But by now it is fairly clear that fundamentalism is much stronger than nationalism. It is not clear to me why the link between a universalized individualist high culture and the doctrine which inspired it should have been preserved in Islam and severed in Europe. It is, maybe, a historical accident. The strength of Islam is one surprise of this century, and the astonishing collapse of Communism virtually the entire body of Sovietologists and Soviet scholars failed to foresee it is another. There are ex-communists, but nobody sticks to the ideology.
People cling to continuity and to their privileges, but nobody is clinging to the doctrine.
I have a theory of this and am happy to try it out on you. What undid Marxism is not its secularism, but on the contrary, its pantheism that it inherited from Spinoza through Hegel. The basic Messianic ideal of Marxism which had a particular appeal for the Russian soul was to abolish the separation of the sacred from the profane in human life. The idea that the world was bound to be soiled and miserable, while fulfillment was to be found in another realm, was merely a reflection of a divided society. The future lay in a unitary world of total consummation.