Note: I just came across this essay, which I wrote some years ago. It reflects my current thinking fairly well, although my understanding of ideology has gotten more complicated. More on that later. Here’s the original post:
Ideology is not a collection of beliefs and opinions. Ideology is a system of beliefs and opinions. The parts (beliefs and opinions) are interconnected and form a complex whole. The whole is organized according to some core principles or themes. The sine qua non of ideological discourse is the “ideological square”, an elaboration of Us versus Them thinking:
Exaggerate Our Good Things: Our vision is good and true.
Exaggerate Their Bad Things: Their vision is evil and false.
Minimize Our Bad Things: Our vision has no serious downside.
Minimize Their Good Things: Their vision has no merit.
Political coalitions are more or less ideological. On the less ideological side, they may be held together by alliances of convenience, whose common cause may be more dislike of the other side than broad agreement on a range of issues. Or their members may share a key sentiment, like ‘keep government small’ but for different reasons, e.g., pro-business, anti-bureaucracy, pragmatism, efficiency, separation of church and state, distrust of do-gooders, freedom from coercion or interference, etc. As allies in a cause, they may become sympathetic to other points of view within their coalition, but that is different than embracing an ideology.
Ideologies are like secular religions – the essence of religion not being belief in supernatural entities or alternative worlds like heaven, but a “...system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." (Geertz 1993)
Within every political party, there are factions that are more ideological than others. That is, they have developed a system of ideas about the general order, ideas held with such confidence and fervor that they are clothed with an aura of factuality.
The problem with systems is their vulnerability to disintegration. With systems, everything’s connected: break a few links and the whole thing comes tumbling down. This vulnerability fosters a sense of threat. Hence, ideologues are often paranoid. Conspiracies and enemies abound. You get Us and Them and the Ideological Square.
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Okay, that’s the original essay. What I would add now is that ideologues are also prone to magical thinking, as reflected in the attitude that power plus the right values and a correct political understanding are enough to achieve ambitious societal goals. Kevin D. Williamson says it much better. Here are some extended excerpts from his recent piece, We’re All Jacobins Now:
I am using the term ideology to designate the two sets of beliefs that, to my mind, constitute the very bedrock of revolutionary consciousness. The first is that all personal problems and all moral or intellectual matters have become political; that there is no human misfortune not amenable to political solution. The second is that, since everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action, knowledge, and morality.
As Marx realized in his early writings, the Revolution was the very incarnation of the illusion of politics: It transformed mere experience into conscious acts. It inaugurated a world that attributes every social change to known, classified, and living forces; like mythical thought, it peoples the objective universe with subjective volitions, that is, as the case may be, with responsible leaders or scapegoats. In such a world, human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries, preferably traitors. The recurrence of that notion is a telling feature of the moral universe in which the revolutionary explosion took place.
Lenin…[believed] that the techniques, capacity, and competency to solve most existing social problems already were in existence, that these could be applied in a scientific manner, that policy and processes could be perfected with empirical tools — and that the only reason this had not already been done was the fact that power resided in the wrong hands rather than in the right ones: his. There is no scarcity or trade-offs, only saboteurs and traitors.
Democrats insist, and many of them are indeed daft enough to genuinely believe, that the Republican agenda at large is driven not by a collection of cultural attitudes expressed in preferences about tax rates or energy policy or the Waters of the United States regulation but exclusively by something sinister — white supremacy, for example, or bad-faith positions that they were bribed into by scheming corporate bosses acting behind the scenes.
One would think that Lenin’s superstition — that the ready-made solutions are all there waiting to be implemented, requiring only pure hearts and some political will — would have been dispelled in both parties by their experiences in power.
But, of course, the partisans have an answer for that: “The traitors have infiltrated our operations! Saboteurs and wreckers!”
I do not expect the American Left to question the premise that “human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries,” because the American Left is, always has been, and always will be both utopian and juvenile.
That last sentence is a bit harsh, but I know exactly what Williamson’s talking about. Consider the following list of “policies” a progressive acquaintance emailed me:
When it comes to policy, I support universal support of peoples basic needs. I support universal basic income, free healthcare for any and all ailments, free housing, free food, free water, and free education.
This individual has since deflected my repeated follow-up questions regarding trade-offs, limited resources, priorities, and other “petty details” (his term) of policy making. Instead, he has focused on “rooting out” people with bad thoughts and the wrong politics (seeing no problem, for instance, with the hounding and declining numbers of conservative professors at American colleges). This particular progressive is the embodiment of the attitude that “human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries”.
References:
Geertz, C. (1993) Religion as a cultural system. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays, Geertz, Clifford, pp.87-125. Fontana Press.
Van Dijk, Teun A. (2005) Politics, ideology and discourse. Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Volume on Politics and Language (Ruth Wodak, Ed.), pp. 728-740.
“We’re All Jacobins Now” Kevin D. Williamson/National Review February 2, 2021