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Are we now, or have we ever been, a nation?
As this century comes to a close, debates over immigration policy, racial preferences, and multiculturalism challenge the consensus that formerly grounded our national culture. The question of our national identity is as urgent as it has ever been in our history. Is our society disintegrating into a collection of separate ethnic enclaves, or is there a way that we can forge a coherent, unified identity as we enter the 21st century?
In this "marvelously written, wide-ranging and thought-provoking"* book, Michael Lind provides a comprehensive revisionist view of the American past and offers a concrete proposal for nation-building reforms to strengthen the American future. He shows that the forces of nationalism and the ideal of a trans-racial melting pot need not be in conflict with each other, and he provides a practical agenda for a liberal nationalist revolution that would combine a new color-blind liberalism in civil rights with practical measures for reducing class-based barriers to racial integration.
A stimulating critique of every kind of orthodox opinion as well as a vision of a new "Trans-American" majority, The Next American Nation may forever change the way we think and talk about American identity.
*New York Newsday
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By P. J. Ricci (Glassboro, New Jersey USA)
Lind is a hater of reason and justice. He champions the policy of entitlement pushed by the Democrats. I am poor...so give me something. I am a minority...so give me something. And so it goes. Nothing about American hard work and commitment just freebies and handouts at the taxpayers expense. (Once again the few carries the great unwashed and unworking masses.) Obama has his hands so deep in our pockets that it is fightening.This book is a blueprint for the rape of the working man and the business man. God help us!!!
By Jeffrey Peter A. Hauck (Pennsylvania USA)
Author Michael Lind, recognizing current problems with multicultural leftism and the non-assimilation of immigrants into American culture, provides a practical agenda for a liberal nationalist revolution that would combine a new color-blind liberalism in civil rights with practical measures for reducing class-based barriers to racial integration.
This book will change your ideas and perception about our collective American identity and the road we are traveling on toward the future. For example (p.188): "While middle-class and working-class Americans have divided over racial preference and symbolic issues, the overclass-dominated political elite of both parties has waged a generation-long class war against the middle class. That class war has been waged on three fronts: regressive taxation, free-market globalism, and the new feudalism."
I rate this easy to read and understand text at five stars for tackling the fundamental issues that the main-stream media will not. Our national future may depend upon this book! A great read.
By Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA)
Every so often, I come across one of those books that really makes me think. Michael Lind's penetrating look at modern America, "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution," is one of those books. I should elaborate a bit on that statement: books that REALLY make me think are ones that I will ponder at odd times during the day, or think about as I am falling asleep at night. I usually don't do that with a mass-market paperback or the latest popular novel. No, certain books on history, society, or philosophy sometimes find me puzzling out their theses while I engage in the mundane activities of daily life. Not every book has such an effect on me, but Lind's effort did. Written nearly ten years ago, "The Next American Nation" asks questions and puts forth conclusions imbued with intelligent insight and forceful conviction. It's iconoclastic, attacking the dogmas that presently govern every facet of our society. Despite the book's age, the issues Lind addresses continue to have relevance in the here and now. The author was once an editor at Harper's and The New Republic, as well as a contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
"The Next American Nation" probably falls under the category of American Studies, a once vaunted field of scholarship that fell on hard times once the multiculturalists took over academia. Lind's explorations borrow liberally from history, politics, sociology, and philosophy in a quest to put forth an overarching argument about where America should go in the future. According to the author, the United States has experienced three revolutions during its history, and it must experience a fourth one if it is to survive. Lind claims these revolutions birthed three distinct republics: Anglo-America (1789-1861), Euro-America (1875-1957), and Multicultural America (1972-present). Each republic put forth a national formula unique to its time. Anglo-America associated itself with Protestant Christianity flowing from a dominant Anglo-Saxon population. Euro-America embraced all white Europeans as authentic citizens while supporting a broader Judeo-Christian ethic. Multicultural America, which Lind despises for reasons he explains in minute detail, rejects the emphasis on Americans of European descent by elevating minorities to the status of autonomous nations within the larger society. Multiculturalists reject Christianity, replacing it with secular humanism as the new civic religion. Wars and other social turmoil led to the rise of these republics.
Each republic survived due to grand compromises, extraconstitutional bargains that allowed the upper classes to thrive. Anglo-America's implicit agreement between the northern upper class and the southern planters allowed slavery to thrive until the Civil War. In Euro-America, the agreement was between white industrialists and poor white laborers to keep non-whites out of the work force. Multicultural America thrives on the repudiation of white supremacy while elevating five socially constructed race categories, which then compete for special favors from the government. Social classes, whether real or artificial, play a central role in Lind's analysis of American society. The author argues that a white overclass exists today, a class that thrives through credentials earned from top schools and nepotism at the highest levels of business and government. This overclass has taken control of both political parties, and uses multiculturalism to defuse resistance from minorities. Lind claims a black overclass, created through race-based handouts like affirmative action, relies on the white elites for power even as they condemn the white power structure. Meanwhile, the majority of the minority population languishes in slums across the country. In other words, multiculturalism is a tool of the elite designed to pit racial groups against one another while the upper classes rob the country blind.
Michael Lind offers a solution to our problems. Scrap multiculturalism, the author avers, or else America will end up looking like a third world country (high crime rates and slums with the upper classes living in gated, privately protected communities). Liberal nationalism should become the Fourth American republic, nationalism based on a common language and shared social and psychological traits called Trans-America. Intermarriage will play a large role in this new nation, with the melting pot once again reasserting itself. Trans-America will abolish the nearly unchecked immigration of low skilled immigrants (they drive down wages for poor citizens), replace the current plurality election process with one of proportional representation, and ban political fundraising. Lind even offers a canon of Trans-American heroes from the past, from Alexander Hamilton to Frederick Douglass.
Whew, is that a lot of material! I'm not even touching on key parts of his argument, but you get the idea. His solutions, however, do have many problems. Replacing the current way we elect officials, for instance, sounds like a solid plan. I would love to get rid of big money in politics. Proportional representation may not be the way to go since this form of government must rely on forming coalitions to elect leaders. Look at the difficulties in Israel and India, where the government is always collapsing as multiple parties duke it out for control. That's not the biggest problem in this book, though. Lind's ideas about class in America are solid, but how will he get people to think about class in a non-Marxist way? Class and Marxism go together like shoes and socks. Most people cannot even envision one without the other. Any effort to overcome the divides between social classes will have an uphill battle in a country that spent fifty years battling Marxism, to say the least. Still, Michael Lind's book is an effort to come up with some solutions to our current problems, one that goes outside the current dogmas in the process. The author is intelligent, a good writer, and truly seems to care about his country. A stellar read.
By the dirty mac (Nutopian Global Institute)
It is impossible to do justice to such a wide-ranging book in only a few paragraphs. Fundamentally, Lind provides a three-phase interpretation of American history. As he sees it, the U.S. has experienced three genuine "revolutions": the American Revolution which led to the era of "Anglo America" (1789-1860), the Civil War/Reconstruction which led to "Euro-America" (1876-1954) and the Civil Rights Revolution which led to "Multicultural America" (1970-present).
The book's middle chapters are a devastating critique of today's status quo. Lind finds fault across the political spectrum. "Since the 1970s ... racial preference policies, associated with the political left, have been extended into one area of American life after another ... [Meanwhile] government policies unfavorable to labor, of the kind one thinks of as conservative, have been pursued under both Republican and Democratic administrations." However, "In reality there is no contradiction between left-wing civil rights policy and right-wing economics."
Instead of threatening the system, multiculturalism is corporate America's secret weapon. In the early 1970s it was President Nixon who instituted the first great wave of affirmative action and school busing, with the intent of driving a wedge between the labor and civil rights movements. (The strategy worked.) After the 1990 census, the first Bush administration collaborated with the civil rights establishment to reapportion and create as many black and Hispanic congressional districts as possible, thereby pulling the rug out from under white Democrats in surrounding districts and making it easier for the GOP to win control of Congress in 1994. As Lind notes: "Tokenism provides suitably 'progressive' camoflauge for a system of divide-and-rule politics ... Without the political division of wage-earning white, black and Hispanic Americans along racial lines, it is doubtful that the white overclass would have been able to carry out its agenda of destroying unions, reducing wages, cutting employee benefits, replacing full-time workers with temps, and shifting the burden of taxation from the rich to the middle class, with so little effective opposition."
Today there is no two-party system in the U.S. Rather, we have a one and a half party system -- a socially conservative corporate party (the Republicans) and a socially liberal corporate party (the Democrats). The "conservative" elites on Wall Street and the "liberal" elites in Hollywood both support outrageously high rates of immigration, affirmative action, and a dogmatic commitment to free trade.
Lind puts forward a series of policy proposals that are an iconoclastic blend of conservatism and liberalism. Lind favors a system of "proportional voting" that would blow up the two-party duopoly and open the door to new parties and policy options. He would break the grip of special interests by banning all paid political advertising and replacing it with free and equal media time and mandatory debates. He would raise wages by banning unskilled immigrants (and potential terrorists) from entering the country and by repealing laws that encourage the use of temp labor. He similarly favors a "social tariff" on Third World imports. (Lind is not a knee-jerk protectionist; he opposes tariff barriers between First World countries.) He supports the repeal of affirmative action, not only for women and nonwhites but especially for wealthy white kids who secretly benefit from "legacy preference" in college admissions. He favors a "war on oligarchy" that would drastically reform the legal and medical professions too.
This is an amazingly original and bracing book. Don't hold your breath waiting for Lind's ideas to be implemented any time soon. But he brilliantly spells them out, and that's the essential first step.
By
This book is just another installment of Lind's unofficial series, "Why I hate Republicans", or "Why I hate people who have it better than me in life". Completely one-sided arguements explain why white people are evil, why Ronald Reagan was worse than Stalin, and why rich people are worse than the nazis. His obsession with racist polices dominates the entire book; every other word is "racist". Liberal professors will LOVE this book, and while it opened my eyes to another viewpoint, it didn't change my own, but rather, pushed me more to my original side.
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