An American View of the Tories

You don’t have to look too far here, or elsewhere for that matter, to find plenty of concern about the Conservatives’ readyness for government. So it’s useful, occasionally, to step back and notice how the party and, more broadly, the British right, looks like to outside observers. Here’s Ross Douthat for instance:

[W]hen you compare the British Conservatives with the American Republicans, what’s most striking isn’t the parallel pandering on Medicare and the N.H.S. It’s the relative specificity of the rest of the Tory policy brief, whose attempts at a localist, “post-bureaucratic” and pro-family agenda contrast pretty favorably, to my mind, with the Republican Party’s noisier but largely detail-free commitment to the same goals.

Still, after a year and change of the post-Bush G.O.P., the idea of a right-of-center party that just offers “good speeches and interesting promises” sounds pretty appealing to me.