INVESTIGATION

Full Marx for George Bush

5 November 2005

The President of the United States is not a communist, says John Laughland, but his belief in a global democratic revolution is inspired by Marxist thinking

Like Marxists, indeed, and like many of his European friends, George Bush appears to believe both that freedom is an ineluctable ‘force of history’ and also that it requires constant struggle to achieve it. He argues, like Hegel, Marx’s precursor, that humanity is one, and that a free state like the USA is not really free if other states live under tyranny. In his mind, old-fashioned American Puritan millenarianism marries easily with the missionary mentality of world revolutionists. ‘The survival of liberty in our land,’ he said in January, ‘increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.’ A true conservative, by contrast, would say that there is much evil in the outside world — and that the duty of a statesman is to hold it at bay.

George Orwell is rightly credited with predicting a great deal, yet it is an indication of how far leftwards the West has travelled that his key prediction is often overlooked. Orwell saw that the Cold War would end on the basis of a convergence between communism and capitalism — the very predicament in which we now find ourselves. At the end of Animal Farm the farmer, who symbolises the capitalist West, returns to the farm and plays cards with the pigs, who symbolise communism. The shivering creatures outside ‘looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’.