I essayed five days ago on “True religion and speech control,” in which I posited that Western Leftist dogma is in fact religious dogma, just a deity-less kind. Leftism is a form of True Religion, a political absolutism. As I explained then, Leftism claims the authority to define whose speech, and what kind of speech, is permissible in society, and will punish those who transgress. Leftism holds that it possesses Absolute Truth which may be denied or defied only at peril. More at the post, because here I turn attention to another religious characteristic of True Religious Leftism: it is apocalyptic like all True Religions are.

Writing in TCS Daily, Glenn Reynolds ponders the mainstreaming of personal-survival kits, now available at Costco and other mainline stores. “The kind of survival-oriented disaster preparedness thinking that once flourished in subcultures like Soldier of Fortune seems to be going mainstream. And why is that?”

Perhaps without really meaning to, Glenn uncovers one of the prominent religious aspects of the contemporary Left in America and the rest of the West: the world is about to end.

Back in the 1990s, it was the Soldier of Fortune crowd that was preparing for some sort of apocalyptic scenario. Back then, the Democrats were in power, and much of the apocalypticism we heard was from the right. Now, with the Republicans in power over the past six years, the apocalypticism has shifted leftward. A quick perusal of Amazon demonstrates this: Where once people on the right were worried about the shock troops of the socialist New World Order or the breakup of America into racial enclaves, now it seems like it’s mostly lefties worrying about self-reliance in the face of collapsing unsustainable technology, and the dangers of suburban extinction in the face of high oil prices. As with some of the righty books from the 1990s, there’s a curious push-pull here: Though these are warnings of catastrophes to come, there’s a sense that to some extent those catastrophes involve society getting what it deserves for its sinful ways, perhaps coupled with an opportunity for purification in the wake of the crisis — with the virtuously prepared having the upper hand, of course.

Ultimately, the wicked will be punished and the virtuous will be saved. That’s mainline True Religion stuff. How interesting that the Left, which shuns traditional religion of the Western types, uses religious templates to frame its tenets.

Update: Strategy Page cites Mark Steyn’s new book, America Alone, in which Steyn observes,

“The end of the world’s nighness isn’t something you’d want to set your watch by. ”

Steyn provides a collection of the dire predictions made by “Chicken Little’s eminent successors.”

Steyn’s list includes:

— 1968, in “The Population Bomb,” distinguished scientist Paul Ehrlich declared, “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

— 1972, in “The Limits to Growth,” the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.

— 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called “The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?”

— 1977, Jimmy Carter confidently predicted that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

None of this happened, of course. The doomsayers are wrongsayers. (Ironically, Steyn’s book is subtitled, The End of the World as We Know It. But he means politically rather than apocalyptically.)