The Limitations of a Neo-Nationalist

MICHAEL LIND IS A STRANGE MAN. He advocates miscegenation but calls for the abolition of affirmative action. He argues that the United States is less free and democratic than the rest of the industrialized West yet presents himself as an unabashed American nationalist. He maintains that the three greatest heroes in American history are Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He claims to present no less than "the most detailed description that has appeared in print" of the present American "third republic" run by an oligarchic "white overclass" and a culturally hegemonic "multicultural left." And, then, how many former protegés of William F. Buckley have become darlings of the American left? Yet what is strangest of all about Lind's young career is that the message of his books isn't strange at all. His political program include little more than economic protectionism, campaign finance reform, and a welfare state. Underneath all the eccentricities and self-aggrandizing bluster Lind is nothing more than a nationalist social democrat. This is why the Michael Lind phenomenon of the past two years is so puzzling. Perhaps his rapid rise to fame was due in large part to his timing. Having established himself as an up-and-coming reactionary under Buckley's tutelage and as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Lind experienced a change of heart sometime around the 1994 elections.

In the winter of 1995 he published an article in Dissent in which he declared his break from the right and denounced the hijacking of the Republican Party by the likes of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan. Perhaps the left, including the editors of Dissent, should have thought twice about rushing to embrace Lind, since the article (and his later book, Up from Conservatism) argues that American conservatism lost its way after the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s. But it appears that following the ascendancy of the Gingrichites, Lind was simply too attractive for the Dissenters to pass up. From there Lind set out to build a new career as the leading American apostate intellectual.

Shortly after the Dissent article Lind published The Next American Nation, which to many represented further proof that he had traveled light years from his intellectual origins. In the summer of 1995, Lind's name was everywhere. Reviews of the book appeared in nearly every mainstream and left journal. Aside from the expected dismissals in The National Review and Commentary and assorted criticisms of the book's specific proposals, most of the reviews hailed The Next American Nation as a profound and provocative contribution to American political thought. In The New York Review of Books Alan Ryan called it "a splendid jeremiad." Scott Malcolmson, writing in the Village Voice, castigated Lind for his attack on affirmative action but nonetheless labeled him a revolutionary and "our first notable apostate from neoconservatism." Even Christopher Hitchens got into the act, writing an almost entirely uncritical piece in The New York Times Book Review.

What is dismaying about the liberal-left reception of The Next American Nation is that hardly anyone took on Lind's central argument that American national culture should be celebrated, preserved, and sealed off from the rest of the world. In the future he proposes, "the nation-dividing mixture of racial preference plutocratic politics and free-market capitalism that defines the politics of Multicultural America would be replaced by a nation-uniting synthesis of color-blind individualism in civil rights, equal voting power, and social market capitalism." He wishes to unite the nation around what he sees as a common culture of language, "folkways," and historical knowledge. To protect this common American culture, Lind proposes the abolition of racial preference policies, radical restrictions on immigration, and a "social tariff" against U.S. companies that move production abroad. Most reviewers, even leftists with an internationalist bent, failed to see how these central conservative assumptions underlay Lind's entire project.

To their credit, several reviewers on the left take a skeptical stance toward many of Lind's proposals. Eric Foner, writing in In These Times, flails away at Lind's racial politics, particularly his assumption "that declaring the nation color-blind" by doing away with affirmative action "will make it so." Foner also challenges Lind's top-down view of history and politics, something the born-again liberal no doubt brought with him from the Heritage Foundation. "Lind sees the evolving definition of American nationality as a set of ideas imposed by elites, rather than being continually contested at all levels of society," Foner writes. Foner's criticisms are devastating, yet they don't do justice to the coherence of Lind's thought. The book is presented as an assortment of ramblings by a sort-of conservative, sort-of liberal political novice.

Malcolmson, while more approving than Foner, devotes a similarly disproportionate amount of space to Lind's stand against affirmative action and racial preference policies. He sees Lind's obsessions as products of his age. "He is very much of his (and my) generation in his preoccupation with race and his acceptance of white racism as central to American history," Malcolmson writes, leaving unmentioned Lind's primary preoccupation, American nationalism.

Hitchens, in his review of The Next American Nation, seems to have lost every vestige of the democratic, socialist internationalism that animated so much of his writing. He approvingly compares the book with John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, celebrates its call for "an update of the New Deal," and echoes Lind's paranoid attack on multiculturalism, which "may very well metamorphose into an ugly tribal negation of itself." Surprisingly, Hitchens offers no critique of Lind's idea of a common American national culture.

Even Ellen Willis, whose review in The Nation is the best of the left critiques, fails to trace Lind's stealth conservatism to its source. She rightly calls The Next American Nation "warmed-over Daniel Bell: liberal in politics, socialist (sort of) in economics, authoritarian in culture." Willis raises a host of important questions about Lind's politics, and, more important, the "unholy alacrity" with which leftists embraced the erstwhile Republican. She faults him for exaggerating the power of the multicultural left, his dismissal of feminism, and his goofy cultural analysis of the white "overclass." Willis also questions the breadth of Lind's notion of American culture and asserts that American workers need an international labor movement, not nationalism.

BUT ALL THESE REVIEWERS FAIL TO UNDERSTAND LIND on his own terms. The Next American Nation is not just an odd assortment of racialist history, neo-liberal policy positions and screwy cultural analyses. It contains a central, unifying argument, one that makes all his secondary points conservative and unworthy of the left's praise. Yes, he calls for a stronger labor movement, but his only strategy to strengthen the movement is to restrict immigration and penalize runaway corporations. Been there, done that. Why not a militant, international, political brand of unionism? Because that would mean a massive social movement that would divide the American nation. Many leftists, myself included, are skeptical about the progressive potential of affirmative action. Lind, on the other hand, opposes it not because it forestalls a more radical black movement against inequality, but because it sets Americans against one another. And it is hardly surprising that Lind ignores feminism in his survey of American history and mockingly dismisses feminists in the rest of the book as "that other oppressed minority, white women." After all, how could he countenance a movement that challenges the patriarchal family, the very foundation of American national unity?

Lind's nationalism soils every element of his book. Since social movements are ruled out as agents of change because of their divisive effects on the nation, Lind relies on the elites to reconstruct American society. He wants to dismantle the ghetto and relocate poor minorities to the suburbs. Who will do this? Because of the debilitating effects of the culture of poverty, "referring the problem to the black community is not an answer." So naturally, the problem has to be referred to the elites: "If there is to be a liberal nationalist counter-elite, capable of rallying the leaderless Trans-America majority and opposing the white overclass, it would be most likely to coalesce around Congress and the military." As Foner points out, Lind's top-down perspective is especially evident in his historical sections. There, he informs us that the "leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution" included Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson!

And finally, one has to wonder why leftists wouldn't be repelled by the idea of promoting American culture in the first place. Lind's description of that culture is, of course, highly selective. It includes "the plain just-folks style" but not the anti-intellectualism, "the dislike of ostentation" but not the monuments of capitalist megalomania found in every major city, soul food and jazz but not the soul-crushing shopping malls and faceless suburbs that dominate the American landscape. Lind claims to despise the free market while celebrating a market culture.

Surely nationalism can be and has been a progressive force, usually as a mobilizing ideology against imperial domination. But as a product of this capitalist empire, one has to wonder just how progressive it can be.

Contents of No. 23