This is my first diary and I did not want to write a candidate hit diary or a love fest. So I decided to write something that could perhaps inspire intellectual thought and meaningful discourse.
So here we go...
Ideology has a rich and troubled past. The word first emerged during the French Revolution as idéologie, introduced by A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, which he coined his science of ideas.
The science of ideas was a science with a mission; it aimed at serving men, even saving them, by ridding their minds of prejudice and preparing them for the sovereignty of reason (Cranston)
The initial question I will attempt to answer is how the original definition and the good will behind ideology has become corrupted and perverted over time. Secondly, what are the the characteristics of a modern ideologue. And how can the ideologue reconcile its set of ideas (be they narrow or broad) and its collective behavior to perfecting the greater good with natural antagonists.
The United States was built by ideologues who had its narrow set of ideas about the world at large. Many of our fore fathers were students of the enlightened period, and their ideology is referred to as Classical Liberalism.
Classical liberalism emphasised the importance of private property rights, human rationality , free markets, and individual freedom from restraint as exemplified in the writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill
Many were inspired by the French Revolution They had a set of ideas and certain way of implementing those ideas.
Ideologies, then, are syndromes of action oriented ideas. They typically contain a program and a strategy for its realization its operational code. Their key function is to unite or at least integrate organizations that are built up in response to them, whether movements, parties, interests groups, or other. For an ideology is a set of literate ideas--a reasonably coherent body of notions concerning practical means of how to change and reform. Carl Friedrich, Ideology in Politics: A Theoretical Comment)
Action oriented ideas of the seventh century were centered around property rights, and taxation. One particular philosopher of the 17th century that found property rights integral to free operating society was Adam Smith. My economic great-grand father Adam Smith ingrained the notion of private property rights and the implementation of positive laws that enforced private property rights. From his work, The Wealth of Nations an ideology was born and was later corrupted and perverted, more on that later.
After the free market ideology took the world by storm, society saw some of the most exploitative business and social practices known to pre modern history. Property rights became the right to own not only land but also individuals (Albeit, women and slaves were commonly sold as communities before 1776, the practice was actualized by the movement of the free market ideology). A key tenet of Smith's ground breaking discipline that was left out of common practice back then and still is today is altruism.
Once the free market ideology, moreover Capitalism as an ideology, was perverted to no end by technological advances of the industrial revolution and greed, an answer was need to counter balance a social and economic deficit. That answer was Karl Marx. Marx saw the social and economic deficit the excesses of the industrial revolution had created and saw the disparaging gaps in income from paid labor by capitalist to the labor force. Marx had his own movement which touted the rewards of collective living--not only for the benefit of the body but also the soul.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
The above quote by Marx does not indicate that he in no way was inclined to have wage pay and or be obliged by the ideology of the capitalists.
The capitalists and the Communists (which later manifested it self to socialism and then a perverted version of Leninism-Communists) are direct antagonists. In the inception each ideology was pure and with good intentions at start and both were corrupted and perverted by power seeking groups and individuals that seem to have forgotten the key concept of altruism.
Thus began the right and left spectrum of the political ideology scale. Each an answer to each other.
In the late 19th and early 20th century the second industrial revolution had taken hold and the United States was in the midst of a Gilded Age. Embodied by get rich quick schemes, graft, political machinery, identity politics, greed, and a increasing disparity between the top quintile and the bottom quintile of the economic wealth and income spectrum.
Capitalism had reared its ugly head in a forceful way. Its excesses led to one of our nations most devastating economic disasters--The Great Depression.
Society at large and social movements more specifically, counter when one ideology skews to far in either direction. The immediate answer to capitalism and the Gilded Age was Franklin D Roosevelt. The movement that skewed our politics and economy farther to the left than it has ever been before or since.
For many decades our country experienced little to no major shifts or resistance to the comfortable niche on the left. We experienced a particularly high rate of growth (due most exclusively to WWII) and was very close to a universal health care plan by Harry Truman.
Before his death in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt came out in favor of universal health care and in November, 1945, Harry Truman asked the Congress to enact a national insurance program "to assure the right to adequate medical care and protection from the economic fears of sickness."
Sadly, Truman's plan was resisted by the AMA. Predictably, it was fought tooth and nail by the pharmaceutical industry. Pathologically, the corporate media and conservative politicians, mainly Republican but joined by Southern Democrats, denounced the plan as "socialistic." When Republicans took over Congress in 1946 it meant that national health insurance was once again declared dead. Source
In my view Truman's plan failed because the country was not yet ready to move dramatically to the left because the temptations of profit and the embedded racism of the southern democrats thwarted a truly left leaning ideology to develop and prosper here in the United States.
Which leads me to the isms. Hate mongering or intolerant ideologies which I like to call the isms: Fascism and Nazism. These ideologies have an implicit skew because they are entrenched by identity, nationalism, greed and intolerance. Mussolini described fascism as right wing collectivism
here.
During the 1960's when our culture, political and social was in upheaval pulling in all directions to obtain true individual freedom, equal property rights, human rationality, and individual freedom from restraint: the creeds our forefathers fought and died for--declared independence for--enacted Our Constitution for. The right wing ideologues pulled just as hard in the opposite direction in order to right what they viewed as a wrong in the juxtaposition of our political spectrum.
The right wing ideologues of our recent past had smatterings of Nazism and fascism--dedicated to identity and race driven politics and married to the greed section of the ideology. They divorced themselves from the Democratic Party, and I say God Bless 'em we sure in the hell didn't need em.
But what they accomplished was truly remarkable they combined several aspects of many different classic ideologies and perverted them into what we now know as republicanism or conservatism.
But what they have left out in the past and still have left out in the present is altruism.
My Great Grand Father of economics spoke highly of altruism. And we as democrats thankfully have not forgotten. Our ideology is built around it.