logo
Lindauthor

Michael Lind

4.30

Average rating

1

Books

Michael Lind (born April 23, 1962) is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in several books, beginning with The Next American Nation (1995). He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lind has examined and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism associated with Alexander Hamilton in a series of books, including The Next American Nation (1995), Hamilton’s Republic (1997), What Lincoln Believed (2004), and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012). Lind has also written two books on American foreign policy, The American Way of Strategy (2006) and Vietnam: The Necessary War (1999). 

A former neoconservative in the tradition of New Deal liberalism; with the original neoconservatives being anti-Soviet liberals who drifted to the right, Lind criticized the American right in Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America (1996) and Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (2004). According to an article published in The New York Times in 1995, Lind "defies the usual political categories of left and right, liberal and conservative."

In 1995, Lind criticized the systems of jury trials and common law, arguing that civil law trials are superior to common law trials and that the civil law model of a mixed panel of professional and lay 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 similarly." He argued that, among other things, the discovery process was much fairer in a civil law system.

Best author’s book

pagesback-cover
4.3

Land of Promise

Paul Graham
Read