United We Should Stand

...World War II and the Cold War further strengthened Washington's hand...

...Identity politics is meekest conformity, masquerading as anarchic rebellion...

...Lind reveals the way the system of "legacy preference" allows these children to gain entry to universities attended by parents and relatives, no matter how mediocre their grades...

...Lind makes clear, though, that multiculturalism is less a threat to society than an insult to democracy: "Those conservatives who see an up-welling of radical individualism in today's identity politics are...

...The multiculturalism monstrosity came into being sometime around the late '60s and early '70s, in large part as a result of Federal education and affirmative action programs designed primarily to help black Americans...

...The Third Republic is rapidly producing a new class system resembling the Third World's...

...The same oligarchy is responsible for the "free market globalism" that has sent dollars and jobs fleeing to other parts of the world...

...which ushered in "Multicultural America...

...Yet the individual states, not the Federal government, remained the guardians of race relations, sexual mores and family rights...

...Lind demonstrates that far from functioning as a successful melting pot...

...This provocative, learned book could well become a classic...

...In this era the U.S...

...In The Next American Nation Michael Lind, a senior editor at the New Republic, is willing to examine head-on the evolution and current condition of the United States, a country rapidly losing its identity to the clamorous cult of multiculturalism...

...The Next American Nation concludes with a plea for a Fourth Republic—for a "trans-American national story" that would be "realist" in recognizing that America was founded upon conquest, "catastrophist" in seeing America as having progressed through such violent conflicts as the Civil War, and "idealist" in expecting better of the American people and their leaders...

...Far from being radically postmodern, identity politics is reminiscent of premodern feudal orders of status...

...Among its heroes are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roose-velts...

...American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers declared in 1905: "Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others...

...Reviewed by John Patrick Diggins Distinguished Professor of Histoiy...

...Today advocates of multiculturalism reject the idea of the melting pot or anything resembling a national community...

...At a time when American productivity is increasing, working-class wages are falling and executive salaries are soaring...

...Liberal nationalists also include "color-blind racial inte-grationists" descended from abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr...

...Most of this changed with the Civil Rights Revolution and the subsequent advent of the "Third Republic...

...But at the height of its prestige in the post-World War 11 years, America actually pursued a "vaguely egalitarian white melting pot nationalism" dominated by "managerial capitalists" mainly from prominent Northeastern families...

...By Bra-zilianization I mean not the separation of cultures by race, but the separation of races by class...

...An ironic outcome of the once-noble civil rights movement, multiculturalism is the Frankenstein of modern politics...

...One of Lind's many virtues is the historical perspective he brings to questions that require sustained analysis rather than demagogic fear-mongering...

...White immigrants, moreover, took jobs away from native-born blacks...

...industrialized, absorbed waves of immigrants, and came to be seen as the truly assimilationist country hailed by the "consensus" historians of the 1950s...

...The chief danger confronting the 21 st century United States is not Balkanization but what might be called Brazilianization...

...The Promise of Pragmatism " EVERY ONCE in a while an exceptional book by a nonacademic writer comes along that addresses issues American historians seem unwilling to face...

...Weber, it should be mentioned, told his students that if politicians must make compromises, it is up to the scholar to uncover them...

...It assumed authority over commerce as well as other economic areas, and under the New Deal introduced Social Security along with numerous welfare programs...

...The alliance that gave the lie to Euro-America's supposed melting pot ideals is one of the many scandals American historians have passed over in silence...

...Lind quotes Douglass: "White men are becoming house servants, cooks...

...Nonetheless, reading Lind on the American condition is like reading the young Walter Lippmann pondering the same subject after the turn of the century...

...Lind observes that some whites are now trying to be reclassified on grounds of distant ancestry...

...Those who assume multiculturalism is a passing fad bound to disappear as quickly as any other failed ideology will, I suspect, find Lind's brilliantly disturbing work almost Orwellian in its warnings about the future...

...American workers, not only the Klan and Southern racists, embraced white supremacy as a means of protection from Asian newcomers and blacks...

...author...

...The classification scheme was concocted in Richard M. Nixon's Administration in 1973, when Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Caspar W. Weinberger asked a Federal agency to draw up consistent rules of racial categories in order to fulfill quotas...

...The author's penchant for enlightened leadership and responsible government is welcome, but he scarcely acknowledges that the Hamil-tonian current in American thought has always lost out to the stronger mainstream of Jef fersonianism, with its animus against government and its giving priority to personal liberty over political duty...

...Those who consider the phenomenon in the light of the past may well conclude that it is the first political formation of the 20th century to infiltrate the very "system" it inveighs against and to bore from within the bowels of American bureaucracy...

...an] informal caste system in which most of those at the top of the social hierarchy are white, and most brown and black Americans are on the bottom—forever...

...mistaken...

...Indeed, for that reason, it has the support of what Lind calls the "Overclass," the white educated professionals who enjoy power and influence by dint of their credentials and income...

...Instead of a hierarchical ranking of races and genders, there is a horizontal distribution of separate-but-equal 'cultures...

...To use Max Weber's categories, the liberal nationalist lives "for" politics, not "off" it...

...From the late 18th to the mid-19th century we were an "Anglo-American nation...

...For the first time in American history, the rewards of politics depend on an official group definition, not on personal achievement...

...It is subculture collectivism, rather than society-wide collectivism, but just as anti-individualist...

...Lind has done precisely that...

...Lind calls himself a "liberal nationalist," a philosophy that he explains has its roots in the country's heritage but rejects white supremacy and Protestant-Christian hegemony...

...with that difference, the ideal of authenticity is a society as rigidly defined by race and gender as in the caste societies of the past...

...Neither the Overclass nor the affluent products of affirmative action have much sympathy for the plight of American labor...

...porters, stevedores, wood sawyers, brick-makers, and bankers, so that [free] blacks can scarcely find the means of subsistence...

...That development, astutely documented by Lind, suggests why history at the top is freighted with more significance than anything to be found in "history from the bottom up...

...Also altered was the behavior of the white elites, or their late 20th-century heirs, who abandoned the interclass compromise and took up the banner of racial inclusion...

...the Second Republic rested on an implicit interclass compromise, a collaboration between the white capitalist elite and the white working masses to support racial segregation and racist immigration restrictions...

...Instead, they say, we must understand that America consists of five permanently separate races: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian...

...The class-conscious Overclass will not stoop to denounce affirmative action because it fears identification with the working class...

...The children of the Overclass, meanwhile, are not threatened by affirmative action in terms of job opportunities and college admission...

...A la Hamilton, adherents think first of the public good and are more concerned about doing what is right than catering to the voter...

...Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson, all of whom believed in a strong nation-state and a viable middle class protected from the vicissitudes of an unregulated market economy...

...Legacy preference, he adds, is "one of the best-kept secrets of the American oligarchy," nothing less than "affirmative action for the white Overclass...

...He shows, too, how during much of the long-lasting Second Republic the national government grew enormously...

...This amounts to a new compromise between white elites and the black elites and feminists who benefit from affirmative action at the expense of hard-working, middle-class Americans and ghetto-stuck minorities...

...Historically, multiculturalism represents a reactionary return to aristocracy and the politics of privilege based upon hereditary claims...

...The new politics not only fails to challenge the American class system, but is dependent upon it...

...The virtues of victimhood quickly became apparent, and each nonwhite race pressed its own tale of woe...

...The "Second Republic" was a "Euro-American nation" that emerged after the Civil War and existed until 1957...

...Until recently, he points out, America defined itself in terms that helped to unify the country...

...This "First Republic" was based on language and culture, sources that fused various regional customs and traditions—as opposed to the exclusionary concepts of religion, race and ethnic identity...