Michael Lind's The Next American Nation
Rorty, Richard
THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION: THE NEW NATIONALISM AND THE FOURTH AMERICAN REVOLUTION, by Michael Lind. The Free Press, 1995. 436 pp. $25.00. One of the most useful things intellectuals can do is to...
...I hope that in his next book Lind will get off his hobby-horse and spend less time demonstrating, as he repeatedly and successfully does in this book, that opening up the overclass to token members of racial minorities has served the oligarchy's purposes...
...Then there will be no American nation worth the name...
...This lack of balance is most evident in his periodization of American history...
...If everybody who wanted to could get hired and stay hired, then the "last hired, first fired" tradition, which has kept African-Americans poor, would probably vanish, as would the culture of the urban ghetto...
...He exposes the Republicans' disparaging use of the term "class warfare" as the propaganda strategy it is—a strategy used by a class whose war on those below has grown steadily more brutal, and whose members are encouraging each other to take pride in being callous...
...The greatest weakness of the book is its awkward attempt to put these two trends on the same footing...
...This was the directive that announced the five-race schema, created the "diversity" industry, and has bedeviled hiring decisions ever since...
...Much of the content of Lind's book can be inferred from a single sentence: "The two most important trends in American society since the 1960s—the proliferation of racial preferences, and the decline in average wages and benefits— both serve the collective interests of the white overclass...
...This class—the one to which I, and many of my fellow academics, belong—thinks nothing of buying groceries without checking the ads for sales, ordering new clothes from L. L. Bean whenever the old ones wear out, jumping on airplanes to go on vacation, and checking into Holiday Inns in exotic places...
...His case for this repeal is based on moral principle, rather than economic consequences...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...But Lind is not content to put off repeal of affirmative action legislation, and the inauguration of color blindness, until these idyllic conditions obtain...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Women who wanted work could find it...
...Any populist revolt in America will be from the right, and will be made up of people who get their understanding of our social problems from Rush Limbaugh...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...q 112 • DISSENT...
...He describes this overclass as "the first truly national oligarchy in American history...
...I hope that he will spend all his time on income distribution...
...Lind has a relatively easy job making racial preferences look ridiculous as long as he keeps attention focused on O.M.B...
...My class is becoming increasingly unable to imagine how the other four-fifths lives...
...But this is only because, if we ever get social and economic equality, we may not have to worry much about race and gender...
...The Next American Nation is oddly unbalanced, for Lind devotes as much space and energy to denouncing affirmative action as he does to warning us against the growing power of the new oligarchy...
...But Lind would not have found it so easy to praise color blindness if he had zeroed in on the situation of African-Americans, and had asked himself whether the civil rights movement would have had much lasting effect without preferential hiring for blacks...
...Here is a sample: "Meanwhile, behind the Potemkin village facade of multi-cultural America, with its five separatebutequal official races and its decorative racially authentic folk art, the American oligarchy is quietly cannibalizing the remnants of mid-century New Deal America to construct its own enclave society, an America-within-America, linked to the global economy and detached from the destiny of the American middle class...
...In Multicultural America, however, the majority is fragmented while the elite is unified...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...But Lind focuses his polemic more sharply than has anyone else...
...Asian or Pacific Islander...
...This word has quickly come into extensive use, and has been very helpful in defining the central problem that America now faces...
...Lind defines "the white overclass" as "a small group consisting of affluent white executives, professionals, and rentiers, most of them with advanced degrees, who with their dependents amount to no more than a fifth or so of the American population...
...SPRING • 1996 • 111 Books of these things coincides with the rise of the overclass...
...Society is constantly throwing up problems that are too diffuse and too complex to grasp until someone comes up with a short, snappy way of describing what is going on—one that, as soon as it is heard, strikes one as exactly right...
...When one remembers that throughout our history every new wave of immigrants, including the Hispanics and Asians, automatically took precedence over, and jobs away from, the descendants of black slaves, it is not clear that affirmative action was as unnecessary as Lind thinks it...
...White...
...But when he tries to convince us that Euro-America was succeeded by "Multicultural America (1972present)"—the Third American Republic—he is less successful...
...It is hard to know whether they are right, but Lind's vision of a morally pure movement of the sixties being corrupted in the seventies by leftist ideologues and schematizing bureaucrats seems a bit simplistic...
...Black...
...Yet this very moral simplicity distracts liberals from more complicated, but ultimately more fateful, questions about immigration policy, medical insurance, GATT, NAFTA, home-mortgage deductions, minimum-wage levels, and the like...
...Most of that price will, as usual, be paid by poor black people rather than politicians or intellectuals...
...The resolution of these issues will determine the outcome of the culture wars as well as of the class war...
...It will take a lot of class consciousness to defeat the oligarchy, and Lind makes a good case for saying that we will not get sufficient class consciousness if we continue to insist on racial consciousness...
...He makes a good case for saying that the "First American Republic," which he calls "Anglo-America (1789-1861)," was succeeded, thanks to waves of immigration, by a Second: "Euro-America (1875-1957...
...Take care of class, and race and gender might well take care of themselves...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...The disappearance, for the majority of American high school graduates, of the hope of doing either A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Even though Lind often rides his hobby-horse—multiculturalismmuch too hard, he is certainly right in reiterating what Daniel Bell and others have pointed out: that our attention is being distracted from potentially fatal economic disaster by "culture wars...
...Once this failure of imagination becomes complete, we shall indeed be two nations...
...Office of Management and Budget] Statistical Directive 15 a document that he identifies as "part of the secret history of the racial preference revolution" and implausibly claims to be "just as important in modern American life as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...
...The best pages of Lind's book are those in which he puts the topic of racial preferences to one side and paints a portrait of the overclass...
...There is a clean-cut, simple, prejudice-vs.-elementary human decency aspect to many of these so-called "cultural" issues...
...This portion of The Next American Nation is one of the finest sociopolitical jeremiads I have read in years, and I hope that what Lind says there becomes part of our conventional political wisdom...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Lind may well be right, however, that there is no hope of social and economic equality unless the blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" can be convinced that the enemies of the oligarchy are their friends...
...Lind has to play down the horror and the bitterness of black-white relations in the United States in order to make color blindness sound as attractive as he does...
...Many black scholars think that it would not...
...He may also be right that the abandonment of racial preferences is the price that liberal politicians will have to pay to regain the allegiance of those blue-collar voters...
...One of the most useful things intellectuals can do is to invent a term or phrase that floodlights a new social situation...
...Why, one wonders, must our generals—Colin Powell among them— keep on pretending that the knowledge that a certain corporal is homosexual would unnerve an entire infantry company...
...It was this directive that made the Samoan junior executive or the Navajo assistant professor a prize beyond rubies...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...With economic inequality continually rising, American liberals, instead of constantly shouting economic statistics from the housetops, are expending a huge proportion of their energy on abortion, gays in the military, separation of church and state, and the like...
...Marx's term "reserve army of the unemployed" spoke volumes, even to those who had not read the books in which it was first used...
...His description of that overclass, and of the inequities that enrich it, is brilliant political polemic...
...According to this schema we Americans come in five flavors: American Indian orAlaskan Native...
...His chapters on the formation and development of these two "Republics" are intelligent, informed, and plausible...
...Because he views Multicultural America as "a grotesque synthesis of New Left and New Right," and because he wants to be even-handed in criticism of both, he has to be as indignant about racial hiring quotas as he is about steady immiseration...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1.You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...But it may have to be paid nonetheless...
...Trans-America"—described as "a colorblind, gender-neutral regime of individual rights" combined with "government activism promoting a high degree of substantive social and economic equality"—is a good American utopia...
...He is certainly right in suggesting that the "politics of identity" has made it a lot more difficult for all of us to get economic inequality in focus...
...Michael Lind, a young ex-conservative, has introduced the term "overclass" into our political vocabulary...
...Lind goes on to say that "In any other democracy, the majority would have coalesced by now in a populist rebellion...
...110 • DISSENT Books Much of what Lind says about growing inequality has been said before, by such authors as Robert Reich, Herbert Gans, and Edward Luttwak...
...Thanks to the consciousness raising undertaken by the women's movement, it is likely that, given those idyllic economic conditions, women who wanted to stay home with the kids could do so without worrying about how to buy food and medicine for them...
...So his book combines high-minded claims about the unAmericanness of racial preferences, of the sort made familiar by the Republicans, with down and dirty stories about how the new oligarchy is raking off all the money...
...A look at the wages offered in the classified columns of your local newspaper will convince you that there is little chance that a pair of high-school graduates working full time (as, for example, security guard and keyboard operator) will ever be able to buy a house, much less send their children to college...
...If there were lots of good, satisfying, well-paid jobs for everybody, then it is likely that, thanks to the changed climate produced by the civil rights movement, raSPRING • 1996 • 109 Books cial discrimination in employment would gradually disappear...
...For if things get bad enough, there will be a populist rebellion, led by people who will make Ross Perot look wise and tolerant...
...and Hispanic...
...When Lind urges that this Third Republic should not outlast the century, but should be succeeded by a Fourth ("TransAmerica"), one feels that periodization has gotten out of hand...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
