Lind FTW

 Michael Lind is one of my favourite writers on American politics and history. He’s an old-school New Deal/Great Society Democrat who has no time for the Wall Street-friendly leaderships of either major party, and his columns often take a big picture view of the country’s history by linking political issues from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to modern controversies. He is particularly good at explaining the great switch in party bases which has occurred since the end of the 1960s, i.e. how the Republicans won much of the Northern Catholic and Southern base of the Democrats, and how the Democratic Party came to be seen as a welcoming home for exiled Rockefeller Republicans.

One of Lind’s recent columns in Salon gave me a ‘Eureka’ moment when he compared today’s Republican Party with the Jacksonian-era Democratic Party. Both, he argues, are led by a class of rent-seeking aristocrats, whether they be slaveowners like Andrew Jackson or hedge fund types like Mitt Romney, and supported by foot-soldiers seduced by cultural populism, from the yeoman farmers of the antebellum South to the Angry White Male demographic today.

On the surface, Lind’s thesis sounds similar to that of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas, but it improves on it considerably. Frank’s analysis is a Marxist one (whether or not he would use that term himself), and he damns working-class Republican voters for voting against their economic interest while ignoring the reverse situation (elites who vote Democratic due to their social liberalism). Most importantly, in true Marxist fashion, Frank lumps all types of capitalists together. Lind, on the other hand, looks at the policies being advocated by today’s GOP, and drives a wedge between rent-seekers and the captains of industry. For example, the abolition of estate taxes helps “the Bushes and Romneys” but doesn’t do anything to stimulate production or consumption. And unlike Frank, who portrays the alliance between Wall Street and Nascar Dads as something new, Lind knows that America has seen this all before.

Lind brings into play his lucid understanding of American political history, and makes the connection between the two men pictured at the top of his column – Andrew Jackson and Mitt Romney. Contrary to some liberal historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, who like to conscript Old Hickory as the ideological ancestor of the New Deal, Lind reminds us of Jackson’s membership of “the most parasitic rentier elite in American history” (i.e. that one that was defeated in 1865). Jackson’s attacks on the Second Bank of the United States, he argues, appeared to be aimed at a privileged financial elite, but resulted in the privatisation of its functions to Democrat-supporting private banks, a process similar to the plans of Paul Ryan and others to privatise Medicare and Social Security.

Lind doesn’t explicitly make the connection, but he is implying that the heirs to the Whiggery and early Republicanism of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln are to be found in the opponents of the Jacksonian party. This fits the historical narrative which runs through much of his work, that is, that American liberalism owes more to the legacy of Alexander Hamilton’s dirigisme than to Thomas Jefferson’s ‘yeoman farmer’ ideal. In the article, Lind outlines a hypothetical economic platform which might be supported by a pro-business (as opposed to pro-hereditary wealth) GOP. Its components – infrastructure investment, research and development, energy independence, etc. – would be more likely to be promoted by the presidential wing of the Democratic Party, and are reminiscent of Thomas Friedman’s imagined third parties (such as the ‘Geo-Green Party’ advocated in this 2006 NYT column).