'America does not need more highbrow apologetics for the conservative movement, nor sophistry that conflates the pathologies of each major party,' argues EricLevitz
The radical center does not hold. Photo: Maranie Staab/REUTERS 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 .
That man, Michael Lind, has long been a heterodox presence in the American commentariat. A professor at the University of Texas and founder of the center-left New America Foundation, he has, at various points in his career, been a neoconservative apologist for the Vietnam War, centrist proponent of entitlement reform, and arch critic of the libertarian right.
The class war according to Michael Lind. Lind opens the The New Class War with a thumbnail sketch of the old one. This “first class war” pitted blue-collar workers against bourgeois capitalists, and it wasn’t a fair fight. For the first decades of the industrial era, plutocrats dominated the proles, who led nasty, brutish, and often short lives performing back-breaking, lung-blackening work. But world wars fostered class peace.
But between the 1960s and the present day, this class compromise unraveled. No longer reliant on mass conscription armies for their social order’s preservation, elites began reneging on their commitments to working people. At the same time, the social stratum of educated professionals exploded in size.
In the postwar period, the news industry was heavily localized and designed to reach a mass readership. Today, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly concentrated in high-cost coastal cities, and major publications are increasingly reliant on subscription revenue. These realities have increased the class homogeneity of major newsrooms, and led their outlets to cater to college-educated urbanites, who are uniquely willing and able to pay for journalism.
Instead, Lind insists that the bulk of popular resistance to mass immigration is rooted in the native working class’s accurate belief that low-skill immigrants are a top-tier threat to their economic well-being. Here too, Lind declines to engage with the vast empirical literature that contradicts his premise.
There’s a fine line between materialism and conspiracism. If Lind sanctifies working-class nativism by insisting on its economic rationality, he indicts professional-class cosmopolitanism through the very same means. In his telling, urban professionals do not support liberal immigration policies for ideological or humanitarian reasons, but merely out of vulgar material self-interest.
Lind’s use of crackpot materialism to cast xenophobic backlashes as proletarian uprisings — and progressive social causes as bourgeois counterrevolutions — are not minor aspects of his thought. Like other “post-left” iconoclasts, Lind uses such strained arguments, and the crass political sociology they rest on, to rationalize his antipathy to the left — if not, de facto alliance with the American right.
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.
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