MICHAEL LIND

The central chapter of Up From Conservatism asserts that American conservatism is in fact an immense conspiracy: “What passes for intellectual conservatism is little more than the subsidized propaganda wing of the Republican Party. Public dissent on matters of concern to the U.S. business elite is not tolerated.”

The mechanism that makes possible such total control is laid out by Lind: ” Republican politicians would adopt a position, in response to pressure from this or that constituency-corporations seeking bigger depreciation allowances, the anti-abortion movement, the NRA — and the intellectuals would undertake to provide scholarly sounding rationalizations for the conservative Republican line.” Orders come down from a series of secret summits: “The Party line tended to be adopted at periodic ‘conservative summits,’ the private meetings once a year or so between conservative editors like [Irving] Kristol, [Norman] Podhoretz and [William E] Buckley, occasional journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Republican politicians and foundation executives.” The most important of these meetings, Lind claims, is the Council on National Policy: “The membership roster of this secretive organization, which does not allow the press to attend its meetings, shows the degree to which mainstream Republicanism blends imperceptibly into far- right extremism.”

Other writers of the Left — those who have actually researched their subject, like E.J. Dionne and John Judis — argue that conservatism is actually fractured and that it may well break apart. But Lind sees a vast apparatus that rigidly controls thought and opinion. The opposition to abortion, for example, “was dictated by the religious right to the Republican party, which in turn dictated it to conservative scholars and journalists, via a few editors and program offcers.” And no dissent!

This ruthlessly effcient apparatus, Lind claims, is two decades old: “The modern conservative brain trust originated in a scheme hatched in the 1970s by William E. Simon, Irving Kristol and others.” One of their goals, he says, was to revive eugenics theory. What we now know as the religious Right, Lind continues, was also created at about the same time: “Today’s religious right, far from being a spontaneous rebellion on the part of people of faith, as Christian coalition leaders Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed would have it, was engineered from above by Howard Phillips, a Jew, and Richard Viguerie, a Catholic, and other grass-roots activists in the 1970s.” The religious Right was started, Lind asserts, with seed money from the Republican party and is now the dominant part of the conservative movement, which is itself ” disproportionately staffed by immigrants and subsidized by foreign interests.” The apparatus works in tandem, Lind says, with its “covert, paramilitary terrorist factions,” including abortion-clinic bombers, the “sons of Gestapo,” and David Koresh.

Conspiracy nuts will be impressed by Lind’s account, but he will lose many of those who stop to wonder at his lifelong habit of taking checks from the nefarious network. Up From Conservatism is published by the Free Press, the same house that has made its name publishing Irving Kristol, Ralph Reed, and David Brock. Lind is vicious about Rupert Murdoch, the backer of this magazine, but Lind’s novel, for which he reportedly received a $ 100,000 advance, is being published by HarperCollins, Murdoch’s publishing house. Those with a Lindian frame of mind will begin to wonder if Lind himself isn’t a careful creation of the conservative mafia meant to discredit those who are really out to expose the right-wing beast.

But it’s not really fair to scrutinize Lind’s assertions, because his writing is not really about argument and evidence; it’s all about momentum, a constant and dizzying flow of certitudes. “Today,” he opines, “the right is defined by Robertson, Buchanan, and the militia movements.” To defend that point in the world the rest of us live in, he would have to explain away the fact that Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan did not win the Republican nomination, and that William Satire and George Will seem to have greater standing in conservative circles than the members of the Michigan Militia.

But in Lind’s hermetically sealed universe, it’s never necessary to address counter-evidence and complexity. What’s important is velocity. Up From Conservatism careens from issue to issue. One minute you’re reading Lind’s analysis of OECD figures on income inequality, the next he’s spinning his theory of constitutional jurisprudence. In one chapter entitled “Three Conservative Hoaxes,” Lind tackles conservative economics, education reform, and welfare reform, throws in the Strategic Defense Initiative, health-care reform, and FDA reform, and gets in a few words about eugenics (a recurring obsession) besides. Others might have written a long book on, say, the Republican economic platform — going back to Friedman and Stigler, Buchanan, Mundell, and Feldstein — but Lind spits out the whole subject in just three pages! And in that tiny section, relying on such sources as the New York Times Week in Review section, he asserts to his satisfaction that Republican economic ideas are not only completely wrong, but willfully wrong, a hoax. (At one point, Lind criticizes Nathan Glazer, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and others for writing on subjects such as administration and foreign policy on which he says they have no expertise.)

To convey some sense of Lind’s frantic pace, I include an outline of the topics covered in this book on pages 15 through 26 (in a Michael Lind outline, there are no supporting points):

I. Republican Realignment in 1994 (p. 15)

II. Overclass Revolution, Triumph of Wealthy (p. 16)

III. Party Switching Since 1994 (p. 17)

IV. Analysis of 1992 Election Results (p. 17)

V. History of American Electoral Swings 1800-1951 (pp. 18-19)

VI. U.S. Not a Two-Party System — Samuel Lubell Thesis (p. 18)

VII. Survey of Global Trends in World’s Democracies (pp. 120)

VIII. Postwar Productivity Gains Declined Post-1973, Wage Stagnation (pp. 20-21)

IX. Achievements of the New Deal (pp. 21-22)

X. Problems with Civil Rights Movement (p. 22)

XI. Rise of Southern Republicans (p. 22)

XII. Analysis of 1948 Presidential Campaign (pp. 23-24)

XIII. Henry Wallace to George Wallace — History of Democratic Party (pp. 23-25)

XIV. End of Ideology Thesis (p. 25)

XV. Rise of New Left Activists (p. 25)

XVI. Influence of Jews on American Left (p. 26)

The most welcome sentence in this book reads: “There are two issues I do not address in this book.”

Serenity does not come easily to men who are aware of their own towering genius (look at Ezra Pound), and in the memoir sections of Up From Conservatism Lind makes clear that his life has been a painful quest for intellectual honesty. While he formerly worked at conservative institutions and now works at liberal ones, he says, “my political journey has been far less dramatic than a switch from left to right. . . . My political views have scarcely changed since college.” His goal, he writes, has been always to support the forces most likely “to return to the tradition of the great age of midcentury liberalism of 1932-68.” Lind writes that since childhood he has ranked Lyndon Johnson among the greatest of American presidents and that the ” New Deal liberals, between FDR and Johnson, were responsible for most of what is worthwhile about contemporary America.”

So where did the young writer, fresh out of college, go in search of the heir to Hubert Humphrey and Lydon Johnson? To William F Buckley, Jr., of course. With Buckley’s support, Lind was able to edit a conservative magazine caled Scrutiny while a graduate student at Yale, which may seem an odd way to champion what Lind depicts as his unswerving pursuit of Humphrey/Johnson policies. (Lind modestly omits any mention of Scrutiny in his brief recounting of his Yale days.)

Then Lind accepted a job at National Review. Now, it so happens that I held a similar slot at NR a year or two before. I did not detect a flowering of Great Society liberalism at the magazine. But obviously Lind by his very presence elevated the job status and saw deeper. When I held it, the job was your basic entry4evel position for kids just out of school, generously offered and gratefully accepted. But by the time Lind took over, it seems, it had become a major position from which it was possible to view the very inner workings of the conservative elite. In the mid-eighties, Lind asserts, “the Republican Party under Reagan appeared to be mellowing and moving to the center,” and so it seemed likely to Lind that conservatism would evolve along Great Society lines. Many of us, lacking Lind’s insight, were unaware of this at the time.

Now when I left NR at age 23, I felt lucky to get any job. But as he makes clear, Lind was on a mission to expound his New Deal/Great Society principles. He writes in this book that in the mid-eighties he especially admired Gary Hart. So where did he go to work in search of promoting these liberal ideas updated by Hart? He decided to join the staff of the Heritage Foundation as a “fellow” (he says). But his talents were put to poor use there. The most he could do to advance the cause of the New Deal and Great Society in those years was to publish op-eds trashing ideas like the Citizens Corps, a national service plan put forward by Sen. Sam Nunn and Rep. Dave McCurdy. (This body of work too is modestly omitted from Up From Conservatism.)

Lind moved on, as his intellectual quest took him to job after job, to the State Department and then to the National Interest, the foreign policy magazine published by Irving Kristol. It was there that he watched the 1992 Republican convention, a pivotal moment in intellectual history. As Pat Buchanan spoke to this convention, Lind was shocked to discover that American conservatives were not in fact the heirs to Lyndon Johnson and Gary Hart, but were, astonishingly, conservatives. Many of us saw the Buchanan speech as a slightly more aggressive version of frequently expressed, though not universally accepted, conservative ideas. But remember that Lind operates in his own world, evlated from ours. The speech, he says, “produced an exodus of leading young intellectuals formerly associated with the neoconservative right.” That is to say, Michael Lind.

Shortly thereafter, he went to work for Harper’s. A bit after that, to the New Republic. A year after that, he accepted some sort of mysterious role at the New Yorker. That is where the scourge of the Overclass, the man who despises Manhattanites with their nannies, now finds himself — working for Tina Brown.

Lind appears to realize in retrospect that two of the loci of evil in America are the two men who gave him his early jobs, William E Buckley, Jr. and Irving Kristol. Others would see these men as unlikely villains, since they have done so much to advance the thinking and careers of so many, since Buckley is legendary for his friendships, since Kristol is equally legendary for his geniality. But Lind, seeing things others don’t, heaps obloquy on the two, especially Kristol. (Though to be fair, his criticism of his former employer is not as great as that directed toward the South, the region where he grew up.)

And so having broken with his past, Lind stands alone, with nothing to protect him from the conservative uber-plot but his role at the New Yorker, his contributions to the New York Review of Books, and his various book contracts. What Lind really needs is a magazine all his own. For who else in American life would feel himself qualified to write, on a weekly basis, editorials on political matters, think-pieces on intellectual history, poems for the literary section, short stories, reviews, satires, and, it seems only fitting, letters to the editor appraising his own work? Until The Lind and I comes into being, or until he finally accepts his proper role as a late-night talk-show host, we will have to be content with more sporadic signposts of his flowering talent.

It seems worth mentioning, in closing, that Lind’s forthcoming Powertown represents another burst of personal growth. The first paragraph of that work announces the emergence of high literary style:

“The eagle slants. It hungers through space, its talons unknotting, its wingspan ragged as a saw blade.” The plot spans the range of Washington life, from elite society — private parties, inaugural balls — to crack-gang hangouts. The novel is Lind’s attempt to achieve a Disraeli-like intimacy with the high and the low. The dialogue demonstrates how Lind has mastered the African-American argot: “‘Oh, lawdy,’ says Velma. ‘Somebody else got shot. Lawd a’mercy.'”

And so Up From Conservatism is aptly named, for that is what we can expect from Lind, that he will ever ascend, up, up, up.

By David Brooks