“America still works,” is the headline on Michael Lind’s cover story for the UK Prospect. Okay, dumb hed, but writers don’t choose their own heds, people. The lede tells us the state of the union is strong: “the US will remain first among equals for generations to come, even in a multipolar world with several great powers.” Huh, okay. So, how do we know that? Well, the first point Lind makes is, “there isn’t going to be a non-white majority in the US in the 21st century. And probably not in the 22nd or 23rd, either.” Because, it turns out, Hispanics are really white.
I don’t think Lind means that if there were going to be a non-white majority, that we could consider that America no longer still works, or that it would no longer be a great power. Does he?
The Edge of the American West 
24 comments
January 30, 2008 at 10:23 pm
ari
Wow, I hate you for making me read that. Take that: 8) You bad man.
January 30, 2008 at 10:24 pm
eric
You are so banned, Kelman.
January 30, 2008 at 10:29 pm
urbino
After Eric’s intro, I’m not clicking. I’m afeared.
January 30, 2008 at 10:39 pm
ari
It’s actually a really weird piece. On the one hand, there’s the conventional wisdom that “hispanic” is worse than useless as a racial catagory. But on the other, Lind seems to accept, without much justification, that so long as the US is a majority white nation, all’s well.
January 30, 2008 at 10:42 pm
ari
I have to delete those emoticons. They’re too horrible to behold. Actually, I’ll leave the first, as the thread won’t make sense otherwise.
January 30, 2008 at 10:44 pm
urbino
Lovely. Paging Dr. Sumner!
January 30, 2008 at 10:46 pm
urbino
And speaking of Social Darwinism, I love this beyond reason.
January 30, 2008 at 11:00 pm
ari
Oh. My. God. You’ve just changed my life.
January 30, 2008 at 11:02 pm
urbino
Great, innit?
“I’m dead, too.”
January 30, 2008 at 11:06 pm
ari
“For you.” Genius.
January 31, 2008 at 4:07 am
silbey
Michael Lind: “I wish for this, this, and this…and a *white* pony.”
January 31, 2008 at 6:10 am
PorJ
Who cares about this trash? Seriously. The Prospect (U.K.) is a ridiculous periodical; it makes the American Right look like a bunch of Commie Symps. This was the magazine, remember, that declared the Iraq War over (and guess what? WE WON!) in October, 2007. It went where even the Weekly Standard refuses to tread. Yes, its fun to laugh at it, but I’d prefer we all just ignore it as it swirls down the chute.
January 31, 2008 at 6:17 am
eric
Well, for one thing, I had an impression that Lind is one of McCain’s house intellectuals.
January 31, 2008 at 6:22 am
eric
Though I could be wrong about that. He’s certainly taken seriously, though.
January 31, 2008 at 6:25 am
charlieford
You can get the boy out of Texas, but you can’t get the Texas out of the boy.
January 31, 2008 at 10:26 am
Greg Miller
Being from the “race is just a social construct” school (although with no diploma to show for it), of course the “white majority” won’t disappear–because the definition of what constitutes whiteness is quite elastic. If we used the standard for whiteness of a 100 years ago, after all, four members of today’s Supreme Court would be non-white: Thomas (African American), Ginsberg (Jewish), Scalia and Alito (Italian)–and another would only be conditionally white (Kennedy–Irish Catholic).
Of course, a hundred years ago, none of them would be on the Supreme Court bench, either.
January 31, 2008 at 3:44 pm
urbino
Well, for one thing, I had an impression that Lind is one of McCain’s house intellectuals.
Anybody able to confirm or deny that? My google didn’t turn up anything, one way or the other.
February 1, 2008 at 6:20 am
Cosma
Lind is one of McCain’s house intellectuals.
Err, no. He’s a curious case, but definitely not that. Up from Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America is actually a rather good book, if somewhat dated, and I can’t imagine anyone who writes sentences like these getting a lot of play with any faction of the GOP: “The largely unintellectual conservatives who preceded them before the 1950s, and succeeded them in the 1990s, have been surly, demagogic and wrong about everything; in contrast, the mid-century `movement’ conservatives around Buckley were wrong about everything in a sprightly and erudite way. They were never for racism, only against desegregation; they did not support apartheid, they merely vilified its victims and critics; they were not in favor of dire poverty, they just objected to any and all
government programs that might ameliorate it.” Or this in The Nation on neo-conservatives.
That said, he has some weird-sounding ideas about demographic bases in politics, and an explicitly American-nationalist streak I find entirely unsympathetic. I’ve not read the piece in Prospect, but given his other writings about racial matters (e.g.), I’d be rather surprised if he’s actually trying to say that America will stay mighty as long as it stays white.
February 1, 2008 at 6:34 am
eric
Thanks, Cosma.
February 1, 2008 at 6:34 am
Ben Alpers
And here‘s a more recent piece in which Lind explicitly argues against “national greatness conservatism,” a term that was frequently tossed around by McCain in 2000.
February 1, 2008 at 6:46 am
eric
Yeah, clearly I was mistaken, or had him confused with someone else.
February 1, 2008 at 6:46 am
AWC
Lind is staunchly anti-immigration, and has written many articles saying so since the mid-1990s. But he is a liberal.
February 1, 2008 at 7:17 am
Cosma
Hmm, from about 1/3 of the way into the article, here’s Lind sounding not unlike Greg Miller above:
If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of “whiteness” that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar “non-Hispanic whites.” In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today’s old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry.
This is clearly Lind expressing his own opinion, mind you, not describing someone else’s views. And the point is that “the US is not going to fall apart along ethnic lines, like Yugoslavia or Iraq”.
February 1, 2008 at 7:39 am
eric
You gotta admit it’s very easy to read this as, “Good news: America, still white!”