William Brafford has an interesting post on the dangers of hubris (or, as he puts it, undue confidence and ignorance of the limits of one’s knowledge, which are all part of this flaw) and on how to understand ideology. Brafford is right that one of the attractions of ideology is that it seems to offer “a schema for predicting the consequences of events.” I would emphasize that ideology only seems to do this, because one of the key features of any ideology is its horrific powers of oversimplification and its impressively narrow perspective on historical events. That is, ideology will not reliably predict consequences of events, but it will condition the mind to force every event into the mold provided by the ideology. If a person approaches the world with an ideological frame of mind, whatever events dominate the historical memory of his fellow ideologues are perceived as constantly recurring again and again as part of a progressive narrative of successive triumphs, each one more important than the last. The simple framing, the certainty of victory and the quick and easy interchangeability of extremely different groups as different faces of the same enemy are all very useful for purposes of propaganda and the acquisition and exercise of power.

This is one reason why so many ideologues express great confidence that History will judge their endeavors to have been worthwhile and why they always avoid accountability for the consequences of their own policies and actions: their grasp of historical contingency is poor, and their knowledge of history is usually limited to a narrow range of approved opinions about major events. These were the people Popper derided as historicists in The Poverty of Historicism and elsewhere. It is therefore endlessly entertaining that some of the most obnoxious ideological snake-oil peddlers hurl the label historicist at anyone who questions their grand theories. When Popper’s historicists accuse their opponents of historicism, they are attacking respect for contingency and context, skepticism of moralizing, self-congratulatory narratives of national virtue, and hostility to grossly anachronistic celebrations of certain historical figures as precursors of enlightened modernity. Ideology thrives on ignoring contingency and context, and on embracing self-congratulatory narratives and rampant precursorism.

The ideology to which Bacevich refers in The Limits of Power has a certain appeal because it offers a flexible rationale for action, which is to say that it can provide rationalizations for just about any exercise of power, and in the case of national security ideology this is the exercise of executive power. This ideology is able to draw readily on a well-established tradition of justifying presidential power-grabs in emergency situations. It was only a matter of time before the emergency would be made permanent, so that the continual expansion of executive power would become more or less unquestionable and seemingly irreversible.