The Vast Redneck Conspiracy

...And how did his popularity help Republican senatorial candidates prevail last year in Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Colorado...

...And don't forget Ross Perot, who accused the first President Bush of plotting to disrupt his daughter's wedding...

...But if he did that, Lind might have to admit that this alliance, which he finds so bizarre, was not entirely the product of hypocrisy and blind zealotry...

...The New York Times, in an editorial on the Trent Lott episode, had to admit, "No one has put more effort than George W. Bush into ending the image of the Republican Party as a whites-only haven...

...He has little good to say about the place his family has occupied with such stubbornness...

...The author writes from the fog of an obsession...

...But Michael Barone, co-editor of The Almanac of American Politics, says that in 2000, Bush ran even with Al Gore among suburbanites...

...Evidence of his malignant character is that he bought a ranch not among the peaceable, tolerant German Americans of Lyndon Johnson's idyllic Hill Country, but near Waco, "one of the centers of lynching in the United States" and a place whose history "has few parallels in the chronicles of human depravity...

...Lind, he tells us repeatedly, is a fifth-generation Texan who "was born, raised, and educated in Texas and never lived outside the state until I studied foreign policy in graduate school at Yale in the 1980s...

...For all the disagreement that many African Americans have with his policies, few can doubt Mr...

...Texas, Lind asserts, has been riven by a civil war of its own for generations, pitting those who prefer a plantation economy against those who want to join the-modern world, epitomized by computer tycoon Ross Perot...

...Makes you wonder why so many Yankees have picked up and moved there...

...Let me report that it was invented for Lind, who thinks anything worth stating is worth overstating...

...But we should keep in mind Lind's heroes...

...Bush's commitment to a multiracial America...

...You may take his arguments to be the conspiratorial ravings of an effete Easterner—particularly when you see the jacket blurb from Gore Vidal—but no...

...Lind knows how: Bush "grew up in what may very well have been, apartfrom black-belt counties in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, the most reactionary community in English-speaking North America"—the West Texas city of Midland...

...The state's wealth is the ill-gotten produce of "a primitive extractive economy," says Lind...

...Another is Bobby Ray Inman, who withdrew as Bill Clinton's nominee to be secretary of defense in a Queeg-like fit—claiming he was getting bad press because of a conspiracy hatched by Bob Dole and William Safire...

...Whatever thread ties those GOP victories together, it's not nostalgia for 01' Massa...

...How did he amass 50.4 million votes in 2000-3 million more than Bill Clinton ever got...

...Others, however, actually came to think much like the fundamentalists—including Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is credited with "sadistic authoritarianism...

...If those aren't credentials enough, he's related to Larry Hagman...

...I can only feel inadequate to the task of reviewing him, since people in my family are generally slothful about keeping track of ancestors...

...But most Americans, in their inexplicable blindness, have convincedthemselves that they actually approve of the job he is doing...

...role in Vietnam would reflect on the war's political repercussions at home...

...The fact that Lind omits is sitting there big as Dallas: Disenchanted liberals came together with old-fashioned conservatives in common disgust with the excesses of the Great Society, McGovernism, and the New Left during the 1970s...

...Lind is not one to be cowed by mere facts, which he often presents in such a way that their own mothers wouldn't recognize them...

...He doesn't explain the cultural geography that spawned scandal at Tyco (based in Exeter, N.H...

...Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida—though an exhaustive study by a consortium of eight major news organizations concluded that if the court had allowed the recount to proceed, Bush probably would have won...

...Lind has the bad luck to publish a book crowing that the president's "uncompromising conservatism cost the Republicans the Senate" just weeks after Bush's vigorous campaigning across the country helped restore the Senate to GOP control...

...Its upper classes share the "mentality of the Spanish conquistador, who dreamed of acquiring fabulous wealth by plundering precious metals rather than by patient effort...

...Its manufacturing productivity now surpasses the national average, which sounds almost modern...

...Are there women who think "shrill" is a sexist adjective...

...One is Lyndon Johnson, whose "paranoia" during his White House years, concluded biographer Robert Dallek, "raises questions about his judgment and capacity to make rational life and death decisions...

...Toward the end of the book, he lays out his own vision of America's future—which involves emptying out our metropolises by restricting immigration, adopting a "hydrogen-based national energy network," encouraging people to migrate into the underpopulated middle of the country, and nudging farmers to give up tilling the soil to become "part-time wildlife stewards...

...He says Bush was installed because the U.S...

...But this shimmering Arcadia can be built only "once the counter-revolution of Southern conservatism in the United States is permanently defeated...

...Primitive...

...He is tormented by the idea that the presidential election of 2000 was not just a victory for George W. Bush and the Republican Party, but a terrifying triumph of the most sinister forces of the president's home base...

...You didn't think he just liked the property, did you...

...IN...

...You'd think they'd agree with Union General Philip Sheridan, who said that if he owned Hell and Texas, he'd rent out Texas and live in Hell...

...Worse still, I gather that in the time since I left to go off to college in 1972, the whole state has undergone a grotesque transformation that makes it about as livable as Calcutta during monsoon season...

...The result, he promises, would be "a twenty-first century version of the decentralist utopia of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Lewis Mumford, and Frank Lloyd Wright: a post-agricultural Plains in which wilderness preserves alternate with small towns and federal research bases, which, connected by hundreds of small airports, are home to telecommuting professionals or well-paid service workers...

...If Lind had gotten out of his native state at a younger age, he might have discovered that Texans didn't invent wickedness and are no more devoted to it than the rest of humanity...

...If Bush is so far out of the mainstream, how did he get half the Hispanic vote and a quarter of the black vote in his last race for governor...

...He indicts the GOP for becoming "the party of the countryside and small towns, in a predominantly urban and suburban America...

...As for that business about its "extractive economy," Texas's economic growth in the 1990s—when a certain former oilman occupied the governor's mansion—was concentrated not in oil but in such sectors as high-tech manufacturing, computer software, and transportation...

...We've been in Texas for a long spell is all I can say for sure...

...The first President Bush, Lind notes, bought a house in Maine because he "preferred not to live in the barbaric place that provided him with his fortune...

...The capture of the "vast power of the federal apparatus by Southern reactionaries and their allies," he says, is a threat to America and the world...

...That's why Lind's hero Ross Perot hated the Bushes "the way that Juan Peron, another modernizing tribune of the masses with a military background, once hated the Anglophile oligarchs of the Buenos Aires Jockey Cliib...

...Lind, not so easily gulled, insists that, on the contrary, Bush is the natural leader of "the party of Jefferson Davis...

...You think there's something in the water down there...

...In any case, he combines Chomsky's lighthearted charm with Ivins's taste for nuance and subtlety...

...One hundred and thirty-eight years after Appomattox, he asserts, we have a president who embodies the base principles of the Confederacy...

...If I was not there, I know a lot of people who were, or who were told what happened by their predecessors...

...By the year 2000," he writes with his ineffably light touch, "a Frankensteinian operation stitched the bodiless head of Northeastern neoconservatism onto the headless body of Southern fundamentalism...

...You would think an author who has written a book defending the U.S...

...Like much of what goes before, his conclusion suggests the early stages of dementia...

...Most of the neocons, he says, were amoral opportunists interested in any route to power...

...Lind finds profound significance in the fact that Enron and WorldCom were located in Texas and Mississippi, blaming their larcenous ways on the South's tradition of aristocratic buccaneering...

...This is the toxic culture that produced George W. Bush, "the most rigidly dogmatic conservative ideologue in the White House since before the Great Depression...

...Growing up in Austin in a politically connected family, Lind claims "an advantage over other scholars in sifting fact from fiction in controversies about the past in Texas...

...He detests the "Anglo-Celtic Southerners" who dominate the state for slaughtering the Indians, imposing a violent and militaristic culture marked by lintellectual and political cowardice," and disdaining thrift and hard work...

...Arthur Andersen (Chicago), Salomon Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch (New York), Global Crossing (Madison, N.J...

...As for political connections—well, my cousin once got elected to the school board...

...or Qwest (Denver...

...Lind occasionally tries to be less negative...

...Adelphia Communications (Coudersport, Pa...

...The entire Bush family is located on the side of the bad guys...

...Readers will trudge through chapter after chapter like parched travelers in the desert, searching in vain for a witty remark or a graceful sentence...

...Lind depicts Bush as a radical right-winger and unreconstructed Southerner whose policies are at odds with the views of most Americans...

...Judging strictly from his prose, Lind appears to be the unacknowledged product of an illicit encounter between Noam Chomsky and Molly Ivins...

...It might even make sense...

...It doesn't occur to Lind that an argument that leads to praise of a notorious Latin American caudillo is an argument that might benefit from a bit more thought...

...How does a Connecticut-born son of the Eastern establishment, who got his education at Andover, Yale, and Harvard, happen to lay claim to the mantle of the Ku Klux Klan...

...Almost everything that comes out of Texas seems to be bad, and almost everything bad seems to come from Texas...

...About the only people whom Lind dislikes as much as Texans are East Coast neoconservatives, who are castigated for daring to find common ground with evangelical Christians and Southern Republicans...