The Next American Nation

The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (ISBN 0-684-82503-1) is a 1995 book by journalist and historian Michael Lind, published by Free Press.

Lind's book focuses on criticism of two trends. The first, multiculturalism, he characterizes as an "unmitigated calamity" and "a repellent and failed regime". Thus, Lind opposes affirmative action and racial quotas, and identifies the elimination of them as a "nonnegotiable demand". The second is a series of compromises struck by what Lind calls the white "plutocracy", "overclass", or "oligarchy". In the "first American Republic", he says, this "Anglo-American nation," the compromise was between North and South to keep blacks in bondage. "The Second American Republic", what Mr. Lind calls "Euro-America," saw the bargain struck between the oligarchy and the white working class to keep blacks marginalized.[1]

Lind further writes that multiculturalism is the basis for another such compromise, in which the "white ruling class" has, in fact, used racial quotas to appease blacks and other minority groups by promoting token numbers among them, but leaving the majority unhelped, while abandoning most whites to impoverishment. This, Lind argues, has led not to Balkanization but "Brazilianization", a toponym which he defines as "a high-tech feudal anarchy, featuring an archipelago of privileged whites in an ocean of white, black and brown poverty."

"Brazilianization", Lind writes, is characterized by the "increasing withdrawal of the White American overclass into its... world of private neighborhoods, private schools, private police, private health care, and even private roads, walled off from the spreading squalor beyond. Like a Latin American oligarchy, the rich and well-connected members of the overclass can flourish in a decadent America with Third World levels of inequality and crime."[2]

Notes

  1. ↑ Books of the Times: An American Manifesto for a Desirable Future, Richard Bernstein, New York Times
  2. ↑ "Moral Crisis in Society", New Dialogue, University of Virginia Center for Ethics, Capital Markets, and Political Economy


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