The fundamentalism that is most frightening is capitalist fundamentalism, because it's the most powerful.

Every time there is any movement towards democracy anywhere the capitalist fundamentalists move in and insist that their economic doctrines are enshrined as sacred texts, qualifying and limiting any kind of democratic system.

During the cold war the impression was given that the disagreement with the Soviet Union was all about freedom and repression and so forth, and that with that lifted it would be possible for them to build their own model of democratic socialism. That was more or less Gorbachev's naive understanding, with his talk of glasnost and perestroika. Not a chance - the bottom line was that the spivs should be set free to take over, and that is what happened. Ot rather, in most cases, the apparatchiks turned into spivs overnight.

And in China the same thing has been demonstrated in a different way - so long as the fundamentalist capitalist doctrines were accepted, it doesn't apparently matter a damn that the political repression continues. In fact it works better that way - real democracy can really get in the way of exploiting people.

And the reason this isn't wholly drift is that this is the agenda for Iraq as well. The idea that there could be any alternative model for a free society that isn't fundamentalist Capitalism is anathema.

And I take the point which Nicole C makes, that the capitalist variety permits massive exceptions to its doctrines for its own purposes for its inner group. That is one of the ways it resembles many other fundamentalists,