality behind the “limousine liberal” image. “Limousine liberalism was never a myth,” he writes, however “absurd and scurrilous” the political rhetoric may have been. Something did change beginning in the early 20th century, as the complexities of modern society began to demand new forms of expertise and new institutions to coordinate them. Resentment of “limousine liberals” is nothing less than a reaction to the modern condition, Fraser argues, though some politicians have more effectively navigated its challenges than others. Franklin Roosevelt managed to transcend his patrician upbringing to emerge as a genuine champion of the “little man” — and to become enormously popular while doing it.

Fraser agrees with Frank that the Democratic Party can no longer reasonably claim to be the party of the working class or the “little man.” Instead, he argues, the Republican and Democratic parties now represent two different elite constituencies, each with its own culture and interests and modes of thought. Fraser describes today’s Republicans as the party of “family capitalism,” encompassing everyone from the mom-and-pop business owner on up to “entrepreneurial maestros” such as the Koch brothers, Linda McMahon and Donald Trump. The Democrats, by contrast, represent the managerial world spawned by modernity, including the big universities and government bureaucracies as well as “techno frontiersmen” like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. These are two different ways of relating to the world — one cosmopolitan and interconnected, the other patriarchal and hierarchical. Neither one, however, offers much to working-class voters.

One liberal whose reputation still seems to be up for grabs is Barack Obama, now on his way out of office and into the history books. Frank gives Obama a middling-to-poor grade — something in the D range, let’s say — for what he deems to be the president’s vague and rambling answer to the “social question.” Frank compares Obama unfavorably with Franklin Roose­velt, another Democratic president who inherited an economic crisis from his Republican predecessor. Roosevelt took advantage of the Great Depression to reshape American society in fundamental ways, introducing social welfare and labor protections that shifted real power into the hands of the middle and working classes. (Frank largely gives Roosevelt a pass on the New Deal’s own structural inequalities, including its exclusions of women and nonwhite workers.) Obama, by contrast, let the crisis go “to waste,” according to Frank, tweaking around the regulatory edges without doing anything significant to change the economic balance of power. “Our economy has been reliving the 1930s,” Frank mourns. “Why hasn’t our politics?”

Part of the answer may be that our economy did not, in fact, relive the 1930s. By the time Roosevelt won his first presidential election, the economy had been in free-fall for more than three years and the stock market had lost nearly 90 percent of its value. Three years into the Great Recession, the stock market had begun its climb toward record highs, though that prosperity failed to trickle down to the middle and working classes. Frank sees this uneven recovery as a tragedy rather than a triumph, in which Obama “saved a bankrupt system that by all rights should have met its end.” He says little, however, about what sort of system might have replaced it, or about what working-class voters themselves might say that they want or need. In a book urging Democrats to pay attention to working-class concerns, there are decidedly few interviews with working people, and a lot of time spent on tech conferences and think tanks and fancy universities.