[Nick Beale]

To argue that the few surviving democracies were "ideological" in the same terms as the Soviet and Nazi regimes, you'd need to demonstrate convincingly that any of them had in their constitution or laws something directly comparable to the USSR's "leading role of the Communist Party" or the "Führerprinzip" under National Socialism in Germany.

Certainly Britain and France (for example) have had elected leaders who tended to delusions of personally embodying the nation (too much power for too long will do that to a person, apparently) but they never entrenched those delusions in law, I'm delighted to say.