Following President Bush’s visit to Ottawa earlier this month, David Warren wrote this perceptive column on what drives the deranged Bush-hating left: The Demons.

What we see on the streets of Ottawa, instead, is an almost pure fanaticism — that radical spirit of alienation that ultimately motivates the Jihadis, too. This nihilism is the splinter in the heart of our modernity; it rejects everything; it proposes, finally, nothing in its place. It is the devil himself speaking out of his void, leading finally to the silence of Iago.

To understand it, we must look into the very faces contorted with rage, and the mouths uttering the vilest obscenities. The evil is not coming from outside them: it is instead welling from the void within.

And yet the tragedy of these people — whose fanaticism puts them beyond the pale of give-and-take in party politics, and whose views, should they spread, would take the whole democratic order down with them — is that they know even less about themselves than they know about the world they condemn. They are angry, but finally they don’t know why.

They don’t believe in evil, as a category; yet it haunts them externally on every side: “Bush” being only the straw man of the moment. And unlike the actual Mr. Bush, they do not believe in grace, either. They see evil everywhere. They rail, and they rail.

You could call them spiteful, but that would be psychologizing.

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