Evangelism on the march

When Robert Goizueta, Coca-Cola’s boss, attempted to justify his $80 million annual income to a meeting of shareholders he was interrupted four times — with applause. Attitudes to wealth and opportunity, as to so much else in the United States, are far removed from the prevailing mood in Britain and Europe. During the Cold War, many of these differences were overlooked in the common cause against a yet more alien ideology. The illusion of unity has disappeared with the Warsaw Pact. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue in The Right Nation: Why America is Different, ‘it is rather like two relative strangers who fight off muggers and then go off for a celebratory meal only to discover that they don’t have as much in common as they thought’. The American hospitality might not, in any case, be to the taste of many Europeans. Nearly a quarter of those living in the southern states want to reintroduce prohibition.

The chasm between a militarily powerful America, with its churchgoing population and sense of righteousness, and a secular, nuanced, semi-pacifist Europe appears to be widening. In his masterful monograph, Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan outlined the nature of this division and its implications for foreign policy. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, two British journalists at the Economist, have pulled off a remarkable achievement, a study of how the United States became a conservative nation. In marked contrast to the unhinged rants of Michael Moore and the blatant prejudice of his imitators, The Right Nation is authoritative, entertaining and astonishing in its breadth and objectivity. It can perhaps make claim to an extraordinary boast as the best book on modern America in print.