When Political Ideology Morphs Into Spiritual Death

Abstract

Perhaps the worst havoc wrought by the George W. Bush era of unbridled neoliberalism was dismantling all investments in the concept of a social safety net to safeguard deliberative democracy. The Bush gang established, with frightening ease and expedience, a revised order of thinking—where citizens could calculate the amount of support and sympathy a crisis and its victims deserved (the Iraq Invasion, for one), based on such spiritually dead criteria as ethnic orientation, national identity, religious affiliation, and political ideology.