For example, creationism and environmentalism (the latter manifested by the rhetoric of global warming) are potent glues that hold the right and the left together. The two belief systems have frightening commonalities. While they are both based on easily discountable junk science, they have become premises of ideological purity and the litmus test for credentials in their respective parties. Policy becomes hostage to dubious theories, and the alternative is presented as looming catastrophe.

News organizations, even those purported to be “fair and balanced,” promote these ideologies when they are couched as hard news or analysis. The Kansas Board of Education’s decision to allow Creationism as an alternative to evolution becomes a “national debate” worthy of cover stories. The debate’s preposterousness gets buried in the fine print, and the discussion is further diluted by the equal time and space allocated to charlatans and American ayatollahs, masquerading as “scientists.”

Religiosity would be merely amusing to irritating were it limited to school curriculum or football team prayer. It is not funny when it takes an entire party hostage and loads it with zealots, whose irrational ideologies and fanatical religious bigotry can push the U.S. into unthinking foreign misadventures that hurt its economic prospects, reduce its prestige, and promote crazies in Iran and Venezuela.

The situation is not much better on the other side. The notion that modernity and economic growth is an affront to man’s “real” and unspoiled nature is a tradition over two-thousand-year old in the western world, and it has strengthened over the last 150 years among romantics and pseudo-intellectuals.

The idea is that progress, urbanization, industrialization, mechanization, and the use of energy cause man to raise his head against nature, which has supplanted the divine. In many ways this becomes the anti-religious religion. The punishment is certain, from Paul Ehrlich’s prediction in the 1970s that a billion people would die from famine, to Al Gore’s “tipping point” theory of planetary destruction, because the “internal combustion engine is the biggest threat to humankind.” This will happen because, in the last 150 years, earth’s mean temperature increased by a fraction of a degree and carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increased by a few parts per million! This is junk science beyond belief, audaciously and ridiculously claiming “scientific consensus.”

Lost in all this rancor is the economic progress and betterment of human life accomplished since the industrial revolution. Consider this: before the industrial revolution, life expectancy was almost half what it is now; infant mortality stood at 50 percent; and one in six women died in childbirth. This anti-progress ideology neglects to mention the dire economic consequences should it carry the day.

News organizations cannot help but promote ideologies, giving them credence in serious-sounding TV specials and print pieces, accepting outrageous claims as the starting point to “predict the future.” And where do these irrationalities culminate? The unfortunate result is that the failed record of one will likely bring the other into power. Even for a certified liberal like me, the specter of a Gore-minded government is scary indeed. Mind you, the country does have a lot of key challenges: Energy supply, re-shaping the economy internally and externally, China, Islamic fundamentalism, anti-American populism in South America, and a re-Sovietized Russia.

The apocalypse of the ideologues may be staring us in the face, but it is of our own making.