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http://theactivist.org/blog/the-ideology-problem
The Ideology Problem
Recently I stumbled on one of those sober exercises where liberals gather together in a common effort to deliberate constructively, and as Alexander Cockburn once wrote: I love liberals when they try to think constructively. In this case, the exercise was especially intriguing because it touches on a theme I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: What is it that liberals believe?
It seems today (whatever the case may have been in the past) that American liberal thought operates at two registers. On the one hand, it conveys a set of vague pre-cognitive mental gestures: a feeling of generosity, a spirit of tolerance, a willingness to see the best in people. These are all to the good, as far as they go. In its more concrete manifestation, liberalism consists of an array of wonkish policy proposals, neatly laid out in charts and spreadsheets: policies on health care, immigration, the environment, etc. These are of varying quality, some good, some not (though in practice it’s always surprising to see how eagerly some liberals will accept the dwindling fractions of a loaf proffered to them by their elected champions).
But between the enlightened impulse and the think-tank PDF there seems to lie a vast, vacant stretch of blankness. And this, I will argue, poses a problem: How does a liberal – or anyone, really – get other people, unconvinced and uncommitted, to share his or her worldview? Protean sentiments like generosity and tolerance can’t be argued for, after all. In fact, they don’t even tell you anything about what ought to be done. Besides, anyone, including the ideologues on the other side, can claim to embrace them – with the proviso that they be balanced against other pleasant-sounding impulses (responsibility, loyalty, realism) more congenial to their interests.
Policy proposals, meanwhile, are complicated; they’re detailed and difficult to judge. The number of people who are able and willing to find out the facts about whether a $50 billion financial-institution resolution fund (to take one of those fractions of a loaf) is a “bailout fund” or a vital tool to crack down on Wall Street is, we can say, limited. Persuading a mass public to adopt your worldview on the basis of the brilliance of your policy proposals is a fool’s errand. In fact, it gets things exactly backward: the only feasible way to assure most people of the brilliance of your policy proposals is first to convince them of the soundness of your worldview.
It seems to follow that there must be some body of persuasive ideas, lying between the extremes of these two registers, that aims to convey such a worldview; some mode of argument that depicts the world in a certain way, morally and causally; that conveys, for example, not why particular policies will work, but why you would expect policies of this type to yield desirable results, given your picture of the world; and why the human impulses they’re inspired by are the impulses we should give priority to. In short, an explanation of why your vision of the social world (to the extent that you have one) is more compelling than others. I’ll call this the ideology problem. In some ways, it’s the problem that lies at the heart of all politics in a democratic society.
So I was intrigued when I came across this essay by John E. Schwarz, a University of Arizona political scientist and fellow at the liberal think tank Demos, which features as the keynote in an ongoing symposium being held at the inauspiciously named website The Democratic Strategist. Schwarz seems to have recognized the ideology problem and he sets out, basically, to fill in that vast, blank space in liberal thought between implicit mental gestures and pie charts. His approach is summarized in his title: “Reclaiming the Ideal of Freedom for Progressivism and the Democratic Party.” I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending here: Schwarz’ effort to develop a usable ideology for progressivism is, in my opinion at least, a failure. But it fails in an interesting, or at least a useful, way. Schwarz’ inability to express a compelling alternative to the right-wing ideology whose dominance he laments can perhaps teach us – us, the left – something about the ideology problem in today’s America.
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