Religion Abhors a Vacuum

City Journal's Benjamin A. Plotsinsky examines the increasing phenomenon of the leftist progressives' proclivity for falling into what is called, in Girard's mimetic theory terminology, worship and adoration of an "internal mediator:"

(T)he Obama campaign’s ubiquitous logo—the letter O framing a rising sun—would not have surprised the scholar Eric Voegelin. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

Read more of The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm here.