He Pledges Allegiance to No Party

Michael Lind is the kind of guy everyone can dislike. Republicans ridicule him because not long ago he was one of them and now loudly says the conservative movement is dragging the nation toward plutocratic ruin. Democrats dismiss Lind--when he’s not bad-mouthing conservatives--because he says the party has betrayed its great history by becoming the slave of multicultural trendiness.

East Coast sophisticates can dislike Lind because he has a Texas-sized disdain for the Washington and Manhattan elites; middlebrow America can dislike him because of his rarefied tastes. The academic community can scorn him, well, because he scorns them. A contrarian’s contrarian, Lind delights in turning sacred cows into filet mignon.

“If there’s an enormous discrepancy between reality and the conventional wisdom, that’s what public intellectuals should expose,” he said over lunch recently, around the corner from his Upper Eastside apartment. “I ask myself, ‘What would George Orwell be doing?’ He spent half his time attacking the left and half attacking the right.”

Lind is the Elvis Costello of American letters: prodigiously productive, protean in talent and slashing in wit. In the past few years, in addition to breaking noisily with the right, he has raced through jobs at several of the more serious magazines in the country, written, in his spare time, two highly praised political books, a juicy Washington novel and, for good measure, a 6,000-line epic poem about the Alamo scheduled to be published next year.

“It’s not like I’m making discoveries in fusion physics,” said Lind, 34, whose boyish mop of dirty blond hair tops a face of gerbil cheeks. “Shakespeare wrote two, three plays a year in his spare time. If you’re an academic novelist you have to pretend to be working harder than you really are. It shouldn’t take you 10 years to write a novel.”

It took Lind, he says, three months to dash off “Powertown,” which has just been published. While the genre usually focuses on Washington’s political-journalistic mandarins, Lind’s novel takes a more Balzac-like view of the city: There is a power-mongering gay lobbyist; his slacker boyfriend, the feckless son of a black civil rights advocate-turned-politician who spends his days booking blowhards for NPR; a clueless downsized congressional aide who stumbles into the editorship of a New Republic-like magazine. The only likable characters are an African American gangbanger, his working-class uncle and a Salvadoran maid, who all meet awful ends while the other characters claw their various ways to happiness.

Lind’s publisher, HarperCollins, is hyping the book as grand satire in the tradition of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987). “More, alas,” sighed GQ, “like a Duraflame weeny roast.” The reviews, so far, have been scathing, which Lind waves away. “If it were someone I respected, I might be devastated.”

In his political books he talks of the necessity of radically upending the current political order; the same thing needs to be done, he insists, in literature. Memoirs, suburban coming-of-age stories, free verse--he’ll have none of it. “It all has to be overthrown,” he said. Lind has the same disdain for the New York literary world (“In New York, people assume if you’re a writer your parents paid your way through college and you went off on a grand tour to Majorca afterward”) that he has for Washington, and talks of someday moving back home to Texas.

“Michael is unique and interesting in that his vision of history and politics has no contemporary vehicle. He has no political home,” noted Adam Bellow, the editorial director of the Free Press, which publishes Lind’s political tomes. “The question is, is it better to be consistent or is it nobler to subject your convictions to criticism and have second thoughts?”

Lind grew up in Austin, where his father is an assistant attorney general, his mother a teacher. He went through the honors program at the University of Texas in three years, spent summers driving a forklift and borrowed money after graduation in 1982 to get a master’s degree in international relations at Yale.

Suddenly, the young liberal Democrat found himself branded a virtual fascist for his moderate political leanings. After President Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, Lind’s fellow students reflexively poured into the campus quad to protest. “It was just assumed that the U.S. was wrong,” Lind recalled. “I began to think, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’m a neocon because everyone says I’m a reactionary.’ ”

Lind helped to found a campus magazine called Scrutiny. Looking for funds, he decided to write to a famous Yale alum who first made a name for himself railing against the school’s supposed radicalism in the late 1940s: William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review. Buckley invited Lind to lunch; the two hit it off (though Buckley later slammed him for his political conversion, writing that Lind had done everything to repudiate his past except change his name).

Lind went back to Austin to earn a law degree, planning to work his way back East and make a career as part of the Capitol’s permanent wonk class--the kind of people, the late Sen. Alben Barkley observed, who would stay in Washington if they had to live in trees.

By some lights, Lind did something worse: He took a job at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank noted for giving offices to former Reagan officials like former Atty. Gen. Ed Meese. He next spent a year working for the State Department’s in-house think tank, then landed a job as the executive editor of the National Interest, a foreign affairs journal published by Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism. Lind spent four years at the magazine, growing ever more disenchanted by the conservative movement.

A few years ago, he began publishing a series of meat ax attacks, in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, on Pat Robertson and his conspiracy theories, which Lind says just dusted off the crude insults from old anti-Semitic writings.

In 1994, he moved further away from his old allies, writing an essay on the demise of conservatism for the socialist journal Dissent. In the meantime, he moved to New York and skipped from jobs at Harper’s to the New Republic, which he left in April to become a contract writer at the New Yorker.

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Nowadays, he considers himself a liberal of a school that is extinct in American politics: Roosevelt-Truman-Johnson, big government, colorblind, friend-of-the-downtrodden liberalism, not the Clinton, touchy-feely-faux-moderate-Republican liberalism. He’s the rare American political theorist who despises Thomas Jefferson, calling his ideas “a poisonous amalgam of white supremacy, state rights and anti-government rhetoric.”

Writing on weekends and evenings for four years, he produced perhaps his magnum opus thus far, “The Next American Nation,” published a year ago to enthusiastic reviews. The book was an idiosyncratic romp through American history up to the present period, which Lind calls a multicultural republic where affirmative action sows racial discord, distracting the middle class from the fact that it is getting its pockets picked by the over-class, the term he favors for the bicoastal elite of which he is a card-carrying member.

Lind’s book, of course, offered a road map out of this morass: “national liberalism,” a radical departure that would combine big government Populism with a true meritocratic society. “Liberal nationalism is not the only way beyond the present stalemate of a discredited multicultural liberalism and a plutocratic conservatism,” he writes. “It is the only path, however, that can lead to an America in which you and your descendants would want to live.”

Self-doubt and ambiguity are alien concepts to Lind. In July he came out with another slashing polemic, this one savaging the right even more than the first book assaulted the left.

“American conservatism is dead,” he declares in “Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America.” The book accuses conservative intellectuals of prostituting their principles for power, of abandoning morality and common sense by kowtowing to the far right.

“For the foreseeable future, as for the past half century,” he concludes, “the honorable name of conservatism is likely to remain the property, in the United States, of shifting coalitions of libertarians, racists, medievalists, Protestant fundamentalists, supply-siders, flat-taxers, isolationists, gun fanatics, anti-Semites, and eugenics theorists.”

“Blowhard foolishness,” snorted Commentary. “Michael Lind is capable of better things,” added Richard Brookhiser, dismissing the book as a paranoid conspiracy tract in Buckley’s National Review. “Michael’s a smart guy but the book is just ruined by his wild conspiracy rhetoric,” said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and Irving Kristol’s son.

Lind’s next book will look at the Vietnam War in light of Chinese and Soviet archive disclosures that show more direct involvement by both countries than previously known. He says he wants to destroy the conventional wisdom that Vietnam was a blunder.

Not having a political agenda of his own, he said, gives him the freedom to analyze issues like a scientist. “One side is right and one side is wrong,” he said. “You can’t fraternize with the enemy. You have to drive them out of public life.”