No, this has nothing to do with the Tory response to Gordon Brown — or to Quentin Davies. This is about what, in another context, Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics’.
In the latest issue of the liberal New Republic Johann Hari has an immensely funny piece about his adventures on a cruise organised by the right-wing National Review. Go here.
But it is not all jokes. Hari’s amused hostility to his fellow-travellers is tempered by his sympathy for William F. Buckley Jr, founder of National Review, and Rich Lowry, the present editor. Both men are sceptics, both talk like conservatives. Most of the others on the cruise, however, are swivel-eyed fantasists, pathologically anti-European — what are they scared of? — and in furious denial about the failure of George Bush’s global democratic revolution.
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