The Next American Nation Quotes

“Michael Lind quotes Frederick Douglas on page 381:

“If we had built great ships, sailed around the world, taught the science of navigation, discovered far-off islands, capes and continents, enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge, improved the conditions of man’s existence, brought valuable contributions to art, science, and literature, revealed great truths, organized great States, administered great governments, defined the laws of the universes, formulated systems of mental and moral philosophy, invented railroads, steam engines, mowing machines, sewing machines, taught the sun to take pictures, the lightning to carry messages, we then might claim, not only potential and theoretical equality, but actual and practical equality. Nothing is gained to our cause by claiming more for ourselves than of right we can establish belongs to us.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 240: [Michael] Walzer transfers responsibility for realizing the old cultural-pluralist fantasy from the all-too-assimilated white ethnics to new ethnic groups from other parts of the world. “Whatever regulation is necessary—we can argue about that—the flow of people, the material base of multiculturalism, should not be cut off.” Walzer hopes that separate ethnic communities in the United States can be kept alive artificially, to prevent the development of a common American cultural identify: “If that vitality cannot be sustained, pluralism will prove to be a temporary phenomenon, a way station on the road to American nationalism.” Assimilation, or nationalism, is a misfortune: “A radical program of Americanization would really be unAmerican. … The public schools, according to Walzer, must be structured to actively discourage the assimilation of immigrants to the majority heritage: “Strengthen the public schools, and focus them … on two things: first, the history and contemporary forms of democratic politics, and second, the immigrant experience.” In Walzer’s view, then, everyone in America should have an ethnic nationality—with the exception of “generic” Americans: “A certain sort of communitarianism is available to each of the hyphenate groups—except, it would seem, the American-Americans, whose community, if it existed, would deny the Americanism of all the others.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 244: It is worth pausing for a moment to ponder the significance of the fact that cultural pluralist ideas originated in two multinational, imperial structures: Austria-Hungary and British Canada. While those nostalgic for the Dual Monarchy or the empire on which the sun never set tend to idealize them as nonnational regimes, treating all subjects according to a single rule, in fact both empires, like multinational regimes throughout history, survived as long as they did by adroitly playing off one nationality against another.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 278: As Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner observes: “theologically and historically, there is no such thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s a secular myth favored by people who are not really believers themselves.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 382: Generations earlier, [Frederick] Douglas criticized “the error that union among ourselves is an essential element of success in our relations to the white race” and that “if we were only united in one body, under wise and powerful leaders, we could shape the policy of both political parties, make and unmake parties, control the destiny of the republic, and secure for ourselves a desirable and happy future.” Douglass demurred: “I hold that our union is our weakness … When we thus isolate ourselves, we say to those around us: “’We have nothing in common with you,’ and, very naturally, the reply of our neighbors is in the same tone and to the same effect; for when a people care for nobody, nobody will care for them.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 110: The change from color-blind civil rights to color-conscious racial preferences took place very quickly. In his Howard University commencement speech of June 4, 1965, President Johnson expressed the color-blind liberal vision by calling for “not just legal equity but human ability” to be promoted by jobs, housing, and “welfare and social programs better designed to hold families together.” On August 5, he signed the Voting Rights Act. On August 11, the Watts riot broke out. … The Civil Rights Revolution, far from assuaging black discontent, seemed to have triggered its violent expression”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 37: Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution counted each slave (usually treated in the law as chattel property) as three fifths of a person in determining Southern representation in the House of Representatives (this compromise, it should be noted, served Northern interests; had each slave been counted as a complete person for purposes of congressional representation, the South would have had even more representatives in Congress).”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 80-81: The two patron saints of American cultural pluralism rejected both Anglo-conformity and the melting-pot ideal. In his 1915 essay in the Nation, “Democracy vs. The Melting Pot,” Horace Kallen was concerned (as the essay’s title suggests) with rebutting the melting-pot conception, as well as the nativism displayed in Edward A. Ross’s polemic the Old World and the New (1915), the immediate occasion of Kallen’s essay. Randolph Bourne, in his July 1916 essay “Trans-National America,” concentrated on contesting the claims of Anglo-conformists for the superiority of Anglo-American culture.* Rejecting assimilation, in its Anglo-conformist and melting-pot forms, both of which, in their different ways, envision the United States as a conventional nation-state with a single predominant culture, cultural pluralists counterposed the ideal of the United States as a nonnational confederation of minorities, a country without a majority nation.

* Kallen and Bourne arguable were influenced by their ethnic backgrounds, Kallen was a Harvard-educated German Jew who had immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of five, a Zionist and a proponent of secular (but not religious) Jewishness, Kallen was concerned about the effect on a distinct Jewish-American identity of the melting-pot ideal that Zangwill (an English Jew) promoted.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 112: In 1970 an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission administrator, Alfred Blumrosen—who despite his relative obscurity is one of the major architects and theorists of today’s racial preference system—expressed this repudiation of color-blind liberalism with surprising candor:

"If discrimination is narrowly defined, for example, be requiring an evil intent to injure minorities, then it will be difficult to find that it exists. If it does not exist, then the plight of racial and ethnic minorities must be attributable to some more generalized failures in society, in the fields of basic education, housing, family relations, and the like. The search for efforts to improve the condition of minorities must then focus in these general and difficult areas, and the answers can come only gradually as basic institutions, attitudes, customs, and practices are changed."

The solution, for Blumrosen and other left-liberal bureaucrats and judges, was to redefine discrimination to mean disparity, to permit the government, “by intelligent, effective, and aggressive legal action,” to assign positions in schools, factories, offices, and government on the basis of racial proportions in the population at large.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 131: The Court’s approval of government discrimination against whites in the name of diversity frees the ideologues of Multicultural America from the increasingly burdensome necessity to rationalize the multicultural program as a remedy for discrimination … The diversity rationale, then, permits black Americans to argue for racial preference as a permanent system, not a temporary measure used in the immediate aftermath of segregation. “Diversity” has another benefit: it justifies the permanent extension of racial preference privileges to Latin American, Asian, and African immigrants, whether or not their own ancestors actually suffered any harm from segregation in the United States in the past.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 147: Over time, this lack of participation in the military by the white overclass could lead to an increasing divergence between the norms of the civilian and the military elites in the United States, and a declining respect for civilian authority by a heavily middle-class and working-class military. The incidents of insubordination that greeted President Clinton’s attempt to end the ban on homosexual men and women in the military showed the existence of both the cultural gap and the possible consequences.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 199: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics, more than 20 percent of all imports to the United States come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. … This is why American business is so adamantly opposed to tariffs—not fear of foreign retaliation, but fear of tariffs on products from American-owned industrial plantations.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 200: This school of thought might be called “free trade plus.” The United States will benefit from global free trade, these liberals argue, as long as the skills and productivity of American workers are upgraded. Higher skills translate into higher productivity, which will in turn translate into higher wages. Here a good theory falls victim to an evil fact: productivity has been going up in America, without resulting wage gains for American workers. The average productivity of American workers increased by more than 30 percent between 1977 and 1992, while the average real wage fell by 13 percent.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 204: In an 1848 address, he (Karl Marx) observed:
"Generally speaking, the Protective system in these days is conservative, while the Free Trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a work, the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favor of Free Trade."
… the neo-fascist right is more likely than the cosmopolitan left to benefit from erosion of living standards by free-market globalism. Laissez-faire globalism may breed its own nemesis, in the form of the most radical and destructive kinds of ethnic nationalism and economic statism.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 286: Common sense on this subject tends to be warded off by ritual invocation of the cliché that we are “a nation of immigrants.” In fact, the United States is not a nation of immigrants, and never has been. At no point in American history have people born abroad constituted more than a minority of the U.S. population”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution