Ideology: Political Concepts Chapter 3

Previous: Ideology

(Introduction and Table of Contents)

At first glance ideology and legitimacy seem identical, because ideology determines legitimacy.

An ideology is a story about how the world is, and how it should be. Most ideologies include:

• A theory of human nature, which determines how they think people should be treated.

• A vision of what the good life is.

• An ideal type of person, who is most virtuous.

• And, combined, these determine what sort of world an ideology’s believers should try to create.

The best way to explore this is to look at some ideologies, both recent ones (which we have emotions about) and older ones we are somewhat disconnected from.

Economism is a modern ideology. The great early ideologue (story-teller) associated with it is Adam Smith, and his book, “The Wealth of Nations.” Economism posits that people are self interested, indeed selfish, and that the best way to run society is to run with this: people pursuing their own self-interest will create a good society.

Economism also posits that people pursue their own well-being and know what is good for them. Thus if someone buys something, or does something for money, well, that thing must be of benefit. There may be exceptions, and Adam Smith recognized quite a few, but they are exceptions, and Smith’s heirs have often reduced the number of exceptions.

To manage people in Economism you manage incentives: you change tax schemes, you reward people with money who do what you want, and you take money away from people who don’t do what you want. Since people buy what is good for them, if someone makes a lot of money selling things, well, they must be increasing human well-being and they therefore not only deserve to keep the money they have gained, but they should have that money because with that money they can do even more, and thus increase human well being even more.

Thus Economism tends to lead to money pooling at the top, with people who have produced products that other people buy. Sometimes these products aren’t really products (in finance), sometimes they are (iPods, cars, Smart Phones, computers, washing machines, etc…) Sometimes they are good for people (penicillin), and sometimes they are bad for people (cigarettes, most social media) but Economism is very bad at recognizing that anyone who has money may not have increased welfare (which it doesn’t really believe in, instead using utility); that some products are actually harmful even if people like them, or that just because someone created a great product or series of products, doesn’t mean they will do more good with their money.

From a “stay in power” point of view, what is important about any ideology is that it empowers those who follow its precepts, and dis-empowers those who don’t do what it requires. I trust it’s obvious how Economism (capitalism) does that: money is power and people who don’t value money don’t tend to get a lot of money, and thus power.

Economism is at the core of capitalism. Without it we wouldn’t be capitalist, because it wouldn’t make sense to us to organize our societies this way. But we have made modifications to it at times. After the Great Depression, for example, we realized that if the rich were too rich, there weren’t enough customers with money, and that regulations were needed to keep capitalism from capsizing. So, in the US from about 1932, and in the rest of the “West” after the war we had policies to keep wages and prices of goods (but not houses or education) up, to discourage too much speculation in financial markets and to share the wealth.

That sub-ideology, which can be divided into the New Deal (32-46) and Post-war liberalism (46 to somewhere between 68 and 80), was destroyed when the oil shocks and inflation + high unemployment happened in the 70s, and in 1979 in Britain, and 1980 in the U.S. we moved over to neoliberalism, which is described well by the form of Economism I highlighted.

Possibly the best way to think of ideologies is as instruments meant to create a type of society. All forms of capitalism feature wage labor, concentration of capital and a primary role for markets: they all create powerful capitalists and remove capital (the means of production) from most of the rest of society.

But New Deal/Post War Liberalism created a large middle class, and even manufacturing workers could support a four person family on one salary, while neoliberalism produced a society where the good working class jobs were lost and families needed two salaries and a lot of debt to get along, while all unavoidable costs like healthcare and housing and education (since almost all good jobs are closed without it) skyrocketed.

However post-war liberalism had a dark side: the exclusion of women from the work force. The post-war era excluded women much more than the New Deal period had, and more than had been the case in the previous laissez-faire form which ended in the 20s. This was not accidental, it was part of the design: to keep wages high, you want a smaller workforce, so less people are competing for jobs. Make it so half the population can’t compete for any jobs outside the pink-collar ghetto, and you’re a long way there.

All ideologies have shadows. In some cases we may judge the shadow to be more than half the ideology: an ideology which justifies widespread slavery might be considered to do more harm than good, and many women might prefer neoliberalism, for all its problems, to post-war liberalism: neoliberalism wanted the biggest workforce possible, to drive down wages, so was OK with letting women work (though there was and still is a lot of prejudice and structural issue, societies turn slowly, like cruise ships.)

The other ruling ideology of the West, though in a lot of danger and retreat today, is representative Democracy.

As a rule, most societies have two to three ruling ideologies, usually with two of them in the cat seat. For most of the European Dark and Middle Ages, those were Christianity and Feudalism, but by the 1100s there is an oncoming commercial/city ideology which eventually turns into the bourgeoisie and later into capitalism. Free cities were ruled by guild masters and merchants and the church, not by the feudal nobility. These people had an ideology which opposed Feudalism, though not so much the church, but they were a minority and far weaker than either Church or the nobility.

Democracy is the most important ideology in our societies other than Capitalism. It is democracy which rescued capitalism, thru high Keynesian spending, price and wage supports and laws forbidding the worst financial excesses, after capitalism drove much of the world into a Great Depression.

In healthy periods, the ruling ideologies complement each other: stopping the worst excesses of the other ideology, and mitigating flaws. Welfare, universal health care, securities laws, industrial policy, and so on are ways that representative democracy manages, or in many cases managed (it now encourages the excesses, rather than mitigating them) capitalism.

Representative democracy is the story and belief that people have the right to choose those who rule them, and that no one who is not chosen by the population has a right to make public decisions.

This story puts democracy in fairly direct opposition to capitalism, because capitalists have a great deal of power to make public decisions, and are not chosen by the people. There’s a lot of effort in some circles to deny this opposition, by suggesting that consuming is the equivalent of democracy, but at the core the two ideologies have opposing visions.

A modus vivendi has been created, in which capitalists often talk up democracy and democratic governments claims that capitalism causes democracy (the Chinese beg to differ). Democrats in effect sanctify capitalism, and capitalism sometimes nods back and sanctifies democracy.

This is similar to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages with the divine right of kings, and support for feudalism, even though it is hard to see most of Jesus’s teachings as supportive of wealth and power, save for the famous “Render unto Caesar.”

But the Church, in healthy periods, served many of the same purposes as Democracy does for Capitalism: it reined in the worst excesses. Churches were centers of charity, Popes often tried to enforce peace and mitigate the damage of feudal wars, and monasteries kept alive literacy and learning in a Europe which otherwise didn’t care for it.

Likewise capitalism might be seen as providing a market dynamism which democracy, by itself, would lack.

Each ideology is also a danger to the other. Democracies may decide that capital shouldn’t be controlled by private individuals and that markets should be regulated to such a point that capitalists feel they can barely operate. Capitalists upon becoming rich generally try and buy government, and often succeed, as they have in the United States and Britain as of this writing in 2021.

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In time not only sub-ideologies change, but ruling ideologies rise and fall. Neither the church nor feudal nobles or even aristocrats rule much of anything any more. (Churches have hung on a bit better.)

The important thing, however, is to see that ideologies are stories about how the world is, and should be, and that those stories tell us how we should act, who should run our societies and what sort of societies it is right and good for them to create.

Ideologies do not float free of material circumstances. An ideology is constrained by technology and geography, and stories must explain our lives. A story which does not make sense any more will lose much of its power, as when the French Philosophes essentially demolished French aristocracy and much of the Christianity’s claim to be good rather than evil, or even make any sense. This was possible because even French aristocrats found it impossible to defend themselves as being better than others or doing anything to deserve their titles. Old-style feudal nobles, who ran their own estates, fought in wars and were generally healthier, stronger and a lot better in a fight than non-nobles would have laughed off such criticisms.

Because this is a short booklet, we can’t go a lot more into the details of how ideologies work. My upcoming “The Creation of Reality” deals with ideology at much greater length.

But we do need to understand what makes stories work; where ideologies get their power from. Just as legitimacy is powered by ideology, ideology is powered by identification and that is what we’ll discuss next.

Next: Identification

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