Rights and Responsibilities of Citizens of This Great Republic : On colorblindness: A rational argument from the extreme center : THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, <i> By Michael Lind (The Free Press: $25; 388 pp.)</i>

To the extent that this has been a land of liberation for many, but also a land of unfulfilled dreams for the American underclass, it is about time someone wrote a book that recognizes the profound ambiguity represented by our sidereal symbols standing alone on islands awash with hope and despair: the Statue of Liberty on one coast, Alcatraz on the other.

The social value and the legal validity of affirmative action programs have been undergoing intense scrutiny during the past year, and that process is certain to intensify as the presidential sweepstakes gain momentum. While many candidates would just as soon fudge the issue--making their obfuscations sound sweet, reasonable and judicious--Michael Lind, a senior editor at the New Republic, knows exactly what he believes and candidly speaks his mind. He is not running for office and can afford to offend.

Lind’s new book is likely to win him admiration from liberals and moderate centrists, but hostility from those at the extremes. Those on the left will reject Lind’s analysis because he argues that multiculturalism as a concept and as social policy has been a disaster during the past quarter-century. Those on the right will be distressed because Lind would like to see a whole lot of “race-mixing” occur so that the United States is eventually obliged to function as a colorblind society--the sooner the better.

For readers aware of the proliferating literature for and against affirmative action, it should be noted that “The Next American Nation” has a far broader scope than most contributions and has the considerable virtue of contextualizing the more parochial and polemical work on the subject. Lind has produced a political history of ethnicity in America, plus a critical review of multiculturalism as social thought and as federal policy since the later 1960s and finally, a schematic vision of what he calls liberal nationalism--a truly democratic melting pot in which racial and ethnic differences really dissolve into a coherent unified national culture.

Cultural pluralists, racial purists and nativists will scorn Lind’s vision. Tough-minded realists are likely to dismiss Lind as an impractical visionary. Those who feel that insufficient progress has been made in human relations since the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, however, may welcome “The Next American Nation” as a well-informed, passionate attempt to think anew about our changing composition as a society.

In one of the strongest sections of the book, Lind makes the arresting assertion that Richard Nixon was the man most responsible for multicultural America, i.e., a society atomized by class, race and ethnicity. He describes a “conscious divide-and rule strategy by upper-income Republicans in the early 1970s, a strategy that sought to pit white and black workers against one another.”

Lind is at his lively best in explaining the genesis of Statistical Directive 15 from the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known policy initiative that began in 1973 when Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Housing, Education and Welfare, sought the development of consistent rules for classifying Americans by ethnicity and race. Lind declares that Directive 15 is “just as important in American life as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights--perhaps more important now that the latter have been reduced to mere occasions for unprincipled judicial law-making” in legitimizing “the racial preference revolution.” Last month’s controversial 5 to 4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court renders Lind’s rhetoric here just a bit passe.

According to Lind, the official division of Americans into five racial categories--American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; black; white, and Hispanic--”resulted from the collision of the desire of liberal Democrats to indefinitely expand the racial preference patronage system with the desire of federal bureaucrats for a few relatively broad categories. Since the racial categories reflect political and bureaucratic imperatives, not cultural realities, there might just as well be three official races in America: Eurasian-American, African-American, American Indian/Mestizo; or eight: American Indian, Mestizo, Black, Indo-European, Turko-Arabic, Malay, Mongoloid, Mulatto. It really is that arbitrary.”

At times the author’s ridicule may interfere with his effort to expose some bizarre realities. Even so, Lind’s cynical but high-spirited humor provides some of the book’s brightest moments--evenhanded humor at the expense of the right as well as the left. One more example must suffice:

“Perhaps support for multiculturalism by the nativist right could be secured by an agreement to include denominations in the group-rights system of Multicultural America. Perhaps, in addition to a black and a Jewish seat on the Supreme Court, there would be a Protestant evangelical seat. Perhaps African-American Studies departments could be joined by Evangelical Studies departments. Perhaps voting districts could be redrawn on denominational lines--Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic--as well as racial lines. Diversity might be redefined to include denominational and not just racial and gender diversity. Why not? The spoils system of Multicultural America is flexible and capable of indefinite extension.”

If Lind uses sarcasm to caricature the fragmentation of American society, he is straightforward and shrewd in his critique of the affluent white “overclass.” He is wonderfully iconoclastic in treating the hackneyed use of community as a conceptual buzzword during the past two decades. He is equally strident--though he will be less persuasive to some readers--in his critical assessments of what he calls “democratic universalism,” cultural pluralism and the new nativism. He finds them naive, unhistorical and intolerant.

What Lind advocates instead he calls non-nativist liberal nationalism, reminiscent of the outlook of Hubert Humphrey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it will be intriguing to watch whether his prognosis-cum-prediction commands any sort of consensus. Essentially, he believes that despite our diversity we share much more than a slender core of civic rights and responsibilities defined by our fundamental political texts. He is persuaded, and devotes his last chapters to asserting, that there really is an American vernacular culture in which most of us do (or can) participate, and that that vernacular culture already owes so much to African-American music, style and other contributions that advocacy of black separatism makes no sense.

Lind’s prose is mostly clear and compelling although he has a penchant for catch-phrase categories or labels that are not always as well defined as one might wish. Although the historical chapters are reasonably well grounded, there are too many small but disconcerting errors, ranging from books whose publication is misdated, to discrete policies that are conflated, to an erroneous account of the genesis of Thanksgiving. Much more serious is Lind’s tendency to present as virtual conspiracies policy decisions that actually emerged as less coherent, less rationalized in terms of their consequences and less deliberately schematized than he would have us believe. On occasion Lind is simply carried away by his own logic and rhetoric. He rejects, for example, “the cliche that we are ‘a nation of immigrants.’ In fact, the United States is not a nation of immigrants, and never has been.” Why? Because “at no point in American history have people born abroad constituted more than a minority of the U.S. population.” This is a meaningless technicality.

In the end, readers will respond in very different ways to Lind’s vision of cultural homogenization--his apparent belief that “the substitution of Maya Angelou for Julia Ward Howe in class-room recitation” is a minor matter of canonical fine-tuning. Readers will have to come to terms with the vigor and freshness of Lind’s analyses, as when he observes that “only in the United States . . . do radicals . . . think that the way to start a revolution is to revise the curriculum of public education.”

If Lind wants us to turn back to the colorblind vision of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and earlier 1960s, a vision of integration and assimilation, he also wants us to move forward to a more democratic and more egalitarian society. He finds our greatest injustices in class inequities rather than racial or ethnic injustices. That perspective will not be readily accepted by all; but it deserves thorough consideration. It is a vision, so to speak, that requires a hearing.