Confessions of a fellow-traveller

Spectator, The, Sep 23, 2000 by Reid, Stuart

It is hardly surprising that no major American political figure is a conservative. The Republican convention in Philadelphia - in theory a conservative gathering - had less moral and intellectual depth than an Amway seminar. The Democratic convention was almost as bad. Bush and Gore are behaving like halfwits not simply because they are halfwits but because without the support of halfwits they are lost. The two candidates are concerned not to lead the people but to bow to the will of the people (whom they will then betray). It is disgusting. It is demeaning. It is democratic. Above all, it. is American. Many apologists for America - the sort who vote Conservative - resist this notion and say that what is happening now is an aberration, the result of the Sixties (if in doubt blame the Sixties) when the United States was taken over by a liberal elite. But the truth is that America was founded by a liberal elite and has always been ruled by a liberal elite. The preamble to its Constitution begins, `We, the people . ' America is a people's democracy. It is not now, and never has been, a conservative republic.

Liberalism and not Christianity is the American religion. Four out of ten Americans may go to church on Sundays, and more than half may say that religion is very important in their lives, but the Constitution is implicitly anti-Christian and the Liberace clones who promise miracles for moolah on cable TV are as fraudulent as professional wrestlers. In its holy crusade on behalf of liberalism America has behaved with ruthless cruelty. More than one million Japanese civilians died in American bombing raids in the last five months of the second world war. In the hot skirmishes of the Cold War, the destruction was equally shameful. According to estimates cited in the National Interest, the US conservative quarterly, as many as one million North Korean civilians may have died as a result of American actions between 1950 and 1953. During the war in Vietnam, the US dropped a greater tonnage of bombs than it had during the second world war (and to little military effect; though, as the Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty observed, `it is harder to hit a hoe than a factory'). Then there was Iraq, then Kosovo. Who will be the next Hitler?

But don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are Americans. My wife is a New Yorker, and we are still on speakers. If I am sometimes inclined to wonder whether the American Revolution will turn out to have been more damaging than the Russian Revolution - not in terms of lives lost but in terms of cultures trashed, minds addled and souls emptied - the fact is that I still like Americans. For the past one hundred years and more they have been among the most inventive, charming, principled and gifted people on earth. Consider only Cole Porter, H. L. Mencken, Jesse Jackson, Noam Chomsky, Mark Twain, Miles Davis, James Stewart, Dorothy Day, William F. Buckley Jr, William Jennings Bryan, Walker Percy, Buster Keaton, Woody Guthrie, Ella Fitzgerald, Eugene Genovese, Henry David Thoreau, Orson Welles, Orestes Brownson, and Robert E. Lee.