The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

by Michael Lind

Are we now, or have we ever been, a nation? 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 "marvelously written, wide-ranging and thought-provoking"* 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.

A stimulating critique of every kind of orthodox opinion as well as a vision of a new "Trans-American" majority, "The Next American Nation" may forever change the way we think and talk about American identity.

*"New York Newsday"

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Cultural, The United States Of America, American, Political Science

448 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

Currently Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, Michael Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (Aralia Press, 2002), Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2003), a children’s book in verse, which won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children’s literature, and a narrative poem, The Alamo (Replica Books, 1999), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of verse, Parallel Lives, was published by Etruscan Press in 2007.

Reviews

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Lind's "The Next American Nation" is a prescient, polemic, ambitious book. Lind walks readers through what he sees as three stages of historical American identity: Anglo-American, Euro-American, and multicultural. Each made up a distinct "American Republic", bolstered by a compromise between the overclass and a larger working class and a distinct political identity. This portion of the book was interesting and provided important context, but I'm not entirely sold on where Lind draws his demarcations. It also wasn't the reason I read this book. The good stuff followed soon after!

His criticisms of multicultural America, the most recent of the triad, are trenchant and worth reviewing. These critiques resurfaced in the last few months as we witnessed a back-and-forth between corporate wokeism and liberatory protest movements. I don't agree with all of Lind's points on affirmative action for instance, but he makes other powerful points. Notably, he hits on how the White overclass uses tokenist identity politics to insulate themselves against a real class-based challenge; Lind suggests that "the greatest beneficiaries of the demise of transracial class politics has been the White overclass" (182). To do this, the White overclass flattens political analysis within races, denying the importance of class (141). They also shut themselves off from competition with licensing and pursue geographic isolation. The White overclass' politics remain out of touch and centered on maintaining their power. In effect, the system remains defined by "plutocracy tempered by tokenism" (183).

This portion, especially a chapter called "Revolution of the Rich" reads like Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy at points. Not shocking; Anna Khachiyan once called Lind a secret Lasch follower, and The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite pairs well with a lot of Lasch's work, even if the democratic pluralist/liberal nationalist perspective of Lind's has tension with Lasch's more decentralist one. Anyway, I digress.

Lind believes that contemporary identity politics came about with the rise of multicultural America and the foregrounding of racial categorization as opposed to the broad-based liberatory class politics of Bayard Rustin. He views this trend as exacerbating division among the working class to the benefit of the elite. Lind's understanding of a deeper diversity in society involves increased class mobility, which in turn promotes racial diversity due to the current race-class stratification. Instead of cultural pluralism or nativism, both of which he strongly critiques, Lind advocates for liberal nationalism.

As Lind details in later books, this involves greater taxation of the wealthy, limiting mass immigration, fashioning trade policy in the interest of the middle class, making access to healthcare and education universal, and ending race-based policies of any sort. While some of his ideas are strangely paternalistic or borderline unconstitutional, by and large, they make sense to me. Lind seeks a more socioeconomically mobile, egalitarian society without an entrenched overclass. If we had followed this approach (to some extent), populism probably wouldn't take root the same way it has.

Lind bases his politics on a view of America as possessing a unique ethnoculture, apparent in shared language, folkways, and customs. One cannot become American simply by thinking a certain way or having a passport, but by becoming ingrained in these deeper traditions. Multiculturalism, according to the author, will only lead to more divide and conquer politics (245) while nativism is untenable and too conformist (251). America is, instead, a great amalgamation of ethnicities and races into one distinct culture. Lind sees this as the future of a potential Fourth American Republic and ends by discussing the historical figures who represent his vision, settling on Alexander Hamilton (many years before the play!), Frederick Douglass, and FDR, three figures I appreciate. Lind's goal is "unit[ing] the idea of the transracial melting pot with the tradition of social-democratic egalitarianism" (260), backed by a Hamiltonian democracy that can marshal a common vision to address issues like education, jobs, and trade policy. When I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, a similar vision implicitly appealed to me. Sanders then ran on a mainly economic platform focused on a transracial working-class agenda, not very left on immigration or other cultural wedge issues but still concerned with social justice. I preferred this vision to Hillary Clinton's approach, less critical of globalization, and centered on parading social issues. By 2020, that Bernie had lost his appeal, absorbed instead by a more identity-focused, divisive left-wing (and I had moved somewhat rightward too by then). Therefore, the work remains for constructing Lind's challenge to the overclass. While I don't agree with all his specific policies, he has the right idea in this book, and provides a more updated, realistic framework in "The New Class War". It's crucial now more than ever that we build the "nationalist counter-elite" which can be paired with the "transracial wage-earning majority" to make America fair again. We can and should be diverse yet unified. If you liked Michael Lind's other books, this is worth a read, even if some of his policy proposals appear a bit unrealistic.

[Pete Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Next American Nation is a sweeping, ambitious and provocative book, filled with passion, history, and vision. The aspect that had the most influence on me was Lind's rediscovery of the "nation" as an idea independent of the government, the legal order, the ideals or the economy of a country. A nation, to Lind, is a group of people who are committed to having shared descendants. Lind recasts American history in terms of three nations: Anglo-America (1600-1865); Euro-America (1865-1960s) and Multicultural America (1960s-today). He then proposes a fourth American revolution for the sake of "liberal nationalism," which aims to rescue nationalism from right-wing race-based nationalists and provide a compelling vision of what a transcultural, rather than multicultural, nation would look like. He places Frederick Douglass — the self-emancipated slave who dreamed of an integrated nation — at the center of his American story.

The book's weakness lies in Lind's all-to-common mid-1990s capitulation to right-wing (and borderline-racist) ideas on affirmative action, the alleged "culture of poverty," and immigration — as well as his lack of serious engagement into why marginalized groups are skeptical of a color-blind liberalism that aims to incorporate the marginalized into a White-dominated power structure (rather than build a new, truly shared power structure together).

However, the other ideas in the book are very compelling — so compelling that it makes one wish that Lind had been even more careful to distinguish his vision of nationalism from the right-wing, racialized nationalism that is dominant today. All this said, the book is well worth a read — one cannot look at the Trump era the same — or discuss the proper response to the Trump era the same — after having read it. And might I add: a vision that calls on us to see Frederick Douglass as our Founding Father is intriguing enough to be worth our engagement.

[Sylvester Snowshoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation is a masterwork of historical revisionism, sociopolitical critique, and civic vision, one of the most provocative and comprehensive reinterpretations of American nationalism in the postwar era. With blistering clarity and fearless insight, Lind exposes the structural and ideological contradictions that have defined the American republic across three distinct regimes, culminating in a call for a radical yet classically grounded “Fourth Republic.”

At its core, Lind’s argument is devastatingly coherent: America has veered off course not because of too much nationalism, but because it has embraced the wrong kind. Rejecting both ethnonationalism and multicultural tribalism, Lind offers a vision of liberal nationalism rooted in shared civic culture, expansion of democratic rights, and economic fairness. He begins with a sweeping indictment of the antebellum republic, where white egalitarianism was restricted exclusively to whites. Jacksonian democracy, he shows, was built on settler expansion, racial exclusion, and a myth of agrarian equality that masked planter dominance. Even Northern abolitionists, Lind argues, were often assimilationists only in theory, more committed to colonization than to integration.

The post-Civil War order, the “Second Republic” is revealed as a fragile compromise, where Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish whites were slowly amalgamated into a racialized national mainstream, while Black, Asian, and Latino Americans were structurally excluded. Lind reframes the Civil War not merely as a battle over slavery, but as a contest between two racial nationalisms: Anglo-America and Euro-America. The New Deal and Cold War consensus that followed integrated European immigrants into the white mainstream while consolidating systemic exclusion through immigration restriction and redlining. The result was a civic religion built not on inclusion but on white ethnic assimilation.

From here, Lind turns to his searing critique of the “Third Republic” the modern multicultural regime he believes has ossified into a system of racial preferences, bureaucratic identity politics, and elite-managed pluralism. Drawing from nationalist principles, Lind argues that the promise of civil rights was hijacked by a coalition of liberal technocrats and minority elites who replaced integration with categorization. Programs like affirmative action and Statistical Directive 15 didn’t solve inequality, they merely repackaged it, dividing Americans into rigid racial blocs, often to the benefit of affluent minority elites and the “white overclass.” Lind is also critical of the black political elite, whom he accuses of trading moral capital for patronage and preferential legal status, thereby abandoning the integrationist legacy of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.

Lind’s economic vision is equally revolutionary. He proposes replacing the current neoliberal model with a social market contract: public investment in universal higher education, social tariffs to protect domestic labor, and a decisive end to corporate outsourcing. He is especially hard on the “market libertarian radicals” and business elites who, in his view, have betrayed national solidarity in favor of global profit margins. The result, he warns, is a neo-feudal America of gated enclaves, privatized infrastructure, and informal caste systems; a process he dubs “Brazilianization.”

What makes The Next American Nation so urgent and necessary is that Lind doesn’t merely diagnose the rot, he sketches a path forward. His “Fourth Republic” is built on class-based solidarity, civic familism, and a shared American vernacular culture; one forged from folkways, immigrant traditions, and republican ideals. He defends racial amalgamation, not as a utopian dream but as a demographic and civic necessity, arguing that a post-racial nation can only emerge through the dissolution of caste barriers in both race and class.

Lind is unafraid to court controversy, his attacks on affirmative action, multiculturalism, and elite liberalism are fierce; but they are never reactionary. His project is fundamentally radical in the best sense: a return to principles, a reimagining of nationalism as a tool for integration, not exclusion. He speaks with the intellectual ferocity of a civic prophet, drawing from the traditions of Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt to propose an America that is genuinely united, not in blood, but in commitment to a national vision.

This book is not an easy read. It is dense, unflinching, and demands serious engagement. But for anyone committed to rebuilding the American republic on a foundation of justice, dignity, and unity, The Next American Nation is indispensable. It is, perhaps, the most honest and most visionary account of America’s past, present, and potential future written in a generation.

Top Quotes

“The left-liberal and conservative myths are both examples of what Charles Beard called the devil theory of politics. The devil theory holds that the social order is basically sound; all problems are the result of conspiracies by evil individuals or factions.”

“The contemporary United States is dominated by the white overclass a small group consisting of affluent white executives, professionals, and rentiers, most of them with advanced degrees, who with their dependents amount to no more than a fifth or so of the American population. The white overclass is the first truly national oligarchy in American history.”

“The overclass war on the wage-earning middle class has also included forcing American workers to compete with exploited workers in Third World sweatshops, low-wage legal and illegal immigrants, and a rapidly growing pool of temp labor whose members lack job tenure, benefits, or union representation.”

“Multicultural America, then, is neither conventionally liberal nor conventionally conservative. The Third American Republic is a grotesque sachesis of New Left and New Right, of rhetorical radicalism and real putocracy, of divide-and-rule multiculturalism and cheap-labor economics.”

“The [Multicultural] ideal of authenticity seeks to eliminate such conflicts, by positing the identity of your true self and your official subculture. To find yourself, you need only find your ghetto, and adopt its politics, its style of dress, and its approved beliefs about the world and humanity. Having done so, you can then demand that society at large recognize your individuality that is to say, your abject conformity.”

“The ideal of [Multicultural] authenticity, then, is profoundly reductionist, to be oneself is to be determined by biology. Even this is ambiguous if one already is black, female, gay, how does one act to express self-acceptance? The answer is, through conformity to this or that subculture. Those who reject the norms of the subculture though they are just as black, female, or gay are not authentic.”

“To be a good, that is, authentic, person in Multicultural America, then, is to conform ‘politically, psychologically, and culturally’ to the official culture of one's official race.”

“In Multicultural America, the political ideal is multicultural democracy. The divisions that count are not sectional divisions, but racial divisions white and black neighbors, anywhere in the country, are thought to have more in common with other members of their races elsewhere than with each other.”

“The color-blind liberals of the mid-sixties did not seek to bring millions of unskilled Third World immigrants into American cities and border states.”

“The white elite is separated from the masses in taste and value, and the masses are divided among themselves along racial lines.”

“Racial preference and multiculturalism are two of the bigest frauds. They provide the illusion of integration, while imposing minimal costs on the white overclass.”

“Conservatives exaggerate the extent to which Americans rise and fall into and out of wealth. They want the public to believe that the average rich American is just a middle-class American who worked his way to the top, when in fact the average rich American inherited his or her wealth from Dad or Granddad and has very limited experience of the world in which most Americans live.”

“The multicultural left takes the strategy of denying the existence of social classes one step further, by denying, or ignoring, the class divisions among blacks, Hispanics, and white women.”

"The wage disparity tears at the social fabric. It is unacceptable to the large polity as CEOs configure themselves into a new monied elite."

“The new black overclass is not so much a middle-class as an imitation oligarchy.”

“The major beneficiaries of racial preference, it can be argued, are overclass whites, who by this policy of ethnic division and co-opting buy social peace. They also, incidentally, undermine any potential mass-based populism in the country.”

“Both racial preference and free-market economic conservatism serve the interests of the new American oligarchy, the white overclass.”

“The divisions between white, black, and Hispanic wage earners, the natural constituents of a broad liberal coalition, have made it easier for members of the white overclass, an extraordinarily homogeneous, powerful, and well-organized group to pursue their own narrow economic agenda at the expense of most other Americans.”

“Like the Bourbons of yesteryear, today's conservatives play up culture war in order to play down class war.”

“A program of radical reform on behalf of middle-class and working-class Americans is not in the interest of a Democratic party which, like the Republican party, has been captured by the white overclass.”

“Although the Democratic party has more middle-class and working class voters, the power of organized labor has radically declined, as suburban activists, more interested in race and gender quotas and environmentalism than bread-and-butter populist issues, have replaced labor leaders in the inner circles of the party. Business interests are now more important than labor in the Democratic Party.”

“The importance of social market capitalism in maintaining social peace for several generations means that its contemporary crack-up should be a cause for alarm.”

“Corporations take advantage of relatively skilled workers with low wages, low or no benefits, and often no legal or political rights.”

“It is difficult to avoid concluding that civilized social market capitalism and unrestricted global free trade are inherently incompatible.”

“While passing in silence over the desire of big business for cheap and docile labor, the elite press has been quick to accuse proponents of immigration restriction of racism, the ultimate slur in contemporary America.”

“Liberal nationalism is the only conception of American nationality that incorporates the elements of American culture contributed by nonwhite Americans into its very definition of American National identity.”

“Racial preference is dangerous, to the extent that the proliferation of racial preference programs lulls white liberals into the comforting belief that, after all, something serious is being done to alleviate the enduring separation of race by class. Most white conservatives simply do not care.”

“The restriction of legal immigration should not be limited to low-wage workers who compete with the native-born poor and working poor for a limited number of unskilled jobs.”

“There must be some limit to the number of skilled immigrants who are admitted, if educated Americans, along with low-skilled Americans, are not to see their incomes dragged down. Today many college-educated Americans are being forced to settle for non-college jobs.”

“The combination of immigration restriction with a social tariff, by dramatically reducing the effective labor pool for corporations selling goods and services in the United States, would tend to drive up the average American wage.”

“Business elites themselves, in an earlier era, took an interest in the well-being of their fellow Americans; but that was before a misguided (though fortunately reversible) policy of free-trade globalism permitted the economic interests of American business to be detached from the well-being of the American majority.”

“The re-invigoration of congressional democracy meant that the American people were now less likely to look anxiously for salvation by a dictatorial president.”

“An American dictatorship would clothe itself in constitutional and legal forms; it would cultivate an aura of nonpartisan technocracy and business expertise, not a feverish cult of the genius-leader and the masses. An American Fuehrer would not rant and stut, but crack jokes and adopt the relaxed, ironic, cool style of a television host.”

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I decided to read a book by Lind after seeing him as a commentator in publications and on television. He struck me as someone with a thoughtful, insightful, sensible view of American political life, and I was not disappointed. In this study, Lind posits three phases of American life: Anglo-America (1492-1865), Euro-America (1865-1960), and Multicultural America (1960-present). He also calls (somewhat dramatically) for a new American revolution, and the creation of a new, Liberal Nationalist America. In the first phase, the USA was the creation of Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain, and hewed close to traditions and identities formed in the British Isles. The arrival of millions of immigrants from other European countries brought in the second phase, in which a common white, and mostly Christian identity was forged. However, in the most recent phase, according to Lind, America has begun to lose its way, and the formerly proud, unified nation has begun to fracture along racial and cultural lines. He sees racial quota systems (which, to be clear, are not widely used or very popular) as being an especially pernicious trend.

Lind could be labeled a moderate in my opinion, because he is neither a conservative nor a leftist progressive. His view of political life very much involves taking history into account, and he looks at policy decisions as well. I liked his writing and spent a fair amount of time reading this book, and reviewing sections that I highlighted. His style is serious and well-developed, but not dry or unnecessarily complicated. He is ocasionally entertaining, and even dips into some speculative, creative writing. At the end of the book is an amusing section in which he imagines a museum of the liberal nationalist America that he would like to see, with exhibits of Frederick Douglass, and features an oneiric comparison of the bucolic American utopia with the sleazy, urban American Babylon.

I also got a laugh out of his lambasting of Thomas Jefferson, whom he describes as backwards and racist, and a far inferior figure to his rival, Alexander Hamilton, whom Lind regards as the greatest of the Founding Fathers. For Lind, the real founders of America are not necessarily the early government leaders (Washington, Adams, etc.), but the ones who laid down the groundwork for our culture, like George Berkeley, who based the plantation life of the South on rural England and its landed aristocracy; William Penn, who helped create our traditions of tolerance and diversity; and Richard Allen, an early leader of Black culture in Pennsylvania.

This book was written in 1995, so we can now review how prescient it may have been. A lot has happened since, but it certainly has not gone way out of date, since many of the problems and conflicts Lind discusses are still with us. The color-blind liberal nationalism that Lind favors clearly has not won out over the multicultural vision, or the retro, conservative vision; this struggle continues. One weakness, and Lind is not the only one who does this, is to think of America only in terms of European Americans and African Americans, and to ignore the fastest growing groups, Asians and Latinos, who currently make up 7% and 19% of the population.

In recent years I find myself thinking about the views of leftist progressives, and how inarticulate and lacking in vision they are. From what I can see, they are not at all clear about what changes they want to see in society. The phrase "melting pot" is never used, and "multiculturalism" is out of fashion too. They seem primarily interested in symbolic gestures, like renaming Columbus Day, and fulminating over racism or "systemic racism", without actually identifying who the racists are, or what the racist policies are. I bet Lind would agree with that, and his call for a color-blind, liberal nationalism (or is it called national democracy?) deserves serious consideration (even if it could use a better name.)

[Steve Barrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this astonishing work, author Michael Lind describes how there have been multiple versions of the American Republic, each following a major revolutionary event. First of all, it's important to understand the Lind treats the United States of America as a cultural nation, with its own common language (American English), and its own culture and national identity (the familiar "American way of life"). The United States is not an exceptional nation, just a unique one, as there are many other nations which are settler societies, and many other nations which have a diversity of ethnic groups and religions. At best, the United States can take pride in being the oldest democracy, and an inspiration for the rise of democracy in the modern era.

Lind describes three American Republics, the one after the founding of the United States, a second one after the U.S. Civil War, and a third one following the Civil Rights era. He also speculates on a possible fourth Republic in the future (which could be forming now, as I write this review in 2023, since he wrote this book in the 1990s). As a nation, each version of the American Republic has four identifying characteristics: a national community, a common ethic, an elite class, and a national political creed. Lind’s book is very orderly, and his arguments easy to follow. He explains what he means and describes these characteristics clearly for each of his versions of the Republic. I won't go into too much detail, just note that the national community has grown from just people of English heritage (the original colonists) to eventually include all Europeans, and ostensibly at least today, all U.S. citizens, regardless of race, creed, or national origin. Politically, we have become gradually more democratic, and the elites remain, to this day, a "white overclass," which uses affirmative action as a "racial spoils system" to prevent any civil unrest like what happened the 1960s.

Thats how things stand in the Third Republic, in which Lind doesn't have much faith. He proposes various radical reforms to achieve his promissory Fourth Republic, in which there is a true national democracy where civil rights are uniform, and the law is absolutely color blind, harkening back to the original civil rights vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. These reforms include immigration restrictions, tariffs, progressive taxation, college tuition subsidies and caps, and an end not only to affirmative action in college admissions but also to legacy preferences. All of this is meant to bust up the oligarchy and elevate the working class. Could it be that the recent Supreme Court decisions are taking us there? I don't know, nor am I aware of any commentary along those lines by Michael Lind, who is still actively publishing opinion pieces online. Though this this book shows its age, having been written, as I already mentioned, in the 1990s, I think it is a must read for anyone interested in historical cycles. Like many other authors, Lind has identified a cycle of civic decay and rebirth, in which American society periodically reforms itself politically along expansive new lines. Lind's writing is lucid, and his arguments level headed. His outlook is optimistic, possibly even to the point of naivete. Online, he is still beating the drum against the oligarchy and preaching for a united front by worker-friendly politicians from both political parties, to go against the elites. I'm not sure that's possible in the current political climate. But at least he lays out a blueprint for how we could achieve a better society in the future, which must always remain unkown to us.

[Soren Dayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had a big impact on my thinking about politics and the progress of inclusion in the United States.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book I wish I read 15 years ago. Starts out very strong but I think the last quarter of the book borders on fantasy.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering this is a book I didn't finish, I really liked it.

Lind has terrific organizational skills, he's erudite, and he convincingly divides the history of America into these 4 parts. He even has some clear-eyed and interesting things to say about affirmative action and (rather surprisingly) modern marriage.