The Economist has a rather good, rather smug and – in the end – entirely self-deluding leader about the predicament of the American right this week.
It is good because the Economist sets out with neatness and style what policies a Republican candidates must sign up to if he or she is to make it through the primaries. The aspiring president must believe not just some but all of the following:
That abortion should be illegal in all cases. That gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it. That the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home. That the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame. That global warming is a conspiracy. That any form of gun control is unconstitutional. That any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk. That Israel can do no wrong and the ‘so-called Palestinians’, to use Mr Gingrich’s term, can do no right. That the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished.
The approved list of right-thinking right-wing opinions explains why so many centrist Republicans who might have defeated Obama – Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush – have stayed out of the election. They were not politically correct enough for the fanatics at the grassroots.
How unlike our own dear Tories the tea partiers are, the Economist implies. While the Yanks are demented, the Brits are sensible, practical men and women of moderate temperament who abhor extremism and have no time for wishful thinking. No member of the coalition cabinet or editor on the Economist would sign up for any let alone all of the above.
Yet British conservatives hold extremist views on economics that are as wild as anything you can find on the American right. The Economist will not mention the failings because it shares them too.
First, the right cannot admit that its policy of imposing austerity during a period of stagnation is – surprise, surprise – pushing Britain and Europe back into recession.
Second, British conservatives in particular cannot admit that the free market in high finance led to disaster, and a bailout that ought to have been so abhorrent to them it forced them to rethink their ideas.
I should add that I write this as an Economist addict, who becomes as fraught as a junkie without a fix if I can’t get hold of a copy on a Friday morning. But something is wrong there. When I began reading it in the late 1990s, Economist journalists predicted the collapse of the dotcom mania with brutal and brilliant clarity. Now they and the wider centre-right with the honourable exception of Vince Cable, don’t see crises in capitalism coming and don’t feel the need to work out why their ideology went wrong, and how their views must adapt if they are to see the world as it is again. It is the great intellectual failure of our time, and not only in conservative journalism.
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