Frontier myth: the spirit of the American pioneer did not inspire modern-day conservativism.

• Author: Lind, Michael
• Position: Book Review

American readers of the "Lexington" column in the British newsmagazine The Economist often have the same response to its survey of a particular U.S. state or region: Many of the details are right, but the picture as a whole is not quite recognizable. American readers of The Right Nation, by The Economist's U.S. editor John Micklethwait and its Washington correspondent, Adrian Wooldridge, may have similar reaction. Micklethait and Wooldridge are intelligent, entertaining writers, and first-rate reporters. But their analysis of both contemporary American polities and U.S. political history is as conceptually flawed as it is politically biased.

Although the authors claim that "we are not members of either of the two great political tribes that dominate the American commentariat," the truth is that they and The Economist belong to the libertarian wing of the right (and the imperial wing, too--The Economist was a cheerleader for the disastrous war in Iraq). By repeatedly attributing the political success of the Republican right to its alleged roots in America's core political traditions, the authors lend credence to Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt's 1980s claim that the real distinction is not between liberals and conservatives but between liberals and Americans.

The thesis of The Right Nation is that the present Republican ascendancy is the result, not of a temporary national political coalition and the exaggeration of the conservative minority's power by the electoral college and the Senate, but rather of deep trends in American society whose values am represented more truly by Republicans than by Democrats. The Republican Party is not a loose coalition of different groups, but the political manifestation of a "right nation"--a coherent conservative tribe which Micklethwait and Wooldridge all too often identify with America as a whole. What the European left hates about the "right nation"--religiosity, laissez-faire economics, the gun culture, foreign policy unilateralism--am precisely the features that make the United States "American," according to these two British writers.

As this summary suggests, The Right Nation is a contribution to the emerging literature which holds that American society, and not merely the electoral college, is divided into a conservative "red nation" and a liberal "blue nation" (their "right nation" is simply another word for "red nation.") In reality, the "red nation/right nation" does not exist, except on...