Ideologies and Politics

Dan Williams wrote an interesting post on ideologies. The term “ideology”, as we know all too well, refers to “belief systems”. While some like Karl Marx viewed ideologies as “inherently bad”, not everyone agrees. For most people, the term doesn’t necessarily have a bad connotation. It just refers to belief systems.

 

Except, as Williams says, when the term is used in politics. He quotes Christopher Federico and Ariel Malka who say, in politics, ideologies serve a purpose. Huh? Politics, they say, covers a huge and diverse set of matters from economics to trade policy to social matters to immigration to geopolitics to taxation. Voters cannot evaluate any political party issue by issue.

“(Ideology) derives in large part from the inherent complexity of politics… By providing leaders and citizens alike with comprehensive, organised frameworks for making sense of politics, ideologies supply political actors with ready-made judgements about the state of the world and many issues at once while also furnishing an overarching narrative about why various political concerns fit together.”

The left-right split is an extreme form of such, er, simplification:

“One-dimensional politics collapses this complexity. Instead of choosing issue by issue, policy by policy, you decide whether you support “left-wing” or “right-wing” (or centrist, far-left, or far-right) political representatives and parties.”

 

Therefore, says Williams, recognize that:

“Ideologies do not aim exclusively or even primarily at truth. They must provide simple, shared narratives that lend clarity and coherence to a complex political world and set of policy proposals.”

While it simplifies, it also over-simplifies. Which is why, in politics, the term “ideological” has progressively acquired the negative meaning of “some rigid framework of preconceived ideas which distorts… understanding”. By the other side, of course, never one’s own.

 

He then asks us to consider the counter-factual. Imagine a politician or party that is “careful, scientific, and humble (i.e., non-ideological)”. Without “simplifying and unifying narratives”, but with the willingness to admit things are complex or no easy solutions exist or that they might be wrong, how do you think such a party or politician would fare?

 

An informative, though a bit depressive, perspective.