This piece originally ran in December 2006. Back tomorrow with a fresh DJ.

RALEIGH – During a recent media appearance, a former elected official told me during a break that while I sometimes stumbled onto a useful stray observation about matters political, for the most part I was blinded by my devotion to abstract ideas. It is raw power, not ideology, that determines what governments do, he said.

I can’t agree. Even if I weren’t in the think tank business, I’d argue that history has proven time and time again the persistent and pervasive influence of ideas. As the British economist John Maynard Keynes famously wrote:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Interestingly, during the past half century it was Keynes himself who more often that just about anyone else played the role of defunct economist enslaving otherwise-sensible minds. The nonsensical nature of his economic propositions and prescriptions didn’t become apparent to most political elites until the stagflation of the 1970s, caused by Keynesian policies, gave way to the growth of the 1980s and 1990s, fueled by sound money, deregulation, free trade, and lower marginal tax rates (yes, both the first Bush and Clinton administrations presided over hikes in top tax rates, but the rates stayed well below the pre-Reagan 70 percent mark and were offset in part by capital-gains tax cuts and trade agreements).

Even now, old-style Keynesianism continues to attract the veneration of government staffers and business journalists of a certain age, who seem not to have allowed practical experience to overcome their poor economics education back in college. A hundred years from now, I suspect, someone will still point to an economic downturn, proclaim it the result of “animal spirits,” and recommend inflation as the cure. Ideological slavery, thy name is Keynes.

I was thinking about the lasting effects of old ideas the other day while reading a Wall Street Journal front-page story, “Anti-Americans on the March,” about the emerging coalition of Islamic fascists, communists, and anti-globalists to combat the West, and specifically the U.S. (you’ll have to pay for it if you didn’t read it, but it’s well worth it). Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez unapologetically spouts Maoist cant while embracing Iranian thug-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sunni extremists, and North Korean Marxists. “Socialism is human. Socialism is love,” Chavez proclaims. To believe this, you have to pretend that the 20th century didn’t happen. That there was no Soviet revolution, and no fusion of national socialism and racialism in the Third Reich. That there was no generation of Third World students in Paris before World War II, absorbing demented ideas and preparing to return to their countries of origin to foment revolution. That there was no death of more than 100 million Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Eastern and Central European Jews, South Slavs, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Africans, and other victims of socialist dictators and demagogues. That billions more did not suffer decades of privation and fear living in command economies run by dictators who had, indeed, read their Marx.

Persistence doesn’t mean coherence. Here’s my favorite passage from the Journal piece, about an international confab in Beirut last month hosted by Hezbollah to celebrate its “victory” over Israel in South Lebanon:

… [A] Mexican Marxist denounced America for “colonizing” New Mexico. A South Korean foe of free trade raged against American beef. A Turk fumed about American military bases. A Frenchman denounced American genetically engineered foods and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There were even a few Americans. One thundered against big business, another against the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Crackpot ideas – unfortunately, much of the world is, indeed, run by little else.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.