America, Right or Wrong

Middle Earth one week, the American heartland the next. Well, I've always prided myself on being an eclectic reader.

This week, in between juggling two essays, I've been working my way through John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge's "The Right Nation: Why America is Different" - a scholarly but readable account of why America is, and continues to be, so much more, well, conservative than other Western capitalist democracies. Now, this could so easily have been the wrong book to try reading at bedtime at this precise moment - after all, I spend all day reading about politics, I've just recovered from an exam on US foreign policy that required me to stuff my head with all things American, and I'm currently spending my mornings researching the impact of New Right ideas in Britain and America during the 1980s. Anything less than a thoroughly engaging account of American conservatism would have been overkill. Luckily, this book proved to be just that - the engaging style belies the formidable amount of research than has clearly gone into it, so I coasted along nicely and finished it in just over a week, barely even noticing that it technically counted as "work".

Anyway, a few brief comments about specific aspects of the book:

1) It's hardly the authors' fault -"The Right Nation" has been on my "to read" list for a couple of years now, and I really should have got round to it before now - but the book is starting to look rather dated. It was published just before Bush's reelection in 2004 (in fact, it accurately predicted the outcome of that election where most people on this side of the Atlantic were forecasting a victory for Kerry). As a result, it depicts a country where the Republicans are in the ascendancy and where the conservative movement is more united, more organised and more ideologically vibrant than the apparently moribund liberal movement. Six years down the line, however, Obama is in the White House, Congress is dominated by the Democrats, and the organised, unified foot-soldiers of the Right have been replaced by the "Tea Party" - that motley band of evangelicals, libertarians and the generally disaffected, as opposed to mainstream Republicanism as they are to the communist, Muslim non-citizen they believe to be in the White House. A lot has changed since 2004, some of the conclusions reached back then don't seem to fit the picture today, and I think that a substantially updated version will be necessary if the book is to continue to be an accurate account of American conservatism.

2) That said, it would be a great shame if this book were to be rendered obsolete - because it's a great account of the historical journey of American conservatism from the fringes of the political scene, through the seminal Goldwater campaign in '64, to the eras of Reagan and George W. Bush. What is more, it offers a nuanced account of the many different shades of political opinion that come under the umbrella of "conservatism". (This is definitely something which is seldom acknowledged by liberals. I've heard many friends and acquaintances - including quite a few Americans - simply equate neo-conservatives with evangelical Christians, when in fact John Ashcroft was very much the exception rather than the rule). One of the negative impacts of the Bush years (well, one of the many, if you ask me!) was a tendency towards extreme polarisation and the obliteration of nuance in political books from and about the United States. If conservatives such as Ann Coulter were guilty of painting all liberals as terrorist-hugging baby-killers, those on the left were just as quick to characterise conservatives as a grotesque patchwork of every offputting right-wing trait - homophobic, Bible-bashing, Iraq-invading, racist bombers of abortion clinics to a man. "The Right Nation" is an excellent antidote to this kind of stereotyping - which, while it can be fun in the right time and place (believe me, I did my fair share of Bush-bashing as an undergraduate) doesn't really help us understand anything at the end of the day.

3) Finally, the most important point this book makes is contained in its title - "The Right Nation: Why America is Different". It is beyond doubt that mainstream politics in the United States is considerably to the right of any of the other Western capitalist democracies. The contrast with Western Europe is especially striking. While the ever-widening gulf between the Republicans and European conservative parties such as Britain's Tories has generated quite a lot of press of late; what fewer pundits have picked up on (but Micklethwait and Woolridge do) is how right-wing even the Democrats tend to be by Western European standards. There is no shortage of Democrats who are opposed to abortion and healthcare reform, and even fairly left-wing Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton and Howard Dean are strong advocates of the death penalty. While their prognosis that the Republicans would continue to dominate US politics for the foreseeable future now looks dated - a throwback to the era of George W. Bush where the Republican grassroots now rallies round Sarah Palin - this is a more lasting feature of American politics.

(One more quick comment before I sign off on this one and collapse into bed. As a Hispanist, I was perplexed by the description of a San Francisco politician - I can't remember who - as "Pablo Neruda-reading", as though this was a clear indication of a terminal case of left-wing looniness. Now, despite my connections with Chile I can't say Neruda is a favourite of mine, but surely a fondness for the work of a Nobel Prize-winning poet is a sign of erudition, not insanity?)