Michael Lind | |
|---|---|
 Lind in 2009 | |
| Born | (1962-04-23)April 23, 1962 (age 62) Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Education | University of Texas at Austin (BA,JD) Yale University (MA) |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, academic |
Michael Lind (born April 23, 1962) is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning withThe Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (1995). He is currently a professor at theLyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at theUniversity of Texas at Austin.
Lind is a fifth-generation Central Texan, of Swedish, English, Scottish and possibly German Jewish descent.[1] Born in Austin, he was educated in Austin public schools. His father, Charles Ray Lind, was an assistant attorney general of Texas, and his mother, Marcia Hearon Lind, was a public school teacher and principal. He attended the Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program at theUniversity of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1982 with honors. He received a master's degree in International Relations fromYale University in 1985 and aJ.D. from theUniversity of Texas Law School in 1988.[2][3]
Lind worked forThe Heritage Foundation's State Department Assessment Project from 1988 to 1990.[4] After working as assistant to the director of theU.S. State Department's Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs from 1990 to 1991, he was executive editor ofThe National Interest from 1991 to 1994. He was an editor atHarper's Magazine from 1994 to 1995, a senior editor atThe New Republic from 1995 to 1996,[5][6] a staff writer atThe New Yorker from 1996 to 1997,[7][8][9] and Washington Correspondent forHarper's Magazine from 1998 to 1999.[10]
In 1999 he co-founded the New America Foundation (nowNew America) withTed Halstead, Sherle Schwenninger, andWalter Russell Mead. At New America from 1999 to 2017 he was at various times Whitehead Senior Fellow, co-founder and co-director of the American Strategy Project, co-director of the Next Social Contract Initiative and an ASU Future of War Fellow.[11]
Since 2017, he has been a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.[12] He has taught courses on American democracy, American political economy and American foreign policy at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Virginia Tech's Arlington campus.[11]
Lind has examined and defended the tradition ofAmerican democratic nationalism associated withAlexander Hamilton in a series of books, includingThe Next American Nation (1995),Hamilton's Republic (1997),What Lincoln Believed (2004) andLand of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012). Lind has also written two books onAmerican foreign policy,The American Way of Strategy (2006) andVietnam: The Necessary War (1999). A formerneoconservative in the tradition ofNew Deal liberalism, with the original neoconservatives being anti-Soviet liberals who drifted to the right, Lind criticized the American right inUp From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America (1996) andMade in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (2004). According to an article published inThe New York Times in 1995, Lind "defies the usual political categories of left and right, liberal and conservative."[13]
In 1995, Lind criticized the systems ofjury trials andcommon law, arguing thatcivil law trials are superior to common law trials, and that the civil law model of a mixed panel of professional andlay judges is preferable to juries. On the history of trial by jury in the United States, he wrote that "from independence until the civil rights revolution, the jury was a means by which white bigots legally lynched Indians, blacks and Asians (or acquitted their white murderers). Today urban black juries all too often put race above justice in the same manner." He argued that among other things, the process ofdiscovery was much fairer in a civil law system.[14]
In May 2015, Lind argued for the adoption of "enlightened nationalism", also called "liberal nationalism", in which the United States "would combine its security strategy of offshore balancing with intelligenteconomic nationalism". RegardingNATO and other American allies, a liberal nationalist foreign policy, Lind continued, "would shift much of the burden of the defense of its allies and protectorates to those countries themselves". He has argued for "an immigration policy in the national interest would shift the emphasis from family reunification to skills ... [and] enable long-term population growth ... compatible with the economic integration and cultural assimilation of newcomers to the United States".[15]
Lind is an outspoken critic oflibertarianism. He had observed that of the 195 countries in the world today, none is fully a libertarian society:
If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn't at least one country have tried it? Wouldn't there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, withminimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?[16]
Media related toMichael Lind at Wikimedia Commons