Volume 42, Number 15 · October 5, 1995
It Takes All Kinds
By Alan Ryan
The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution
by Michael Lind
Free Press, 436 pp., $25.00
The Next American Nation is a deeply imperfect book. It is also exhilarating, original, and mostly right on target in its criticisms of the current state of American politics. Even where not, it is wonderfully thought-provoking. Its imperfections are very obvious: it is needlessly repetitive and needlessly combative; it is more boastful of its own originality than is quite decent; it contains too much wishful thinking; and there are too many purple passages that a kindly editor should have struck out. But these are a small price to pay for the energy and high spirits of which they are a reflection. Sacred cows are slaughtered at the rate of one a paragraph—Jefferson is a villain, Hamilton a hero, Lincoln a good guy, but inferior to FDR; the Mexican War did more good than the Civil War, and President James K. Polk should be as revered as the Founding Fathers. Lind is a liberal but attacks affirmative action and 'open door' immigration policies; and when talk of nationalism reminds us of xenophobes like Zhirinovsky and Karadzic, Lind is an unabashed American nationalist.
Review, 5912 words
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