The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite

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Lind started his career on the right, then moved to the left in reaction to the radical anti-statism of the 1990s Republican revolutionaries. More recently, he has turned his criticism against the Democratic Party, which he believes is abandoning its New Deal legacy and “transforming itself into the older Republican Party under a new, ostensibly progressive label.” The problem is that terms like “non-Hispanic white” and “Hispanic,” even when used by the Census Bureau, are decidedly arbitrary and unscientific. Lumping together a Greek-American with a Norwegian-American to get a generic “non-Hispanic white” IQ score, and then lumping together, say, a Mayan from Yucatan with an Argentine of wholly Italian ancestry to get a generic “Hispanic” IQ score, and then comparing the two numbers as though the results tell you anything significant about “races,” is an exercise that confirms nothing except the old adage of computer programmers: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Again, I think that there is another aspect of this. What you find is a convergence of the desire for constant creativity on the part of the intelligentsia with the desire for constant novelty on the part of capitalism. That is, both of these groups, for different reasons, are trying to overthrow everything that existed before yesterday.

When the last idolater of the Founders has boarded the last National Review cruise and sailed off into the sunset, the acronym WWTFD—“What Would the Founders Do?”—will leave Americans as baffled as contemporary Singaporeans would be by veneration of Sir Stamford Raffles, the 19th-century British imperial official credited as the “founder” of their island city-state. This isn’t to say there is nothing to be learned from individual American Founders, like Hamilton on industrial policy or Jefferson on religious liberty. But their relevant views can and should be defended on their merits, without deferring to a sacral authority. Finally, Lind does not weigh any issues other than his chosen three as a legitimate basis to choose a candidate. This is a rather large hole in his argument. After all, even if you hold Democrats responsible for every left-wing tweet about racism, green energy, and transgender rights, and even if you consider the Republican stance on all three issues preferable, it does not necessarily follow that one must vote Republican, as he insists.Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. HarperCollins. ISBN 9780062097729. [20] [21] This iconoclastic brand of post-partisanship isn’t the exclusive property of revolutionary communists, or left-libertarian Fox News personalities. The viewpoint is also upheld by at least one “ radical centrist”: a man who dreams of a cross-class coalition for expanding the welfare state, collective bargaining, and public investment in manufacturing — and has, nevertheless, spent the past few years arguing that the working class has no interest in seeing Democrats defeat Republicans, and that the Democratic “Establishment” poses a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump does. Taxing the eugenic elite hurts both them and the dysgenic majority, by redistributing resources that the creative rich can put to best use for the long-term benefit of the benighted majority.

Over the past two decades our country has lurched from false start to collapse, and then reaction. The story can be repeated across the Western world, and no one has told it better than the US political analyst Michael Lind, an academic and prolific writer, with decades of experience in the Washington beltway. Lind has examined and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism associated with Alexander Hamilton in a series of books, including The Next American Nation (1995), Hamilton's Republic (1997), What Lincoln Believed (2004) and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012). Lind has also written two books on American foreign policy, The American Way of Strategy (2006) and Vietnam: The Necessary War (1999). A former neoconservative in the tradition of New Deal liberalism; with the original neoconservatives being anti-Soviet liberals who drifted to the right, Lind criticized the American right in Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America (1996) and Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (2004). According to an article published in The New York Times in 1995, Lind "defies the usual political categories of left and right, liberal and conservative." [13] Michael, your analysis makes good sense; it rings true and is probably statistically correct. However, you have neglected to mention the most important bone of contention that sharply divides us Americans: donald trump.This is really being driven by elite whites, not by members of minority groups necessarily. They pose as saviors and champions of victimized groups and take a highly melodramatic view of politics.” On both sides of the Atlantic this group is the equivalent of the nomenklatura in the former Soviet Union. While some are self-employed business owners or independent professionals, most work for large, hierarchical organisations – corporations, government agencies, non-profits, universities. I define democracy differently from most of the people who talk about liberal democracy. I don’t like that term ‘liberal democracy’, because the premise is that it is all very procedural and formal. That is to say, you have free elections, and minorities are not persecuted. But you can still have a very oligarchic society if you have free elections and respect basic civil rights, because most of democracy is about policies and not about rights. I argue that in the middle of the 20th century in all of the Western democracies, there was a substantive democracy – I call it democratic pluralism – in which the power of this managerial elite, which already existed by 1945, was counterbalanced by working-class organisations like trade unions, as well as powerful churches and powerful local political machines. And as those have eroded, by default, the college-educated elites have come to dominate the entire system – not by conspiracy, it is just that countervailing forces have eroded.

According to Lind, social disempowerment constitutes the kindling of populist conflagrations. Demagogues are the spark. Figures like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Matteo Salvini are good at identifying the sources of working-class disempowerment, Lind contends, but are poor at actually redressing them. A truce in the new class war will require more than a few tariffs here, a few immigration restrictions there. What’s needed is a 21st-century version of democratic pluralism. Lind has not offered any public reflection on why his expectations for the Biden presidency proved faulty. Nor has he revised his basic account of American politics, in light of Trump’s insurrection or Biden’s governing agenda. He has not retracted his claim that the “Establishment response to populism [i.e., Trumpism] threatens democracy more than populism itself.” Instead, he has carried on maligning the Democratic Party as a vehicle of professional-class tyranny, while saying precious little about the GOP’s pathologies. Thanks to various defects in our system of government, there are only two viable political parties in the United States. The leadership of one is currently trying to take money away from capitalists and invest it in public infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, at-home care for the elderly, and a monthly child allowance for all non-rich families (among other things). This party has also advanced legislation that would make it easier for working people to vote in elections and organize their workplaces. Nordicist racial ideology shaped the Immigration Act of 1924, signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who declared: “America must remain American.” A few years earlier, in an article in Good Housekeeping, Coolidge had called for the United States to remain not only majority-white, but also majority-Nordic: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”Central to this class war, in Lind’s reading, is the rural-urban divide, which has reared its head in recent electoral contests as well as in social movements such as France’s gilets jaunes. Today’s technocratic liberals want us to believe that metropolitan “hubs” are more productive than the so-called “heartlands.” Yet Lind shows that professionals and managers in these hubs increasingly spend their discretionary income on “luxury services” provided by low-income and mostly immigrant workers. Michael Lind (born April 23, 1962) is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning with The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (1995). He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Michael Lind’s The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite follows from a series of works on the “ white working class” published in the wake of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election. Seeking to redefine class in terms of cultural belonging and territorial rootedness, these works have dovetailed with a discussion of the new “ professional-managerial class,” who want to run society according to liberal and technocratic principles. These are the same “metropolitan elites” from whom Lind wants to “save democracy.” But in 2016, along came an anomaly that has overturned all the classifications and categories that you have so adroitly analyzed: donald trump.T he editors have been kind enough to give me space to respond to Michael Lind’s reply to my article on the us Constitution in nlr 232. footnote 1 In contrast to populists, elite fusionist conservatives since the 1950s have privileged 1787 over 1776. They have treated the federal Constitution as the equivalent of the Ten Commandments, teaching the American people, “Thou Shalt Not Have Nice Things,” like a living wage, labor unions, guaranteed access to inexpensive health care, or adequate social insurance. The Founders thus become ventriloquist dummies for rich donors who fund fusionist magazines that few but the same donors read. The details of this new dispensation varied across national contexts. But in just about every Western country, Lind writes, “power brokers who answered to working-class and rural constituencies — grassroots party politicians, trade union and farm association leaders, and church leaders — bargained with national elites in the three realms of government, the economy, and the culture, respectively.”