If the quality press is any guide, Americans are more interested in the British election than the “special relationship is dead” school of thought thinks appropriate. A Nexis search after the first few days of campaigning threw up 32 stories on the election in newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Nor were they merely reprinting agency copy. Bigfoot correspondents, such as Joe Klein of the New Yorker and Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times landed in the shires when voting was still a month away. There is not even the excuse that the rich crop of British scandals is the lure. American journalism is puritanical by Fleet Street standards and-so far at least-its reporting has concentrated much less on “sleaze” than have Britain’s own broadsheets.
Why, then, this level of interest? A theme that emerges from many of the reports is that the British election may tell Americans something about how their own politics is likely to develop as the ideological flux of the post-cold war period gives way to new alignments.
This sense of a similar future is not unreasonable. Conservative and liberal trends in the two countries have tracked each other closely in the last two decades: two strongly ideological conservative leaders emerged in the 1970s and set both countries on a new right-wing path; they were succeeded by weaker personalities who embarked on a kinder, gentler pragmatism; this was welcomed at first but subsequently led to serious divisions in their own parties; and after a while, they lost power to liberal parties led by men who had persuaded their followers to accept many of the right’s reforms.
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