Up From Conservatism. - book reviews

The title of Michael Lind's book, Up From Conservatism, refers to both Michael Lind's defection from the political right and his anxious hope that America, too, can be rescued from rightwing dominance.

Working first for the Heritage Foundation and William F. Buckley Jr., and then for Irving Kristol at National Interest, Lind was a rising star of the New Right.

Then, just when you would least have expected it, in the wake of the 1994 elections, he turned his back on his mentors and, in quick succession, took up senior editorial positions at Harper's and The New Republic.

Lind's surprise defection made him a celebrity, and afforded liberals and leftists some welcome news in tough times. However, even if Lind has become an antagonist of today's right--which we should appreciate--we must be careful about treating the enemy of our enemy as our friend.

The distance from neoconservatism to The New Republic is not great, but Lind created a grand canyon when he proceeded to author several articles directly attacking the movement that had nurtured him.

In The New Review of Books, he revealed the grand-conspiratorial and anti-Semitic thinking in the writings of Christian Coalition godfather Pat Robertson. In Dissent, he argued that intellectual conservatism was dead, showing how it had been done in by its own elite's corrupt, hypocritical, and opportunistic deference to creationists, homophobes, racists, and public-policy kooks. And in The New Republic, Lind, a Texan, decried how rich Southern reactionaries had taken over the Republican Party in a coup and were now promising to refashion the nation in the image of the old South, with its culture of racism and political economy of low taxes and lower wages.

Up From Conservatism expands upon these essays with an account of Lind's own sojourn in the ranks of the right. Calling for the Republicans to be stopped in 1996, Lind provides a devastating critique of their pseudo-populist "culture wars," showing how they serve to obscure their far more insidious class war. Lind also gives a clear warning of the menace represented by conservatives' willingness to truck with, succor, and legitimize the far right. Although Lind's work is not as original as he purports, his alarms should be heeded.

Given Lind's trajectory, should we expect him to turn up next in the pages of The Progressive or The Nation? There are moments when one can imagine it. Both in his first book, The Next American Nation, and here in the new one, Lind describes an America in which the rich--the "white overclass" that heads our corporate, public, and educational institutions--is getting steadily richer, and the middle and working classes are being made poorer. All of which leads him to issue a call for a revolutionary movement to (peacefully) overthrow the overclass.

In The Next American Nation, he spells out a vision of the new political movement that would unite "the ideal of the transracial melting pot with the tradition of social-democratic egalitarianism." His view of the good society--"a color-blind, gender-neutral regime of individual rights, combined with government activism promoting a high degree of substantive social and economic equality"--is clearly derived from traditions of the left.

Nevertheless, I would not expect to find Lind in The Progressive very soon. Lind disavows any interest in reinvigorating the left: He is in favor of "national liberalism" or the resurrection of what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "vital-center liberalism"--though Lind also indicates it might well include "one-nation conservatism." Lind says that he was a moderate Democrat in college, and claims that his own views never actually changed; what changed was the political world. He describes himself as merely having "wobbled slightly around the vital center."

Up From Conservatism is clearly no God That Failed or mea culpa. For example, Lind states without apology that mideighties Reaganism appealed to him because it offered the greatest chance to cultivate the vital center. Reaganism? And, he recollects that his "second thoughts began with the budget debate in 1990." The budget debate?

For all his talk of class warfare and racism, for all his readiness to appropriate significant elements of our tradition, Lind is no friend of the left. It's not just the snide remarks. Eager to portray vital-center liberalism as the only reasonable alternative to the prevailing power structure, he fabricates a history that either downplays the left's role in making a freer, more just, and more equal America--or damns it.

Lind glosses over the vital center's role in building up and maintaining the American Empire, a buildup that culminated in Vietnam. He neglects the left's radical-democratic contributions to labor and the campaigns for racial and gender equality. He doesn't even accord us the role of serving as the conscience of liberalism. He apparently would just as soon we withered away and died.

Lind attributes the success of the right to the failings of the left. Warming up with a nostalgic rendering of the "Golden Age" of national liberalism extending from FDR's New Deal, through Truman's Fair Deal, to LBJ's Great Society (but not including his War on Poverty), he charges the postwar left with threatening this tradition by being soft on the Soviets. Next, he blames a liberal-left and black takeover of the Democratic Party (1968 to 1972) for destroying national liberalism, turning vital-center intellectuals into neoconservatives and Reaganites, and alienating working-class whites--thus making them susceptible to rightwing populists. Finally, he blames the post-sixties liberal left for establishing a new "multicultural" regime committed to divisive racial designations and preferences. This regime, he says, has distracted attention away from the nation's growing class inequality.

By the way, despite Lind's success at revealing Robertson's anti-Semitism, Lind seems to have his own "Jewish problem." He finds it imperative to depict both the New Left generation and the New Right's neoconservative intellectuals and their children ("minicons") as primarily Jewish phenomena. The role of the Jews, he says, has been ethnically "unrepresentative." And what are we to make of this: "In opposing the Vietnam war, [the New Left Jewish radicals] were merely reenacting the opposition of their leftwing parents to the Korean War and (during the Popular Front period) to World War II, and the opposition of their radical grandparents to Woodrow Wilson and U.S. entry into World War I. The `rebellion' of the sixties radicals, in short, was entirely due to the tradition of the tiny immigrant subculture from which the New Left emerged"?

Although he claims to be concerned about the common people, Lind's politics are not only anti-left, they are also elitist. He all but ignores progressive popular struggles, while dwelling on the dangers of reactionary populism. Lind seems intent upon discounting or denigrating struggles from below not overseen by a vital-center elite of politicos and pundits. When Lind observes that every persuasion but national liberalism has its own magazine, one gets the idea that all he really is after is his own new weekly.

COPYRIGHT 1996 The Progressive, Inc.
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