The Transatlantic divide...in ideas

Torrents of ink and saliva have been spent on describing or forecasting the inevitability of the transatlantic divide. Since the inauguration of George Bush in 2001, 9/11 and the bareknuckled adoption by the White House of a unilateralist agenda these prospects have seemed indeed confirmed by the principle of reality. Partisans of a mature, balanced and respectful transatlantic link have increasingly looked like daydreamers.
And in this growing divorce many Europeans have convinced themselves and tried to convince the rest of the world that they were right. That their foreign policy model, based on soft power and international law, was better, and more progressive than the neoconservatives' project.
Now Europe is up for a surprise. Whereas the Old Continent is dominated by the center-right (a catch all concept that disguises the presence of extreme rightists within governing coalitions like the Northern League in Italy) the U.S. seems poised for a break with conservatism.
A number of surveys but also of essays by the sharpest journalistic minds predict indeed a change of political cycles in America. The late and regretted Arthur Schlesinger would have liked to see the confirmation of his predictions: after three decades dominated by the ultraconservative agenda the right wingers seem to be in disarray and the U.S. citizens seem to have had enough of them.
True? Is the conservative movement suffering from its success? "This country is a center-right country, declares conservative columnist George Will. Conservatism is the default position for a stable Presidential majority".
In a recent edition of The New Yorker, George Packer provides a detailed perspective on 'the fall of conservatism". If he is right it would invert the ideological meaning of the transatlantic divide. Or it might bring the two continents closer through the combined process of a "redder Europe" and of a "bluer America".
Read George Packer. In The New Yorker, they still believe that readers can absorb more than a headline and a teaser...