Michael Lind: Envious and Invertebrate

         Michael Lind lacked the spine to take on Christopher Hitchens while the polemicist was alive.  Lind only saw fit to trash him in a long, dull, and inaccurate column on Salon's website once Hitchens had succumbed to cancer.  Unlike Hitchens, who had no problem hurling mud before and after an opponent's death, Lind had insufficient decency.   
          "Some claim that Hitchens was a fascinating conversationalist, but as I recall he showed no interest in ideas and preferred to peddle gossip about politicians and journalists and authors, until I found opportunities to excuse myself," Lind wrote.  So, Lind boasts that Hitchens favorably reviewed his own book, paid for drinks, and his response is to complain about the content of the conversation years after the fact?  As someone who was lucky enough to have Hitchens as a teacher in New York, I can verify that over drinks the famed polemicist spoke of nothing but ideas and poetry and literature.  Stories about Arthur Schlesinger, arguments with Sam Harris, descriptions of Syria, and quotations from Mencken.  Perhaps Hitch was so rocked to sleep by Lind's "on the one hand" shifting, one had no choice but to engage in a little vivifying personality chat?  One thing Hitchens did hate was a crashing bore.  (Check out Lind's book chats:  Pure chloroform.)    And to accuse Hitchens of being all over the map when you yourself have swung from Texan conservative to Hamiltonian progressive is a bit much.  
            Lind has a litmus test for real intellectuals:  "First, intellectuals need to produce some substantial works of scholarship, literature or rigorous reporting, distinct from the public affairs commentary for which they may be best known to a broad public."  Well, if anyone can read For the Sake of Argument, Unacknowledged Legislation, or Love, Poverty, and War without discovering "rigorous reporting," you've got me.  The incisive arguments, eye for quotation, and close attention to language illustrates the best of Orwellian cultural criticism--not scholarship--a claim Hitchens never sought.  Though, regarding academe, I should add that his review "Transgressing the Boundaries" is a Hitchens essay/review at its best regarding universities at their worst.
         Hitch's work for Harper's on polls ("Voting in the Passive Voice") helped change the conversation about the emergent industry and his amazing polemic The Trial of Henry Kissinger not only was turned into an excellent film documentary.  One can easily see that C.H. plumbed the archives and formed a hard-hitting and persuasive argument for Kissinger's arrest.  So much so that the filthy old criminal thinks thrice before leaving his adopted country, as did his old comrade Augosto Pinochet in Chile.  And I should also mention, Hitch's discussion of literature and reportage in places like Contra-befouled Central America; his letters to young radicals; his interview with Borges and Fallaci; his defense of Bernard Henry-Levy; and his evaluation of novelist Anthony Powell will surely live much longer and is much closer to truth than say, the prose of Lind's novel Powertown.  (If you don't know the work you can buy it online for .75 cents.  Oh, and Hitchens' own essays from the 1980s, collected in Prepared for the Worst, are going for $80.00.)   
              Lind continues:  "Second, genuine intellectuals base their interventions in public debate on the basis of some coherent view of the world.  Hitchens left behind no substantial scholarly or literary work, and if he had any core principles or values they are hard to discern."  Well, Hitch's polemics about Mother Teresa and Clinton have just been republished to wide acclaim and introduced by scholars like Douglas Brinkley and literary icons like Ariel Dorfman.  I doubt Lind's arguing that Vietnam was a "necessary war" (while whining about the liberation of Iraq) will attract such quality of collaborators on his next reprint, if there is one.  And regarding the many "lumpenintelligentsia," who Lind denounces as Hitch's fan base.  This group, which is, I chance to guess, Lind's slur against the young readers with an interest in literature and criticism and philosophy outside of the skunk-tank consensus of D.C.  The lumps might testify to Hitchens' principles which, for better and for worse, devoted him to a lifetime of speaking up for the victims, attacking the powerful, seeking the truth, forming original arguments, rejecting "the gift" of absolute authority innate in religion, and rejecting consoling fictions.  As he said in one of his last orations, "Think of [authority] as a poisoned chalice, push it aside however tempting it is.  Take the risk of thinking for yourself.  Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way."  
                Hitch forgot to add "respect," which came his way, deservedly.  

Why is Michael Lind so wrong about the future?

               “Despite its reinforcement of the status quo and the lack of debate about large issues during the campaign, the election of 2012 will go down in history as the end of the backlash against mid-20th century liberalism," says Michael Lind.  Could he be more wrong?  What Republican Party has he been following for the last 30 years?  Have studies of the conservative movement in The Hammer, The Wrecking Crew and Pity the Billionaire not given away the game?  Haven't the terrifying reports from the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and the unnumbered hacks and spinners flying out of well-funded skunk tanks given Lind the update?  Here it is:  Movement conservatism can never die or fail with such flushed accounts.  As the saying goes, movement conservatism can't fail, conservatives can only fail it.  It is an ideology.  And not one that will vanish or give up it's "anti-statist" position because Barack Obama received a little more than half the vote.   

                This movement's goal is the reversal of the 20th century social-welfare state, true.  And that is the reason for its being; it's the glint in its eye, or more accurately, the very twinkle in its monocle.  Without the dream of a "free market" the party is reduced to the ideology of a permanent minority:  the lesser of two evil status with which it ambled through the 1950s and 60s.  A fate its ideologues and funders will not accept.

                Lind argues that “No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost.  But as a formula for achieving a governing majority in the United States, Reaganism is finished.”  I am not so optimistic.  With the financial and political power of the corporations and its useful instruments in the media (as well as the continuing disappearance of unions from below) I see no organized opposition to movement conservatism, regardless of its current unpopularity.  When Tea Party Republicans were elected in 2010 they ran on fiscal issues, "debt reduction," but spent most of their time passing legislation to restrict abortion and slow down the Affordable Care Act.  And as they are elected in the future, they will use their influence to chip away at the earned benefit programs they call "entitlements" as sure as they will lie their way into office.  Free- marketeers will also engineer new crises--as was done in Rhode Island by Ms. Raimondo--and force through necessary, immediate, critical 'reforms.'  And while a market-based Medicare or 401K Social Security plan may not be on the schedule now, working state programs are enduring reminders of good-government and consequently can never be off the table for the ideologists of the right.  The party's method of pushing reforms might look less like Bush's feckless 2005 attempt to privatize Social Security and more like the travesty of Medicare part D, the health industry giveaway jackhammered through Congress.  

                Also, "Reaganism" cannot be "finished," as Lind argues, when the very policy of the doddering old fool was regulatory capture:  turning over the state umpires to corporate players.  Does anyone think that if, say, Paul Ryan or Rick Santorum are elected in 2016 they will not follow Ron's sinister and cynical policy of handing over the car lots to the carjackers?  Is there any indicator that Reagan's famous denial of science, his backing of odious regimes, his war against agencies like OSHA and unions would not continue in the next Republican administration?  With the right vessel, whose to say a double victory ala Reagan--cuts and all--could not be on the agenda once more? 

               Lind argued in 2004 that the Democrats were no longer a national party, two years before they won back Congress, four years before Obama's landslide, and eight years before a mighty re-election mandate.  In 2008, Lind argued that "Obama may join Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the short list of American presidents who, thanks both to their own leadership and the fortuitous timing of their elections, presided over the refounding of the United States."  This nicely overlapped with his book.  But not only is Obama a timid moderate on the domestic front, even mild transformations Lind hopes for are delayed by the very conservative forces he argues are ideologically irrelevant.  Even now, "fiscal cliff" looming and stung by a large defeat, austerity and the folly of a slashing "Grand Bargain" of cuts on the welfare state are the real conversation in Washington among the famed "consensus."  Meanwhile a jobs agenda with real regulatory reform and handcuffs for the crooks and thieves on Wall Street is as fantastical as a New New Deal.