The Next American Nation.

• Author: Mansfield, Harvey C.

MICHAEL LIND IS not lacking in ambition. His first book is the "first manifesto" of a "real, not merely metaphorical revolution in politics and society" leading to a new America to be known as Trans-America. Lind compares his revolution to the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s and expects it will come by election. He offers his personal guarantee that it will be bloodless. Its analysis makes a book that, while too long for a genuine manifesto, does suit his ambitious goal: a new understanding of the American nation supported by a new interpretation of American history.

Believing that America is a nation-state -- a state arising from a nation -- Lind calls himself a "liberal nationalist." As nationalist, he opposes those who define America as an idea, while also distinguishing himself as a liberal from nativists, who define America by its race or religion. Liberal nationalism in his view sees the nation as formed essentially by language and culture, even though up to now America has been held in the grip of a "white overclass" bent on racial and religious domination. But the discrepancy between what a nation has been in the past and what it can be in the future cannot be removed by politics purging the nation of its excrescences, he believes, because politics comes from within a nation and cannot impose solutions from outside.

Lind therefore deprecates politics together with ideas in the formation of the American nation. The two suffer together because ideas would become effective only through conscious, concerted, deliberate politics. Lind more than deprecates; he subjects American statesmen, all but Alexander Hamilton, to relentless denigration throughout his book, and he reduces their ideas to instruments of rule by the white overclass. Disputes over first principles, he says in regard to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, were results, not causes, in the formation of the American union. Most Americans before World War II, he continues, would have been "puzzled by the idea that the American people was created in 1776." That was when their government, not their nation, was established.

Many of these Americans, though fewer these days, would have learned by heart at least the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, and so would not have felt the puzzlement Lind attributes to them. For Lincoln said that a new nation was brought forth in 1776, one dedicated to a proposition; the government came later after a false start. That proposition is everything and nothing to Michael Lind. It is nothing because he never discusses it and everything because he takes it for granted. He despises Jefferson, the "sainted author" of the Declaration of Independence, together with Jefferson's friend Madison, whom he calls "rich farmers." That all men are created equal, however, Lind takes for self-evident truth. He cannot understand how any...