Afterword: Moderation in an Age of Crisis

Abstract

It is the Right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Through the war in Iraq through the unrequited desire to dismantle public education and health services, to the decades-long project of financial deregulation, the political Right – from Thatcher and Reagan to Bush and Blair – has abandoned the association of political conservatism with social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, from Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefeller . (223) — Tony Judt , Ill Fares the Land (2010)