Essay: America’s Conservative Right

Yet, the right should be concerned about its own “capacity for extremism and intolerance” and about holding collectively its improbable coalition of religious moralists and small-government activists. Be that as it may, say the authors, conservative ideas are now so all-encompassing in American society that even a Kerry government could do little to distract the country’s long-standing rightward flow. This epochal political conversion is on the odd occasion investigated with the quantity of unflustered intelligibility that Micklethwait and Wooldridge bring to their incisive investigation.

The portrait detains the groups, proposals, think tanks and philosophy that characterize the America’s conservative right, a movement beyond compare in any other part of the world. Conservatives, the authors of the book have marked out, are constituents of rifle clubs, feel affection for NASCAR, extremely dislike government, live in the South and outer reaches of the heartland, and are ferociously straitlaced. With forty-one percent of Americans making out themselves as conservatives, the country’s focus and attention is more towards the right as compared to other developed nations. This, the authors say, explains the gulf between America and its cronies, as well as their abhorrence of President George W. Bush.