American Government: Balancing Democracy and Rights Book

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.