Customer Reviews

Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics

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Author Michael Lind, a 5th generation Texan, provides a dual biography of a President and the state of Texas. This is what makes it so interesting. Many authors have recently published books regarding Bush 43's personality and policies, specifically, in response to September, 2001. In this book however, Lind analyses and examines George W. Bush's policies and links them to the influential continuum of the cultural and political forces of Texas: the Deep South, Southern Protestants, and the Neo-conservative foundations that were solidified by his father's, administration. In short, what he's doing today according to Lind is not solely or even significantly as a result of September '01. Obviously as for any policy-maker, Bush 43's current policy-making in general is derived from himself, and his convictions are the result of his primary influences, past and present. Therefore the question is, what is this spectrum that influences him the most?

Texas
Lind expands more on his home-state of Texas. The state of Texas is often seen misappropriately, as culturally Western, but in fact it's clearly Southern, and Deeply Southern. This has always been apparent to those who've lived in and/or studied the South and Texas.

There are two camps in Texas: One is the "Texas modernists," of which Bush 43 is not. Lind categorizes Bush 43 as one of the "Texas traditionalists." These are proponents of militarism and an economic base focusing on commodity exports and oil exploration. This southern economic model which George W. advocates, Lind claims, will continue to push for free-trade agreements which send U.S. jobs oversees, and entice out-of-state companies to move to southern states because of lower wages.

These are but a few examples and insights Lind provides. He's not a fan of George W. but this isn't over-bearing in the book. If one wants to understand the rational and philosophy behind Bush's domestic and foreign economic, military, and diplomatic policies this book provides a wealth of information. It also explains the interests, cultural, sociological, and political forces of Texas, and its' major components. Those interested in national electoral politics such as the next Presidential election for example, can take much of this information and ask them self: who in 2004 can appeal to the southern block, which still is obviously instrumental in winning a Presidential election.

First, to be honest, I did not vote for George W. Bush. Probably like many people I viewed him as well-meaning but under-informed, an underachiever in life who was handed the reins of power through pure luck and powerful connections. I was sure, with the help of his father and the elders in the Republican Party, he would surround himself with competent advisors and ultimately pursue a course of moderation and good sense in both domestic and foreign affairs. Therefore, when some of the early initiatives out of the White House seemed counter to earlier expectations (abrogation of important treaties, anti-environmental positions, unilateralist and militaristic approaches to complex world problems, a dangerous and unbalanced approach to the Middle Eastern crisis) my visceral discomfort with this man has evolved into alarm. This book by Michael Lind confirms my worst fears. It is a scholarly and objective survey of the culture from which our president arose. As Lind points out, we have had southerner presidents who were liberals and northerner presidents who were conservatives, but never since Andrew Jackson have we had a southern conservative holding the most powerful office in the land. Lind does a thorough job of analyzing the state of Texas from the demographic standpoint, pointing out that the majority of the population reside in East Texas which is intrinsically part of the deep south. These people largely originated in Scotland and Northern Ireland (Scots-Irish) and brought with them to this country a 17th and 18th century British outlook on class and empire, typified by the attitudes of a land-holding aristocracy. In an economic sense their ancestral model is Thomas Jefferson. In a chapter entitled "Southernomics" he describes how this region evolved on the plantation model of extraction of raw materials (oil, cotton, minerals, etc) and the exploitation first of slaves and more recently of low wage and undereducated menial workers (modern day "serfs"). This model favors "free trade" and opposes tariffs in order to maximize profit in the exportation of commodities. It places low value on preservation of natural resources while promoting their extraction and utilization. Lind contends that this model has shaped our 43rd president's thinking about economics. He contrasts an "old boy network" style of management and connections peculiar to the deep South with the traditional culture that shaped most of the rest of the country, one that is based on an economic model of meritocracy, emphasis on the creation of ideas, the valuing of higher education as the key to economic development. Lind is careful to avoid over-generalization as he points out that Texas is a diverse state, and that these two economic models both exist in the state and are in fundamental conflict. For example, he points to many Texas leaders who typify modern liberal enlightenment attitudes, people like Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Wright Patman, and Ross Perot.

The most disturbing aspect of this book for me begins with a chapter entitled "That Old Time Religion" which exposes the influence of the southern Protestant fundamentalist religious culture on George W. Bush, and how this in turn has become a driving force in the almost messianic identification of this president with the right wing in Israel and Mr. Sharon. This plays into fundamentalist dispensationalist dogma about the End-times, Armageddon, and The Second Coming. It further sheds light on the peculiar alliance of these mostly southern Protestant militaristic and fundamentalist masses (who provide the electoral clout) with a powerful intellectual neoconservative elite (who provide the brains) and who now control our defense department. These people hold a radical and fundamentally new view of American foreign policy, one that promotes a doctrine of preemption and the aggressive exercise of American military power. They are tightly allied with the Zionist movement both here and in Israel.

This is a powerful and very disturbing book. Michael Lind has tried not to over-emotionalize this information but he obviously feels passionately about these issues. He has given us a well-researched and thoughtful expose' of the real forces that are driving this president. Everybody should read it!

Michael Lind is a native Texan who loves his state, but pulls no punches about the destructive path its recent leaders (George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, etc.) are taking the nation. He is also one of the more original and unpredictable pundits around. Just when you think you have him pegged ideologically, he throws you a curve. Although a fierce critic of today's Republican right, he also opposes affirmative action and property taxes, and he is no apologist for today's Democratic Party either. The constants in his writing are populism and contempt for conventional wisdom. Check your preconceptions at the door before reading him.

The book's central focus is how Texas as a state and the South as a region have impacted, in both positive and negative ways, American political ecomomy. As Lind sees it, the two dominant political factions in Texas have been the "traditionalists" and the "modernists." He stresses that these labels do not necessarily coincide with "liberal" and "conservative." Today the traditionalists are represented by the Bush family and other Texas Republicans (although Lind also places Lloyd Bentsen in this camp). They are more or less the successors to the 19th century Confederates and the segregationist Democrats who ran the state in the first half of the 20th century. This group, he writes, "is content for Texas to have a low-wage, commodity exporting economy, even if the result is a society with enormous inequalities of wealth and opportunity."

The "modernists" have been more eclectic politically. They have included John Connally on the right, H. Ross Perot in the center and Barbara Jordan on the moderate left. Lind defines their vision as "a high-tech economy with a meritocratic society. If traditionalist Texas is symbolized by oil companies, ranches and farms, modernist Texas is symbolized by the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the computer industry that grew up in Austin's silicon hills." The modernists combined "populism and a military ethic in a synthesis that, although not unique to Texas, was particularly pronounced in the Lone Star State."

The traditionalists have generally held the upper hand. In the 19th century the Confederates envisioned America as 1) the British Empire's junior partner in the realm of international politics and as 2) a low-wage exporter of raw materials to industrialized Britain under the banner of free trade. This is what Lind derisively calls "Southernomics" -- a banana republic or Third World style of political economy in which it is taboo to use tariffs and high wages to foster domestic industry and technology. In 2004 George W. Bush's vision was remarkably similar. But this time Britain is America's junior partner in a self-defeating policy of military overextension, and this time America does the importing from low-wage countries in a system sacrificing the middle class on the altars of free trade and cheap labor.

The era in which Texas modernism rode high was when the New Deal brought the Industrial Revolution, rural electrification, and middle class prosperity to the South by way of "state capitalist" projects such as the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). This era peaked in the 1950s and '60s when Sam Rayburn (of Texas) was Speaker of the House and Lyndon Johnson (of Texas) was Senate Majority Leader and then President of the United States.

Back in the Goldwater, Nixon and early Reagan years, the Southwest (Arizona/Southern California) was the GOP's geographic homeland. That is no longer the case. The geographic core of the Republican coalition is now in the South. Lind writes: "Conservative thinkers and politicians rooted in the old Texan commodity-exporting oligarchy have redefined what conservatism means in the United States. Even in the Northeast and Midwest, older, rival conservative traditions...have been replaced by a recognizably Texan (and broadly Southern) conservatism uniting belief in minimal government [in theory, but not in practice] at home and a bellicose foreign policy abroad with [Protestant] fundamentalism." There was ample evidence of this at the 2004 GOP convention. Witness Rudolph Giuliani shilling for the Bush Doctrine in all its bankrupting glory and Governor Ah-noldt mocking the manhood of anyone dissatisfied with the consequences of Southernomics.

Lind devotes the final chapters to the growing nexus between the New York neoconservatives and the Southern right. It is the neocons, mostly ex-socialists or ex-liberals and their progeny, who give today's GOP whatever intellectual credibility it has. However, it is precisely because of the neocons that most of what is today labeled "conservativism," in both foreign and domestic policy, bears no philosphical connection to the true conservatism of Edmund Burke and George Washingtion. It is basically Marxism turned inside-out. (Lind developed this rather amusing point at greater length in his 1996 book UP FROM CONSERVATISM.) Try this at home if you can. Throw together an outline of Maoist and Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Then substitute "permanent war" for "permanent revolution" and "culture" for "class." Presto! You have the 2004 Republican platform.

Lind makes a couple of factual errors. Ross Perot and Al Gore debated the NAFTA treaty on the Larry King Show in 1993, not 1992. He also misidentifies the date of a Weekly Standard editorial ("Axis of Appeasement") which was printed in 2002, not 2000 (it's listed correctly in the index). Also, in discussing the Middle East, the dissing reviewers have a point when they complain that he goes too easy on the terrorist/mass murderer Yasser Arafat. I would also deduct one star for style. Lind has a habit of overstating his case and making the same point in ten different ways. Nonetheless, his brand of iconoclasm is needed now more than ever.

A very reassuring book, this. But the relief took a while to sink in. Michael Lind meticulously traces George W. Bush's world view to his Texas upbringing and disappointing experiences outside the Lone Star State. And, Voilá, we find a president entirely, and predictably, consistent with his roots.

Now, if Texan ways grate with your sense of what America the Liberal is all about, this book may upset you more than reassure. But to the extent you see Texas as an example of what all America should become, you'll be encouraged.

Regardless, the insularity of our southern border state and its sense of great superiority toward its southern neighbor does seem to be reflected in Bush's sense of how the world ought to be.

As a book of anthropology, sociology, and politics, this is a most insightful book. It provides the most coherent explanation of where Bush is coming from, and where he's taking America. He may not succeed, but at least we know he has a goal. And that's reassuring. Scarily reassuring.

Cultural factors do not explain everything about the policies of the George W. Bush administration, but it is uncanny how the ways and mores of the Old South (crony capitalism, Protestant fundamentalism, a primitive extractive economy with a tiny oligarchy riding on the backs of an impoverished populace) shed light on otherwise incomprehensible follies. Mr. Lind's thesis is plainly informed by the work of historians and cultural geographers such as David Hackett Fischer and Joel Garreau. The genius of his book lies in the author's ability to use this background to help explain the here-and-now.

For example, how is it that the Republican Party-once the stronghold of Taft/Eisenhower-style fiscal discipline-now thumps wholeheartedly for "supply-side" quackery that may end up making the U.S. economy as debt-ridden and broken-down as Argentina's? The answer is that with the "southernization" of the GOP, Old South habits of wildcat financial schemes and scams are back in vogue again. (Even supposedly wealthy southern planters usually barely staved off bankruptcy by borrowing year after year against crop liens on tobacco or cotton.) This carefree approach to debt has the added attraction for some supporters of hamstringing government so that it is unable to perform pesky functions such as civil rights law enforcement or occupational safety and health inspections.

Equally striking is the disproportionately strong influence in first the Texas, and then the federal government of Protestant fundamentalism, especially its' apocalyptic and authoritarian strains. Oddly enough, while agitating against the menace of evolution or the Teletubbies, our modern Pharisees seem blind to the weakest in our society judging from the snake-pit conditions in the Texas state mental health system. (Along with Mississippi's the worst in the nation.) What Would Jesus Do?

However well-meaning he may be, for George W. Bush to continue in office for another term would probably shove the United States into the widespread poverty and social strife of such large, potentially rich and misruled countries as Russia, Nigeria, or Brazil. Hopefully, this trenchant book will be the occasion for a widespread reappraisal of the man and his policies.

Michael Lind, like David Brock, understands the inner workings of the American right as one who formerly camped under that tent. A protege of William F. Buckley Jr., Lind, like Brock, was horrified by the perpetual vitrol extending from rightist circles masquerading as policy, along with the capitulation to the most egregious elements of corporate greed.

Lind's thought provoking work "Up From Conservatism" provided valuable insight into why Lind left the movement. In this current work he provides a working political philosophical genesis of George W. Bush's underpinnings. Lind sees Bush as a product of the most archaic West Texas thought. The most reactionary of this sagebrush breed feels comfortable with laws such as the Patriot Act and sees subversives uncomfortably lurking from beyond every corral. This is the mindset that affected Bush when, after a black man was dragged to his death from a car in a hate crime occurring in Texas which shocked people of conscience throughout the world, Bush as governor did not even ask the victim's grief-filled daughter to sit down when she visited him in his office and sought to implore him to support hate crime legislation then being considered. This West Texas twisted brand of machismo was what prompted Bush to spend an average of 15 minutes considering final death penalty reprieve pleas. In the case of one woman, for whom conservative televangelist Pat Robertson and others of his persuasion sought clemency, a prisoner who wanted to stay alive to continue working with female drug users behind prison walls, in a widely reported television interview then Governor Bush made fun of her by imitating her voice in a high-pitched falsetto. This attitude also exclaims why, as commander-in-chief, when he learned that the first bombs had fallen on Baghdad, Bush reportedly thrust his fist into the air and exclaimed, "Feels good!" Unlike Clinton and Gore, who included many public policy books in their reading, Bush prefers biographies of baseball players. Once more, this is a macho good old West Texas boy at work!

Lind's finely reasoned work explains how this type of macho anti-intellectualism which Bush espouses works against America and its relations with the world. The West Texas rhetoric sadly oversimplifies, leading to the conclusion that America must be right and any nation choosing to disagree with our policies must be wrong. This leads to ridiculous responses, such as the renaming of French to Freedom Fries by the proprietor of a Beaufort, South Carolina restaurant. Once more, the good old boy network was at work, substituting runaway male hormones for reflective thought. This is the segment which loves the neocon preventive war concepts of Cheney-Rumsfeld-Perle-Wolfowitz.

"Made in Texas" seeks to explain George W Bush by describing the social, economic and cultural milieu of the region in Texas where the president grew up. It's an unorthodox approach since many people assume - especially the president's critics - that Bush's Texas roots are a put-on. It's well-known, for example, that his father, George H.W. Bush, had a flexible idea of where he called home; the Bush family is from New England stock; and even the president himself was born in Connecticut. But to Lind, George W Bush is very much a son of Texas and it is this premise that "Made in Texas" works from.

The book starts off well. Lind is at home describing Texas and its history. (It's possible, however, that I only found this part of the book the most interesting because I know the least about it.) He argues that Texas has two political camps: a modernizing side typified by men like LBJ, Sam Rayburn, and Ross Perot and a conservative side typified by men like Pappy "Pass the Biscuits" O'Daniel, Coke Stevenson, and George W Bush. The modernizers have their roots in the American Midwest and in the Scandinavian and German ethnicity of some Texans. The conservatives' roots are in the Deep South and the Scots-Irish ethnicity of many Texans' descendents.

Lind says that until FDR and the New Deal, the conservative side dominated Texas politics. Only with the large government spending projects of the 30s was their stranglehold on Texas loosened. Since the 1970s, however, the Texas conservatives have been winning back the ground they lost during the previous four decades. Many people think of LBJ as a southerner, but Lind argues that Bush is far more representative of the southern roots of Texas than LBJ was. Up to this point, I found the book interesting. While Lind generalizes a good deal about Texas and ethnicity, generalizations - if accurate - are useful and indeed necessary to understanding any culture and society.

But when Lind turns to other subjects, his book begins to disintegrate. He obviously has little knowledge of economics - there are so many elementary mistakes in the book that it would take an entire review just to point them all out. At one point Lind even suggests higher wages *cause* higher productivity. He also writes "One need not be a Jeffersonian agrarian to recognize that the big city and middle-class society are usually incompatible." In this light, he advocates big government projects - similar in spirit to the work projects of the New Deal --to seed the South and Midwest regions and attract people back from the coastal cities to the interior.

This is pure silliness - a complicated and wrong-headed approach to a large but fairly straightforward problem (growing income disparities between groups of Americans because of fewer good job opportunities for blue-collar workers). First, large cities are not incompatible with a large and secure middle class. One could argue the exact opposite in fact. Second, Lind wrongly identifies globalization as the cause of the problem when most economists agree that it is but a small part of the problem. Third, he fails to think through the economic implications of his grand policy proposal and instead spends most of his time dealing with environmental objections to it.

After dealing with economics, Lind turns to religion. Where he was simply wrong in his economic prescriptions, he is positively hostile in describing the religious impulses of a good portion of his fellow Americans. George Bush's thoughts on religion are dealt with in a perfunctory and risible way. Lind plainly thinks that if you take your religion seriously, you are a bit nuts. He drags up every already well-covered anecdote to show that your average religious southerner is about as civilized as a Neanderthal. (As hostile as Lind is to the religious Christians, it should be mentioned that he is nearly off the charts in his attitudes towards Jews. Given Lind's fascination with ethnicity and social determination, one could probably make a good go as to why this is so by using Lind's own methods.)

Michael Lind is in many ways a fascinating writer. I consider his book "Vietnam" one of the finest and most unusual interpretations of that war I've ever read. Lind tries to avoid the standard answers to the standard questions we often hear in U.S. political discourse. He also manages the rare trick of being a powerfully direct writer who is still able to make a sophisticated argument. But he overreaches his talents here and this book is clearly an emotional one rather than a well-thought out argument.

I was born in 1944 in the farthest, rural reaches of southwestern Mississippi -- my ancestors fought for the Confederacy and preached hell-fire-and-brimstone gospel. I grew up a Southerner, a Baptist, and a Democrat. Then, I learned to read, joined the Army, and spent 30 years traveling around the world. I am still a Democrat.

Lind provides an excellent and accurate description of the attitudes of Southern Protestants and the Southern elite. His thesis is that these attitudes led the Democratic Party to be the party of Jim Crow and racism -- but when the Democrats became the party of civil rights under Truman and Johnson, Southern Protestants and elite transferred their attitudes and their racism to a new home -- the Republican Party.

Sad, but true, the party of Lincoln is now the party of Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, and now, George W. Bush.

The book is about much more than Bush and what the author calls "Southern Takeover of American Politics." It allows one to better understand American's cultural history, especially that of the South.

Lind is by no means an ultra-liberal trying to discredit Bush. On the contrary, some of his sternest criticism is reserved is reserved for extremist liberals and environmentalists with their rigid notions of race, ethnicity, and "green" politics that hurt ordinary Americans.

The books is a valuable addition to a library of anyone trying to understand the politics of America, the most wonderful country in the world.

Clearly, this book has a message that many people would rather not hear. But Michael Lind insists on revealing the slime hidden beneath the rock. It is not always a pretty picture. However, this is still a fascinating exploration of the peculiarities of Southern politics. Also an important one, because the phenomenon has now been nationalized thanks to corrupt campaign financing and the quirks of the electoral college, which denied the White House to the candidate who won the popular vote in 2000. Anyone who is interested in how and why the United States is overextending and bankrupting itself to the brink of national suicide will find many answers in this book.