*What is Ideology?

I know you frame many of your critiques in terms of "ideology", but you seem to use the term in different ways depending on the post. Sometimes you talk about abstract values: caricatures in media, nebulous culture iconography. Sometimes you're separating broad familiar political groupings and specifying their traits (this comes up when you talk about socialism). And sometimes you seem to be talking about communities (or demographics, but it's important to make a distinction between those). I see these situations as different enough that I would prefer to use different words. Why do you use the one? Do they all reduce to one concept for you? If so, how?

So let’s start with why we are having these conversations. If you’re reading this blog I assume you’re familiar with the claim “both sides do it,” when you notice both sides of a political fight are acting badly. Ignoring evidence, name-calling, cognitive dissonance, even harassing members of the other political side, or obsessively focusing on a few instances of terrorism to prove the entire other side is bankrupt. You’ve probably been in the situation where you agreed with the fundamental beliefs of one political side, but didn’t know what to do about the fact that it felt like they were acting badly and betraying their beliefs, but the other side wasn’t really any better. Scott has certainly written about this dilemma a lot.

And we recognize “a lot of the way people talk about politics fails, and it fails in the same way.” That’s why politics is called the mindkiller. Now many people will say “Oh I just guess political discussion is terrible, lets just not talk politics or morality.” But that can’t be right either - we can easily imagine good political discussions - based on evidence and ethical principles, with respect for our opponents as human beings even when they disagree with that.

So to critique ideology is trying to find “the ways these political dynamics keep failing, what the whole system has in common, and how we can avoid that.”

I for instance am strongly opposed to dehumanization. It is the bedrock principle of this particular blog. The left wing side of American politics has policies more in concordance with this, but it must be admitted that liberal discourse has increasingly embraced dehumanization of its enemies. So why doesn’t American liberalism resist dehumanization, and how can you have a politics that consistently follows your ethical principles, without being seduced into thinking “your greatest values are worth violating as long as it hurts your enemies.”

That’s the aim. Let’s talk about why it’s all one big system, and not separable parts.

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Question for you. What is the Republican Party? Especially if you’re looking at it from the question of “if there was one thing I could control, to thereby control the whole party with, what is it?”

(As with my previous post on Republican dynamics, you can say all these same things for the Democratic Party if you prefer to think of it that way.)

It’s not the Republican National Committee, or any other institutional organizations. They can’t really drive policy or discussion. Most voters or radio talk show hosts just complain about them.

It’s not individual politicians. Many of them are very different from each other - look at the passage from Dubya to Trump. But the torch passed with most of the same voters and supporters intact (despite a hostile takeover. Something was taken over. What was it?)

It’s not “the collection of all the voters or office holders.” These are many different demographics - rich bankers, white farmers in Idaho, oilmen in Texas, Cuban families in Florida. And what more there’s very little demographic test. While their policies are bad for black people and gay people and hispanic people, by and large individuals of those demographics are enthusiastically embraced as converts, to say “Republican policies ARE better for black people!” Just look at their love of Tim Scott and Colin Powell. By the same token, loyalty to current Republicans is very shallow - if you step out of line and disagree with the popular line of the day, you get labelled as a RINO, attacked by radio talk shows, possibly even harassed and driven out of the party entirely.

Are they defined by their particular values then? Well on a policy level, their lock-step-heel switch the Individual Mandate solution for health insurance, or Cap-and-Trade, showed alarming rapidity in how a favored policy can become an opposed policy. There wasn’t even cognitive dissonance really, just complete disavowal. Even on policies we think of as very fundamental to Republicans, like lower taxes, were not negotiated on by federal Republicans so long as President Obama was part of the deal. Any presence of any Democrat in the deal could ruin its purity.

You could say they are committed to certain philosophical principles in the abstract sense, but what are they? Would all the factions agree with those? Do they even consistently predict what policies will be proposed and voted on?

As I said before in the Senate Republicans post, I wouldn’t even identify this system within individuals. As individuals many Republicans believe sensible, similar object-level things like you or your liberal friends.

We could go all nihilistic here and say the Republican Party isn’t a real thing we can understand. But it seems like there are a lot of predictions we can make based on our knowledge of something called the Republican Party. We know the way all the Senators will vote, we know which candidate will win Georgia and by what percentage within ten percent, and we know what bills they will try to repeal.

How do we identify this ideology?

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So you read my post on terminology: the Big Other, the Dark Other, and jouissance.

Arlie Hochschild spent five years talking to various conservatives of different class levels that helped him understand the populist uprising that we eventually saw last year. They had a lot of different life circumstances, different politicians they were supporting of, and their expression of abstract political values was vague at best.

When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed (“I believe in freedom”) or who they’d vote for (“I was for Ted Cruz, but now I’m voting Trump”). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I’ve come to think of as a deep story. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it’s-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need. Except Trump had opened a divide in how tea partiers felt this story should end.

…

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit (“the line-waiters form a new line”) or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, “I live your analogy.” Another said, “You read my mind.”

Hochschild thinks this a sympathetic way to describe their beliefs, because it shows they don’t actually hate black people or whatnot. I think it’s abhorrent. And it precisely fits that triptych to define an ideology: the Big Other is whoever at the front of the line giving things out, the Dark Other is the people cutting, or rather leaders like Obama helping them cut, and joissance is the “American Dream” that is being handed out.

The story isn’t even a very effective way of handling problems. It’s about resentment at that Dark Other, and not what sort of compromises you could make to reduce line-cutting, or increase the amount of “American Dream” to hand out. These are fantasy concepts after all, and people’s feeling about them. Some policies or individual politicians will not reduce their impact on you nearly as much as “Someone speaking out against them!” feeds your sense of injured anger.

So that’s the best way to define it. What is the Republican Party? It is the system that follows this explanation for “what is wrong with the world” and everything that builds up around it. It’s the system’s memetic efficiency, and the people acting as a group to execute it, and the cultural artifacts they surround themselves with that share the same ideological message. (Art does have political messages, even the most inoffensive stuff.) But none of those epiphenomenon are responsible for the ideology itself, nor should they be held accountable for it.

Twenty-Four is a highly ideological show that talks about the need for harsh violence that offends our intuitions about virtue in order to defend our freedoms. That doesn’t make it responsible for the perpetuation of neoconservative ideology, more a reflection of what’s going on under the hood.

So you can’t really separate the “abstract values: caricatures in media, nebulous culture iconography” because I’m not even objecting to any of those on their own. The values, media, and cultural icons can all be good in different contexts. But as part of an overall system, I want to understand them and fight them.