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

The neocons hated Bill Clinton for his pragmatic refusal to follow Tony Blair’s logic through to its conclusion — for instance, when he withdrew from chaotic Somalia rather than carry the burden of nation-building. George Bush has done the opposite. He seldom allows reason of state, or any other practical consideration, to befog his own ideological clarity. In his second inauguration speech, Bush pronounced the word ‘freedom’ 28 times, the word ‘free’ seven times and the word ‘liberty’ 15 times: he sounded as if he was singing the Internationale. Bush makes a highly moralistic appeal to universal values, which he says America embodies and which he insists ‘are right and true for all people everywhere’. ‘Freedom,’ he has said, ‘is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person — in every civilisation.’ Laced as it is with religious (often esoteric and even apocalyptic) vocabulary — the American President frequently says that freedom is God’s plan for mankind — Bush’s messianic political discourse recalls the Marxist movement which swept through Latin America in the 1970s, conjugating God and politics, and which was known as ‘liberation theology’.

It is this promise to emancipate the whole of mankind which so endears George Bush to a phalanx of former Marxist ideologues like Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill and David Aaronovitch. People who in their youth idolised the worker ‘who has no country’ have little difficulty identifying with today’s cosmopolitan ideology of globalisation, or with George Bush’s internationalism. Hitchens has defended his own surprising work with the neoconservatives by saying, ‘I feel much more like I used to in the 1960s, working with revolutionaries’, and he understands that George Bush’s policy of regime change is by definition going to be supported by revolutionaries. As he pointed out, with his customary clarity, in a recent debate on the Today programme with his brother, Peter, ‘It is right, I think, that conservatives oppose regime change: that is what conservatives do.’