American readers of the "Lexington" column in the British newsmagazine The Economist often have the same response to its survey of a particular U.S. state or region: Many of the details are right, but the picture as a whole is not quite recognizable. American readers of The Right Nation, by The Economist's U.S. editor John Micklethwait and its Washington correspondent, Adrian Wooldridge, may have similar reaction. Micklethait and Wooldridge are intelligent, entertaining writers, and first-rate reporters. But their analysis of both contemporary American politics and U.S. political history is as conceptually flawed as it is politically biased.

Although the authors claim that "we are not members of either of the two great political tribes that dominate the American commentariat," the truth is that they and The Economist belong to the libertarian wing of the right (and the imperial wing, too--The Economist was a cheerleader for the disastrous war in Iraq). By repeatedly attributing the political success of the Republican right to its alleged roots in America's core political traditions, the authors lend credence to Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt's 1980s claim that the real distinction is not between liberals and conservatives but between liberals and Americans.

The thesis of The Right Nation is that the present Republican ascendancy is the result, not of a temporary national political coalition and the exaggeration of the conservative minority's power by the electoral college and the Senate, but rather of deep trends in American society whose values are represented more truly by Republicans than by Democrats. The Republican Party is not a loose coalition of different groups, but the political manifestation of a "right nation"--a coherent conservative tribe which Micklethwait and Wooldridge all too often identify with America as a whole. What the European left hates about the "right nation"--religiosity, laissez-faire economics, the gun culture, foreign policy unilateralism--are precisely the features that make the United States "American," according to these two British writers.

As this summary suggests, The Right Nation is a contribution to the emerging literature which holds that American society, and not merely the electoral college, is divided into a conservative "red nation" and a liberal "blue nation" (their "right nation" is simply another word for "red nation.") In reality, the "red nation/right nation" does not exist, except on maps of electoral college voting. The Republican Party electorate today is largely a coalition of three distinct subcultures--Southern whites, Northern Catholic "ethnics," and Prairie Protestants of Yankee, German, and Scandinavian descent (Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives are important in the elite but not the electorate). Micklethwait and Wooldridge do not analyze the Catholic ethnics or the Prairie Protestants, without whose votes the Republican Party would be a minority coalition representing only the former Confederate states. They recognize the Southern influence on the right, but tend to treat the South's synthesis of God, guns, and free trade as though it were a variant of a common national conservative tradition. But if the base of the right were Catholic ethnics in the Northeast and Midwest, American conservatism would resemble European Christian democracy, combining social conservatism with support for a strong and paternalistic welfare state. And if conservatism were defined by Prairie Protestants, it would be a synthesis of fiscal restraint and social liberalism. (By the same token, there is no "blue" or "left nation" either; the groups that make up the Democratic Party's electoral coalition share little in common other than a desire to elect Democrats.)

In addition to perpetuating the red/blue fallacy, Micklethwait and Wooldridge repeat the conventional wisdom about the divide between America (religious, gun-loving, libertarian) and Europe (secular, pacifist, statist). The real division, however, is not between the United States and Europe, but between the more individualistic English-speaking nations as a whole (sometimes called the Anglosphere) and the more statist societies of continental Europe. Once the South is factored out, the United States looks much more like Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Like many foreign (and East Coast) observers, Micklethwait and Wooldridge can't distinguish the Yankee-Germanic West from the Anglo-Celtic South (which includes Texas, more a Southern than a Western state). They erroneously attribute America's fundamentalist religiosity and gun culture to its historic frontier experience: "Yet many of the rootless people of the new frontier combined this reinvention with a fierce thirst for the solace of religion