Michael Lind
- : Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. His most recent books are What Lincoln Believed (2005), Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (2003).
The Radical Princeton Project
I'm eager to read Fareed's next post. In the meantime, I'd like to indicate my agreement with Fareed and Josh, and respond briefly to the latest posts by Anne-Marie and David. I stand by my observation that what Anne-Marie...more »
Posted on May 7, 2008 2:37 PM
Which Internationalism?
Fareed is right that we're living in unusually peaceful times, by historic standards, notwithstanding jihadist terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ethnic battles, many of them generations or centuries old. Here I suppose I am as "state-centric"...more »
Posted on May 5, 2008 6:14 PM
Krugman Gets It
Read Paul Krugman's essay on immigration, "The Road to Dubai," in today's New York Times, in which he makes several of the same points I have made on this site. P.S. Max Sawicky says he agrees with me that a public employment policy...more »
Posted on March 31, 2006 12:05 PM
A Post-Patriotic Progressive Runs for Congress
"Hello. I'm a post-patriotic progressive. I believe that nation-states like the USA are obsolete and indeed immoral. I abhor and denounce the bigotry of 'citizenism'--the idea that the American government should favor the interests of the 300 million citizens of the...more »
Posted on March 30, 2006 9:43 AM
Cheap-labor Liberalism: How the Democrats Mutated into a Socially-Liberal, Economically-Conservative Party
The enthusiastic support by Democrats like Senators Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid for the cheap-labor guest-worker program opposed by the AFL-CIO is a symbol of the final transformation of the Democratic Party from an economically egalitarian party uniting Southern and...more »
Posted on March 29, 2006 1:07 PM
Progressives Should...
Support temporary work visas leading to citizenship for most non-criminal illegal immigrants now in the U.S., whether they have jobs or not (making a work visa conditional on an employer's sponsorship would create a caste of millions of guest-worker serfs overnight);Oppose the...more »
Posted on March 28, 2006 8:35 AM
Is Paul Krugman a Nativist?
In the 1990s, the liberal egalitarian case against unskilled immigration and guest worker programs was forcefully made by three Texans who understood the schemes of George W. Bush and the cheap-labor Right in their state and region--the late Barbara Jordan, the late Richard...more »
Posted on March 27, 2006 7:58 AM
"Global Economic Refugees"--The New Frontier in Political Correctness
This is really rich. According to Nathan Newman, citizens of foreign countries who violate our federal immigration laws are now to be called "global economic refugees." This weird euphemism is a step beyond the already Orwellian political correctness of the...more »
Posted on March 26, 2006 5:14 PM
Borderline Insanity: The Democrats Commit Suicide Over Immigration
In 1964, liberal reformers and labor activists succeeded in persuading the Democratic Congress to abolish the hated Bracero program, which brought in low-wage guest workers from Mexico to labor as serfs in the U.S. Like slavery and contract labor ("coolie labor"), the Bracero...more »
Posted on March 23, 2006 10:24 AM
the welcome candor of kevin phillips
As a Southerner who has spent a decade writing about the Southernization of American politics, I feel compelled to defend Kevin Phillips from the implication in some quarters that he is, as it were, a xenophobic Yankee South-basher. There are xenophobic...more »
Posted on March 22, 2006 9:48 AM
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You're missing the point. In war or a time of warlike crisis, countries want guaranteed sources of supply--no matter what the market price for oil might be (if an oil market is even functioning, in a war or other crisis). In the worst-case scenario, a country can simply sieze oil and gas and other resources it needs in wartime.
By your reasoning, Imperial Germany was foolish to make obtaining the Mesopotamian oil fields a strategic goal in World War I, Britain was foolish to divide control over Iranian oil between itself and Russia in the early 20th century, and Britain was foolish to establish its hegemony over the Persian Gulf after World War I, creating today's Persian Gulf countries in the process. These decisions were driven by the strategic considerations of denying oil supplies to enemies, having politically-secure supplies for crises, or both. The Germans, Russians, British and French weren't fools who didn't understand economics, and neither are the Chinese, now seeking bilateral supply agreements, any more than the neocon strategists are. They're thinking like national security strategists, not private sector business elites. Since oil replaced coal as the basis of industrialized militaries, the energy policy of most great powers, whether wise or not, has been guided by long-term strategic planning, not faith in the free market.
Posted at August 23, 2005 11:23 AM in response to We're in the Middle East To Threaten Asian Oil--Not Protect Ours
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You never, ever give your enemies a time-table. Never.
If you are going to pull out, you should do so--but you don't telegraph it in advance, much less fix a date. That only emboldens your enemies and demoralizes your allies, whom you may still want to help indirectly, even after you've left.
Anti-Vietnam Democrats in the 1970s were right to support a withdrawal but wrong to support deadlines and pass laws handicapping Nixon and Ford. A president may be a bad president, but he's the only negotiator we've got, and it's a terrible strategic mistake for Congress to undercut his ability to use threats while negotiating a strategic retreat, whether the other side is a totalitarian tyranny like the North Vietnamese dictatorship and its Soviet and Chinese patrons or insurgents as in Iraq.
So much for strategy. As a political issue, Democratic calls for timetables and moves to curtail Bush's commander-in-chief flexibility will be noted and carefully recorded by conservatives, who will use them as Exhibits A and B in the case for the "stab in the back" argument in the "Who Lost Iraq" debate for the next 30 years. Liberals should not unwittingly give the Right any material they can use against liberals in the future.Posted at August 19, 2005 8:58 AM in response to Naive Questions on Getting Out of Iraq
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Sigh. Once again, anyone who disagrees with the libertarian Right/open-borders Left position on labor-market grounds is a "racist" who allegedly shares the motives of Le Pen or Buchanan or the populist-right bogeyman of choice (why not add "fascist" while you're at it, just to be consistent in your name-calling?)
Posted at August 15, 2005 10:50 AM in response to David Brooks Admits that Mass Immigration Lowers Wages
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So your view is that the Democrats should sacrifice the economic interests of low-wage workers (including low-wage Latino workers) in return for votes on the basis of ethnicity? So the Democrats are no longer the party of the working class but an ethnic patronage machine?
Social Security's funding problems should be solved by a combination of means tests on the affluent and paying for Social Security out of general revenues rather than a payroll tax. Trying to pay for Social Security by importing young workers is a Ponzi scheme. We'd need far more immigrants every year, to restore the age structure of the 1950s; and when this huge cohort retired, we'd need even vaster inflows of people every year. The lower the wages paid the immigrants, the more immigrants we'd have to import every generation--and the more retirees there would be, when they hit 65. We'd have to go from 300 million to 500 million to a billion people and we still couldn't stop. Inevitably this Ponzi scheme would collapse by 2100 or so, after global fertility slowdowns predicted by demographers reduced the pool of young migrants available for any country.
Posted at August 15, 2005 9:41 AM in response to David Brooks Admits that Mass Immigration Lowers Wages
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Let's see. My views on the effects of immigration are based on the Jordan Commission, chaired by the late Barbara Jordan and appointed by President Clinton, and the Hesburgh Commission on immigration, appointed by President Carter. Both of these Democratic commissions, chaired by Democratic liberals, concluded that it was necessary to reduce both legal and illegal immigration in the interest of low-wage American workers.
Then there was that well-known morally-blind racist Cesar Chavez, who had his followers picket the INS because, by failing to prevent illegal immigration, it was undermining unionization.
Mr. Newman thinks that the views of Jordan, Hesburgh and Chavez, which are also my views, are "morally blind" and equivalent to the "European anti-immigrant right." I think that Chavez, Jordan and Hesburgh knew what they were talking about and Nathan Newman doesn't.
Of the two of us, Newman is the unacknowledged ally of elite economic conservatism. First he uncritically echoes the Wall Street Journal line that mass illegal immigration can't be stopped (in reality, a combination of stiff employer sanctions, Border Patrol enlargement and partial fencing of the US border, most of which is private property that foreigners aren't legally allowed to trespass across anyway, can shut down illegal cross-border migration pretty effectively).
As a fall-back, rather than address the economic question Newman uses another tactic of those who agree with him on the Wall Street Journal cheap-labor right--accuse centrist and progressive critics of elite conservative mass immigration policies of "racism." This is an old cheap-labor conservative trick--according to the cheap-labor right, for example, pro-union laws are "racist" because they allegedly increase black unemployment.
So Mr. Newman not only agrees with the basic immigration policy favored by Wall Street Journal conservatives, but copies their cynical method of accusing the critics of that policy of "racism." (By the way, Mr. Newman, the next move in the Wall Street Journal immigration-debate playbook is to mention the Statue of Liberty).
I for one find this really Orwellian. The older liberal position of Barbara Jordan in the 1990s and Cesar Chavez in the 1970s is now "racist" in the early 2000s; the new liberal orthodoxy, represented by Mr. Newman, is that of....the Republican Party's economic elite. With friends like Mr. Newman, working-class Americans don't need enemies.
Posted at August 15, 2005 9:31 AM in response to David Brooks Admits that Mass Immigration Lowers Wages
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It's impractical to enforce a higher minimum wage, which I support, without creating a tight labor market by reducing low-wage immigration (the immigration of skilled professionals does not threaten low-wage workers). If you raise the minimum wage to, say, ten or eleven dollars an hour (what the 1960s minimum wage would have been today if it had not been eroded by inflation), in an area with a huge pool of low-wage labor, even if that low-wage labor consists entirely of legal immigrants and citizen-workers, then there will be a massive increase in the employment of black-market labor and off-the-books transactions. Not just sweatshop owners but middle-class people with nannies and maids will have a much greater incentive to pay people off the books. And the expansion of the use of black-market labor by the upper middle class and middle class will make it even more politically difficult to enforce a high minimum wage.
If, as seems unlikely, the federal government is willing to use Gestapo tactics on ordinary Americans to force them to pay a high minimum wage, then many people will forego services and do-it-themselves rather than pay low-skilled workers. The result would probably be large-scale unemployment at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum and a further increase in inequality, poverty and alienation.
A tight labor market, created by reducing the numbers of legal as well as illegal immigrants, could force people to pay a high minimum wage, without the need for a politically-impossible degree of government enforcement of laws against black-market labor. Once the numbers of new entrants to the labor market have been reduced and the labor market tightens up, low-wage workers who might otherwise be unemployed should be given well-paid jobs in a government-subsidized eldercare and child care sector.
You can have a high, politically enforceable minimum wage reinforced by a tight labor market, or you can have a constant influx of low-wage labor (even if it's a completely legal influx). But there's a trade-off; and in practice flooding the labor market with low-wage immigrants (even if they are 100% legal) probably dooms more than a slight increase in the minimum wage.
Posted at August 15, 2005 9:02 AM in response to David Brooks Admits that Mass Immigration Lowers Wages
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Nathan: I wasn't talking about federal outlays, either (I know that situation quite well, as Pat Moynihan used to send me copies of his Fisc every year on its publication). I was mocking the complaints of capitalists and affluent professionals living in major cities whose earnings come from investments in agriculture in Montana, textiles in North Carolina, or Nike factories in Southeast Asia. I can't believe that anyone to the left of the Wall Street Journal would endorse the conservative line that the true "wealth creators" are investors, rather than the often remote people who actually do the work.
In my universe, the "wealth creators" in the South were the black and white field hands who picked the cotton, not the absentee landlord who owned title to the plantation, and the West was developed chiefly by ranch hands, not by the British and French investors who owned title to properties they never saw. In my native Texas, most of the oil industry was owned in practice from the 1920s by people in New York, New Jersey, London, etc. Did that make the coupon-clippers in New York and London "wealth-creators" compared to the roustabouts who worked on the rigs? Unless one hundred percent of the (private, not public) investment income streaming into the pockets of the wealthy few in blue cities comes entirely from enterprises located in blue counties, my point stands. To me, as a Roosevelt Democrat, it's bizarre that any Democrats would take the line of reactionary Republican conservatives in the 1930s--namely, claiming that the only true "wealth creators" in the US are investors, and the rest of us are either mere factors of production or beneficiaries of their largesse.
Oh, and by the way, as I used to point out in friendly debates with Senator Moynihan, the flow of profits from the red states to the investor class concentrated in a few coastal cities is the reason why the New Deal Democrats favored the reverse flows of federal revenue-sharing and other forms of national redistribution in the first place. Poor New York, New Jersey and Connecticut--having to subsidize New Mexico and Mississippi! This argument was pioneered by Alf Landon Republican types who hated the New Deal and the Great Society; the fact that Democrats are now professing to feel sorry that rich states (translation: extremely rich people who happen to live in a few states) are taxed to subsidize poorer states shows how far the party has drifted from its labor-populist roots.
Genuinely egalitarian liberals would oppose the abuse of inter-regional transfers by Newt Gingrich and the like, but they would never complain that tax money is flowing across artificial state lines from the rich (who are concentratedin coastal cities) to the needy (who are diffused throughout the country and concentrated in the South and Southwest). If the base of the Democratic Party is becoming coastal-city investors and professionals (the old anti-Roosevelt base), then it's no longer the party of the people. (The anti-Roosevelt investors and professionals tended to take liberal positions on social issues like birth control and separation of church and state, too, half a century ago).
Posted at August 12, 2005 1:51 PM in response to reply to nathan newman
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You should read a lot of the replies to my posts! Among the respondents (who may not be representative of the readers) there seems to be a perception that blue-state people are enlightened, tolerant, and productive, while red-state people are primitives who subsist on welfare checks from "creative class" geniuses in a few liberal cities. For dissenting from this smug (and absurd) consensus I've been called "Fox News Lite" and "David Brooks" (as should be apparent, I'm a Rooseveltian New Dealer in the Progressive-Liberal tradition).
It appears that there are Dittoheads on the left as well as the Right who are enraged by any questioning of unexamined orthodoxy--in this case, unexamined center-left orthodoxy.Posted at August 12, 2005 1:21 PM in response to reply to nathan newman
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Josh:
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "realignment," which Mark Schmitt reminds me has narrowly electoral overtones (I like 2004 because of the symmetry of 1932-68 and 1968-2004). "Transformation" might have been better.
I'm not predicting that the Republicans will win every election forever. My point--which is hardly original with me, as Ruy Texeira, John Judis and Joel Rogers have made it before, in different ways--is that both parties, to be competitive, will have to be predominantly suburban parties that appeal to the service sector working class majority, albeit possibly with an urban wing (the Democrats) or a rural wing (the Republicans). By the mid-20th century, there were two urban-industrial parties (each, by the way, with a remnant agrarian wing), the Roosevelt Democrats and the Eisenhower Republicans. By the mid-21st century, my guess is that there will be two rival parties focused mainly on suburban service sector workers. If that is the case, then my guess is that the priorities of the suburban service-sector party of the left will not include anti-sprawl ordinances and tariffs limiting manufactured imports. An educated guess, but a guess.
Posted at August 11, 2005 5:50 PM in response to Perhaps. But before we get on to that ...
