THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION IN AMERICA
Guy Sorman
Chicago: Regnery Books, 1985
Guy Sorman's sympathetic account of the basis and the recent successes of the American conservative and "New Right" movements is based on the author's observations of the United States during an extended visit to this country from 1982 to 1983. There are similarities, then, between the origins of The Conservative Revolution in America and Democracy in America, but Sorman is not a de Tocqueville, despite his frequent comparisons of himself to his countryman of the nineteenth century, and his book is neither as searching nor as balanced as de Tocqueville's classic.
Unlike his earlier compatriot, Sorman appears to accept without question a number of illusions about America that have been floating around in the heads of some European intellectuals since the end of the War for Independence. These illusions, which often resurface among Americans of the Right or the Left who want to be what they think is European, add up to the view that America is literally a "New World," in which the realities of human nature and society as they are known in European and Old World history do not apply.
Americans, unlike people anywhere else, are said to be always in a hurry, materialistic, egalitarian to the point of boorishness, too loud, and disrespectful of the past, of high culture, and of the standards of taste and morality. This is essentially the portrayal of America that obtains in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, and it bobs up in such aspercus of Sorman as his claim that "The Americans have no history. Theirs is the only nation without roots or genealogy. Their past, hardly old enough to be written about, is immediate, within reach of memory and family tradition" (p. 2). Elsewhere, Sorman pontificates, "America is a civilization of the road," and "Americans spend their time traveling, flying from one airport to another, and communicating by telephone" (p. 5). Presumably, Frenchmen and other Europeans fly from airports to non-airports to non-airports and do not have telephones and other uncivilized inventions.
The dominant impression that an American, Left or Right, will receive from Sorman's observations is that the author has spent too much time watching American television and has made the error of believing that the styrofoam characters, dialogue, and habits portrayed on television represent an accurate depiction of American society. One must wonder how anyone could believe a society of this kind could come into being, much less exist for two hundred years and more. It even flourished to the point where twice in less than half a century it has preserved the political independence and national institutions of more civilized places like France and the rest of the planet, revived their economies, made a deep impression on their cultures, and continued to sustain what remains of European civilization.
To his credit, and probably to his surprise, Sorman finds that America is not exclusively the society imagined by European highbrows and New York and Hollywood scriptwriters. And his discovery that there is something more between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts than New York, Washington, and southern California has much to do with his appreciation of the American Right, which contradicts the European cliches about American culture. Sorman accurately
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