Conservatives, in power…

It’s becoming the new wisdom in the mainstream US media: the conservative movement is losing its ideological grip on American politics.

The Economist summarised the cleavages that are currently on show among US conservatives most succinctly. Bush, it pointed out, is in the line of fire from ‘‘small-government conservatives’’ who accuse him of ‘‘big government conservatism’’, in other words, a spending binge. He is attacked by ‘‘conservatives of doubt’’ for giving the upper hand to ‘‘conservatives of faith’’ or those who believe it is the task of federal government to reach into people’s private lives and encourage virtue. The ‘‘insurgent conservatives’’ of the south and the west attack the cronyism of ‘‘establishment conservatives’’ in Washington. ‘‘Business conservatives’’ are angry with Bush for overly indulging the religious people. And ‘‘neo-conservatives’’ are attacked by ‘‘traditional conservatives’’ for envisioning too Napoleonic a role for America in the world.

… and right out of it

In Britain, the Tory party conference in Blackpool failed to throw up a front-runner in the leadership sweepstakes. Nor a clear agenda to recover the centre of a party that has lost three successive elections and has been consistently pushed by the fleet-footed New Labour into taking the most extreme, most unpopular positions.

The question at Blackpool was: would the leadership candidates flatter the party, to make a downcast lot feel better about themselves? Or would they challenge it to address the difficult questions?

The conservative Daily Telegraph urged each one of the leadership hopefuls to answer this: ‘‘Why are you a Conservative?’’ For the less sympathetic Guardian, the question was whether party members are prepared to admit that it is they, not the country, that needs to change. For too many in the party, the Financial Times diagnosed, modernisation has come to mean ‘‘a flight from principle… The organising emotion of Conservatives during the past decade has been of rising anger at modern Britain’’.

After it was over, the Daily Telegraph praised the lack of outcome at Blackpool. ‘‘The conference has been the most exciting for years. It leaves the leadership race entirely open’’, it said.

Certainly, from here in India, where another out-of-power conservative party is in search of a leader and a modern agenda, it all looked terribly exciting. On show in Blackpool was a contest more remarkable for its process. Whatever be the final outcome of the leadership tussle in the Tories, and despite all the carping in the British media about a competition reduced to a beauty pageant — the ‘‘Mr One Nation’’ pageant — the sheer pressure on wannabe leaders to articulate and to publicly defend their politics, is something the BJP is unlikely to submit to.

The missing people

The list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals, as toted by Prospect and Foreign Policy, may be a ‘‘reflection of the preoccupations of the Anglo-American centre at a particular moment’’. So confessed writer David Herman in an essay dissecting it in Prospect. Once the self-conscious disclaimers are done with, it offers some broad and revealing trends.

A very large number of names come from the US and Britain — almost half these people live in the US. Says Herman, ‘‘America is where the action is’’ and Europe has become America’s ‘‘intellectual poor relation’’. Paris, once the world’s intellectual capital, has almost completely disappeared from this map.

Essentially, Herman read it as a list of many striking absences. It is male — only 10 women on it. Then, ‘‘too many names are from political and economic debate; too few from labs and research institutes’’, it shows the the decline of the Left, and the eclipsing of Freud. No list in the 20th century would have featured so few socialists or communists, he wrote, or psychologists and psychoanalysts, regardless of who was doing the compiling.

In fact, looking at the list, Herman wrote out an epitaph for the public intellectual as we knew him/her in the last century: ‘‘wrote prolifically, championed unpopular causes and was often linked to the revolutionary left’’.