My fellow ideologues.(on Barack Obama)

'WHAT is required," proclaimed Barack Obama in his pre-inaugural address in Philadelphia, "is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives--from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry--an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels."

What's a poor ideologue like me to make of that?

Now before I go on, I need to clarify something about what I mean when I say I'm an ideologue. It's true, there's a venerable tradition in conservatism that doesn't like ideology. H. Stuart Hughes's famous aphorism "Conservatism is the negation of ideology" earned applause from no less than Russell Kirk. But Kirk was talking about such poisons of the mind as Jacobinism, Bolshevism, fascism. What Barack Obama seems to have in mind is nothing more than disagreement.

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Remember his famous comment that small-town folks bitterly cling to their sky god and boom sticks because of the lack of jobs (and of the progressive economic policies that would supposedly create them)? The press usually downplayed the rest of the quote. He went on to say that the same people might also cling to "antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Now whatever your positions on trade or immigration, it's hard to see why they should be chalked up to bitterness and bigotry simply because they differ from President Obama's.

As a matter of political strategy, Obama is trying to preempt any criticism by casting it as intellectually illegitimate. For instance, at a much-discussed press conference on the economy, then-President-elect Obama cast himself as an open-minded pragmatist. He said that he's receptive to new ideas no matter the source, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal. But he also insisted that the one thing we all know is: "Only government" can fix ...