Redefining the Vital Center
GEWEN, BARRY
Redefining the Vital Center Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America By Michael Lind Free Press. 295 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review,"preview...
...Today's conservatives run for office as populists, and then govern on behalf of the plutocracy...
...A fossil of the Lincoln-to-Eisenhower era," declares Lind...
...the Progressive, Henry A. Wallace...
...Thus the Democratic Party supports a laissez-faire economy, free trade, high levels of immigration, and balanced budgets, and is suspicious of organized labor...
...Although much of Up From Conservatism reads like a polemic, it does not have a polemic's superficiality...
...They have used the thousands of activists of the far Right as shock troops to pursue policies that in fact work against the economic interests of the Republican Party's populist wing...
...The 59 delegates who replaced them included only three Polish-Americans and a single Italian-American, and one of the replacements was a black activist named Jesse Jackson...
...His final break with conservatism in general occurred after Pat Buchanan gave his divisive culture-war speech at the 1992 Republican Convention...
...The people trying to keep the party from flying apart are Right-wing intellectuals, primarily the neoconservatives...
...No one on the magazine claimed to be a segregationist, but neither, Lind points out, did any National Review contributor advocate civil rights at the state level...
...In place of old-fashioned free-thinking conservatives like Peter Viereck, who opposed McCarthy-ism during the 1950s, we get Norman Podhoretz apologizing for Pat Robertson's anti-Semitism because he is pro-Israel...
...Since then he has published The Next American Nation, and so many articles in so many places that it has often seemed you could not open a magazine or newspaper without tripping over his byline...
...By turning a commitment to civil rights into a commitment to identity politics and affirmative action, they have alienated the party's core constituency and provided invaluable ammunition to the Dixiecrat Republicans...
...One is the far Left perspective of the Henry Wallace wing, a line that has been carried forward by the McGovernites and the New Left in their battles against "Cold War liberals...
...My political views have scarcely changed since college...
...And he adds that "in the absence of a Truman, it is necessary to support moderate Thomas Dew-ey-style conservatism (today's neoliber-alism) against Right-wing radicalism of the Strom Thurmond variety...
...In effect, says Lind, the Republican Party, which beginning with Richard M. Nixon set out to capture the South, has itself become a captive of the South...
...Their success, Lind writes, has been "a disaster of the first order" for the Democrats...
...The other legacy Lind cites is, of all things, the liberal Republicanism of Thomas Dewey, which in large degree finds its embodiment in Bill Clinton...
...One of the book's most telling sections briefly recounts the Republican Party's revival of Southern racial attitudes?what Lind calls "a tale mostly of evil and expediency...
...So much for free-thinking and disinterestedness...
...he asked his audience on another occasion...
...Lind variously describes them aspropagandistic, dogmatic, cynical, opportunistic, intellectually sterile, casuistic, even Leninist...
...the Republican, Thomas E. Dewey...
...Fair enough, but in this book he rips into the neoconservatives with a passion, indeed a savagery, that suggests a kind of unrequited love...
...Its analysis of our present political situation is assured, enlightening and thought-provoking...
...they march in lockstep, showing few signs of independence, and their creed is "no enemies on the Right...
...Lind sees no prospect of the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted reaching out to these voters any time soon...
...What is more disturbing about the book is a certain tone that creeps in from time to time...
...Neither wing of the contemporary Democratic Party appeals to them...
...Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review,"preview editor WITH THIS BOOK Michael Lind confirms his position as one of the most astute political commentators of our time...
...Its Congressional leadership comes entirely from below the Mason-Dixon line...
...Lind returns to the election of 1948 for his basic framework, finding in the four main Presidential candidates—the Democrat, Harry S. Truman...
...It is about as vague conceptually as that favorite whipping boy of the neo-conservatives, the "new class" (a construct that Lind gleefully takes apart in one of his chapters...
...Lind "experienced an epiphany of sorts" when he saw Republican moderates, including his own neoconservative colleagues, co-zying up to Buchanan, Robertson and the rest of the far Right...
...Its views on the Constitution and the Supreme Court derive from the thinking of John C. Calhoun...
...In the 1950s and early '60s Buckley and the writers around the National Review genteelly opposed civil rights laws as a violation of states rights...
...The most faithful Republican voters today are the kind of conservative white Southerners who voted for Strom Thurmond in 1948," and "Pat Robertson is the single most important kingmaker in the Republican Party...
...Such a party would call for higher taxes on the rich, propose replacing welfare with workfare, suggest means-testing for entitlements, support a strong but trimmed-down military, pursue universal health care, favor immigration restrictions, stand for outlawing affirmative action, urge free college education for qualified students, advocate national standards in education, demand a limit to the role of money in politics, take a second look at the dogma of free trade, acknowledge the legality of abortion, and back antidiscrimination laws for gays and lesbians...
...Now back with the Democrats, he says that "my political journey has been far less dramatic than a switch from Left to Right...
...Ultimately, though, he hopes for a resurgent Democratic Party in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert H. Humphrey, Henry M. Jackson, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr...
...There are, of course, Republicans from regions other than the South or such Southern-influenced localities as Orange County, California...
...Lind first came to prominence about a year and a half ago with articles in Dissent and the New York Review of Books on Pat Robertson and the Religious Right...
...Although he voted for George Bush in 1988, because Bush's "desperate pandering to the far Right repelled me," he supported Bill Clinton in 1992...
...They are "up for grabs," ready to respond to any candidate who abjures identity politics and advocates some brand of egalitarian economic nationalism...
...With an eye for the historically resonant detail, Lind relates how, in 1972, Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Chicago Democrats were thrown out of the Democratic Convention for not including enough blacks and women...
...Charles Murray has provided a patina of scientific legitimacy for 19th-century notions of genetic and racial inferiority, and Rush Limbaugh has given voice to blatant racism: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back," he told one black listener...
...Given the breadth and the energy of Lind's analysis, however, these are relatively small complaints...
...At college in Texas during the 1970s Lind was a moderate Democrat, but like a large number of others he was turned off by the McGovernite New Left that came to dominate the Democratic Party...
...and the Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond—intellectual currents that have continuing significance...
...I am not quite certain what either term means, but I am pretty sure that both apply to me...
...By the late 1980s he was working at the conservative Heritage Foundation as a protege of William F. Buckley Jr...
...He maintains that "for the indefinite future, national liberals will have to choose between the existing political alternatives: Left liberalism, neoliberal-ism, and conservatism...
...It has given the country a second Republican Party (though one without a powerful Right wing), and has left vast numbers of traditional Democrats—middle-and lower-class, white, generally Catholic, patriotic, economically liberal but socially conservative—without a political home...
...Lind has a penchant for attributing nefarious motives to those with whom he disagrees and seeing patterns of behavior that may not be conspiracies, exactly, but have rather too much in common with the fantasies of paranoid populism...
...Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson...
...I have gone from the Right wing of liberalism to the Left wing of conservatism and back...
...This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems...
...The overclass idea marred Lind's previous volume, and it does not help this one, either...
...A novel and an epic poem about the Alamo are on the way...
...Today, however, in and around the Republican Party, hostility to blacks is out in the open...
...Nixon made coded appeals to the George Wallace backers and used affirmative action as a wedge to divide blacks and labor...
...Ronald Reagan, who said he was not a racist, fed prejudices with his fraudulent stories about a black "welfare queen...
...Lind is quick to praise principled conservatives like the libertarians, who want less government not only in social programs but in defense matters and abortion decisions as well...
...One is inclined to say that he has gone too far in branding the neoconservatives political hacks—there are serious and honorable thinkers among them, after all—but he makes it hard to argue against him when he trots out the now-notorious comment of Irving Kristol from the 30th anniversary issue of the Pu blic Interest: "Among the core social scientists around the Public Interest there were no economists...
...As for the rest, they have joined in a devil's pact with the far Right...
...At most, I have wobbled slightly around the vital center...
...Pat Buchanan's primary campaign earlier this year, Lind points out, threatened to rum this fault-line into a full-scale earthquake...
...Lind shrewdly explains how the business interests of the Eastern Establishment, those Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans who made their peace with the welfare state and the labor movement in the '50s and '60s, have reverted to a brutal laissez-faire philosophy?a shift of historic proportions"—in the face of growing competition from the global economy...
...This is the man, Lind reminds us, whom William J. Bennett called "possibly our greatest living American...
...Its ties to evangelical Protestantism are bringing redneck sentiments out of the bushes (the Reverend James Robison, who gave the opening prayer at the 1984 Republican Convention, has said that an "anti-Semite is someone who hates Jews more than he's supposed to...
...Surprisingly, in Lind's view, it is Truman, the winner of that election, whose influence is now weakest, and Thurmond, seemingly the most ephemeral of the four, who has had the greatest impact on our time...
...It is not clear that this list is entirely in the tradition of, say, Truman or Scoop Jackson, or would necessarily appeal to the people Lind wants to bring back to the Democrats...
...On issue after issue, Lind provides incriminating facts and figures...
...But sympathetic readers will understand what he is getting at—and they are free to draw up their own lists...
...He is overly fond of words like "elite" and "plutocracy," and he has invented a whole new villain, the "over-class...
...Well known as a liberal convert from conservatism, he reveals in autobiographical snatches here that his background is somewhat more complicated than that...
...Since 1968 these heirs of Harry Truman, "liberal nationalists," have gone seeking after strange gods: George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan...
...If the Republicans have become the captives of a radical Right that has its roots in a Dixiecrat past, the Democrats, Lind says, have inherited two regrettable traditions from the 1948 election...
...Overclass or no overclass, Up From Conservatism is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand American politics today and the possibilities for American politics tomorrow...
...They are at least consistent, though their influence on practical politics is limited...
...So what about the party's Presidential candidate, Bob Dole...
...He should drop it forthwith...
...The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority—so political effectiveness was the priority...
...The party's key positions?small government, low taxes, states rights, cultural populism, opposition to gun control and foreign aid, hostility to trade unions—are traditional Southern positions...
...Later he became executive editor of the National Interest, the neoconservative foreign policy journal...
...Yet for Lind these writers and thinkers are anything but genuine intellectuals: They are not disinterested...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
