Conservatives (or at least the ones here) do tend to approach everything from the perspective of the "US is the greatest...etc" . I wonder how a British conservative would read those lines I quoted; as a wryly critical commentary of American culture he might heartily agree with, or an attack on conservativism in general which he would most certainly not agree with. I suspect the former. That's how I read it, and I am neither British nor conservative, but then, I have always kept my politics and my nationalism separate. The two are volatile in combination and should be stored in isolation from one another.

I do not see it as a political slam (i.e., a boosting of liberal ideas) because the text does not attack American political or economic institutions, on the contrary, Fowles recognizes their basic value in his aside on why the immigrants came here. The "system fails" not because the politics are wrong, but because the culture itself cannot recognize that people are inherently unequal. This is highly conservative concept, often put forth by conservatives on this board. Oddly, Lee was the only conservative here who actually picked up on this and interpreted the text correctly. Incidentally, I don't particularly agree with Fowles or Lee on this, but that doesn't stop me from admiring Fowles' insight and his clever way of phrasing it.
I don't want to put words in Fowles' mouth, but what he writes could be interpreted as saying "American liberalism fails because it fails to recognize the inherent inequality between people." Then again, I didn't actually diagram every sentence and parse ever syllable in order to extract the precise meaning. I just liked how it sounded.

Believe me, Fowles has a great time sending up the British welfare state as well, but not having access to the text in electronic form, I didn't want to take the effort of typing that side in the interest of political correctness and scrupulous fairness. "Daniel Martin" is available in paperback; after reading only a hundred pages, I highly recommend it. And those who read it with the expectation of finding damning evidence of liberal propaganda are going to find themselves highly disappointed. It is not a book about politics.

As for conservatives "always being on the defensive", you've got a point there, but that's their problem, not mine. It's one of things that make this board so annoying, you're afraid to say anything without being jumped on by a defender of the faith. In an environment like that, you sometimes get the desire to annoy right back. I'm sure you'd be surprised how little politics would be discussed on this board if conservatives weren't so eager to be defensive, and as a result, wind up doing just the opposite.