They both recently graduated from liberal-arts colleges on the East Coast, and they have travelled around most of Europe. Maura has done a spell at the European parliament; Dustin interned at the White House, and is thinking about politics. And those politics? Both are working for the Republican party in Colorado Springs, one of the most conservative cities in America.
Both immediately volunteer John Ashcroft, President Bush’s fire-breathing attorney-general, as someone they admire. Both are pro-life “under any circumstances”. Both support capital punishment and oppose gun control (“At college, people were like, ‘Why does anybody need guns?’ and I was like, ‘Have you ever been to a ranch?’ ”).
Both go to church every week. Both passionately support school vouchers. Both think government should be smaller and prison sentences tougher. Both regard the United Nations as a bit of a joke and support the decision to withdraw from the Kyoto environmental protocol.
They dissent from others on the right on some things. They dislike any intolerance toward gays, and they were initially nervous about dealing with Saddam Hussein unilaterally, though they both eventually supported Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
For Dustin and Maura, conservatism is a progressive creed. It is not about old people trying to cling to things, but about young people trying to change them. And that, they insist, is what America is all about too. Few in Colorado Springs would dispute that assertion. Nestled in the Rockies, it is one of America’s most successful cities. It spawned a successful revolt against state taxes, and it is the home of about 100 Christian organisations. The biggest, Focus on the Family, is enormously influential in Republican circles.
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Europeans prefer to dismiss people like Dustin and Maura, and places like Colorado Springs, as the extreme fringe of American society. In fact, however, at least one in three Americans supports all the principles that Dustin and Maura believe in. On the death penalty, taxes and tough sentences, Dustin and Maura stand firmly with the majority. Twice as many Americans describe themselves as “conservative” (41%) as describe themselves as “liberal” (19%).
Wander around America — particularly the south and west — and you’ll find plenty of towns that feel like Colorado Springs. As Republicans never stop pointing out, the counties that voted for Bush four years ago take up far more of the map than the ones that voted for Al Gore.
These places help to explain modern America. They explain why Bush is in the White House, why the Republican party has won six of the past nine presidential elections and controls both houses of Congress, why every serious Democratic candidate for president supports mandatory sentencing and welfare reform, why the cultural capitals of Hollywood and Manhattan — the America that Europeans know — remain the exception and why the much-disdained “flyover” land that lies between them is the rule.
This is not to say that America is on the verge of becoming a giant Colorado Springs. There are millions of Americans trying to pull the country in the opposite direction: witness the enormous groundswell of support on the left for Howard Dean’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. America is more polarised than it has been for decades.
Yet there is no doubt which pole is exerting the most power. The right has been forcing its opponents in the Democratic party to make compromises.
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Bush-haters in Europe might imagine that a Bush defeat in November would bring their nightmare to an end. But a Democratic president would still have to deal not just with the Republicans in Congress but with Colorado Springs, with Focus on the Family, with Dustin and Maura — with the huge part of America that is the Right Nation.
AMERICA is different. Not only has it produced a far more potent conservative movement than anything available in other rich countries; America as a whole is a more conservative place. The centre of gravity of American opinion is much further to the right — and the whole world needs to understand what that means.
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Most Americans do not realise how extraordinary their brand of conservatism is. The American left — unions, academics, public-sector workers — have their equivalents overseas; but Dustin, Maura, Focus on the Family, the angry taxpayers and the militant gun-owners are distinctly American.
America tolerates lower levels of government spending than other advanced countries, and far higher levels of inequality, at least in terms of wealth. One in six American households earned less than 35% of the median income in 2002. In Britain, one of Europe’s more unequal countries, the proportion of similarly disadvantaged households is closer to one in 20.
America is the only developed nation that does not have a full government-supported healthcare system, and the only western democracy that does not provide child support to all families.
America upholds the right to bear arms, the death penalty and strict sentencing laws: its imprisonment rate is five times that of Britain, the toughest sentencer in Europe. It is much more willing to contemplate the use of force in human affairs, even unilaterally, and much more wary of treaties than its allies.
The Right Nation has also been a Righteous Nation. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, it thought that it had a God-given task to redeem the world from the evils of communism, and to redeem America from any hint that it might slacken in this task. Now it is organising around the struggle against terrorism. The more other countries question America’s war plan, the more the redeemer nation is convinced of its rightness.
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When asked about similar creeds overseas, many American conservatives mention Margaret Thatcher. “Now she was a western Conservative,” argues Bill Owens, Colorado’s ambitious young governor. But Thatcherism was a far less durable phenomenon than American conservatism and one without much of a moral agenda.
The United States is one of the few rich countries where abortion is a galvanising political issue, and perhaps the only one where half the families regularly say grace before meals. It has taken a far tougher line on stem-cell research than almost any other country. Some of these positions are “Republican”, but most of them enjoy broad-based support.
In no other country is the right defined so much by values rather than class. The best predictor of whether a white American votes Republican is not his or her income but how often he or she goes to church. In 2000 Bush won just 54% of the votes of those Americans who earned more than $100,000 a year; but he won 79% of the votes of those whites who went to church more than once a week (and only 33% of those who never went).
At the same time, America has failed to produce a xenophobic far right on anything like the same scale as Europe has. In Colorado Springs, conservatives see immigrants mostly as potential recruits rather than as diluters of the national spirit.
There are numerous exceptions to this exceptionalism. American conservatism cannot help but contain contradictions because it contains so many vital elements. There are thousands of conservative activists, hundreds of conservative think tanks, a small army of conservative intellectuals. One useful book of conservative experts, published by the Heritage Foundation, the movement’s biggest think tank, is as thick as a telephone directory.
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On the positive side, this pluralism helps to explain why it is such a big and vibrant movement. Yet the broad church also means that people are often worshipping different gods.
Look at Colorado Springs and you’ll find at least three competing forms of conservatism: the laissez- faire individualism of the tax-cut- ters and gun-owners, the Christian moralism of Focus on the Family, and the militaristic nationalism represented by a neighbouring US Air Force Academy and the bumper stickers laughing at Saddam.
How can you trumpet a strong military and a vigorous foreign policy and then insist on small government? How can you celebrate individualism but then try to subject those individuals to the rule of God? Wherever you go in the Right Nation, you discover similar contradictions.
Neither of the first two definitions of conservatism offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary — “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes” — seems a particularly good description of what is happening in America at the moment.
Similarly, the American right diverges from Edmund Burke, classical conservatism’s most eloquent proponent. His creed might be crudely reduced to six principles. Modern American conservatism exaggerates the first three: patriotism, a deep suspicion of the power of the state and a preference for liberty over equality. But it takes a resolutely liberal approach to the other three: elitism, a belief in established hierarchies and scepticism about progress.
Far from being elitist, Republicans play the populist card. Even George W Bush, a president’s son who was educated at elite schools, has successfully played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington.
As for hierarchies, the heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out west and, of course, the cowboy.
The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism about progress. Most American conservatives think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.
Despite its populism, however, American conservatism is not as popular as it likes to think. The right may be in the driver’s seat and it may help to explain why the United States is different, but the right is not the United States.
Jim Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, can attract 8m Americans every week to his radio station to hear about the evils of homosexuality; but Will & Grace, a sitcom with openly gay characters, is watched by 20m a week. Hence the importance of the conservative movement. No matter how much they claim to represent the real America, conservatives have succeeded because, in a country where only half the electorate bothers to vote, they are better organised than other sorts of Americans.
When Hillary Clinton talked about a vast right-wing conspiracy levelled against her husband’s presidency, conservative activists could complain about the tone of her charge much more than they could about its substance. There is far more cohesion to the conservative movement — not just at the local level but also at the national level — than most Americans realise.
EVIDENCE of this organising prowess is on display every Wednesday in Washington. The day begins at Grover Norquist’s weekly breakfast meeting at his Americans for Tax Reform on L Street. This used to be a fairly eccentric affair: the unhygienic libertarian types who attended were known as “droolers”. Nowadays, more than 100 people come, a third of them women.
The activists include lobbyists from the National Rifle Association, Christian Coalition staffers, home schoolers, free-market fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, Muslim businesspeople, contrarian blacks, intellectuals from the Cato Institute, congressmen, senators, the odd visiting governor (including Owens of Colorado) and, of course, a contingent from the White House. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, makes a point of turning up several times a year.
The gathering is impeccably egalitarian. Conservative grandees such as Rove, Owens or Newt Gingrich sit next to student activists fresh off the Greyhound bus. Every available surface is piled high with conservative literature: flyers advertising upcoming events; issue papers and reports; comment pieces from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times; booklets about government waste; the latest offerings from the American Enterprise Institute.
Throughout the meeting people walk around the room handing out yet more material. Here are details on an attempt to raise taxes in Oregon: can anybody help stop it? Has anyone heard of the dastardly attempt to prevent Mars from being opened to private enterprise? Now is the time to nip it in the bud.
Norquist’s meeting ends promptly at 11.30am. Many activists immediately jump into taxis to head for Capitol Hill and the Coalitions for America lunch meeting.
This is a slightly smaller affair, a mere 70 to 90 people. It is more venerable, having been established in 1983 by Paul Weyrich, the man who invented the Moral Majority and created the Heritage Foundation. The participants are older, more likely to be wearing suits and more focused on the culture wars than low taxes. Most people have American flags pinned to their lapels. Before the meeting starts everyone turns to a flag in the corner of the room and repeats the pledge of allegiance. “Born and unborn” someone adds loudly as the pledge finishes.
The atmosphere here is more inquisitorial than at Norquist’s meeting. Weyrich presides from a wheelchair as leading politicians and people from the administration justify themselves to the assembled barons of the conservative movement. A congressman is hauled over the coals for pondering a run for the Senate and thereby losing a place on a key committee. Bullied about an upcoming vote on school vouchers in the District of Columbia, a senator promises to provide the names of his colleagues who might be “a little wobbly”.
Every piece of paper at the Weyrich meeting is also a call to arms. Two-thirds of all partial-birth abortions are committed in New Jersey! Half of all marriages end in divorce! Girls Gone Wild videos (each week a film crew visits a bar in a different city and sees how many drunken young women it can persuade to take their clothes off) are for sale in supermarkets! People at both meetings have no doubt that they belong to a coherent movement. They dismiss moderate Republicans as “establishment types”, discuss who should be “our candidate” in forthcoming congressional races and seem resigned to the fact that their lives will be measured out in an unrelenting series of battles against liberal evils of one sort or another.
Many reassemble for drinks at Norquist’s house in the evening. Some of them will reappear at various Dark Ages weekends (the conservative movement’s answer to the Clintonian Renaissance weekends) or go on holiday together. One recent vacation, a National Review ocean cruise, was hosted by Colonel Oliver North of the Iran-contra affair and Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association.
This is a group of people that eats, drinks, vacations and inevitably sleeps together. At first sight, there is nothing unusual in that — most political parties have their clubs, their meetings, their romances. But they do not have the same omnivorous reach, the same devotion to an agenda and the same sense of struggle. Other groups are usually just there for the inebriation and the interns.
Indeed, the movement that most resembles America’s new right in recent history is Europe’s old left. It too had its agenda, its omnipresence, its zeal and its hinterland. And just as the old left, gathered together, was always in danger of self-parody (remember when feminists demanded to be called “wimmin” to avoid the word “man”?) so is the right.
Visit the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the right’s main beanfest held between the Republican conventions, and you’ll discover fresh-faced young men buying George W Bush dolls and queueing up at the Traditional Values Coalition to fling beanbags at grotesque trolls called “Hillary Clinton”, “the Liberal Media” and “the Homosexual Agenda”.
WHAT will become of the right? It’s a pertinent question, because 50 years ago America lacked a real conservative ideology, let alone a cohesive Right Nation. When Dwight Eisenhower came to power in 1952, he prided himself as being above ideology. In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration wore its civilised European values on its sleeve. Liberals advocated the creation of a European-style welfare state, particularly through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programme. They imposed greater restrictions on firearms and mounted campaigns to outlaw executions, legalise abortion and introduce not just racial equality but positive discrimination in favour of minorities.
The first howl of fury from the Right Nation came with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, which by ordinary standards was a calamity. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson by a greater margin than anyone before or since. Yet in the long run, Goldwater had an extraordinary influence on the Republican party.
The senator from Arizona shifted the balance of power in the party westward, to a region where the American dream was being refashioned by sunlight and open space. He did as much as anyone to redefine Republicanism as an anti-government philosophy: “I fear Washington and centralised government more than I do Moscow,” he said — and this from a cold war warrior who had once suggested lobbing a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin.
GOLDWATER’S rise coincided with a growing intellectual ferment on the right, a ferment that was transforming the “know nothing” wing of the party into the know-it-all wing of autodidacts poring over Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and William F Buckley’s National Review.
This dynamism helped explain why in 1964 clever young Hillary Rodham was a Goldwater girl right down to her fake cowgirl outfit. But the other begetter of modern conservative America was the cause that she embraced when she left her suburban Chicago home for Wellesley College: the radicalisation of the Democrats.
This phenomenon was not just about southern racism, though Johnson’s prophecy, as he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, that he was “signing away the south for 50 years” proved accurate. Southern whites certainly rallied to the Republicans, but so did other blue-collar workers annoyed by the Democrats’ lurch to the left.
The tiny band of Goldwater Democrats in 1964 grew into the small army of Nixon Democrats in 1972 and the mighty horde of Reagan Democrats in 1980. The Republican party acquired a more ideological edge and a southern-fried flavour. Yet, although it has done so well electorally, the conservative movement’s main crusades — against big government and moral decay — have so far been more successful as rallying cries than as policies.
The fact that virtually every American politician now attacks Washington has not stopped government from getting ever bigger. And the news from the culture war is mixed. Young people are more patriotic and less supportive of abortion than their baby-boomer teachers, but the antics portrayed on the Girls Gone Wild videos suggest, at the very least, that there is ground to be recovered.
But if the right is not winning on every front, the stage is set for a possible realignment of American politics to make the Republicans the natural party of government in the same way that the Democrats once were.
This might seem far-fetched. Bush won the 2000 election by only the narrowest margin, and he has continuing problems with both Iraq and the American economy. The Republican party also has deeper problems to contend with: it might have become too southern and too moralistic for its own electoral good.
Crucially, however, the Republicans control both houses of Congress, most of the governorships and the majority of state legislatures. Another Bush victory would cement their lock on power.
Despite some demographic trends that favour the Democrats, the Republicans seem to have more of the future on their side: they are the party of entrepreneurs rather than government employees, of growing suburbs rather than declining inner cities, of the expanding southwest rather than the stagnant northeast.
Bush does not have to prevail, however, for America to remain in the thrall of the Right Nation. A Democratic presidential victory would barely change America’s conservative stance.
For the foreseeable future the Democrats will be a relatively conservative party by European standards. They rely for their cash almost as heavily on big business and wealthy individuals as the Republicans do. They cannot win an election unless they regain the “conservatives of the heart”.
A Democratic administration might try to reduce the use of the death penalty, but it is unlikely to push states to abolish it. It might restrict the use of guns, but it would not ban them. Overseas, it would probably support Ariel Sharon no less trenchantly and would surely have no chance of persuading Congress to ratify the Kyoto protocol. America would still be different.
The more time you spend in the Right Nation, the more you are struck by its sense of certainty. Billy Graham, the man who rescued the young George W Bush from his dissolute life, once said simply: “I know where I’ve come from. I know why I’m here, and I know where I’m going.”
The same confidence resounds from Colorado Springs to the rolling mid-western plains. It sits at the heart of the Right Nation: conservative America is “right” not just in the sense of being conservative but also in the sense that it is sure it is right.
That righteousness helps to explain the paradox of the United States: why America is often both the most admired country and the most reviled, why it is hailed as a symbol of success, opportunity and progress and also of intolerance, injustice and inequality. That paradox will endure as long as the Right Nation itself.
© John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge 2004
Extracted from The Right Nation: Why America is Different by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge to be published on Thursday by Allen Lane at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.99 plus £2.25 p&p from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 or at www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy. (John Micklethwait is the US editor for The Economist magazine, and Adrian Wooldridge is its Washington correspondent)