Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama's State of the Union speech. "Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed," David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power.

Two years into Obama's administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

Such is life after ideology. Bell likened Marxian socialism to a secular religion and stressed its eschatological imperative. About non-Marxist forms of ideology, he had little to say. Of these forms, which focus disagreement and discipline action, contemporary America may need more.