Politics Without Ideology

There's been a bit of a discussion going on between Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen, Ross again, John Holbo, and Brad DeLong about defining conservative ideology. At the same time, Richard Just did a piece recently arguing that Jim Webb may agree with liberals about a lot of policy issues but really he's a conservative.

To me, thinking about all this mostly reminds us that American politics isn't especially ideological and hasn't historically ever been especially ideological. Tradition and institutional structure have given us a robust two-party system. Geography and immigration have given us an enormous, extremely diverse country. Typical democracies have many fewer people and substantially more political parties. Consequently, practical politics in the United States revolves around a competition between two political coalitions that are, of necessity, pretty slapdash and unwieldy. The primary fact about an American's political allegiance, under the circumstances, is his attitude toward those coalitions not his or her abstract ideas about how things ought to be. A "conservative" in this sense just is someone who supports the Republican coalition versus the Democratic one and who in internal debates tends to support the institutionalized conservative movement's "three pillars" approach against various reformist tendencies.

This is in a lot of respects disappointing for a writer, since it involves people who are interested in ideas spending a lot of our time doing "gotcha" stuff about how the other team is desperately in hoc to malign interests. But I think that if you look at our history overall, you'll see that America has benefitted from having a political system that's relatively comfortable acknowledging the essentially grubby and transactional nature of real-world democratic politics rather than one dominated by a lot of aspirations to purism and total victory.

Comments

Spot on. You've also got a winner-take-all presidential system that encourages pragmatic voting ("You're throwing your vote away!" is not an intelligible concept in central Europe). As a friend of mine once said after I explained the Austrian parliamentary system to him, "Oh, I get it. We form our coalitions before the election, and they do it after the election." There's a lot to that.

Posted by Martin | June 15, 2008 9:39 AM

American politics isn't ideological in the more traditional way, because the American political landscape hasn't even decided on a general direction to go in, which is a different type of ideology.

As long as people are, in good faith, working towards the same goal they can work together. But when people are NOT working towards the same goal, this becomes impossible, and that's the current state of things.

So you have a guy like Jim Webb, who is rather conservative, however, he has a distinct and strong interest in furthering various progressive goals. We may not agree with how to get there, but compromise IS possible. However, with someone for example who believes that health care should be a carrot on a stick to reward good behavior, for someone who thinks that everybody should have affordable health care, compromise is nigh impossible.

Posted by Karmakin | June 15, 2008 9:49 AM

This is why a profoundly ideological character like Addington was able to subvert the system so easily.

Posted by Alex | June 15, 2008 9:59 AM

But I think that if you look at our history overall, you'll see that America has benefitted from having a political system that's relatively comfortable acknowledging the essentially grubby and transactional nature of real-world democratic politics rather than one dominated by a lot of aspirations to purism and total victory.

Actually, the transactional nature of politics is less clear in a two party, non-parliamentary system. In a multi-party parliamentary parties have to explicitly form coalitions in order govern. Each party then can express the views of its supporters more acurately than America's two parties, yet still accomplish the sausage making that is legislation. Also, in forming these coalitions, it becomes clear what is a core, non-negotiable value of a party, and what isssues it is willing to negotiate. So you get a sense of the party's priorities and not just its stands on the issues.

Of course, this can all be carried too far, as in Isreal and Italy. But Germany and France seem to have pretty good systems.

Posted by Cap and Gown | June 15, 2008 10:29 AM

Let me just point out that in a parliamentary system a guy polling like Bush would have run in to a no confidence motion a long time ago.

Posted by Mike in Denmark | June 15, 2008 11:06 AM

Few thoughts:

First, conservatism disgusts me. Everytime I see it laid out bare I can't help but think, "This isn't a philosophy, it's a justification of the worst parts of history." Why does it take liberalism to point out to the moral absolutists that segregation's wrong? I suspect if conservatives had their way, we'd all still be building pyramids for the pharaohs.

Then I think of a Tiny Revolution post where Noam Chomsky debated George Will and absolutely crushed him - and the poster (I think it was Bernard) remarked on how even the intellectual heavyweights in conservatism know nothing compared to their leftist counterparts.

And that leads me to think, "What is conservatism without its belief system?" A thinker like George Will seems obtuse because he works from premises moored in religious doctrine.

That's why intellectuals on the right are so maddening - like Megan McArdle, Douthat, and Will. They’re uncritical of Truths, and indifferent to how Truths encapsulate truths. Stuff like supply side economics and imperial benevolence and patriarchy affords social tranquility require more faith than facts to advocate and implement.

Posted by A Different Matt | June 15, 2008 11:08 AM

In fact, the US political system allows a lot of room for the aspirations to purism and total victory of small organised groups that manage to dominate both political parties because there's no well organised and funded issue-specific opposition and because the interest-based nature of both loose coalitions imposes very limited constraints on issue-specific mobilisation in both cases.

Posted by otto | June 15, 2008 12:51 PM

Matt, the only reason anyone thinks there isn't any ideology in American politics is that they don't see the hegemonic ideology as, in fact, an ideology. Which is a common problem within many systems, but is still a big, fat mistake.

The Dems and the GOP basically agree with each other ideologically. So there's not much reason to debate ideology. That doesn't mean that American politics is "unideological" unless by "politics" you just mean "elections."

Posted by Pesto | June 15, 2008 5:14 PM

Certainly, provably, correct Matt.

There has not been a major US policy since the New Deal, if not since the Civil War, that hasn't depended on a broad, middle-or-the-road, bi-partisan consensus--social security, medicaid/medicare, the development of the military/industrial complex, containment of communism, civil rights, the invasion of Iraq--you name it, and if it's an important policy it's been supported by the Big Middle that amounts to, effectively, a one-party system.

Posted by robert powell | June 15, 2008 5:33 PM

Shorter Matt: Universal corruption and both parties being members of the "War Party" is just fine with him.

Nitwit.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 15, 2008 8:33 PM

I think this is wrong, though characteristic of your thinking, so it's probably not worth arguing with you about it, so i'd just ask you to define ideology. If your point is that most Americans aren't Marxists or libertarians, that's true. But if ideology were to include something like the American creed (life, liberty, equal opportunity and protection), you could argue that Americans are indeed ideological and there are fierce ideological debates over its boundaries and how it plays out in practice. These debates do make a difference, too.

Posted by mj | June 15, 2008 11:05 PM

There's definitely something to be said for Matt's point about "attitude" toward party coalitions being stronger than ideological commitments in American politics, and also something to be said for Pesto's response --

"Matt, the only reason anyone thinks there isn't any ideology in American politics is that they don't see the hegemonic ideology as, in fact, an ideology. Which is a common problem within many systems, but is still a big, fat mistake."

Still, there are some potent ideological fault lines lurking beneath the surface in American politics, which tend to be obscured because they don't map precisely onto our political coalitions. It's in the intraparty conflicts where ideology matters the most... Joe Lieberman may be more of a "liberal" than Jim Webb if you compiled an issue checklist, but it's Lieberman whose unswerving ideological commitments are irreconcilable with those of the Democratic base.

I'd also compare those who claim that they don't have an ideology to an old acquaintance of mine in Indianapolis who believed, sincerely, that he did not have an accent. Just because it isn't distinctive and you don't think about it consciously, doesn't mean it isn't there. Technocratic pragmatism is itself a utilitarian ideology of a sort. And partisan hackery, in the service of a belief that certain types of people should be in power instead of other types, is hardly non-ideological.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 16, 2008 3:42 PM