Why America Is Different

ONE OF THE enduring genres of political writing is the conservative freak show, the book titled: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” or “Thunder on the Right.” It feeds a aching need among the world’s Pharisees to remind themselves that they are not as other men are: bigots, businessmen, and boobs. So The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, spends almost three hundred pages peering into the cages at the zoo, describing the “vixens” and other “ferocious” animals they encounter. Only in the final 25-page conclusion do they get around to admitting that “Hastertland,” the sprawling Congressional district represented by Speaker Denny Hastert, is a much better place than “Pelosiville,” the district represented by San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi. Hastertland is a suburban and egalitarian world of middle-class families where the schools are decent and government works; Pelosiville is a mean-spirited world of rich singles and homelessness where the schools are lousy and government is dysfunctional.

Hastertland is where the “Right Nation” lives and Pelosiville is where liberals live. But they have just spent three quarters of the book looking down their noses at the freaks in Hastertland. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that our bien pensant elites cannot begin to face the fact that their rule-of-the-experts welfare state, the one they have been congratulating themselves about for the last century, is a hole-in-the-corner affair that pales next to the self-governing city of a hill of capitalism, patriotism, and religion. Anybody could tell that North Americans learned self-government early on, and never could be talked out of it, except after the perfect storm we call the Great Depression. But anybody couldn’t tell our western elites, so Micklethwait and Wooldridge are forced into writing a “Straussian text,” where the real message is hidden between the lines, understandable only to those that know the code.

Still, underneath the epithets and the condescension, the authors have written a journeyman description of the conservative movement since 1945 with all the usual characters given their due: Buckley and National Review, Hayek and Mises, neocons ancient and modern, the foundations and the think tanks, Goldwater and Reagan, anti-communism, supply-side economics, the social issues and the rise of the Christian Right. What really got it going was the leftward lurch of the Great Society. Americans are different from lefty Europeans, and the “Right Nation” rose up against an alien creed.

The bottom line is that conservatism in the United States is a kind of reformation, “combin[ing] renewal with heresy.” It has renewed Burke’s conservatism, particularly in a “deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; love of country.” But by embracing classical liberalism it has subverted his “belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about progress; and elitism.” Thus American conservatism is a meeting of opposites. Even though “classical liberalism has traditionally been the sworn enemy of conservatism,” American conservatives behave as though it was a marriage made in heaven. And the man that married them was Hayek who wrote “’Why I am not a conservative,’ cursing the creed for worshiping the state and trying to constrain individuals.” Conservatism, the authors admit, is merely returning the United States to its roots, capitalistic, patriotic, and religious, from the aberration that began in 1933 and peaked in 1965 with the “overreaching” of the Great Society.

With that off their chests, there’s not much left to do except explain the Bush-haters, foreign and domestic. Micklethwait and Wooldridge are rather shy about this. But I’m not shy at all. The fundamental thing to know about Bush hatred is that it is not spontaneous. It was ginned up by political actors that needed an enemy. Al Gore could have folded his tents after the Florida squeaker, as Richard Nixon had done forty years before, but he contested the result and riled up the Democratic faithful. “Old Europe” could have done a deal on Iraq, but Chancellor SchrÃƒÂ¶der needed a spot of America bashing to put him over the top in the German 2002 elections. And President Chirac much preferred filling the streets of Paris with anti-American demonstrators than dealing with bloody-minded government employees striking over pensions.

As usual, the bien pensants have got it backwards. Bush didn’t get it wrong, but stunningly right. It took three world wars, but now the United States has successfully bullied the three bad boys of EuropeÃ¢â‚¬â€France, Germany, and RussiaÃ¢â‚¬â€into a sulk. This is a world-historical achievement. It has a created a window of opportunity in which to clean out the Middle East before confronting the great challenge of the millennium: house-breaking a resurgent China. Anybody around here know how to train a dragon?

Why America is Different

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