> Michael Lind makes use of Fischer in, "The Next American Nation."
>
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19990901faessay1010/michael-lind/civil-war-by-
> other-means.html
I think that Lind is a useful writer in some ways. For those unfamiliar with him, he was a protege of Wm. F. Buckley and used to edit "The National Interest," where Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" claptrap was first published. For a time, he was sort of the boy wonder of inside-the-beltway conservatism. Eventually, apparently disgusted by the company he was keeping, he broke with the right. No leftist, he now considers himself a "vital center" liberal.
Lind's book _Up from Conservatism_ (the title is a swipe at Buckley's _Up from Liberalism_ of 40 or 50 years ago) is an entertaining, often scathing attack on the US right, all the more convincing coming from a former insider.
Lind shows in great detail what I think cannot be emphasized enough: that the shift of the US political spectrum to the right over the past 30 years did not just happen, but came about as a result of a carefully planned, highly coordinated strategy orchestrated by political intellectuals, business organizations like the Business Roundtable, GOP operatives, and right-wing foundations. It's a strategy that Irving Kristol has publically called "Gramscianism in reverse." The right sought to change US politics by establishing their cultural hegemony.
Lind is especially scathing on the role of conservative "intellectuals" in the transmission belt. He writes:
"...the neoconservative network orchestrated by the foundations resembled an old-fashioned political patronage machine, or perhaps one of the party writers' or scholars' guilds in communist countries. The purpose of intellectuals was to write essays and op-eds attacking liberals and supporting official Republican party positions Where the official position of the Republican party was not yet decided, debate was permitted. But once the party line had been adopted, any conservative scholar who questioned the new dogma in print would find himself the victim of a whisper campaign about his 'liberalism.' The party line tended to be adopted at periodic 'conservative summits'..."
"The communication between the Republican party and the conservative editors and journalists...has tended to be one-way. That is to say, Republican politicians would adopt a position in response to pressure from this or that constituency--corporations seeking bigger depreciation allowances, the anti-abortion movement, the NRA--and the intellectuals would undertake to provide scholarly sounding rationalizations for the ... Republican line. There was never any debate, among conservative intellectuals, on the adoption of a strict anti-abortion position as the 'conservative' position. That position was dictated by the religious right to the Republican party, which in turn dictated it to conservative scholars and journalists, via a few editors and program officers..."
"...there is no longer an independent conservative intellectual movement in the United States. What passes for intellectual conservatism is little more than the subsidized propaganda wing of the Republican party. Public dissent on matters of concern to the US business elite--most notably, on matters of taxation and public spending--is not tolerated."
So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Which prompts some further thoughts on the "Policy Review" article that Kelley, for other reasons, called our attention to recently. But that's enough typing for one day.
Jacob Conrad