anchor: Liberals have been like the pre-Civil War Whigs, at least as rendered by Louis Hartz in his classic Liberal Tradition in America . The Whigs kept seeing the proles through the lens of Europe's old feudal societies, imagining that America's lower orders wanted to seize property rather than acquire it.
positive: The Whigs framed things like in the feudal societies.
negative: The Whigs framed things like in the industrial societies.