This iconoclastic brand of post-partisanship isn’t the exclusive property of revolutionary communists, or left-libertarian Fox News personalities. The viewpoint is also upheld by at least one “ radical centrist”: a man who dreams of a cross-class coalition for expanding the welfare state, collective bargaining, and public investment in manufacturing — and has, nevertheless, spent the past few years arguing that the working class has no interest in seeing Democrats defeat Republicans, and that the Democratic “Establishment” poses a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump does.

The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (with Ted Halstead). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385500456. [26] [27] An American Manifesto for a Desirable Future" (review of Lind, Michael, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution). Bernstein, Richard, The New York Times, July 5, 1995.Institutions that used to magnify the power of working-class people – trades unions, local political parties and religious congregations – have all dissolved for different reasons. By default, power has siphoned upwards in the culture, politics and the economy,” he says. Lind evinces an awareness of this fact. His own economic program would provide legal status to undocumented workers (thereby limiting their exploitability), while establishing sectoral wage boards that set minimum compensation and benefits for all laborers. If these aspects of Lindism were enacted, the purported threat that immigration poses to native living standards — which looms so large in the author’s critique of “technocratic neoliberalism” — would seemingly be nullified. Lind tries to hide this contradiction behind a straw man, writing: ML: The term professional-managerial class was coined by the late Barbara Ehrenreich and her then-husband John in 1977 to mean professionals who are intermediate between workers and capitalists in a three-class system. I don’t use it, instead, for college-educated people in general, I use James Burnham’s term “managerial elite”, or overclass, to avoid the aristocratic or plutocratic associations of “ruling class”. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham describes the managerial elite as not only the executives of large private companies, but also civil servants, military officers and careerists in the non-profit sector.

JR: Your comment about the necessity for a “common identity” suggests you reject the idea of multiculturalism. Since 2016, many American intellectuals have thought more expansively than before about the possibilities in the party system. Donald Trump’s populist campaign against his party Establishment thrilled some, and terrified others, with the possibility of smashing the old Reaganite creed. Bernie Sanders’s two unsuccessful campaigns inspired similar dreams of a new class-based politics. Meanwhile, new social movements dedicated to eradicating racism and sexism, propelled by the first nonwhite male president, drew energy from Trump’s overt bigotry and misogyny. ML: Multiculturalism is relevant in societies such as Switzerland or Canada (with its Anglophone and Francophone communities) in which two or more ethnocultural nations permanently retain their distinctness and there is little intermarriage. Modern Founders-ism is a relic of the second half of the 20th century. It served two purposes for the American nation-state: providing a nonracist definition of the American nation during the civil-rights revolution, and supplying the American state with a missionary creed that could rival Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War.

Between an oligarchy in technocratic form and outsider populism, Lind predicts that oligarchs with money and connections will win nine times out of 10. But as they turn narrow and nepotistic, the ruling class will further lose their connection to reality. Instead, Lind insists that the bulk of popular resistance to mass immigration (and thus, support for xenophobic demagogues) is rooted in the native working class’s accurate belief that low-skill immigrants are a top-tier threat to their economic well-being. Here too, Lind declines to engage with the vast empirical literature that contradicts his premise. Researchers have looked for a negative impact on wages or employment from the mass influx of Syrian refugees into Turkey; from refugee migration to Sweden between 1999 and 2007; from refugees immigrating to Denmark in the 1980s and 1990s; from the mass migration of Russian Jews to Israel after the USSR’s collapse; and from Dust Bowl migrants dispersion to other parts of the U.S. during the Great Depression — and, in every case, found none. Meta-analyses of the literature on immigration’s labor market effects have found little to no negative consequences for native workers. There are some individual studies consistent with Lind’s view. And it’s true that native workers in discrete subsegments of the labor force can suffer a loss of bargaining power due to competition with disenfranchised migrant laborers. But Lind’s routine equation of immigration restriction with “tight labor markets” is, to use his own epithet, simpleminded. Immigration increases labor supply, but it also increases labor demand. Fiscal policy, central-bank priorities, and labor regulations do far more to determine workers’ bargaining power and living standards than immigration policy does.