I will intersperse my reactions, marked w/ my initials 'mbs'. The rest is Mark's review, set off in quotation marks.
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 . . . "
mbs: Protectionism and welfarism are loaded terminology. We could just as easily call it fair trade and an expansion of social insurance & the safety net. It works for me.
". . . 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. . . . "
mbs: I don't think he jettison's race/gender equality. He does propose a route to that goal that is certainly open to question.
" . . . 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. . . . "
mbs: there is a comment in the book to the effect that, contrary to some pundits, the U.S. is not so unique in terms of its diversity. The uniqueness or lack thereof is not so important to the main argument, which is that the American 'nation' is the cultural merger of groups with very diverse origins, and that, contrary to the racist & theocratic right, this nation is decidedly not limited to Europeans, Christians, or the 'white race.' Lind is as militant on the social constitutedness of race as anyone on this list. Maybe more so.
"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)."
mbs: I agree this is a crucial and problematic part of his argument.
"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. . . .
mbs: This is too strong. He does not quite spell out that the significance of race is declining, and let's not forget W.J. Wilson, a progressive black sociologist, wrote a book with that title. He is more forthright on the declining or stagnant effectiveness of anti-racist politics as presently constituted. His argument for how to solve race is not easy, but the argument for doing more of what is being done now is not easy either.
"Lind thinks that if not for the color-conscious policies of the overclass race would be of little significance today."
mbs: The conscious use of race for class war purposes is an important theme, and I would say anyone who illuminates the historical origins of this -- and Lind does -- is doing a service.
" 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."
mbs: It should be obvious that this Directive institutionalizes racialization that had been in process for some time prior. Lind is not stupid enought to think the Directive is the source of racism.
"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,"
mbs: nothing in Lind contradicts this.
"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"
mbs: what are we most interested in fighting, if not the use of race by the State for evil purposes? Once again, this exagerates.
"imagine that racial preferences could have a valuable role in ameliorating preexisting racial inequities, divisions which hinder the type of populist coalition Lind champions."
mbs: As I said above, in light of where we are, the prospect of preferences successfully reducing inequality should not be overstated either. Surely the 1970-2000 is the era of racial preferences in the U.S.; how much real progress can be attributed to them? The question deserves to be asked.
"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."
mbs: Keep in mind that by 'nationalism,' Lind means the following:
(Lind):"Liberal nationalism is the idea of America as a cultural melting pot, and ultimately a racial melting pot. The creation of a common national culture, from the cultures of Anglo- Americans, Africans, Algonquins, Dutch, Germans, Irish, Ashkenazim, Mexicans, and many others has already taken place. The extension of the melting pot from white Americans to Americans of all races is a slow process, but one that is indisputably occurring, despite the opposition of racists of all complexions."
{mbs: incidentally, this should blow out of the water any analogy of Lind's ideas to racism or nativism made by certain irresponsible hysterics, present company excepted. Lind's solution to racism is miscegenation. This may be a bit goofy, but it does not reflect racial prejudice to imagine the future well-being of the nation as depending on the fusion of races.)
"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."
mbs: this is a fair assertion, though asserting it doesn't mean he's wrong. It is a little loaded to say 'subordinate to social conservatism,' since what's at issue is replacing racial demands with class ones.
"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
mbs: Nobody doubts that racism, militarism, and capitalism are intertwined. And class can be a pretty radical basis for reconstructing society. As a general framework, liberal nationalism looks pretty good to me. It doesn't have to be the last word.