Following the script | The fundamental force driving American political policy at the beginning of the 21st Century

Ignorance of our own western history, specifically the understanding of the bourgeoisie's rise to power, is principally the reason why many political pundits and inside-the-beltway gurus fail to fully comprehend the deep-seated motivations of the Bush administration and their general ideological thrust. Without this understanding, much of their seemingly “un-cerebral” goals appear to be queer, puzzling, and oddly elusive, especially when it springs out of a few erudite minds who contribute to prominent conservative think tanks.

One must have an understanding of the bourgeois class, in it's full historical context, beyond the oversimplified and misinterpreted definition of what is meant by the term “bourgeoisie” to cold-war communists. To comprehend the principal factors that have manifested themselves here in today's political arena, particularly in the "neo-con" G. W. Bush camp though it's not exclusive to them by any means, is to comprehend our bourgeoisie inheritance. It is more than one theological story, or a few fashionable political precepts, such as a tacit backlash to feminism, and the unprecedented growth in power by women that occurred only recently – in the latter part of the past hundred years.

You must understand this, in its broad traditional framework and in its entire scope, if you intend to have any hope of making sense of why, say, the average Joe will state that he's against homosexual marriage yet sees no real conflict with the fact that he has a long-time and unflinching friendship with a co-worker he knows to be gay and accepts for being so.

Classic traits of narrow-mindedness, materialism, hypocrisy, opposition to change and lack of cultural savoir-faire, along with limited banal aesthetic sensibilities and mercenary aspirations are all aspects born directly out of our bourgeoisie past. Karl Marx noted that the ideology of the bourgeoisie, as they ascended to become the new ruling class, sought to reshape society after their own image, believing that their concepts and institutions, their view of civil society and culture, to be universally true. Although he commended the industriousness of the bourgeoisie, he criticized them for their moral hypocrisy. Concepts such as personal liberties, religious and civil rights, and free trade all derive directly from bourgeois philosophies.

From his personal travels throughout many parts of America, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, having seen for himself the material industriousness that supported our eventual rise to world prominence, had also confirmed the fundamental bourgeois aspects of our national character. He wrote, “America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a State. ... Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough.”

Americans and American culture is comprised of many things, to be sure, but we are the way we are in a very fundamental way because of the overwhelming success of capital markets, which in turn led to the bourgeoisie becoming the de facto global ruling class; thereby giving us the capacity to exercise our dominance and influence, in way and on a scale we had not had the temerity to do so – until now.

Our leading political minds are not as divinely inspired as you've been lead to believe; they're not billowing out great political epiphanies they've elucidated through great debate. Hardly. They're following an embedded cultural script; reading lines from the middle class handbook that we've inherited.