The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

Rich, challenging and sometimes maddening, this broad analysis and agenda for political reform should spark much debate. Lind, a Harper's senior editor, is a lapsed conservative and the current wunderkind among neoliberals. Here he argues against both left-wing multiculturalists, who consider the nation ``a federation of races,'' and right-wing universalists, who say America is based on an abstract notion of liberal democracy (``The very notion of a country based on an idea is absurd''). Those are caricatures, and Lind's sweeping survey of American history and national identity is intriguing but selective. But his critique of Multicultural America--his term for our current state--has resonance: we have no agreed-on history, holidays, myths or monuments regarding anything that happened after Martin Luther King. Moreover, his attack on the ``white overclass,'' from legacy preference in college admissions (``by far the largest affirmative action program'') to regressive taxation, buttresses his claim that we should not fear cultural balkanization so much as ``Brazilianization''--an informal, race-based caste system. Culturally, he advocates a ``liberal nationalism'' that recognizes a ``Trans-American'' nation, one without racial preferences and in which an American identity trumps ethnic ones. Politically, he argues for multiparty, proportional representation, for treating higher education as a ``public utility'' and, in a revival of the New Deal spirit, for an ``old-fashioned redistribution of wealth.'' (July)