The important thing was not to admit you were wrong in any fundamental way.
—Tom Wolfe, “The Land of Rococo Marxists”
Political-intellectual currents in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet Communism continue to stimulate compelling questions, some of them timeless, others closely linked to the historic event.[1] How do people acquire strong political beliefs and commitments, and why do they retain them even after they have proven to be destructive, foolish, contradictory, or irrational, as the case may be? Under what conditions do idealism and fanaticism become indistinguishable? How do moral and political values intersect?
Such questions remain relevant because of the familiar spectacle of fanatics slaughtering, with a clear conscience, their perceived enemies to advance a cause and rid the world of undesirables. Puzzling questions are also raised by the seemingly unyielding disposition of some intellectuals to overcome the “cognitive dissonance” between historical evidence and their residual commitments. Clinging to such beliefs is especially remarkable when specific historical events and revelations have decisively invalidated them, when their ethical substance has been shown to disappear without a trace in the process of their attempted realization.
Over a decade after the fall of Soviet Communism, it is apparent that numerous major Western public figures, opinion-makers, and intellectuals have preserved some of their core beliefs, if not in the defunct political systems themselves, at least in the supporting ideas; the collapse did not discredit these ideas in their eyes. Their continuing devotion is of great
