Ideas matter in politics. Few people believe this simple truth, believing instead that politics is all about the accumulation of power and self interested advocacy. People see electoral politics as the sum total of politics. Governance is popularly thought of as posturing and positioning for election or re-election, and little more.
In fact, when public policies are hashed out in the committee rooms of our Congress and state legislatures, among other places, the contending arguments are based on ideas, on ideological assumptions. When these debates are translated for public consumption they are packaged in ideology-free rhetoric. They are put into bite-sized slogans and laced with references to our deepest shared principles. Creedal ideals such as democracy, equality of opportunity, freedom, individual rights, and limited government provide rhetorical wrapping paper for policy proposals that compete in the marketplace of public opinion for attention and attraction. The Framers of the Constitution hoped such competition would occur in a marketplace of ideas, not poll tested images.
Lost in transition between the formulation stage and the enactment stage in our public policy making process are the ideological assumptions that give particular meaning to the universally accepted creedal values attached to policy proposals. While in reality liberal and conservative approaches to solving public problems are locked in competition at all levels of governance in America, voters often seem fixated on the competition between liberals and conservatives, that is PEOPLE, locked in competition for our votes in order to secure their jobs and power.
The failure of voters to comprehend or give credence to ideas (ideology) actually fosters the cycle of cynicism and apathy that threatens to extinguish democracy from our democratic system. Politicians begin to lose track of the ideas they got into politics to champion. Forced to enslave themselves to deeply anti-ideological public opinion, politicians become private thinkers and public marketers. A sort of schizophrenia engulfs politicians who must always “know their audience.” As the power of public opinion grows, the principled idealist living inside every person willing to put their name on a ballot becomes squashed and trampled by electoral imperatives.
The tragic irony of this cycle of cynicism, apathy, and ignorance is that we all unintentionally perpetuate it by failing to judge politicians and policies ideologically, philosophically, and critically. By seeing politics as a fight among and about people, voters inadvertently handicap themselves. People are too complex to be sufficiently judged by sound bites and commercials. Facts and issue positions are too easy to spin. The only reliable barometers of the public interest are the ideas in dispute.
Americans have a luxury no one else has. Our nation was founded, not on cultural, social, moral, or historical grounds, but on ideological grounds, on a set of contested and contestable ideas that all Americans cherish. The only way for Americans to take back their government, their politics, and their democracy, is to reconnect with these ideas and to understand what each one means to each one of us. To do so would be to develop a philosophical perspective, or ideology of governance that could guide one through the morass of superficial rhetoric and emotional appeals that dominate electoral politics.
Ideology is not a bad thing. Having an ideology means that you process the world around you with the assistance of a set of ideas, a frame of reference, an intellectually consistent perspective. Americans fear ideologues because they have seen so many rigid ideologues. Rigid ideologues become obsessed with the universal applicability of their interpretation of reality. When this happens, they are transformed from reason-based thinkers to faith-based thinkers, which may be appropriate for our spiritual life, but not our public dialogue. In our this or that, high tech, "fast food nation" we have come to equate this abuse of ideology with ideology itself, effectively throwing the baby out with the bath water, intellectually speaking.
In America we are all democrats. We all love freedom, equality, and limited government. So what are we arguing about? It must be just a power struggle, right? Wrong. We are arguing about the meanings of, and the means to realizing, our shared values. Even if some politicians don’t realize it, policy debates in America do amount to ideological debates about how best to realize our shared democratic goals. Until Americans accept this and begin to demand that politicians reveal and explain their ideological assumptions, rather than merely spin facts and pull at our heart strings, our politics will continue to degenerate and our democratic ideals will continue to elude us.
It’s not the economy, or jobs, or faith, or family, or character, or unexplained values. Its ideas, stupid! If we can transform politics into a self-conscious argument about the best policy approaches to our shared ideals, we can change the country for the better.
Voters should punish superficial imagery, and reward explanation; punish over-simplification, and reward clarity, precision, and accuracy; punish emotional and personal appeals and reward explicitly ideological debate.
Voters are right to be annoyed at hearing the same rhetoric from both (or all) sides, but they are wrong to simply choose anyway. Whether they choose a candidate, or choose not to choose, they are wrong not to question, not to compel candidates and parties to explain the differences between liberal equality and conservative equality, between liberal freedom and conservative freedom. Democracy requires informed choice and busy American voters need help.
We should be compelling politicians to wear their ideology (read partisanship) on their sleeves. Voters should be encouraged to choose candidates with whom they have ideological sympathies, rather than merely selected issue agreements or personal affinity.
We need candidates for public office who make ideology and party platforms the focus of the debate. While no candidate ever agrees with every plank of his party’s platform, most call themselves members of an organized party, which ought to require them to explain to voters what aspects of their party’s platform they support and what elements they don’t support, and why. Voters should be asking themselves which broad philosophical approach to politics (i.e. which party) serves their interests best before they consider the impact of particular issue positions or candidate characteristics. Applying these criteria in reverse order leads to irrational decisions.
The best (though imperfect) way to make ideas matter in politics is to make party affiliation matter and to hold candidates accountable for their choice of party. Partisan voters may not have more substantive knowledge of issues or important ideas, but collectively they push the government in ideologically consistent directions, which over the long haul makes it easier to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions. Hot button issue positions and candidate-centered election campaigns produce short-term distractions that create serious long- term problems for our democratic system.