"Whenever we inhabit such siloed towers and make no effort to leave them - not even in the imagination and through dialogue - we do not understand the point of view of our neighbours who are aloft in a nearby tower of their own." So writes Political Scientist Jason Blakely near the end of his Lost In Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda, 2024). Our "experience of being disconnected from an alien culture is now nearly universal in our society, as we struggle to understand not a foreign tribe but our own neighbours, fellow citizens, colleagues and family members." In Blakely's masterful analysis of contemporary ideologies, we see reflected much of our own present political experience, through the competing worldviews which map our perception of human nature and society and the purpose of politics.
Blakely's procedure in this book is to treat several major (and less major) ideological traditions, attempting in each case to achieve what sociologist Clifford Geertz called a "thick description," an account "nuanced enough to be recognized by its own adherent as faithful to it."
An important premise of his study is that "ideological maps," as he calls them, "conjure forth and help build social reality." Thus, "ideological means and symbols" become "embedded in practices, institutions, laws, economies, regimes, and forms of self." One becomes "lost in ideology" whenever "everything in a social world reflect it back as natural." So, for example, the familiar Louis Hartz thesis linking Lockean liberalism and the American way of life is to be interpreted "as an artifact of liberal ideology itself." Thus, "where natural-rights liberals like Locke claimed to simply describe a state of nature, they in fact helped create a world in which such things as rights and liberal postulates appeared natural and commonsensical." Likewise, for the utilitarian variation of liberal theory, such a political culture produces "people who have a utilitarian conception of their own pleasures and pains," a "self-confirming" psychological theory.
Blakely starts with classical liberalism - both in its Lockean and utilitarian formulations - as the ideology most widely associated with the American founding. He complements classical liberalism, however, with two other ideologies also associated with the U.S. from its founding. the first is the tradition of "civic republicanism" - a more anciently rooted tradition of political thought than classical liberalism, which fosters "a communal and participatory form of democracy," which "continued to inspire heterodox politics on both the left and the right." This alternative to classical liberalism was associated by Alexis de Tocqueville with Puritan New England. "Unlike natural-rights liberalism, civic republicans ascribe freedom not primarily to autonomous individuals but to the entire community and specifically cities. Such freedom is a cooperative accomplishment and not a natural, individualistic given."
Both classical liberalism and civic republicanism have long been acknowledged and celebrated in the history of American political thought. But Blakely also calls attention to a third claimant, "White supremacist ideology," which he suggests "represents a possible rival mutation and abuse" of Enlightenment rationalism and scientism. Analogous to the construction of other ideologies, e.g., natural rights, White supremacy did not discover "the factual basis of race," but rather helped to "create it as a sociopolitical category." He highlights the historical importance of John C. Calhoun, not only for his theory of "concurrent majorities," but also as "an important source of the argument that the conflict between the North and the South was a dispute over state versus federal rights and not the abolition of slavery."
The second part of the book explores "the hyperpolarization of left and right, including progressive liberalism, right libertarianism, conservatism, fascism, socialism and communism." The first two are twentieth-century variations on classical liberalism. The left variant, progressivism, "pursues individual liberty but in a way that experiments with new practices and allows for communal cooperation and a greater role for government." This "progressive ideological map led to the construction of the New Deal welfare state as well as a political culture emphasizing social solidarity." at its extreme, it tends toward "a political ethos of ceaseless modernization" and risks assuming politics to be "developmentally linear," such that progressivism erroneously seems to progressives to be self-evident. Opposing progressive liberalism, "neoliberalism advances a species of right-wing libertarianism that asserts individual autonomy and anti-statism but targeted at the realms of economics and wealth distribution" In contrast to progressive libertarianism in the areas of traditional morality, "neoliberals assume that to survive in the competitive world of markets, individuals and families are best served by moralities or personal responsibility, frugality, sobriety and self-control." these two competing variants of liberalism are easily recognizable as mapping onto the ideologies most popularly associated with the our two political parties for much of the post-war period.
According to the normative (e.g., Louis Hartz liberal) interpretation of American history, apart from the southern exception in its racial hierarchy, ther is no true conservative tradition of American thought. In fact, to a considerable extent American conservatism is a twentieth-century invention. To find a true conservative tradition, one must go back to Europe. Accordingly, the author considers the legacy of Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France "remains a fountainhead for nearly all forms of this ideology."Such traditionalistic conservatism favors limited government not because of liberal principles, "but because no one person can or should be trusted with a power that exceeds then infinitely." Conservatism opposes "the degradation of tradition by the modern world. Disenchantment and alienation are experienced by conservatives as products of secularization and radical innovation." Conservatism struggles with the internal dilemma that, while hoping for a "return or revival of a sacralized past," it has "an underlying sense in which truly premodern, traditional political belonging is no longer available even on conservatism's own terms."
I think this section is particularly relevant for Roman Catholics, because so much of historic Catholic political thinking - at least until relatively recently - resonated with this conservative tradition. In the U.S., of course, conservatism was fused by mid-20th-century thinkers like William Buckley with the very untraditional, quite unconservative "libertarianism of Wall Street elites, entrepreneurs and economists." The Cold War was the catalyst for this peculiar alliance. Absent the Cold War, the alliance has proved much more fragile, and "one way to understand twenty-first century upheavals on the American right is precisely to see that religious conservatives no longer think of capitalist markets as straightforwardly an ally to their politics."
Fascism is a particularly difficult ideology to analyze "as it appears disguised and diluted by more familiar ideological traditions." But Blakely recognizes a feature which is, I think, central fascism and fascist-like contemporary phenomena: "Fascists tell stories about a world gone catastrophically wrong," and they "believe in the need to liquidate existing institutions and leadership." Something else that is very characteristic of fascism and fascist-adjacent movements is the discarding of Judeo-Christian "compassion and mercy as signs of weakness and morbidity" and the aestheticizing of "violence, masculinity, military-ready bodies, weaponry, marshal uniforms, camouflage, and so forth." We don't have to look too far today to find these features alive and well in our midst. Blakely's treatment of MAGA ideology in relation to the fascist paradigm highlights, for example, "the injection of fascist motifs into Christianity" and it "takeover of traditional Christian imagery."
From conservatism, the book moves to socialism, which "expanded the emancipatory projects of the Enlightenment beyond liberalism and individualistic rights." Marxism, the author argues, "is liberalism's ideological alter ego. It appears a rival claimant to rational universalism touting its own competing account of liberty, equality and enlightenment." But "a cultural view of ideology makes clear that there is nothing automatic or structurally fated about revolution," and Blakely highlights how democratic socialists need "to forge alliances across different sectors of society," and how this form of socialism has "retained liberalism's emphasis on political compromise as well as respect for individual rights of assembly, speech, voting, and so on."
The third section of the book considesr newer, "liquid" ideologies "that scramble the whole notion of a clean split between left versus right, such as nationalism, multiculturalism, feminism and ecologism." It concludes with a discussion of how to argue critically about ideologies.
Lost In Ideology is a perceptive introduction to the principal currents of contemporary political thought that should be a useful resource for anyone struggling to comprehend competing versions of political discourse, which increasingly simply talk past one another uncomprehendingly. accessible to the ordinary reader and intellectually comprehensive at the same time, it should help everyone to make sense not only of the strengths and weaknesses of his or her own ideology but also its relationship place to other ideologies currently on offer on the wider spectrum of contemporary American political thought
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