The following quotations are all taken from John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's book on conservatism in the United States, “The Right Nation” (Allen Lane, 2004). I have collected them together because I find them interesting, both individually and collectively; but I make no value judgement on any of the material.
In America think tanks have taken over much of the policy making that is handled by political parties in other countries. To describe the Republican Party organization as intellectually barren would be a little unfair, but it mainly exists nowadays as a vehicle for raising and distributing campaign contributions. [...] Meanwhile, every ambitious Republican in Congress is a semidetached policy entrepreneur looking for an idea that might make his or her reputation. They are normally strapped for time, so what could be more sensible than to get think tanks to do their policy research for them?
—p. 161
The [conservative] activists' loyalty is usually not so much to “conservatism” as such as to one of a thousand different causes—for example, keeping the Confederate flag, banning abortion or cutting the capital gains tax. The parallel that springs to mind [is of] a medieval army. As king, George W. Bush may place his standard in the center of the line, but most of his troops wear the livery of other causes. Those troops can be loosely divided into two main groups: rebels against government and social conservatives. [...] By and large, [Karl] Rove and Bush have managed to keep both of these groups happy. Yet it is also plain that both groups take a much more extreme view of the world than Bush does.
—p. 174
By April 2003, the neoconservative agenda had been made flesh and blood. What only two years previously had been hot air in the American Enterprise Institute was reality in the streets of Kabul and Baghdad. [...] How on earth had this revolution happened? The first and least convincing explanation comes from the Left (particularly in Europe): that a ruthless cabal hijacked foreign policy from a weak president. The second comes from the neocons themselves, who regard their rise as a matter of logic: they had foreseen a world of terrorism and knew how to deal with it. But in our opinion a third factor was the most important: after September 11, the neocon message, for better or worse, struck a mighty chord with the rest of the Right Nation. A neoconservative foreign policy soon became a conservative one.
—p. 203
The neoconservative view of the world can be divided into three parts: first, a pessimistic diagnosis, then two radical solutions—one, a brutally realistic championing of American unilateralism, and the other, a surprisingly optimistic view of the moral imperative of spreading American values, particularly in the Middle East.
—p. 210
The “sole source of legitimacy for the United States,” a senior neocon in the administration reminded one group of horrified Europeans in 2003, is “our constitution. Period.”
—p. 212
[After the deposition of Saddam Hussein] the dream of transforming the Middle East began to melt away. It was not just that rebuilding civil society in Iraq proved to be devilishly difficult, despite the country's much-vaunted oil wealth and educated population. As the power of local Shia clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani grew, it soon became clear that a “democratic Iraq” would have a strong Islamic tinge and a marked anti-American bias. There was a straightforward contradiction between the pessimism of the neocons' diagnosis and the optimism of their trust in transformation.
—p. 223
American culture is so omnipresent that everybody has, as it were, a virtual American buried inside their brains. [...] And with this familiarity has come a growing sense of powerlessness. People around the world feel that they are citizens of the United States in the sense that they are participants in its culture and politics. They watch Bush and Co. make all sorts of decisions on subjects about which they feel passionately. Yet Bush and Co. are plainly not accountable to these non-Americans; indeed, they often treat them with contempt. It is not surprising that the mantra of the protesters about the Iraq War was “We have the right to be heard.”
—pp. 294-5
In the ten years after 1986, the average term in federal prison rose from thirty-nine to fifty-four months. [...] Meanwhile, the “war on drugs” has been used as an excuse both to expand police forces and to militarize them. [...] Throughout the 1990s, as conservative lawmakers built more and bigger prisons, they tended to cut back on soppy “European” programs, like drug treatment. They also disenfranchised “liberal” parole boards: mandatory prison sentences mean that prisoners have no obligation to prove that they are ready for outside life. Outside prison, the after-care system is even weaker. Many ex-cons are simply presented with a one-way bus ticket.
—p. 301
Social mobility is higher in America than other countries, with 50 percent to 80 percent of the people in America's bottom quintile [for earnings] pushing themselves out of that bracket within ten years.
—p. 308
[One] American trait that the abortion debate typifies is the fondness for arguing about fundamentals. Europeans routinely turn moral issues into technical ones—and then hand them over to technocratic elites. America is a country of fundamentalists of all sorts, secular as well as religious. [...] In Europe the debate about abortion is conducted in medical rather than moral terms. Ditto the debate about stem cells. For Americans, abortion can seemingly never be just about health. It has to be a clash of absolutes: the right to choose versus the right to life.
—p. 311
We think that the best way to understand the exceptional nature of American conservatism is through a religious metaphor—as a reformation. Not unlike the religious upheaval that Luther began five hundred years ago, American conservatism combines renewal with heresy. The established faith the Right Nation has reinterpreted is classical conservatism [as defined by Burke], and the heresy it has introduced is classical liberalism (or at least a good chunk of it). The result may not be a clean break with conservatism elsewhere [...] but it is nevertheless a very singular creed.
—p. 341
A growing part of the American middle class is abandoning the state: living on private roads, sending their children to private schools, paying for their own private police force, playing golf at private clubs. Why bother supporting public services when you get all yours delivered privately?
—p. 352
Conservatives laboriously built a counterestablishment of think tanks, pressure groups and media stars that was initially intended to counterbalance the liberal establishment but has now turned into an establishment in its own right—and one with a much harder edge than its rival. [...] The relentlessness of conservative America can be unedifying—the treatment of Bill Clinton springs to mind. But over the long term, it has made for effective politics, particularly as the conservative movement has tightened its hold on the Republican Party.
—p. 382
Europeans seldom acknowledge Bush as a man who has increased America's aid budget by 50 percent or as the first American president to formally endorse a Palestinian state.
—p. 390
The sad drama in Iraq has taught the Right Nation a tough lesson about the importance of soft power. The philosophy of oderint dum metuant (let them hate us so long as they fear us) makes no sense for a country trying to wage a global war on terrorism. Fighting terrorism is about winning “hearts and minds”. For all its might, America contains only 5 percent of those hearts and minds: it does not help to have most of the rest regarding you with suspicion.
—p. 390