> This question could actually be reduced or raised,
> depending on your point of view, to a serious
> policy-wonk discussion. For which purpose, I
> would recommend Michael Lind's discussion on
> the five races in the U.S. officially stipulated
> and incorporated into law and regulation by the
> U.S. Office of Management and Budget in "The
> Next American Nation."
Wow. I found this to be one of the more absurd parts of this book. Here's a review I wrote of it a while ago.
mark
Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New American Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. New York: Free Press, 1995.
According to the conservative apostate Michael Lind, present-day America is in the grips of plutocratic "overclass" who for their own benefit have undermined the economic security of the majority. The overclass has also forestalled any populist revolt from below through a highly effective divide-and-conquer policy of racial particularism, a strategy which has left the multiracial majority badly fractured over spurious "identity politics" issues. To rectify this situation and renew the American nation, Lind advocates a new "liberal nationalism" which would revive the old color-blind policy of integration and pursue economic equality through protectionist trade policies and welfare statism. While Lind's jeremiad against the ill-gotten gains of the overclass is at times exhilarating, his text represents the disturbing trend among some in the left/liberal camp of jettisoning the goal of racial and gender equality in the name of rediscovering a tempered class politics.
Lind's text is no ordinary polemic; unlike most of what the punditry produces, his work is actually informed by history. Unfortunately, Lind's narrative does not pass muster. Although he claims not to adhere to an "American exceptionalism" - the belief that American history is characterized by the painful but progressive extension of the universalist ideals of the Founding Fathers - his analysis is very much within the exceptionalist tradition. Essentially, Lind sees the defining dynamic of this country as the progressive incorporation of European immigrants and blacks within the national community. With the formation of the overclass in the 1950s and 1960s, this progressive trend toward a color-blind integrationism was supplanted by a schema of color-conscious preferences which balkanized the nation along racial and ethnic lines.
In this regard, the weakest aspect of Lind's text is his racial analysis. For instance, he opposes racial preferences and its supporting ideology of multiculturalism on both philosophical and pragmatic grounds (racial particularism contradicts a color-blind Americanism as well as fractures a nascent populist majority). This position is supported by faulty historical reasoning: undergirding his attack on preferences is his belief in the declining significance of race, if not the end of racism. Lind thinks that if not for the color-conscious policies of the overclass race would be of little significance today. For instance, he points to the Office of Management and Budget Statistical Directive 15, which he believes created almost out of thin air the five "official" races that one encounters on various federal forms. Suffice it to say for that many historically-minded observers, unencumbered by a teleological and exceptionalist understanding of racial relations in American history, race has a material base which is deeper than the policies of the federal government, and thus see little reason to triumph the virtual end of racism in American life. Unfortunately, Lind is loathe to acknowledge that race and racism would "still" be alive today without the color-conscious policies of the state. Hence, he cannot imagine that racial preferences could have a valuable role in ameliorating preexisting racial inequities, divisions which hinder the type of populist coalition Lind champions.
More helpful is the Next American Nation's class analysis. Lind champions diverse measures - from a renewed labor movement to increased social spending to restrictions on the mobility of capital (as well as on immigration) - as a means to close the income gap between the overclass and the rest of the nation. Yet the sine qua non of these reforms - a renewed sense of American nationalism - may prove to be unpalatable for many Americans. Lind's nationalism calls for the subordination of the demands of feminists, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities to the putative social conservatism of the populist majority. Any identity (or multiple identity) outside of a nationalist identity - such as a black feeling of "two-ness" that W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of - is dismissed as playing into the hands of the overclass.
Lind's "liberal nationalism" is not the answer to the challenges the United States will face in the twenty-first century. Perhaps this former conservative needs to hit the history texts with a more discerning eye. He would do well to reconsider the figure of Martin Luther King Jr., who was not the avatar of color-blind ideology and Americanism that Lind believes him to be. In the 1960s, King increasingly saw the problems of racism, militarism and capitalism to be intertwined, and called for the radical restructuring of the architecture of American society. Sadly, this book offers no such plan.
University of Virginia Mark Rickling