Michael Lind

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

This intellectual biography uncovers the heart of Lincoln's public philosophy and places his ideals and presidential decisions within the context of his times. Lind dispels the popular image of Lincoln as a self-made man and a naive, inspired genius, and shows that the president was very much a product of his time and place, influenced by the pragmatism of his fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, and by Enlightenment thinking. Lind asserts that Lincoln fought the Civil War not to free the slaves, or even to preserve the Constitution, but to ensure the survival of democracy. With the failure of numerous liberal revolutions throughout Europe in 1848 heightening the possibility that democracy itself would be deemed a noble but failed experiment, Lincoln realized that the stakes in the Civil War were nothing less than the future freedom and prosperity of all mankind. It was this conviction that determined his policies and compelled him to wage the war to the bitter end. Lind also reveals that Lincoln was not a Christian, but a deist who believed in the abstract deity posited by Enlightenment philosophers; and that although he believed slavery was evil, he opposed the idea of a multiracial country and supported the relocation of black Americans abroad.

"In this reinterpretation of America's most disastrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes the state orthodoxies of the left and the right and puts the Vietnam War in its proper context - as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War, he argues, was actually the third world war of the twentieth century, and the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan were its major campaigns."--BOOK JACKET. "Lind offers a provocative reassessment of why the United States failed in Vietnam despite the high stakes. The ultimate responsibility for defeat lies not with the civilian policy elite nor with the press but with the military establishment, which failed to adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war."--BOOK JACKET.

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 - and about their cynical "culture war" strategy for acquiring and maintaining political power. 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. For a century, these elites dominated southern politics and economics, fortified by white resentment and the disenfranchisement of black voters. 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 right's cynical electoral strategy fabricates issues and frightens voters - particularly low income whites - into voting for Republicans whose policies are devastating the very families they claim to represent.

Only a few blocks beyond the brilliant marble monuments, only a few steps behind the most powerful of Washington's elite, a whole, nearly hidden world exists - a world where high-profile fixers reign supreme while low-level bureaucrats jockey for Beltway "McJobs" and the city's impoverished slide further into squalor. Powertown follows a range of characters separated by endless differences and yet connected by the most spidery of threads - a lobbyist, a programmer for NPR, a journalist, a drug czar's flunky, a private security guard, a Salvadoran maid, and a teenage gangsta - as they are borne along a shifting and potentially calamitous current until their destinies converge in a shocking flare-up of violence.

As this century comes to a close, debates over immigration policy, racial preferences, and multiculturalism challenge the consensus that formerly grounded our national culture. The question of our national identity is as urgent as it has ever been in our history. Is our society disintegrating into a collection of separate ethnic enclaves, or is there a way that we can forge a coherent, unified identity as we enter the 21st century? In this book Michael Lind provides a comprehensive revisionist view of the American past and offers a concrete proposal for nation-building reforms to strengthen the American future. He shows that the forces of nationalism and the ideal of a trans-racial melting pot need not be in conflict with each other, and he provides a practical agenda for a liberal nationalist revolution that would combine a new color-blind liberalism in civil rights with practical measures for reducing class based barriers to racial integration.

"Abraham Lincoln was a skilled politician, an inspirational leader, and a man of humor and pathos. What many may not realize is how much he was also a man of ideas. Despite the most meager of formal educations, Lincoln's tremendous intellectual curiosity drove him into the circle of Enlightenment philosophy and democratic political ideology. And from these, Lincoln developed a set of political convictions that guided him throughout his life and his presidency. Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas, a compilation of ten essays from Lincoln scholar, Allen C. Guelzo, uncovers the hidden sources of Lincoln's ideas and examines the beliefs that directed his career and brought an end to slavery and the Civil War. These essays reveal Lincoln to be a man of impressive intellectual probity and depth as well as a man of great contradictions. He was an apostle of freedom who did not believe in human free will; a champion of the Constitution who had to step outside of it in order to save it; a man of many acquaintances and admirers, but few friends; a man who opposed slavery but also opposed the abolition of it; a man of prudence who took more political risks than any other president. Guelzo explores the many faces of Lincoln's ideas, and especially the influence of the Founding Fathers and the great European champions of democracy. And he links the 16th president's struggles with the issues of race, emancipation, religion, and civil liberties to the challenges these issues continue to offer to Americans today. Lincoln played many roles in his life - lawyer, politician, president - but in each he was driven by a core of values, convictions, and beliefs about economics, society, and democracy. Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas is a broad and exciting survey of the ideas that made Lincoln great, just as we celebrate the bicentennial his birth." -- Book jacket.

Presents a historical perspective on the relationship between economic, technological, and political change by analyzing the economic growth of the United States over the course of two centuries.

"The hair-breadth closeness of the 2000 election and the growing number of voters who identify themselves as independents make it clear that most Americans no longer think in terms of the conventional agendas of Left and Right. In The Radical Center, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind boldly announce the death of sixties liberalism and eighties conservatism and the birth of the new philosophy of Radical Centrism. Taking on experts and partisans on both sides of the political divide and explaining why current ideologies and frameworks are ill-suited to the Information Age, they offer a groundbreaking blueprint for updating and remodeling all sectors of American society.". "The Radical Center presents irrefutable evidence that many institutions that promoted progress in the twentieth century now retard progress in the twenty-first. Our archaic electoral system fuels increasing disenchantment with politics; our social contract provides neither the flexibility nor the security that American workers require in the new economy; and our schools and communities are failing to impart the skills and values our citizens need. Arguing that the Information Age has produced a more sophisticated citizenry capable of handling greater choices and responsibilities, Halstead and Lind propose far-reaching, pragmatic reforms for the way we organize elections, provide health and retirement security, collect taxes, structure employment, enforce civil rights, and educate our children."--BOOK JACKET.

Describes the political culture and tradition of Texas and how it has influenced George W. Bush, the country, and the world.

A retelling of a Comanche legend of how a young girl's sacrifice of her most precious possession saves her land and people from a drought.

"Including readings from: Alexander Hamilton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, James Wilson, John Jay, George Washington, John Marshall, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry Cabot Lodge, Walter Lippman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, Fareed Zakaria, James Chace, Samuel Beer, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson."