I am reading historian Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers, his history of politicized religion and religious politics from roughly the French Revolution to The Great War. He writes that his goal is to explain the rise of “religious politics” — socialism (both revolutionary and evolutionary), reformism, counter-revolution — and while the book is chock full o’ facts, I’m not entirely sure whether he pulls this off. Yet. I’m not quite finished.

In his chapter on the New Men of Alexander II Russia (Alexander was the “Good Tsar” for ending serfdom and liberalizing society) he describes the people who would eventually become the assassins and revolutionaries of the Bolsheviks. There’s more than a little whiff (actually, there’s quite a stink) of our Neoconservatives and the loudest partisans of the GOP in this:

The “new man” was a monlithic personality, a tyro of enormous will, a little poorly digested utilitarian knowledge, no capacity for self-doubt and blinkered singularity of purpose. He was incapable of relating to the complexities of another human being beyond whatever ideological stereotypes he has already imposed upon them. In the eyes of [Russian author Alexander] Herzen, who attacked such “New Men” in an article entitled “The Superfluous Men and the Men with a Grudge,” they had the roughness, rudeness and ruthlessness of ambitious and unsuccessful mediocrities, although they themselves were notoriously touchy.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone