Bøger af Michael Lind

A sweeping and original work of economic history by Michael Lind, one of America's leading intellectuals, Land of Promise recounts the epic story of America's rise to become the world's dominant economy. As ideological free marketers continue to square off against Keynesians in Congress and the press, economic policy remains at the center of political debate.Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States offers a much-needed historical framework that sheds new light on our past--wisdom that offers lessons essential to our future. Building upon the strength and lucidity of his New York Times Notable Books The Next American Nation and Hamilton's Republic, Lind delivers a necessary and revelatory examination of the roots of American prosperity--insight that will prove invaluable to anyone interested in exploring how we can move forward.

From one of America’s leading thinkers, a provocative diagnosis of the cause of America’s decline—and a searing indictment of those who caused itFor nearly half a century, Americans have been bombarded by neoliberal propaganda promoting the lie that wages are objectively determined by impersonal labor markets. This falsehood has been repeated by academics, journalists, business leaders, and politicians so often that even many on the liberal left and the populist right believe it. In Hell to Pay, Michael Lind, author of The New Class War, debunks this lie. With brutal clarity, he tells the story of how bipartisan political and business interests united to smash the bargaining power of American workers and reduce wages. And with devastating insight he demonstrates that their success has indirectly caused or worsened nearly every symptom of American decline, from the increase in political polarization to the declining birth rate. Calling for a revolution in the way we think about work and wages, Lind argues that the American republic will collapse if worker power is not restored. Fortunately, Hell to Pay doesn’t just sound the alarm but also offers a plan for breaking the power of the neoliberal elite and reforming America’s disastrous low-wage/high-welfare model—before it’s too late.

Lind argues that the goal of U.S. foreign policy has always been the preservation of the American way of life--embodied in civilian government, checks and balances, a commercial economy, and individual freedom. Lind describes how successive American statesmen--from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton to Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan--have pursued an American way of strategy that minimizes the dangers of empire and anarchy by two means: liberal internationalism and realism.

A maverick thinker who's drawn the applause of both the left and right offers a bold new framework for understanding the turmoil in the West

Why small business is not the basis of American prosperity, not the foundation of American democracy, and not the champion of job creation.

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.

One of America's leading intellectuals presents a startling thesis sure to provoke controversy: that the Vietnam War was the right war at the right time, with the wrong military strategy.