For nearly a decade, Michael Lind worked closely as a writer and
editor with the intellectual leaders of American conservatism.
Slowly, he came to believe that the many prominent intellectuals he
worked with were not the leaders of the conservative movement but
the followers and apologists for an increasingly divisive and
reactionary political strategy orchestrated by the Republican
party. Lind's disillusionment led to a very public break with his
former colleagues on the right, as he attacked the Reverend Pat
Robertson for using anti-Semitic sources in his writings.
In "Up From Conservatism," this former rising star of the right
reveals what he believes to be the disturbing truth about the
hidden economic agenda of the conservative elite. The Republican
capture of the U.S. Congress in 1994 did not represent the
conversion of the American public to conservative ideology. Rather,
it marked the success of the thirty-year-old "southern strategy"
begun by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. From the Civil War to
the civil rights revolution, the southern elite combined a
low-wage, low-tax strategy for economic development with a politics
of demagogy based on race-baiting and Bible-thumping. Now, Lind
maintains, the economic elite that controls the Republican party is
following a similar strategy on a national scale, using their power
to shift the tax burden from the rich to the middle class while
redistributing wealth upward.
To divert attention from their favoritism toward the rich,
conservatives play up the "culture war," channeling popular anger
about falling real wages and living standards away from Wall Street
and focusing it instead on the black poor and nonwhite
immigrants.
The United States, Lind concludes, could use a genuine
"one-nation" conservatism that seeks to promote the interests of
the middle class and the poor as well as the rich. But today's
elitist conservatism poses a clear and present danger to the
American middle class and the American republic.
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