The Right Fails to Go Global

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference has proved so popular that it had to be moved from its usual venue in Arlington, Va., to the Ronald Reagan Building in the heart of Washington. More than 4,000 people turned up last week to listen to Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, to buy Ann Coulter dolls and to swap personal anecdotes about the evils of liberalism.

The conservative movement is in its glory. A recent poll shows Republicans favoring George W. Bush over George Washington 62% to 28%. Conservatives are in control of the executive and legislative branches and, for all intents and purposes, hold sway over the judicial branch and talk about a permanent hegemony. In just 50 years, they have built up a mighty movement, with outposts in every state and a dominant set of ideas. Americans can now spend their entire lives surrounded by conservative ideas, much as Europeans could once spend their entire lives “on the left.”

An impressive achievement, but with one glaring exception. Unlike Europe’s socialist movement, the American conservative movement has failed to export itself. No sooner did Sidney and Beatrice Webb pen some new book on nationalizing the British coal industry in the 1920s than they had people queuing up to buy it in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Bombay. By contrast, when Bush lands in Europe this week, he will be touching down in enemy territory: There is no meaningful conservative voice in Europe.

In Brussels, his first stop and the heart of a European Union that increasingly governs the lives of 450 million people, there is only one think tank that Americans would remotely dub as conservative, the Center for the New Europe (which pluckily holds an annual Capitalist Ball). The conservative grouping in the European Parliament is a mishmash of competing groups -- most of them well to the left of John F. Kerry and with the two biggest parties, Britain’s Euroskeptic Tories and Germany’s Europhile Christian Democrats, bitterly split over the main issue of European integration.

This failure to go global is odd. American conservatism has actually drawn lavishly on European thinkers -- particularly F.A. Hayek and Leo Strauss. The grand old man of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, spent his early career as a London-based editor of Encounter, a magazine that, with the help of a little covert CIA funding, tried to wean European intellectuals from statism. Milton Friedman and his fellow “Chicago boys” first tested some of their monetarist ideas in Chile.

In the 1980s, a transatlantic conservative movement seemed possible. Those were the days when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher walked side by side, when ideas about privatization shot back and forth across the Atlantic, when London’s Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs seemed like the equals in terms of influence with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Nowadays, Thatcherism looks ever more an aberration in Britain; the current Tory leader, Michael Howard, isn’t even on speaking terms with Bush. There is now probably more conservative brainpower (and money) in just one building in Washington -- the home of the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard -- than there is in the whole of Britain.

For some of the more insular American conservatives, this merely proves why the United States should stay well clear of lefty foreigners. That is shortsighted for two reasons.

First, the American right’s failure to spread its creed is affecting its ability to deliver its agenda. The Iraq experience has proved how hard it is for even a hyperpower to go it alone. Bush’s ability to persuade Jacques, Gerhard and the rest of them to back his ideas about democracy in the Middle East (or indeed about anything at all) is severely limited by the fact that there is no domestic constituency in their countries for his ideas.

Second, the American right is missing an opportunity to further its cause at a time when there are promising signs for success. These are most obvious in Eastern Europe, of course, but you can spot them even in the heart of Old Europe.

One senior French politician points out that, since the Iraq election, there has been a quiet reassessment in Paris about American ideas in the Middle East. European social democracy, he adds, is also going through a crisis: The French are getting rid of their 35-hour workweek. As for secularism, the fastest-growing religious movement in France is Pentecostalism.

A few of the smarter U.S. conservatives are trying to build a conservative counter-establishment. Devon Cross runs what might be called a neoconservative outreach program in London. The Heritage Foundation plays host to about 500 Europeans a year. The Stockholm Network, which brings together 100 or so (often state-funded) right-of-center think tanks from across Europe, has lured a few White House officials, such as Bush aide Tim Goeglein, across the Atlantic to visit them.

As Bush searches vainly for kindred spirits in Brussels, he could usefully reflect that, 50 years ago, American conservatism was in much the same impoverished state back in Washington. If the right wants to become a global force, it will take the same formula that has brought it success at home: ideas, time and cash. Come to think of it, Kristol’s Encounter magazine is not a bad model for Bush. From the right’s point of view at least, the CIA could find worse uses for its money.