Where Have You Gone, Michael Lind?

Changed the template of the blog for more cheerful colors, I guess, though there isn't much to be gleeful over concerning the subject matters that 'Left-Federalist' hammers at times redundantly. Also uploaded at 'Blogs &Websites' is a link to the liberal think-tank, Economic Policy Institute, founded by Bob Kuttner. Currently in the middle of reading one of his books - "The End of Laissez-Faire" -where the author adopts an economic nationalist/protectionist viewpoint, but demonstrates as well that this has to be international, and protectionism has to be the international order in today's world.
My thoughts exactly and always were.

In the process of uploading the 'Economic Policy Institute', I decided to purge, if you will, 'The New America Foundation' from said Blogs&Websites. The reason being is that this think-tank is dull, and does not take a stance that I like on globalization - the folks there are wishy-washy and seem to try to pose as such enlightened, intelligent folks that they are opaque in their policies. Though I still like Michael Lind, one of the founders of the above think-tank, I believe that he has become lukewarm on his Hamiltonian, 'Radical Centrist', civic nationalism that was his zeal in his writings in the late 1990s. And I don't gel with Lind's foreign policy very well, and his latest books on it were not well researched unlike his earlier texts such as his one on Abraham Lincoln. Lind has accepted the 'reality' of NAFTA, which is something that is a antithesis that cannot be reconciled into a synthesis with his civic nationalism: no one can label themselves a 'nationalist' and be for Free Trade or be an apologist of entangling trade blocs that are inimical to the national interest and the national economy. I'm sorry...one cannot have laissez-faire and protect the Republic too; extreme laissez-faire - as designed by Ricardo, Say and Cobden - is by design hostile to a soveriegn nation/state. Adam Smith himself is not the boogeyman: Smith was actually a moderate capitalist who believed that when Free Trade was detrimental to a country, retaliatory tariffs should be imposed to correct the problem; Smith wrote that government had a dirgist duty to step in on public education, aid to the poor, and also maintain high wages with the laboring sector. Smith himself was not totally sold on his own 'hidden-hand of the Market", but I have digressed here(imagine that).

The problem with Lind is that he has changed his political stance so much in his life that he has yet to experience a political-animal wholeness , a Ground, maybe. Nevertheless, his excellent - "Hamilton's Republic: Readings in the American democratic-nationalist Tradition" remains one of my 'bibles', essential to my own political worldview, as expounded here at this little blog. Though I've always been partial to Alexander Hamilton as my favorite thinker of the triumvirate of the Founding Fathers, Lind reconfirmed my own Hamiltonianism, gave me a substantial amount of idealistic vigor. The earlier Michael Lind, at least, remains in place though I've deleted his think-tank from my recommended links at Left-Federalist.