Up from Conservatism Why the Right is Wrong for America

by Michael Lind

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.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Memoir, History

Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Currently Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, Michael Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (Aralia Press, 2002), Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2003), a children’s book in verse, which won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children’s literature, and a narrative poem, The Alamo (Replica Books, 1999), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of verse, Parallel Lives, was published by Etruscan Press in 2007.

Reviews

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Decries the fall of the National Liberal tradition, which is socially moderate and fiscally center-left. According to Lind, this New Deal/Great Society left was displaced by the Left-Liberals within the Democratic Party and decimated within the Republican Party when the 1950s Republicans turned to McCarthyism instead of Viereck and the early neocons (no relation to Bush and Cheney, we're talking Kirkpatrick). In both eras, the US had a real chance for one-nation conservatism, which Lind sees the current conservative movement as very far from. He laments the downfall of this National Liberal ideology in elite circles while noting that it actually represents a decent portion of the American public. I appreciated his analysis of ideological tracks within the right and left. In some ways, his analysis hasn't changed in his newer works; Lind points to an elite track of opinion and a popular track. Within the popular track, radical centrism matches up with national liberalism. But because national liberals are few and far between, the radical centrists feel underrepresented and angry at the political establishment. Lind connects this group to the Middle American Radicals often discussed in the rise of Trump. He points out the flaws in fusionism and says we might be nearing a class war on the right. More recent happenings have proven him correct.

Lind makes a Thomas Frank-like argument about the culture war distracting from the class war the right is waging from the overclass, abetted by neoliberals who share their free-market outlook. Modern conservatives (often former leftists) borrowed Marxist conceptions of market evolution and revolution. Instead of representing a true conservatism, they represent a counterrevolution of the overclass, shrouded it in a Jacksonian/Jeffersonian outlook. I found this to be a sharp and accurate critique of the right wing. They continuously engage in a politics of class that's cynical at best. Lind calls them out, showing the links between the right and the overclass and smashing their most prominent myths about welfare, schools, etc. One critique I have is that it gets away from the exciting, creative style that Lind often writes in for a more conventional "hey the right's policies aren't good", which I was less engaged in.

At the end, Lind engages in a must-read discussion of government-economy relations. For him, there is no such thing as a market divorced from government policy (253). Nonethelss, this myth persists in politics until today. But right after, Lind endorses neoliberals for the short-term because they share the same ends as National Liberals, if not by differing means. I thought this merited more explanation because he spends time deeply critiquing the neoliberal approach. I guess in the context of the 1990s it might have made sense. Read this book with an understanding of when it was written and pay special attention to his discussion of radical centrism and national liberalism. Things really haven't gotten better on that front.

[Augustus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure why I read this book. I saw something about one-nation conservatism reference it, which was interesting, but that's not really what the book is about, and I don't know why I decided to power through the whole thing.

In Up From Conservatism, Lind pens a diatribe against the conservative movement he had just left. His argument is fair enough but far from novel — he mostly criticizes American conservatism for exactly what anyone paying any attention would expect — and it is inexorably rooted in the time he was writing, full of specific complaints that have long ago lost their relevance.

The whole thing, though, has a characteristic Lind sheen to it. I've only read this book and another essay or article or two from Lind, but he is a distinctive writer, preoccupied with the ancient folkways and patterns of thinking undergirding modern dynamics. Sometimes this can be revealing, as in Lind's characterization of movement conservatism as an inversion of communist radicalism. But more often than not, you're left asking yourself just how much the migration patterns of Scots-Irish settlers of the Upland South can really tell us about the world today.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an interesting analysis by a confused conservative who's turned into a confused liberal/centrist/some of me never changed memoir

He'll make two profound points and then about 8 dumb ones along the way, and it's a fun book to browse if say you read your Samuel P. Huntington.

One thing Lind is famous for is he is a huge critic of libertarianism, and he said it best in 2014 with:

"If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn't at least one country have tried it? Wouldn't there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?"

Though i think New Zealand has been one to experiment more than others.

Everything Lind speaks about in this book, was proven largely wrong by Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump.

Lind did say something interesting in Politico in 2016:

"Trump, in fact, has more appeal to the center than the conservative populists of the last half century. Before Trump’s rise in this year’s Republican primary elections, the best-known populist presidential candidates were Alabama Governor Wallace and tycoon Ross Perot, along with Buchanan. Yet none of these past figures had broad enough appeal to hope to win the White House. Despite his folksy demeanor, Perot was more of a technocrat than a populist and did poorly in traditionally populist areas of the South and Midwest, where Trump is doing well. Wallace was an outspoken white supremacist, while Trump tends to speak in a kind of code, starting with his “birther” campaign against President Obama, and his criticism of illegal immigrants and proposed ban on Muslims may appeal to fringe white nationalists even if it has offended many if not most Latinos. Nor has Trump alienated large sections of the electorate by casting his lot with Old Right isolationism, as Buchanan did, or by adopting the religious right social agenda of Robertson."

"Indeed, the best explanation of Trump’s surprising success is that the constituency he has mobilized has existed for decades but the right champion never came along. What conservative apparatchiks hate about Trump—his insufficient conservatism—may be his greatest strength in the general election. His populism cuts across party lines like few others before him. Like his fans, Trump is indifferent to the issues of sexual orientation that animate the declining religious right, even to the point of defending Planned Parenthood. Trump’s platform combines positions that are shared by many populists but are anathema to movement conservatives—a defense of Social Security, a guarantee of universal health care, economic nationalist trade policies. “We have expanded the Republican Party,” Trump claimed the night of his Super Tuesday victories. He may well be right, though it’s not clear what that Republican Party will look like in the end."

I would say that those two paragraphs were far more interesting than anything Lind wrote in Up from Conservatism actually.

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"Compared to Trump, Buchanan was a flawed vehicle for the Jacksonian populism of the ex-Democratic white working class."

"But even before the unexpected success of Trump in the Republican primary race beginning in 2015, there were signs that this generation-old bargain was coming undone. Hostility to both illegal immigration and high levels of legal immigration, a position which free-market conservatives had fought to marginalize, has moved very quickly from heresy to orthodoxy in the GOP."

"Glancing backward, it is unclear that there has ever been any significant number of voters who share the worldview of the policy elites in conservative think tanks and journals. In hindsight, the various right-wing movements—the fusionist conservatism of Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, neoconservatism, libertarianism, the religious right—appear to have been so many barnacles hitching free rides on the whale of the Jacksonian populist electorate. The whale is awakening beneath them, and now the barnacles don’t know what to do."

So Lind has an amazing capacity to repair himself from his earlier writings, and it's neat to see where he's right and wrong on a lot of things.

But honestly, i wouldn't really trust Lind on much, other than a critic of the beds he used to sleep in.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much a historical document of its time and works better as a critique of the right than its analysis/prediction of national American politics and where it could go. But it's striking how many of the criticisms remain, and how the American right seems the same as it ever was, except it got worse than Lind predicted.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

very revealing...

[Ben Rothman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sheer nonsense. I'd give it no stars if possible.