For years I’ve tried to create an awareness here on what constitutes ideology, and why it’s important. It’s plainly obvious that I’ve failed.
Fom my POV, one of the greatest problems we confront in today’s political discourse is the lack of ideologies. In the US and in many other countries, people are “divided” by “values”, but largely obviate the means to achieve common goals. This, to me, is the artificial wedge used to differentiate parties and candidates.
Back when it was Kerry vs. Dubya, I pointed out that the candidates respective websites proclaimed a series of goals which were almost identical. Even the means to achieve those goals were almost identical, and the differentiation between the two were obviously products of Madison Ave.-style marketing: similar goals and means to acheive said goals were described in different ways in order to attract different market segments.
This is shallow democracy, this is a farce.
The rise of the concept of the “third way” was the death knell of ideology in most of the West. The concept of “centrism” and the fallacy of “being all things for all people” was the ideal scenario for the absolute corruption of democratic systems and the inexorable move to the right – and the current crisis.
Ideology, however, isn’t entirely abandoned in current political discourse. Aspects of ideology are apparent in the undercurrents of political parties, particularly with regards to the policy makers in the corporate-funded thinktanks. Those aspects are overridingly economic, and for the most part are atuned to neoliberalism.
So I ask again - why is ideology important? Are not the ends enough, or are the means important as well?
Hereabouts, with a national healthcare system, the rw is on a binge of privatization. National healthcare is being farmed out to private companies, purportedly because they are more efficient than government-run healthcare. This is a case of neoliberalism in action.
What’s the difference for the tax-payer or those who need healthcare? They have publicly-mandated health coverage as part of the social safety net. What does it matter if it’s a private company or the government who actually provides the service, as long as the public receives the service?
The answer is not simple and has many facets. On one side, by giving control of healthcare to private companies, governments are recognizing their own incompetence, which in itself is an incredibly undemocratic way of interpreting things:
- If a government doesn’t provide a service efficiently, it is the fault of elected officials that aren’t doing their job properly.
- By outsourcing a fundamental (over here at least) public service to private corporations, whose only raison d’être is to make a profit for its stock-owners, there’s an initial inefficiency (the margin of profit) that can never be amended.
- By outsourcing a fundamental public service that is not amenable to competition, the government is permanently abdicating its control over it.
- A private corporation without competition invariably incurs the same inefficiency as an incompetent government would do, with the added fillip of the profit motive.
So while the European rw does not question the right to healthcare (which would be electoral suicide), it changes the means to achieve the ends. And the means, as I showed above, are incredibly important. As Overton’s Window shifts over time, inexorably to the right in the absence of an ideological opposition, at some point the right to healthcare will be questioned, and the neoliberal dream of a serviceless government will come to pass.
From Wikipedia:
David W. Minar describes six different ways in which the word “ideology” has been used:
- As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative;
- As the form or internal logical structurethat ideas have within a set;
- By the role in which ideas play in human-social interaction;
- By the role that ideas play in the structure of an organization;
- As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion; and
- As the locus of social interaction, possibly.
For Willard A. Mullins, an ideology is composed of four basic characteristics:
- it must have power over cognition
- it must be capable of guiding one’s evaluations;
- it must provide guidance towards action;
- and, as stated above, it must be logically coherent.
Points 2 and 3 are, for me, of tantamount importance, and the source of my displeasure with the center-left in general and the DNC/Obama in particular.
Electoral plausibility has taken the place of ideology. The third way drive towards appealing to a majority, over having an actual content that can be checked and balanced against a road map, is an egregious error. It can only lead to what we have seen in spades since Carter – a continuous move to the right.
So I say that we need ideology to measure what our politicians and parties are doing, in order to keep them kosher. It might make for some electoral defeats, but it might also avoid others – since a level of ideological “purity” will lead to less cases of Obama Hangovers, and a real distinguishing characteristic that will differentiate parties and politicos. We need a series of goals, a measuring rod to judge not only results but the means to the end.
-
We have a real life example of what happens when we elect rigid ideologues to run our government.
The baggers have nearly shut down our government multiple times in the past 2 years, and I have no doubt they would have been fine with shutting it down each of those times. One result is the downgrading of our credit rating, because the bagges refuse to pay even the bills we’ve already run up, to protect the income of the wealthiest among us.
Congress has an approval rating of somewhere near 10%. This, too, is because of the rigid ideologue baggers.
I wouldn’t hold Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich out as “ideologues”. I’d rather think of them as intelligent people who care about our country and the middle class. But I would use them as an example of someone who just can’t get elected in TX or OK. So, in the first place, and given our seemingly mutual awareness that the American electorate is dumber than a box of rocks, I have no idea why you think we can elect a sizable minority of Sanders’s and Kucinich’s.
But, in what may be a more important second place, I have no idea why you think having (just to pick a number) 60 “left wing teabaggers” and 60 Koch-backed faux-populist astroturfed teabaggers in the House would be in any way beneficial to our government functioning in a way that benefits anyone. All we’d actually have is even more grid-lock than we currently have.
We need intelligent people in congress who care about, and understand the importance of, having a strong middle class, not people who won’t change their position no matter what the facts or realities of the consequences.
Michelle Bachmann said she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling no matter what. That’s insanity. I couldn’t imagine Kucinich or Sanders making a similar statement about a “left wing” position.
Whether you accept it, or not, the American people are tired of rigid ideologues preventing our government from functioning.
-
“We have a real life example of what happens when we elect rigid ideologues to run our government.”
No, we have an example of what happens when we have populists, influenced by a bad ideology, without the benefit of an opposing ideology, running our government.
Think about it.
Otherwise, it seems that even now you can’t quite get what ideology is about.
-
From Wikipedia:
“Many political parties base their political action and program on an ideology. In social studies, a Political Ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. Some parties follow a certain ideology very closely, while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them.
Political ideologies have two dimensions:
Goals: how society should work
Methods: the most appropriate ways to achieve the ideal arrangement.An ideology is a collection of ideas. Typically, each ideology contains certain ideas on what it considers to be the best form of government (e.g. democracy, theocracy, etc.), and the best economic system (e.g. capitalism, socialism, etc.). Sometimes the same word is used to identify both an ideology and one of its main ideas. For instance, “socialism” may refer to an economic system, or it may refer to an ideology which supports that economic system.”
This is what is important: “Goals: how society should work
Methods: the most appropriate ways to achieve the ideal arrangement. ”And this is where, for example, the “third way” fails.
According to Wiki:
“The term was later used by politicians in the 1990s who wished to incorporate Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s projects of economic deregulation, privatization, and globalization into the mainstream centre-left political parties.”
So in the end, the third way IS Reagan republicanism, with a progressive veneer.
And so, if you have populists with a neoliberal base, without a counterbalance, what you will get is neoliberalism. Nothing else.
As a moderate democrat (and I don’t mean DNC), I WELCOME a Bachman or a Reagan, as long as we have an equal and opposing force to counteract their influence. Let them fail because their policies, based on their ideology, fail. But give us a real alternative, an alernative roadmap, to balance them out.
Now, we don’t have that. We have an extreme rw counterbalanced by a center-right that is willing to do whatever it takes to take office, and every time the center-right (DNC) loses, it moves further to the right in order to piggyback on the very real success of decades of corporate-funded indoctrination.
If we have one extreme, we need another or the fulcrum will continue to move to the right.
You often refer to the supremes. A Sotomayor wouldn’t even be considered by a Nixon as being too far to the right, but since Overton’s moved to the right, you might consider Sotomayor to be a valid opponent to the batshit crazy Alito’s et al. But then again, Nixon – once the bugbear of progressives- would be in Kucinich’s camp. Hell, Goldwater would be a moderate Dem in this day and age, and so would Dole.
“”We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater told Dole, who was then facing criticisms from hard-line conservatives in the presidential campaign.
”Can you imagine that?””
——————–
At one point a line has to be drawn. The longer we wait, the line will be drawn further to the right. The idea of a lesser evil looses it’s meaning when, every time the greater evil wins, the lesser evil tries to emulate the greater one.
————
Timbuk, we seem to look at things from a different perspective. You seem to follow the orthodox American POV, within the framework of the GOP/DNC dichotomy. I don’t, I try to see things with, perhaps, a more historical POV. I’m used to digesting things from an evolutionary POV, cutting through the rhetoric and ideals of crhoniclers and endeavouring to make a more universal interpretation of actions, motivations and consequences.
I’m not saying that my POV is “superior”, just different. When I look at, for example, the Nike Rebellion during the reign of Justinian, I don’t take the contemporary historian’s interpretations at face value. I am a Marxian in that respect – I try to interpret what the contemporary historian says with more than a grain of salt, taking into consideration that the historian might be an aristocrat with a chip on his shoulder, that he sees thing from only one point of view, and that he doesn’t have the benefit of 1500 years of posterior history and sociological, economic or philosophic experience. Procopius’ “Secret History” springs to mind.
So it should be clear that “contemporary issues”, which are important in the short-term, do not mean too much to me in the long term. And as a lay-historian, I make more light of the long-term and the undercurrents – because, as a student of history, I have become aware that most “contemporary issues” tend to be unimportant in the greater realm of things.
Who remembers the William Jennings Bryan and his “Cross of Gold”? That was the core of American political discourse in his day, and it was bullshit.
————
“Whether you accept it, or not, the American people are tired of rigid ideologues preventing our government from functioning.”
They’re not rigid ideologues preventing our government from functioning, but rigid populists.
If the rigids had a well-articulated ideology behind them, they’d have an argument to justify their intransigience. And if their opposition had a well-atriculated ideology, they’d have a valid argument against their opponents’ rigidity.
Ideology provides a litmus test, a roadmap, a measuring stick, by which political actions can be judged. A voter doesn’t have to become an acolyte and follow an ideology at every turn, but a party or a politician can be judged as to how well or badly he follows his purported ideology, and choose an ideology as opposed to a charisma or a platform when election time comes around.
Get it?
I must be a terrible explainer….
-
OK, if my ideology POV doesn’t work…
Are we only to judge politicians on the basis of their promises or even their successes?
Hitler was very popular. Except amongst his opponents and victims, of course. But he rebuilt the German economy, made Germany respected internationally, etc. etc. etc.
Means are, perhaps, more important than ends. And in the absence of other checks and balances, shouldn’t a politician’s word (as might be his compliance to an ideology), be worth something?
Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://www.timbuk3.com/discuss/wp-trackback.php?p=7537