Unlike a lot of people who write about “red” and “blue” America, Michael Lind has an understanding of the various and diverse ethno-cultural groups that make up the USA. In his book Vietnam: The Necessary War, for example, he discussed how these ethno-cultural factors influenced attitudes toward the politics of the Vietnam war.
Here Lind tries to convince folks on the left that Bush and the Republicans have succeeded not because all of “red” America buys into the values and agenda of the far-right, but because they are able to speak to the broad center, people who support gay rights but are uncomfortable with redefining marriage, for instance.
Lind also underscores that the habit of many on the left to disdain suburban life – a habit that drives “anti-sprawl” initiatives, the jihad against the car, etc. – will only be self-defeating since many, if not most, Americans choose to live that way. He also points out that suburbs are not the desolate wastelands of anomie that many left-wing (and some conservative) critics imagine.
He argues that 18th-century (small-“r”) republicanism still provides a viable framework for American politics. The republican ideal of independent property-owning citizens rooted in local communities is distinct from both liberal welfare-statism and conservative capitalist individualism:
The republican ideal is a citizen with enough property to be independent both of the labour market and of government. This explains why American populism, and much of the US labour movement, has been almost as hostile to the welfare state as it has been to unscrupulous employers. The continental European welfare state was devised in countries with traditions of bureaucratic monarchy and aristocratic paternalism, like Germany and Sweden. Americans have rejected the ideal of a society in which government pays for everything while a benevolent mandarinate governs in the public interest not because we are stupid, but because we are republicans.
When the Bush Republicans speak of “the ownership society,” they are tapping into common American values, not narrow conservative ideology. The most popular New Deal liberal programmes of the mid-20th century were those which diffused property or earning capability, like low-interest loans for people seeking to buy their own homes and loans for college students. Social security and Medicare–both redistributive systems–were carefully packaged by New Dealers as social insurance, to avoid offending republican populist sensibilities.
Lind sounds here very much like the social historian Christopher Lasch who became disaffected with the left and tried to recover a populist vision rooted in the republican tradition (see especially his The True and Only Heaven). Lasch saw both the Leviathan state and big corporations as a threat to the kind of independence valued by the republican tradition.
Lasch accused the modern conservative movement of exploiting the distrust of the mega-state, even while funneling vast sums of money to the military-industrial complex and supporting a variety of unrestrained capitalism that corrodes social bonds. Liberals, on the other hand, exhibited a profound distrust of ordinary people in seeking to replace informal authorities and social structures (families, neighborhoods, churches, etc.) with the impersonal bureaucratic institutions of the welfare state. What was needed, Lasch thought, was a re-assertion of the competence of ordinary people in local economies, intact communities and local democratic self-governance.
Much of the post-election commentary on the left has displayed precisely the kind of sneering condescension toward middle and working-class Americans that Lasch was all too familiar with. I doubt he would be surprised that the left has failed to learn the lessons he tried to teach them. Nor, I suspect, would he be surprised that the right continues to appeal to “conservative values” while championing an economic system that is anything but conservative.
(Lind article via Godspy)
A Thinking Reed 
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