America’s Ideologue in Chief (Patrick Buchanan)

  Sept. 9, 2006 -- “The war we fight today is more than a military conflict,” said President Bush to the American Legion. “It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”

  But if the ideology of our enemy is “Islamofascism,” what is the ideology of George W. Bush? According to James Montanye, writing in The Independent Review, it is “democratic fundamentalism.” Montanye borrows Joseph Schumpeter’s depiction of Marxism to describe it.

  Like Marxism, he writes, democratic fundamentalism “presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. … It belongs to that subgroup (of ‘isms’) which promises paradise this side of the grave.”

  Ideology is substitute religion, and Bush’s beliefs were on display in his address to the Legion, where he painted the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century” in terms of good and evil.

(more)

READ MORE: Information Clearing House