‘My God was bigger than his’

Colin Kidd

  • The Right Nation: Why America Is Different by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
    Allen Lane, 450 pp, £14.99, August 2004, ISBN 0 7139 9738 9
  • Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann
    Penguin, 448 pp, US $16.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 14 303489 8
  • Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image by David Greenberg
    Norton, 496 pp, £9.99, November 2004, ISBN 0 393 32616 0
  • America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven
    HarperCollins, 274 pp, £18.99, October 2004, ISBN 0 00 716456 4

Since the ‘stolen’ election of 2000 the Republican Party has set out its values with a starkness not revealed even during the despised regimes of Nixon and Reagan. This has yielded a rich seam of material for satirical film-makers, caricaturists and polemicists, though at some cost for dispassionate analysis of the political scene. Cartoonish simplicities abound. The electoral geography of the United States, so vividly realised in the 2000 presidential election results, appears to possess its own crude straightforwardness, with Republicans dominant in the conservative heartland but enjoying less appeal on the urban coastline.

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[*] Secker, 306 pp., £12, September, 0 436 20539 4.