In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published The Leisure of the Theory Class. It popularized the terms conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Veblen, imbued with the austerity of his Norwegian immigrant parents, argued that the rich buy uselessly expensive things and indulge in uselessly expensive leisure activities to assert their superiority over the rest of society. Veblen’s strictures don’t describe American society today: Affluent people work more hours than those with average and low earnings, and increasingly dress casually, even if they’re returning now to downtown offices. But what an unprecedentedly large number of affluent Americans — defined in polls as white college graduates, living in fashionable city neighborhoods or in comfortable high-end suburbs — have been conspicuously consuming, in their leisure hours and even at work, is politics. And a particular kind of politics, one that was once called “liberal” but is now increasingly dubbed “progressive,” that seeks policies that supposedly will help minorities and the disadvantaged but in many cases are opposed by large percentages of blacks and Hispanics, in some cases almost as much so as by the very large percentage of those included in the enormous subgroup of non-college graduate whites. Rationales for these policies are readily supplied by progressive think tanks and academics in our nearly unanimously left-wing colleges and universities, by bloggers more or less loosely affiliated with each other, and by originally conservative but now progressive foundations. Theories out of...