Up from Conservatism [Paperback]

Michael Lind (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 15, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0684831864 | ISBN-13: 978-0684831862

For nearly a decade, Michael Lind worked closely as a writer and editor with the intellectual leaders of American conservatism. Slowly, he came to believe that the many prominent intellectuals he worked with were not the leaders of the conservative movement but the followers and apologists for an increasingly divisive and reactionary political strategy orchestrated by the Republican party. Lind's disillusionment led to a very public break with his former colleagues on the right, as he attacked the Reverend Pat Robertson for using anti-Semitic sources in his writings.

In Up From Conservatism, this former rising star of the right reveals what he believes to be the disturbing truth about the hidden economic agenda of the conservative elite. The Republican capture of the U.S. Congress in 1994 did not represent the conversion of the American public to conservative ideology. Rather, it marked the success of the thirty-year-old "southern strategy" begun by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. From the Civil War to the civil rights revolution, the southern elite combined a low-wage, low-tax strategy for economic development with a politics of demagogy based on race-baiting and Bible-thumping. Now, Lind maintains, the economic elite that controls the Republican party is following a similar strategy on a national scale, using their power to shift the tax burden from the rich to the middle class while redistributing wealth upward.

To divert attention from their favoritism toward the rich, conservatives play up the "culture war," channeling popular anger about falling real wages and living standards away from Wall Street and focusing it instead on the black poor and nonwhite immigrants.

The United States, Lind concludes, could use a genuine "one-nation" conservatism that seeks to promote the interests of the middle class and the poor as well as the rich. But today's elitist conservatism poses a clear and present danger to the American middle class and the American republic.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This former rising star of the right reveals what he believes to be the disturbing truth about the hidden economic agenda of the conservative elite - and about their cynical cultural war strategy for acquiring and maintaining political power. Penetrating in its analysis and insight, savage in its wit, Up From Conservatism adds an important and funny voice to the '96 campaign. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Lind is perhaps the most prominent convert from 1980s neoconservatism. Though his book only occasionally dips into his personal story, it is a powerful attack on conservatives who, he says, use "the culture war, a revival of racism and radical antigovernment rhetoric" to distract voters from the realities of their own economic exploitation. Lind's language is strong, and he has much ammunition. The most damaging conservative hoax of recent years, he argues, is supply-side economics, which led to our current deficit, "the central fact of American politics today." He also critiques proposals for school vouchers, tax policies that shift burdens to the middle class and proposals to cut welfare, noting the much larger "Hidden Welfare State" of programs such as mortgage subsidies. 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. Translation rights: ICM/Kristine Dahl; U.K. rights: Simon & Schuster.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (July 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684831864
• ISBN-13: 978-0684831862
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,558,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent history muddied by passion November 11, 2003

By Slippery Pete

Format:Paperback

I ordered this book based on a recommendation I found on Josh Marshall's blog. I was immediately enthralled with it and finished it over a weekend.

This book does a superb job of tracing several arcs of American political history from Thomas Jefferson, to Jefferson Davis, to George Bush.

For my own part, I recently left the Republican Party because it seemed increasingly obvious that it has become the province of race-baiters and mercantilists, not of individualists and pro-market (as opposed to pro-business)conservatives. The title, "Up From Conservatism", and the author's good reputation, convinced me to buy. I'm glad I did.

In this book, you will learn that the GOP's southernization is not a marriage of convenience - the south has fully taken over the party. This is now the party of creationists, religious fanatics, and the generally intolerant. I do not believe - for one minute - that George W. Bush is a racist. In fact, much of the party's leadership, in my opinion, are good people. But they've made a deal with the devil - they wink and southern racism as a way of appealing to low-income southern whites. This bloc of voters, along with the GOP's alliance with business elite, constitute a winning formula for the GOP. It is now THE national party.

This book has several serious flaws. It frequenly stoops to sneering and name-calling in lieu of analysis. And although the GOP is truly guilty by its association with southern-style racism, it uses the tactic of guilt by association far too much. For example, the book mercilessly mocks school vouchers as transparently impotent, and goes even further by stating (probably correctly) that the idea was first touted in the south as a way of allowing whites to pull out of integrated schools and form new all-white districts. Perhaps. A more honest appraisal of vouchers would acknowledge Milton Friedman as the true source of this idea. It may not be a new idea, but it's not a continuation of a racist policy of decades ago. To suggest that it is is breathtakingly dishonest, a really cheap shot.

Another of this book's failures is its treatment of supply-side economics. In fact, Lind should have taken his criticisms of Jude Wanniski, the father of supply-side, even further than he did. Wanniski is now a full-blown crackpot of the first order, referring (for example) to Slobodan Milosevic as Yugoslavia's Abraham Lincoln. Anyway, when Lind gets into the Laffer curve, he trips terribly and again stoops to mockery when analysis would have served his readers better. The Laffer Curve is a simply indisputable theory. Very simply, the Laffer Curve assumes that (a) federal revenue at a tax rate of 0% would be $0, (b) federal revenue at a tax rate of 100% would be, if not $0, at least very low, and (c) federal revenue at a tax rate between 0% and 100% would be higher than either 0% or 100%. Plot (a), (b), and (c) in a piece of paper, and there's your curve.

Therefore, if you start with a tax rate of 100%, and lower it, federal revenue will increase as tax rates decrease. But this does not hold forever. At some point, decreasing tax rates will result in lower revenue for the government as you approach a tax rate of 0%. Whether lowering tax rates will increase revenue depends entirely on what point of the curve you're currently on.

Lind's mockery of the Laffer Curve prove that he does not understand it well enough to even explain it. The problem with the Laffer Curve is how it's implemented in practice. Our tax rates are closer to 0% than 100% - that is, we're on the part of the curve where increased tax rates clearly do not result in lower revenue. The 1990s ought to prove that - Clinton raised taxes, and internal revenue soared.

The point is that Lind's smarter-than-thou attitude deprives him of a good opportunity to truly deconstruct supply-side economics, instead of merely mocking it.

There are other flaws in this book. Still, it remains an excellent guidebook to how the Republican party maintains an alliance of business elites and poor white cultural conservatives in the south - which, if you've been following the GOP lately, remains as timely a topic as it was when this book was written. It stands up well over the intervening years and is worth reading.

48 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars thoughtful analysis of conservatism derailed by extremists January 24, 2003

By audrey TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Lind makes a convincing argument that the American conservatism of Lincoln and Dewey has been hijacked by extremists like Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan and Wayne LaPierre. That much is easy for anyone to see. What made this book more interesting is the author's contention that there has also been a change in the Left's priorities, evidenced by the rise of neoliberalism (Carter, Clinton and the DLC, for example) and the shift from working class and immigrant concerns to that of identity politics. What remains is a gaping void where middle class working folks reside -- moderate-to-conservative on social issues and liberal on economics -- left-populists. Essentially, both parties are looking out for the economic concerns of corporations and the affluent, while each does its best to appeal to various special interests in order to get votes. When is the last time either political party decided to strengthen employees' rights, keep jobs in this country, reward workers for having the best productivity in the world, or eliminate the obscenity of a class of working poor?

It was interesting to read this book post-9/11. I expected a lot of it would be outdated and made irrelevant by that awful morning, but much of what the author said then still rings true, though at the time of writing he had no inkling (who could?) of GW and the 2000 election debacle to come. Lind discusses the religious right's stranglehold on the GOP even without knowing that they would sabotage John McCain with a disinformation campaign in South Carolina in 2000. He traces the myths of the success of supply-side economics and the failures of the public schools and social welfare even before knowing that the Bush administration would bankrupt the country for upper-income tax cuts and push faith-based programs and school vouchers through the back door. He denounces the whacko anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, irrational rantings of Pat Robertson that conservatives allow to go unchallenged because he controls a vast grass-roots network of voters. (This is what finally led him to renounce his own conservative affiliations.) But my favorite chapter has to be the one attacking the conservative myth of the Golden Age (the 1950s for Newt Gingrich, the 1930s for Trent Lott). It is very funny. Tragically, scandalously funny.

Lind calls attention to the hypocrisy of conservatives who call for law and order (at the same time they let the NRA halt even the most basic controls on weapons), smaller government (at the same time they establish the department of Total Information Awareness headed by situational ethicist John Poindexter), fiscal responsibility (at the same time they dip into Social Security in order to give tax breaks to the top 1%), pro-family (at the same time they tax families to give tax breaks to the rich), and non-intervention (at the same time they send young people off to die in order to divert attention from a poor economy and constitutional shenanigans).

Lind, most interestingly, makes the case that the GOP has shifted from American conservatism to southern conservatism, with its concomitant anti-intellectual, anti-government, pro-industry and separatist attitudes; at the same time, corporations have shifted from a pro-government (investment) model to a low-wage/non-regulation model favored by conservatives.

This is a big-picture book that will give you a lot to think about. If you are a curious and honest thinker, of any political persuasion, you will find this treatise, at the very least, thought-provoking.

The title's implication that current conservatism is bottom-of-the-barrel politics is bookended by the work's final lines: "It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right. But it is not too late to rescue America from conservatism." You gotta love that.

An excellent companion book would be David Brock's Blinded by the Right. While Lind looks at the philosophical underpinnings of conservative thought, Brock's emphasis is on the evolution of the conservative movement since the 1980's and on specific individuals and the media.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-intended, but flawed. July 27, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I began reading this book with great anticipation, intrigued by Lind's call for a revival of old-fashioned populist/centrist "vital center" liberalism, a position that has almost completely disappeared from the radar screens of the nation's political and media elites. For the most part, Lind delivers; his comments regarding the professional-managerial overclass are right on the money, and go a long way toward explaining the current political "consensus" that combines cultural liberalism and economic conservatism, both of which are a slap in the face to the working and lower-middle classes, black and white alike. Similarly the usefulness of leftist "multiculturalism" and identity politics as useful tools for that same overclass are given much-needed exposure. However, his belief that the so-called "culture war" is purely a right-wing fabrication betrays a misunderstanding of the depths of people's convictions regarding issues like abortion, sexual morality, drug abuse, careerism, and materialism. While conservatives (and more than a few liberals) have proven adept at exploiting these convictions for political gain, they didn't invent them from scratch. Indeed, for all his jeremaids against overclass elitism, Lind himself seems oddly unwilling to recognize the validity or authenticity of cultural populism, dismissing it as the exclusive province of crackpot fundamentalists a la Pat Robertson. (A more thoughtful consideration of these concerns can be found in the works of Christopher Lasch i.e. "The Revolt Of The Elites." Despite this reservation, however, I found this book to present a compelling case for political reform, and more than worthwhile for the millions of us who are relatively lacking in wealth and privelege and dare to assert that we have a voice too.