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The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooridge. Penguin Press, 2004, 450 pp.
America the Exceptional
by Bruce Ramsey
Libertarians are forever thinking of themselves as a
minority fighting against high odds. Here is a book that paints them as part of a
new American establishment.
Imagine that.
| | Bruce
Ramsey is a journalist living in Seattle. |
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"The Right Nation" is the name these British authors give for conservative
America, which they say has become culturally and politically dominant.
Collectivism, they say, is "all but vanquished"; left-liberalism a shadow of its
former self. Not only do they say that libertarians are part of the force that
did this, but that they are a distinctive, defining part of it.
The authors are Oxford-educated editors of The Economist who have traveled
extensively in the United States, especially in the "red" states of the South and
West that Europeans and New Yorkers seldom visit. John Micklethwait is the
magazine's U.S. editor, based in London; Adrian Wooldridge is its bureau chief in
Washington, D.C. This is their fourth book, following one on management
consultants, one on globalization, and one on the history of the corporation.
They contrast America's conservatism with Edmund Burke's conception. Burke
defined conservatives by their suspicion of state power, their preference for
liberty over equality, their patriotism, their defense of established
institutions and hierarchies, their skepticism of progress, and their veneration
of aristocracy. The American Right, these authors say, exaggerates the first
three of these attributes and contradicts the last three.
"The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility toward the state than any
other modern conservative party," they say. One example is homeschooling, which,
they say, "represents a remarkable rejection of the power of the state." So does
the insistence of a right to bear arms in self defense. |
| Left-liberalism is a
shadow of its former self. Not only do the authors say libertarians are part of
the force that did this, but that they are a distinctive, defining part of it.
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By European standards, The Right Nation is markedly religious and moralistic;
issues the Europeans allow technocrats to deal with, such as abortion, the
Americans address with fundamental principles. The Right Nation is populist,
wielding the power of initiative and recall in those states, mostly in the West,
that allow it. In Europe, only Switzerland uses initiatives in this way. The
Right Nation is remarkably pro-capitalist. "Its heroes are not paternalist
squires but rugged individualists," the authors say. It exhibits the
"conservatism of a forward-looking commercial republic."
Libertarians tend to cite their differences with conservatives. Libertarians
define themselves — and it is the radical ones that see the greatest need to
do this. Micklethwait and Wooldridge use a more forgiving definition of the
Right, which encompasses both libertarians and conservatives. They are writing
partly to explain America to Europeans, and they are looking at America from the
outside in. Said Micklethwait in an interview on National Public Radio, "If ever
there was a subject for which being an outsider is an advantage, 'The Right
Nation' is it."
Their book does two things. It describes The Right Nation, almost
anthropologically, and it makes an argument. The argument is that The Right
Nation is a resurgence of nationalist and classical liberal America, an echo of
pre-New Deal America that has no referent outside of the United States. No other
country has a Rush Limbaugh, an Ann Coulter, a Wall Street Journal editorial
page, or a Fox News; no other country has a National Rifle Association, a Focus
on the Family, and a university for homeschoolers; no other country has a
Heritage Foundation, a Hoover Institution, American Enterprise, Cato, Hudson, and
Manhattan Institutes, a state-level network of right-wing think tanks, or the
kind of money that keeps all these things churning.
America has a Left, and it recognizes its cousins abroad. Our Greens salute
their Greens. But the American Right is not blood brothers with the German Right
or the French Right or the Japanese Right or even the British Tories (except for
Margaret Thatcher, who the authors consider culturally American). The American
Right is exceptional. One reason, Wooldridge said at a recent Cato Institute
seminar, is that the American Right "is much more anti-state, much more
libertarian." (Of course he is using "libertarian" in that fuzzier sense.)
| Bush may be ejected in
November. But a President Kerry would not be able to govern from the Left any
more than Bill Clinton was. |
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Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue that the exceptionalism of The Right Nation
flavors the whole country, and is one reason why America is so often at
loggerheads with Europe. America will not ratify the Kyoto Treaty or the
International Criminal Court and it will not have its soldiers commanded by U.N.
bureaucrats. Europeans will give up their national currency and sovereignty;
Americans don't even like their currency redesigned. Europeans have all had
socialist governments, and they have socialist institutions. America never had a
socialist government. (The authors say the New Deal was too tame to qualify.)
Americans see government's job as providing the background conditions for
individuals to pursue their own interests; Europeans see government's job as
making sure no one is left behind.
America thinks of itself as a young country, but really, these Britons say, it
is not. It is the oldest republic in the world. It settles disputes by arguing
over a document written in 1789 and makes bestsellers of biographies of the
Founding Fathers. It goes to church, prays to God, sends robbers to prison and
murderers to hell. It has a vice president who takes a gun and goes out in the
woods to shoot animals. (No European politician, they write, would want to be
seen to "point a gun at a fluffy-looking creature.") It expects healthy adults of
working age to pay their own way without much state help. In these things,
America had the cultural soil. But The Right Nation as an enterprise did not
really get going until the 1960s. It had some earlier prophets — Russell
Kirk, Ayn Rand, and some others — but Barry Goldwater was its first flag
bearer and Ronald Reagan its first president. George W. Bush is its standard
bearer now, though he imperfectly represents it.
"Bush's enthusiasm has generally been for business, particularly big business,
rather than for the free market," the authors write. "His own career was a
textbook example of crony capitalism." They note that he has aided "the
Republican Party's incontinence" (such a delightful word!) on federal spending,
and that his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have given "steroids" to the
state. They worry that under Bush II "the Republicans have moved from being the
party of small government to the party of big government (as long as it isn't run
by Democrats)."
Bush may be ejected in November. But a President Kerry would not be able to
govern from the Left any more than Bill Clinton was. Even if Americans eventually
elect Clinton's "socialist wife," she will be forced to govern like an Eisenhower
Republican. "America would still be different," they say.
What do libertarians get from this? The book's message is that we are part of
a much larger political army. The authors see us as a congeries of militias
— Christians, tax cutters, gun defenders, property rights defenders,
small-business conservatives, support-our-troops nationalists, neocons,
paleocons, abortion opponents, all of them jostling for position. Among these
factions libertarians are small and not very ferocious, but they do have one
advantage. They are the fount of ideas some of the others are using: school
vouchers, privatization of Social Security, and so on. More than that, they are
the proponents of the theory that explains and justifies The Right Nation's
hostility to the state.
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