Actually, Lind barely mentioned the particular historians, but he deftly summarized the thrust of their argument and its significance, and then for good measure placed it into the larger historical framework of how conservative intellectuals have repeatedly tried to deligitimize liberalism. I want to summarize briefly, and then argue that this understanding helps shed enormous light on how conservatives routinely operate, and how Obama's attempts to cope with them intellectual are both subservient, and doomed to failure.
I also want to underscore, from the beginning, that this provides a perfect example of how framing reflects a fundamental act of cognition, not just communication, and that for conservatives, far more often than not the cognitive act is intimately tied up in establishing dominance, a basic, primitive form of social mammalian behavior. See, for example, Meerkat Manor. The embededness of cognition in frameworks of purposive action is one of the deeper discoveries of cognitive linguistics (or, rather, re-discoveries, for those familiar with William James) that virtually never leaks through into political discussions of framing, but that has profound implications for big-picture understanding. For liberals, cognition tends to be embedded in a wider range of purposive activities, leading to a fundamentally more pluralistic diversity of intellectual enterprises.
First off, Lind lays out the basic framework behind Beck's pushing of the progressives-are-fascists meme--it comes from "dumbed-down versions of the history of the American center-left that originated with serious scholars on the American right.... including Harry Jaffa, Pestritto, Thomas G. West and Charles Kesler." They were all influenced by Leo Strauss, but Strauss is not the evil genius he's made out to be, or some such nonsense, according to Lind. (For once, I'll just let the little bit of crazy in almost every Lind column lie.) He explains:
In their version of Straussianism, the American Founders established universal human rights as the only legitimate foundation for government. The enemies of natural rights liberalism are historicists and relativists who argue that there are no absolute values and that good and evil vary in different times and places. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln defended the idea of universal values against historicist, relativist Southern slaveowners who dismissed the Declaration of Independence because it claimed "all men are created equal." In the 20th century, neoconservative hero Winston Churchill defended universal values against Nazi amoralism.
This is, of course, pure bunk. Universal human rights and slavery? Details, details....
Lind goes on to note that there's a germ of truth here:
What would you think of a government policy that gave $706 on average to American households in the lowest income quintile (lowest 20% of income), and gave $18,713 on average to American households in the highest income quintile?
You probably wouldn't think it would be very politically popular.
You'd be wrong.
Because that's the way that tax expenditures--all manner of deductions, exemptions and special rates combined--affect America's income distribution:
This week, in "The tax breaks that ate America", Michael Lind took aim at tax expenditures-everything from mortgage interest rate deductions, to untaxed Social Security benefits, to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)-and did a decent job of arguing why they're generally a bad idea, even in those cases-such as the EITC-where purposes seem quite noble, and the practical results quite good. There was one real boner in his argument, which I double-checked with Jim Horney, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and one rather questionable strategic suggestion. We'll get to both in a bit, but this time out I really want to stress my agreement with Lind over my differences. Tax expenditures skew strongly toward the more affluent, even the wealthy. But even beyond that, the use of tax expenditures greatly confuses our public policy debates, along with public understanding of how government works, what it is doing, and why. Thus, even when used for progressive ends, it contributes to an overall political climate in which conservative anti-government attitudes thrive. What's more, as a Center on Budget Policy and Priorities (CBPP) policy brief "New Analysis Shows "Tax Expenditures" Overall Are Costly And Regressive" argued earlier this year, tax expenditures need to be part of any long-term budget solution. Otherwise all the pain will be concentrated on those who can least afford it.
But first, Lind argues against the sheer magnitude of tax expenditures, a point that's simply inarguable, as seen by this diagram from the CBPP policy brief:
Given their size, just ask yourself how much discussion you've ever heard about "tax expenditures" as compared to "wasteful" social spending, for example.
Secondly, Lind argues that "tax expenditures warp the market and corrupt private enterprise." (As if private enterprise needed any help on that score. But I digress.) He continues:
Throughout the month of August, I responded to several Salon columns by Michael Lind--published on Tuesdays--the following weekend. This week, I responded to Lind's column the same day, in "[I Should Be] Looking For The Next FDR With Michael Lind". Out of that came a very clarifying comment by John Emerson that inspired me to write a followup diary this weekend. But as I started work on it, I realized that I first needed to finally correct a long-standing oversight, and discuss the importance of social science situationism, not to be confused with the revolutionary Situationist Internationale. The Situationist blog associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School explains:
There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else.Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception.Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong."The situation" refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. "Situationism" is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation.
An important part of my core differences with Lind spring from a situationist perspective. I don't think that many people's basic attitudes have changed as much as he does, nor do I think that some of the actors he identifies are responsible for the changes he associates them with. Rather, I think that the political/economic situation has changed dramatically, and that we need to adopt political practices that take account of that changed situation, and seek to modify its impact.
One of the clearest ways to get a handle on that change is from the various presentations of changes in income and wealth concentration from the work of US Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Here's an example:
It's my primary contention that people living in a highly income-polarized society--as we do today--will act in ways quite different from those living in a more income-equalized society, such as predominated during the Post WWII New Deal Era, and even into the 70s and early 80s. It's my second contention that while changes in attitudes and actions have taken place, and vast ideological structures have been erected, these are more reflections of a changing economic situation, and have substantially less to do with changes in core attitudes. It's my third contention that the neoliberal trap Obama is caught in--which Lind wrote about in the column I agreed with most--is itself a manifestation of old-style non-situationist thinking, which systematically misapprehends the foundations of human action. In short, the problem goes much deeper than the Team of Rubins.
Another week, another perplexing Michael Lind piece in Salon, "Can Obama give 'em hell before it's too late?". First, the good part, to dispel the false impression that I'm constantly bad-mouthing him. Toward the end of his article he imagines the sort of speech that Obama ought to give, in the spirit of FDR during the 1936 campaign. "A Rooseveltian or Trumanesque campaign speech, addressing the concerns of the American majority, invoking the heroic history of American reform and naming the enemy, practically writes itself," he says. This is how it begins:
"My fellow Americans, we say that healthcare is a right of all citizens. The other party says that it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you agree with them that healthcare is a privilege, not a right, then vote for them. We would like to persuade you to join us, but if we can't, then we are going to defeat you.
"Decades ago our opponents tried to block Social Security and Medicare, using the same bogus arguments that they are using today against healthcare reform. They said Social Security and Medicare would bankrupt the country. They were wrong. Once we fix the cost inflation of our broken medical sector, with some minor tweaks Social Security and Medicare can be made solvent forever.
"Decades ago, our opponents said that Social Security and Medicare would turn the United States into a fascist or communist police state. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And not only are they wrong, they are hypocritical. Many of our opponents who claim absurdly that universal healthcare will bring tyranny to the U.S. have defended some of the greatest assaults on civil liberties and the rule of law in American history during the previous administration.
"They can draw a Hitler mustache on me. They can draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, for all I care. They are wrong and we are going to defeat them.
"We won the elections and we are the majority. We would like to build the biggest consensus possible, but progress is more important than consensus. Our job is to help the American people, not split the difference between right and wrong by giving a veto to the party that the American people have rejected....
I agree totally. That would be a great speech. Where I differ from Lind is not in terms what the Democrats need to do. It's in terms of understanding why they don't.
Once again this week, Michael Lind has written a piece for Salon that's distorted by his own preconceptions, and ghosts from his political past. This time, however, the main thrust is sounder, and the preconceptions considerably less odious. Yet the misconceptions remain significant enough that they warrant serious attention-as does his main thesis. In "Liberalism without labor unions?" Lind attacks the notion that the party can survive by effectively marginalizing the core economic concerns of its traditionally working-class base. On this point, Lind and I are in complete agreement, no questions asked. Indeed, I'm inclined to think that my critique goes deeper than his in some ways--but that's an issue for another time. At any rate, I can point to repeated pieces by Chris Hedges that I think make this case much better, and more deeply than Lind has done.
That said, if we want to change the Democratic Party, so that it truly represents those that it should represent, then we need an analysis that gets the problem right, not just in its broad sweep, but also in its breakdown into actionable chunks. And this is where my problems with Lind come to the fore.
As before, Lind is confused over the fact that minorities are disproportionately more working class than whites--as, too, as women. The centrality of this misconception cannot be ignored, when his second paragraph reads thus:
In trying to paint Drum as a bigot, Lind was engaged in the age-old Southern strategem of misrepresenting northern disgust with Southern bigotry as itself constituting a kind of bigotry. Necessarily overlooked in this "clever" inversion is the fact that Southern bigotry is based on skin color and alleged group attributes that no individual can change. Northern criticism is based on Southern political culture, and individual behavior, which millions of White Southerns in fact have changed.
Bit of a difference there.
In fact, Lind has a multitude of problems thinking straight about individual and group attitudes, as revealed in his column--a characteristic that's quite typical of effects of white supremacy. This is not to say that Lind is a white supremacist. I don't believe that for millisecond. But as historical works such Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory have clearly demonstrated, whenever anyone tries to accommodate themselves to Southern white supremacist ideologies--whether actively or passively--the end result is inevitably a tangle of contradictions, and wholesale abandonment of reality. However innocently one begins--such as Walt Whitman's ministering to those wounded in battle--the end result of the attitudes and narratives that emerge are inevitably pernicious in the extreme, and they are as pernicious to logic and truth as they are to human dignity.
This is what we behold at work in Lind's arguably well-meaning attempt to focus on the need for building cross-racial, cross-regional solidarity for an economic populist agenda. My previous diary, "Michael Lind Secedes From Reality: Mixing Up Race, Class, And Party ID In The South", showed that Lind was mistaken in his very premise--the Birthers are not primarily representative of the White Southern working class base he wants us to reach out to. They primarily represent better-off White Southerners who want to buttress their higher socio-economic position with a veener of moral superiority as well. And Lind's "hands-off" admonitions would only help them in this quest.
But there are a multitude of other confusions as well, as indicated by the preceding diary on Lind's misrepresentation of Kevin Drum. In comments, Gray quickly pointed something I was saving for this diary as a sort of jumping-off point: Lind generalized wildly to "liberals" in general based on a single post by a single blogger. Even if he hadn't misrepresented Drum, that's a mighty small data set. But it's perfectly consistent with the imperative to defend "Southern honor." More fun and games along these lines on the flip.
In much of his writing Michael Lind generally makes a very good point: focusing on economic populism is both the smart thing, and the right thing for Democrats to do. Sometimes this leads him to surprisingly insightful critiques--as it did in parts of his article critiquing Obama's neoliberalism that I wrote about last weekend. But other times this leads him to neglect--or worse yet, severely misrepresent--the opposing forces that stand in the way. Last weekend, I criticized him for misrepresenting the role of racism during the New Deal, but it was only a minor point with respect to the main thrust of that argument. This week, Lind's mis-apprehension of racism emerged full-blown as the center-piece of a truly delusional attack on "liberals".
Before turning to the issue of how Lind mis-represents liberals in my next diary (a task I already introduced in my earlier diary, "Going After Michael Lind With Occam's Razor"), I want to clearly show how Lind mis-represents those he claims to champion, and how confused he is more generally about issues of race, class and regional identity. As I've noted in the past, the South really is different, and I'm down with Tom Schaller on his "Whistling Part Dixie" thesis--not that the South can go to hell, but that Dems should stop trying win back the South on terms set by White Southerners.
Here is how Lind's article concluded:
o be expected that people, black and white, who have been deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.
The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.
Lind's attempt to equate Sharpton and Wright with Robertson and Falwell is an insult I'll return to in a later diary, along with his attempt to equate the Birther conspiracy theory with AIDs conspiracy theories. What I want to focus on here is Lind's wholly unfounded assumption that it is poor, uneducated White Southerners who are the core demographic who buy into this nonsense. Of course, Lind isn't the only one who makes this mistake. But he is, after all, the one who pretends to be both holier-than-thou and more knowledgeable-than-thou. And so it must be forcefully recalled that (a) the Birther belief is concentrated among White Southern Republicans, and (b) White Southern Republicans skew wealthy, not poor. On the first point,
PPP's North Carolina poll (pdf) had Republicans saying Obama wasn't born in America by almost 2-1 (47-24, with 29% unsure) while Democrats saying he was born in America by over 6-1 (75-12 with 13% unsure). On the second point, the following table, based on ANES data, is particularly clear:
(It should be noted that the sub-sample for the top income group is particularly small, especially for this decade, and thus the data is noisier and less reliable.)
Ever since the 1950s, the wealthiest Southern Whites have been more Republican than the poorest Southern Whites--indeed, the entire top third was more Republican than the bottom third. The last two decades, the relationship has been perfectly monotonic--every income group is more Republican than the group just below it--and the 2000s were more markedly so than the 1990s. Whatever may have been true in the past, the picture that Lind has in his head is 100% the opposite of what the NES data tells us.
On the flip, more tables to put the trend among White Southerners into context.
I'll have a lot more to say about this in a later post. But I just have to get this off my chest. (h/t William Timberman in quick hits .)
On Tuesday, Michael Lind posted an article at Salon, "Are liberals seceding from sanity? The left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group". In it, he used a brief blog post from Kevin Drum to tee off his whole argument. There's a whole lot wrong with Lind's post that I intend to get into later. But first I want to establish one simple point: the entire argument is disingenuous, as can be seen by comparing Drum's piece to the way that Lind misrepresents it. Lind ignores the simplest explanation of what Drum is saying, because otherwise he has nothing to hang his injured Southern pride on.
Here's how Lind sets it up:
In a recent Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker quoted Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's assertion that the Republican Party is "being taken over by Southerners" to suggest that the GOP risks becoming a permanent minority party of the old Confederacy. In itself this is a legitimate point that I and many other critics of Republican conservatism have made for years. However, at Mother Jones, the blogger Kevin Drum used Parker's political argument as an excuse for all-too-typical liberal Southern-bashing. According to Drum: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Southern whites who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Southern white culture is [redacted]. Jim Webb can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Drum did the redacting on his own blog post, explaining he'd blacked out the offending text "on the advice of my frontal lobe."
Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."
The way Lind puts it, it can sound pretty damning. "Bigotry" might even seem an appropriate label. But Drum was actually far, far closer to Parker--whom Lind claims to agree with--than Lind lets on.
This is part 2 of a two-part diary on two new articles that provide insight into the newly visible weakness of Obama's politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some of their content, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they both primarily grounded in pragmatist arguments. In part one, I examined "The Character of Barack Obama", by David Bromwich, which was really more about the process side of Obama's politics. In this part, I turn to Michael Lind's critique of Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?".
The main thrust of Lind's piece is unassailable: New Deal liberalism worked. Neoliberalism does not. New Deal liberalism produced the broadest prosperity, the largest and most affluent middle class in the history of humanity. Neoliberalism produced a bubble economy in the 1990s that briefly balanced our federal budget, but utterly failed to stop the erosion of our manufacturing base and our rising trade imbalances.
By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original "third way" between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a "capitalist society" or a "market democracy" but rather a democratic republic with a "mixed economy," in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production....
The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish "Putting People First" program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin's influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.
Lind is also very astute in capturing how Obama's agenda seeks to elide the deeper economic problems that neoliberalism is not prepared to tackle, and how it seeks to rationalize doing so:
Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.
But there is another layer that Lind gets wrong-a layer dealing with race from the New Deal forward on the one hand, and the nature of post-50s progressive politics on the other. I'll first review what Lind gets right, and why it's important to advance this perspective, then I'll look at what he gets wrong, and what its significance is.
Weekly Pulse: The Rocky Road to Reform
by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
Healthcare is dominating domestic politics this week, as Congress and President Obama outline their visions for reform. The president is pushing Congress to pass a bill that keeps healthcare costs in check before the August deadline. Obama must have been disappointed when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced last week that the Dem's healthcare bills won't cut spending. The president won't sign a bill that doesn't contain cost cuts, so legislators know they'll have to tweak the bill.
Obama's strenuous efforts to pass healthcare reform have invited comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which created the American social safety net. In Salon, Michael Lind argues that Obama's insistence on tying health insurance to employment actually betrays the legacy of the New Deal:
We decided that when it came to benefits our guiding principle should be a "citizen-based social contract." We chose this phrase, not to discriminate against non-citizens, but to express two ideas: first, that benefits like healthcare ought to be not a privilege but rather an entitlement of all citizens in our democratic republic, and second, that all benefits should be detached from employers and follow individuals through their lives. In thinking about healthcare, we rejected various options that would not move us toward a citizen-based social insurance system. Unfortunately, the health plan being promoted by Obama and Congress is based on one of those bad options.
Special interests are sparing no expense in their final campaign to influence healthcare reform. Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., was charged with crafting a public plan for a bipartisan seal of approval, but raked in more than $3 million from healthcare lobbyists and industry groups between 2003 and 2008, according to Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent. Baucus announced that he was swearing off healthcare bucks after June 1 in order to avoid the "appearance" of conflict of interest.
Aides for Baucus told The Post that the Finance chairman stopped accepting contributions from healthcare PACs after June 1 to eliminate the appearance of conflicts of interest. But he's not doing a very good job following through. On June 15, according to the Federal Election Commission, Baucus accepted $5,000 from the Schering Plough Corporate Better Government Fund.
Baucus's staff say the Schering Plough money has since been returned. No word on whether the money got sent back before or after the story hit the media.
Advocates of single payer did score a victory last week. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) managed to pass an amendment to the House bill that gives states the option of creating their own single payer healthcare systems. John Nichols of The Nation explains that the Kucinich amendment opened the door to single payer. As Nichols points out, Canada didn't start with a national single payer system. The province of Saskatchewan created its own healthcare program that became the model for Canada's celebrated Medical Services Plan.
Josh Holland of AlterNet says the Kucinich amendment may salvage healthcare reform. That sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it's definitely a step forward. For additional background, check out Truthdig's interview with Kucinich.
Abortion was back in the news this week. The Prospect's Dana Goldstein notes that the White House appears to be vacillating as to whether abortions will be covered by national healthcare. Health and budget guru Peter Orzag danced around the issue on the last Meet the Press. This kind of equivocation is part of a pattern: Back in March, senior Obama domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes, a former Planned Parenthood board member, insulted the intelligence of viewers of the Christian Broadcasting Network by claiming that she hadn't even discussed the issue with Obama.
Should the anti-abortionist zealot accused of gunning down Dr. George Tiller be charged as a domestic terrorist? I weigh the pros and cons in my new piece at RH Reality Check.
Finally, Laura Miller of Salon favorably reviews Ryan Grim's new book, This is Your Country on Drugs, an offbeat social history of America's twin love affairs with drugs and moral panics over drugs.
With the August deadline looming, legislators will be scrambling to get their respective bills in shape in time to pass healthcare reform through the budget reconciliation process. Odds are that the bills will be further scaled back and watered down in the process.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.
In my intro to that diary, I said:
This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Examples of those limits are everywhere, but none is better than the virtual exclusion of single-payer health care from discussion in the health-care debate. Private insurance companies take roughly one third off the top for their bureaucracy, their advertising, their lobbying and their profits, and they don't contribute anything to providing health care. In fact, they are a clear impediment, as millions of people know from their personal experience on a daily basis. They are, at this point, purely parasitical on our diseased political culture. Yet, getting rid of them is politically unthinkable in Obama's mind, in the world he accepts as given. On Democracy Now! on Friday, this was the topic of discussion with Harpers senior editor Luke Mitchell, author of the article "Sick in the head: Why America won't get the health-care system it needs."
Note: Last weekend, I wrote a diary "George Lakoff's 'Obama Code' As A Partial Model", which largely validated Obama's reading of Obama as a progressive, while noting some problematic aspects to his analysis. This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Michael Lind is pretty much an old-fashioned centrist, without being stuck in the past. Like David Brock after him, he started out as conservative foot-soldier rising rapidly through the ranks, then grew appalled by what he saw once he rose high enough to finally grasp the rot within. Yet, as Publishers Weekly noted in the review of his watershed book, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America:
It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right, he declares, pointing out the surprising sympathy conservatives have for antigovernment hate groups. Lind doesn't dwell on attacking the left; he did that in The Next American Nation. Given that few politicos today espouse the "national liberalism" he propounds a centrist populism that unites moderate social conservatism with economic class warfare.Lind urges his readers to support neoliberals such as President Clinton.
So what's he doing writing a piece in Salon bewailing "Obama's Timid Liberalism"? Setting the record straight, that's what. Like many others, I was pleasantly surprised by his budget proposal the week before last. To be honest, I was relieved after all that dangerous talk about entitlement reform and center-right "fiscal responsibility." But that still left so much uninspired policy muddle draped in Obama's inspiring rhetoric that it was difficult to know where to begin. Lind knows where:
Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...
Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?
Oh. OK. Never mind.
It wasn't just FDR and atomic power, Lind reminds us. It was FDR and Social Security, too. And Eisenhower and the Interstate freeway system. The direct public provision of public goods. And it worked. Hello, President Pragmatism! Over here!
Earlier today, I echoed a claim by Stirling Newberry that New America Foundation fellow Michael Lind had lifted his work on the monetary order's relationship to the rise of constitutional orders, in particular the moment we are in right now which is being dubbed the fourth American republic. Lind wrote me a response, and asked me to publish it. I've retracted my blog post, apologized to Lind, and asked Stirling to respond as to the substance of his claims. It's really not my fight and I shouldn't have tried to adjudicate, I was just hoping to bring attention to Stirling's claim, which you can find here.
It's worth noting that Michael Lind is plagiarizing Stirling Newberry's Fourth Republic concept, which Stirling wrote about for years while the Republicans were ascendant. Lind is a so-called 'radical centrist' at the New America Foundation, so I suppose it's not a surprise that he's swinging with the times and stealing the intellectual capital of a progressive. That's how things work in DC.
Update: Lind responded and asked me to publish his response here. I apologized to him and asked him to take this up with Stirling Newberry.
STATE BLOGS
