Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (14 page)

The second feature of conservative technique is to assemble a counter-set of conceptual configurations, directed against whatever is seen by conservatives as most threatening to the social order. When classical liberals promoted political emancipation in the 19th century, conservatives recalled the duties of the aristocracy and called in the concept of inequality. When socialists pursued social reform and nationalization from the turn of the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th, conservatives hauled property rights to the centre of their ideological room. When fascists employed violence on the streets in the 1930s, conservatives fell back on the rule of law and the constitution. When social democrats advocated planned economies, Thatcherite and Reaganite conservatives applauded the free choice of citizens, deliberately redefined as consumers. Note that in each case these conservative reactions employed concepts and ideas shared with other ideologies (this bears out the point of ideological permeability), but not with the ideology they regarded
at the time
as the most menacing to the core conservative principles. Flexibility
in arranging their adjacent concepts helped conservatives to protect their core notions of safe change and the need to shield the social order from the vagaries of the human will. What seemed to its castigators an opportunistic ideology was in fact a highly consistent one. Even the ostensibly radical social transformation engaged in by Thatcherites was intended to re-establish the kind of natural organic change that, in their view, had been undermined by over-generous welfare measures and by trade union politics.

While conservatism was engaged in a psychological as well as a political struggle with the ideologies of moderate and planned reform – liberalism and socialism – the latter two were also at loggerheads with each other. Their relative proximity triggered off the hostility of two groups competing over a similar clientele, forced as a consequence to caricature the differences between them. True, Marxist versions of socialism and libertarian versions of liberalism shared little common ground, but the main body of the two families overlapped on issues of democracy, constitutionalism, and the recognition of the plight of the disadvantaged. Nevertheless, liberals depicted socialism as bureaucratic and unrealistic; socialists retaliated by damning liberalism with endorsing an instrumental egoism that most liberals had already discarded. None of this, however, could match the mortal combat between two newcomers, fascism and communism, and the rest of the ideological field in the middle third of the 20th century. If anything, the emergence of these totalitarian ideologies reinforced the widespread view of ideology as doctrinaire, dogmatic, closed, and inflicted on an unwilling populace.

The Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, employed the notion ‘totalitarian’ favourably, as indicating a breadth and sweep of social concern and political unity. More commonly,
totalitarianism
was understood as the main feature of an ideology that left no stone unturned in penetrating human activity and even thought. It
collapsed the space between the public and private spheres, insisting that the state was entitled to regulate all areas of social and individual life. Hannah Arendt saw it as breaking down the distinction between legality and illegality, so that ordinary citizens never knew on which side of the law they were, a law changed at the whim of the rulers. That itself perpetuated a state of terror and disorientation, through which compliance was extracted from the body politic. Fascism combined a fierce and
aggressive nationalism
at the disposal of the state and its henchmen, a cult of the
leader
(Il Duce),
terror
and physical violence, and a
myth of regeneration
that resurrected the past glories of Rome and promised national rebirth. The German variant, national socialism, was more methodical both in its ideology and its practical realization. It added to the above a
racial myth
, to be achieved by the unification of the pure Aryan race under a thousand-year German Reich, paralleled by the
demonization of Jews
as subhuman and the subsequent mass annihilation of millions. This abstraction from real Jews, to which the myth bore no resemblance, was an ideological contrivance necessary to hold together the disparate and incoherent features of a preposterous doctrine with catastrophic consequences. Leader worship for Der Führer was, if anything, more pronounced than in Italy.

Communism, on the other hand, was a more elusive ideology. For a long while it played on its ideational derivation from the socialist family and from the linguistic interchangeability between socialism and communism as the ideal society held out by Marxists. Instead, it became a perverted offshoot of the socialist tradition. (That usage of ‘socialism’ was happily accepted by anti-socialists in the West, though not by social-democrats.) Its
elitist
and
totalitarian
features emerged in the Soviet Union under Lenin and, more dramatically, under Stalin, when vast numbers of opponents were murdered in the name of the revolution. After the Second World War, with its spread to Eastern Europe, communism became more bureaucratic and
conservative
. Its discourse still utilized the idea of a
general will
, though no longer a democratic one, represented through the
mass activation
of the people in support of egalitarianism and communal projects. Communist rhetoric was however shorn of its original grand social vision, while retaining
brutal methods of repression
and a systematic abuse of human rights, liberty, and individuality. Communism’s most powerful current manifestation, in China, reserved a central guiding role for political elites in fostering a peasant revolution and cultural change, though it is now experimenting with limited free markets.

In the terminology of ideological morphology, the meanings of the concepts used by these totalitarian ideologies, and the proximities among the concepts, were rigidly and inflexibly nailed down. Authority was only associated with the state; the leader with sole knowledge and legitimacy; liberty always meant emancipation from the falsehoods of the other ideologies; and some concepts, such as accountability, rights, and tolerance, were forcibly removed from the political lexicon. This was brilliantly parodied by George Orwell in his novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
: ‘war is peace; freedom is slavery’; ‘ignorance is strength’.

As one of its characters put it:

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Ideology had become, now more than ever, the war of the words. Through it, citizens had a stark choice: they could either find their ‘true’ political voice or be silenced.

The expansionary ends of Nazism and fascism, as well as their repulsive beliefs and actions, occasioned a world war that, more than most wars, was consciously seen as an ideological struggle to the death between grand systems, dressed up in the dialectical language of good and evil. This epic confrontation was extended to
the cold war of the 1950s and 1960s, with communism replacing fascism as the implacable enemy of Western values. The moderate ideologies were encouraged to reject the epithet ‘ideology’ for themselves, not because they saw ideologies as illusory on the Marxist interpretation, but because – to the contrary – they perceived them as very real and menacing. In retrospect, the dominant mid-20th-century view of ideology was fuelled by the intimate association of ideology with totalitarianism. Through this narrow definition, the defeat of the totalitarian regimes entailed the eradication of ideology itself, and provided ammunition for the ‘end of ideology’ school. By contrast, current analysts of ideology half a century later are beginning to regard totalitarian ideologies as exceptional rather than normal manifestations of ideology, obscuring the bona-fide ideologies that are far more rooted in social thought and practice.

It would be wrong to take for granted that the grand ideological traditions, or their virulent counterparts, fill the entire field. Occasionally distinct ideological formations are carved out of an area that straddles two already existing ideologies. In other cases, a full ideological family may act as host to a less developed one. A less developed, or what I shall call thin, ideology, may also exist on its own. Nor should we forget the many non-Western ideological variants that have unjustifiably lived under the shadow of European and North American ideological hegemony. Over the past 25 years, new forms of political thought have emerged in which standard types of political ideologies are not always discernible. Has this changed the nature of ideologies and the way we perceive them?

Any answer must be tentative. On the one hand, we now live in a world loosely described as global, which leads some people to revive the chimera of a universal or global ideology, possibly dominated by icons of American capitalism such as free enterprise and the consumption of Levi jeans, McDonalds hamburgers, Coca Cola, and Microsoft systems. On the other hand, ideologies have been fragmenting into more diverse, unstructured, and temporary combinations that offer partial political solutions while undergoing
continuous modification. This slipperiness seems to endorse the ineffectiveness of ideologies at present. Globalization, however, is
not
an ideology but a political and economic process that can denote the breakdown of political borders and of the realm of states; or the spread of certain production and consumption practices across the world; or a demand that claims for justice be treated irrespective of their geographical origin. It may be stimulated by ideological standpoints that originated within liberalism, but it is a misrepresentation and narrowing of the versatility of the liberal tradition.

The revival of free-market, or neo-, liberalism has, after all, recently appeared under a conservative protective mantle. It has also characterized libertarianism, which has broken away from liberalism. Libertarianism affords a typical example of a gravitational shift within conventional ideologies that obscures an ideology’s foundational principles by reorganizing the core units of furniture. In this case liberty is associated with unlimited consumer choice while crowding out or demoting other liberal core concepts. The fact that libertarianism is also carved out of conservatism releases a strange hybrid. It includes the sanctioning of existing economic inequalities and a built-in reluctance to contemplate state regulation as a possible cure to social evils. And it frequently takes shelter under the umbrella term ‘community’, in which a communal
market
supplants the alternative association of community with affective ties of trust and social solidarity.

Perhaps rather than assume the fragmentation of ideologies we should argue that they constituted illusory wholes to begin with. What has changed is not so much the modular structure of ideologies as the public perception that they are being dismantled and reassembled at a rapid rate. The ‘third way’ is one such example. An amalgamation of social-democratic, conservative, and liberal principles has been packaged and distributed as a new ‘ideology’ or political programme. The
third way – presumably between liberal-capitalism and state-socialism – has combined a liberal belief in rights with a conservative/socialist belief in responsibilities. It has commercialized those rights as privileges to be purchased through responsible behaviour. It has advocated a mixed economy, with the balance being increasingly tilted to the side of private regulation and initiatives. It has endeavoured to moralize citizens and encourage the expression of their plural individualities while creating a powerful centralized and paternalist state. It has preached the primacy of welfare while making it partly conditional upon work (a conservative or socialist value, as you wish). It has sought to modernize relentlessly while relying on traditional family values. This unstable mix may be ephemeral, but it is being kept together by elite governmental manipulation and publicity.

But such top-heavy, artificial ideological compounds are constantly jeopardized by the proliferation of new sources of ideological creativity, assisted by the mass media. Ideological mini-structures may focus around pressure groups, such as anti-immigration campaigners who retreat into a conservative nationalism. They may centre around newspaper crusades, say for the legalization of mild drugs, which relate to issues of liberty and individual lifestyles. And they may be located around popular feeling arising from momentous or disturbing events, such as an earthquake, which brings into play questions of mutual responsibility and the distribution of scarce goods to the needy; or an act of terror, which reimposes the rigid boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that analysts of ideology periodically query and on which ideological discourse thrives. All these cases contribute to the rich patchwork of ideological thinking at the disposal of a reasonably free community, recalling Gramsci’s insight into ideology’s multiple origins. But they are also exemplars of constricted ideological expression. They differ principally from the mainstream families in evading the formulation of a broad menu of solutions to major socio-political issues.

The break-up of ideologies is itself a matter of some dispute. There are those who see it as the personalization and individuation of ideology, a tribute to the greater liberalization and pluralism of contemporary societies. Still, once we begin to talk of a million ideologies, we abandon common sense, as well as missing out on their political flavour. Even the emergence of new forums of debate and information do not offer a clear-cut conclusion. We are repeatedly told that the internet offers such a revolution in the production of ideologies, enabling voluntary and spontaneous groups to converse with each other so that a discourse emerges. It is of course far too early to see these networks as ideological innovators, since they would need to be more publicly and centrally disseminated if they wished to compete over political language and policies.