Michael Lind: Up From Conservatism

Micheal Lind might not have ever been a movement conservative, but he certainly associated with them.  An editor tied to such figures as William Buckley, Jr. Lind was an uberinsider in the conservative movement.  Lind still does not really repudiate the one world conservatism of Disraeli, Webster or Burke.  He does, however, abhor what he calls the “shipwreck of American conservatism.”
 
Up From Conservatism is a phenomenal book.  It is an insider’s account, a political history, and a vision of the alternative.  Lind is a talented and lucid writer and as unsparing in his criticism of the Left as he is in his rebuking of the Right.
 
Introduction: The Triumph and Collapse of Conservatism
-         “American conservatism is dead”
-         The conservative intellectual movement was the first to fail.
-         Conservative populism is a fraud
-         There is no conservative majority in the United States
-         The “right” now means the overlapping movements of the “far right”, the religious right, the paramilitary right.  The remnants of the Washington-New York conservative movement, the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan right, simply do not matter.
-         The purpose of this book is to explain the shipwreck of American conservatism
-         The contingent and avoidable result of the defeat of the New Deal liberals and the victory of the New Politics/New Left faction within the Democratic party
-         This conservative political realignment has been accompanied by a social revolution: the rise of the American overclass.
-         To establish that a politician is a hypocrite is not to establish he is wrong.  In this book, I hold conservative leaders accountable for their ideas and their public deeds, not for their private lives or private dealings.  Conservatives can have the gutter if they want it.
-         Make no mistake, the present Republican spree on behalf on the corporate elite and the richest families in America will sooner or later provoke a backlash- if not from renewed liberalism, then from the sinister sort of far right populism symbolized by Patrick Buchannan
 
Chapter 1: Realignment and Revolution
-         In 1992, the anti-system revolt came to America
-         The culprit it seems is the world economy
-         In 1994, New Politics/New Left liberalism was dealt a deathblow
-         Thanks to Truman’s narrow victory, the dominant faction in the Democratic party from 1948 until 1968 consisted of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called “vital center” liberals.
-         The War on Poverty united highly educated white liberal reformers with black and Hispanic activists in alliances against the urban political machines representing working class whites
-         In 1994, the ex-Democratic white working class exacted its greatest revenge on the post-McGovern Democratic party.
-         The overclass is not merely an institutional elite, but a quasi-hereditary social elite.
-         A theory that persuades blue-collar workers that they relay belong to the same class as Forbes, Dupont or Buckley and share the same economic interests.
-         The fact that there is a degree of mobility between classes does not mean that classes do not exist
-         A simple test of overclass status: can afford maids or nannies.
-         The first observation that needs to be made about Gingrichian techno-conservatism is the fact that it clearly derives from Karl Marx.
-         The “global economy” cannot explain the economic troubles of the majority of Americans.  The world economy like the information revolution it is an alibi.
-         How convenient that the policies that promote Historical Progress should also, by coincidence, be those that promote the short term interests of the business elites that subsidize the Republican party, and the minority of Americans who belong to the overclass.
-         The yawning void where the center left should be is one of the major reasons the Democratic party is in trouble
-         For the moment, the right is where the elites and the masses are
-         The room for a center-left elite is the most intriguing possibility that American politics present.
 
Political Philosophy (Left to Right)
Overclass:        Left Liberal       Empty              Neoliberal        Libertarian Conserv.
Middle: Empty             Radical Cent     Empty              Far Right
 
Chapter 2: The Center Cannot Hold
-         The history of modern American conservatism is a tale, as farcical as it is tragic, of missed opportunities
-         The McCarthyites led by the young William F. Buckley, Jr.- a band of old-fashioned anti-eastern populists and recent defectors from the radical left- wrested the conservative title from the post-WWII “new conservatives”
-         By 1992, however, the neoconservatives who had remained in the Republican party had abandoned all of the positions that had distinguished them from the Old Right.  What is more, in one of the most bizarre episodes in American political history, many of these former Democratic national liberals allied themselves not with their natural allies in the GOP, moderate Republicans, but with the Protestant fundamentalist far right
-         The capitulation of the neoconsveratives in the 1990s following the defeat of the new conservatives in the 1950s has doomed the enterprise of an intelligent, moderate, centrist conservatism in the United States.
-         The glaring contradiction between social conservatism and radical, destabilizing capitalism had not been resolved- but conservatives pretended it had been.
-         The very lack of intellectual seriousness of the Old Right was a virtue of sort
-         The story of neoconservatism has two episodes.  In the first, the neoconservatives attempted to take back the Democratic party- and failed.  In the second episode, a group of neoconservative attempted to take over the Republican party- and failed.
-         Having spent the past decade adapting right-wing arguments with only minor reservations, the New Democrats today are in no position to refute right-wing ideology.
-         The purpose of Republican “culture war” politics is to divert the anger of working-class whites from corporations, lobbyists, and the Republican party toward the federal government, mass media, nonwhites and the Democrats.  By concentrating on race-and-gender identity politics, instead of lunch-bucket liberalism, the Democrats since McGovern have created their nemesis in the form of an identity politics of the right reaffirming the identity of the white and Christian majority.
-         For the foreseeable future, as for the past half century, the honorable name of conservatism is likely to remain the property of shifting coalitions of libertarians, racists, medievalists, Protestant fundamentalists, supply-siders, flat-taxers, isolationists, gun fanatics, anti-Semites, and eugenics theorists.
-         The defeat of one-nation conservatism is among other things, a defeat for American Catholicism.
 
Chapter 3: The Triangular Trade
-         Conservatism consists of Midwestern foundations paying Jewish and Catholic intellectuals in the Northeast to tell Southern Baptists why they should vote for Sunbelt politicians
-         The populist conservatives of the grass-roots rights are, then, neither populist nor conservative.
-         The grass roots activists are radical demagogues, of the worst kind
-         The populist, or pseudo-populist, grass-roots right and the libertarian corporate right might as well be in different parties- indeed, on different planets
-         The strategy of the modern Republican party is based on a division of labor, with the grass-roots right serving as an electoral coalition, and the libertarian right as a governing elite.
-         In order to convince (them) they are part of the same political movement, an umbrella ideology, manufactured and disseminated by a group of generalist intellectuals, is necessary.
-         Minicons: the highly placed children of leading conservative intellectuals and journalists (Christopher Buckley, Willaim Kristol, John Podhoretz)
-         Immicons: immigrant conservative intellectuals (Rupert Murdoch, David Frum, Reverend Sun Myung Moon)
-         Republican politicians would adopt a position, in response to pressure from this or that constituency and the intellectuals would undertake to provide scholarly sounding rationalizations.
-         In the last fifty years, American intellectual conservatism has been extraordinarily sterile
 
Chapter 4: No Enemies to the Right
-         Today Pat Robertson is the single most important kingmaker in the Republican party
-         Robertson is the single most important purveyor of crackpot conspiracy theories in the history of American politics.
-         The New World Order: the central theme of this rambling diatribe is the existence of a two-hundred year old, worldwide conspiracy.
-         The claim that wealthy, cosmopolitan Jews consciously incite wars so that they can make money as war profiteers
-         Other conservatives soon joined Buckley and National Review in defending Robertson
-         For Podhoretz, it seems practically any lunacy can be forgiven conspiracy-mongering leader of a mass movement, as long as he supports Israel
 
Chapter 5: Whistling Dixie
-         The southernization of the right; a vision of the United States as a low-wage, low-tax, low-investment industrial society.
-         The obsessions and themes, the rhetoric and imagery, of today’s national right are, with few modifications, those of yesterday’s Dixie segregationists and demagogues
-         The new Southern elite in the Republican party brings with it obsessions and attitudes that have long been part of the political culture of Jefferson-Jackson conservatism.
-         Today’s Republican right, then, is not conservative.
-         The economic program, of American conservatives, if enacted in its entirety, would devastate the middle class while helping the American overclass.  Income would be redistributed upward, while taxes would be redistributed downward.
 
Chapter 6: The Culture War and the Myth of the New Class
-         Change the subject from economics to culture
-         A Republican majority based on the exploitation of racial and cultural rather than economic division
-         Most societies have some version of the Golden Age myth
-         The myth of the Golden Age tends to be accompanied by the Devil Theory
-         The Golden Age in the United States, the right has decided, ended in the 1960’s,  when long-haired campus radicals took over the culture, or, at the earliest, in the 1930’s when FDR’s New Deal liberals took over the country.
-         The agent of the fall from grace, the serpent in the American garden, was “the new class,”  a tiny group of professors, journalists, social workers and Hollywood producers.
-         The picture Novak and other conservatives paint of an America that turned into an orgiastic Sybaris in the 1960’s, then, seems utterly unreal.
-         The “new class” is then a figment of the neoconservative imagination.
-         It gives the appearance of social-scientific validation to the apocalyptic conspiracy theories.
-         Goal of stimulating an artificial “moral panic” among Americans.
-         Judeo-Christain: the term was invented in the nineteenth century by anti-Semites, who sought to discredit Christianity by stressing its Jewish origins.
-         “Christian conservative”: to pass of the narrow, and often bizarre, political-moral agenda of the tiny minority of Americans who are far right Protestant evangelicals as the agenda of the substantial number of Americans who are both Christian and conservative.
-         “People of faith”: the cant of victomology
-         “Pro-family voters” is an even greater masterpiece of rhetorical sleight of hand psychological manipulation.
 
Chapter 7: Three Conservative Hoaxes
-         It would be tragedy enough if conservatives had been innocently mistaken in promoting fallacies.
-         The victory of supply-side economics over fiscal conservatism owed nothing to its intellectual credibility and everything to its political utility
-         Thanks to a decade and a half of well-coordinated conservative propaganda, many Americans have been persuaded that America’s public schools are a miserable failure
-         Cross-cultural comparisons are flawed by differences in curricula; Decline in SAT scores is attributable to more lower income students taking the test; Bureaucrats make up only 4.5% of the total staff of public schools; Most increases in funding have gone to special ed.;
-         School choice was a key element in the southern strategy; its primary appeal was to former southern segregationists
-         The increase in the proportion of illegitimate births in the black community is a result, not of a striking greater tendency in recent decades on the part of poor blacks to have more children out of wedlock, but the striking tendency of middle-class and affluent blacks to have fewer children in wedlock.
-         If an excessively generous welfare state and sinister liberal media elite in the United States are not responsible for family shrinkage and breakup, what is? The answer, it seems, is the political and social emancipation of women.
-         The spiritual importance of marriage is wholly absent from the Gospels
-         Homosexuals, being an unpopular and politically weak minority, make useful scapegoats for demagogic Republican politicians trying to create or capitalize upon artificial moral panics
-         A major reason for the dramatic increase in the feminization of poverty was an unprecedented reduction in poverty
 
Chapter 8: The New Social Darwinism
-         Appealing to the racial anxieties of white voters has become a central element of the strategy of the Republican elite
-         The new racial politics of the Republican have been helped by the disastrous racial politics of left-liberal Democrats
-         The thesis of The Bell Curve (Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein) is that the position of blacks and Hispanics in American society is best explained by their genetic inferiority
-         Whites should not only not be forced to pay for programs to help the black poor; they should be allowed to engage in “rational discrimination” (The End of Racism, Dinesh D’Souza)
-         German war bands were actually less of a threat to Roman cultural unity than Mexican-Americans and Korean-American immigrants are to the integrity of American society (Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation)
-         In his discussion of education, Snow tortures history until it confesses what conservatives want to hear.  If Snow is to be believed, the era of segregation was a veritable Golden Age of black education.
 
Chapter 9: The Confederate Theory of the Constitution
-         The basic themes in this tradition are animus against government at all levels, states’ rights, a cult of firearms linked to a supposed right of armed insurrection, and support for a variety of political gimmicks like term limits that give the illusion of popular democracy
-         The first argument- states’ rights and freedom go together- is not supported by either American history or the history of other countries.
-         The practical argument for strong federalism that sees the states as ”laboratories of democracy” is just as dubious
-         If the devolution of authority were combined with the cutoff of federal funding, this would represent a genuine, if misguided, commitment to a small-government philosophy.
-         What is surprising is the sympathy that mainstream conservative intellectuals have begun to show for anti-government hate groups.
 
Chapter 10: Soaking the Middle
-         On the subject of taxes, the American right since Ronald Reagan has substituted demagogy for sober analysis
-         Like members of a cult who rationalize the failure of the world to end on the predicted date, many of the supply side enthusiasts of the 1908’s still argue they were not utterly wrong
-         Total federal receipts as a percentage of GDP are now no higher than they were in 1954.  Nevertheless, middle-class and working-class Americans pay a higher percentage of the federal tax burden because since the 1970s conservatives have succeeded in shifting taxation for the rich and business to the middle calss
-         The father of the modern welfare state is Bismark
-         Two principled arguments for the welfare state can be made: 1) Social-contract theory developed by John Rawls 2) A republican constitution is much more difficult to establish and maintain than autocracy or oligarchy.  It requires a fairly substantial population of citizens with the leisure and education to play at least a minimal role in public affairs.  Education and leisure require a certain material base.  This requirement can be met in two ways- by restricting the suffrage to propertied elite or by spreading property.
-         Conservatives themselves abandon their theoretical objection to entitlements altogether when it comes to education
-         Conservative theorists may be in love with minimal government, but conservative politicians, in power, have nothing against welfare entitlements- as long as their chief beneficiaries are affluent white Republican voters
-         During the past twenty years families in the middle have seen their incomes stagnate or decline, and the bottom has seen an absolute decline
-         It is a false religion.  “The market,” as a realm of purely economic transaction distinct from the social and political spheres and operating to quasi-natural “laws,” is a figment of the imaginations of academic economists.
-         Far from being inimical to capitalism, government regulation makes modern large-scale capitalism possible
-         Contemporary American conservatism combines free-market radicalism in theory with support for a generous invisible welfare state that disproportionately benefits the well-to-do
-         Today’s conservatives run for office as populists, and then govern on behalf of the plutocracy
 
Epilogue: Up From Conservatism
-         The point can hardly be stressed too much: on all the great political debates of the twentieth century, the national liberals were right and their opponents, the left-liberals and conservatives were wrong.
-         American national liberals have won all of the great debates- and lost the political war
-         What passes for conservatism in the United States today, I have endeavored to show in this book, has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism of a kind that Edmund Burke or Daniel Webster would have recognized
-         The chief beneficiaries of the radicalism of the right are the small number of individuals and families that constitute the economic elite of the Untied States
-         It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right.  But it is not too late to rescue America from conservatism.