The poverty of ideology

The sheer cognitive exhaustion inevitably produced by ideology has been demonstrated in several ways. There is the prevalence of ideological 'mirroring', for example, where apparently separate themes are understood exclusively in terms of each other: the concept of the 'free market' is used to understand actual markets, and the (idealised) operations of actual markets strengthen the conviction in the theoretical concept.

I've been banging on on this blog with examples of 'moral panics' where various themes are articulated together by moral entrepreneurs in the press and elsewhere: Brexit gets woven into corona, minority oppression etc. so their qualities transfer. Thus the harms of corona symbolise the harms of Brexit, or overcoming thewishes of the minority who opposed Brexit somehow puts them in the same category, victims, as the minorities who experience discrimination.

Some writers and analysts are more skilled at this than others -- some marxist analysis of rival philosophies have patiently disentangled mirror structures lying half-hidden in arguments. Circularity or tautology are other names for this deferred justifcation, although that remains with just logical flaws.

Any road up, ideologies can never make progress as a result, it is argued. At its most abstract, they can never become sciences, trying to actually discover anything, but are doomed to 'apply' concepts by endlessly repeating variations of the same few privileged ones. Maybe these themes lie in the Unconscious, or the social habitus where they are beyond rational analysis. They get joined into current 'political' and social activities more explicitly in the endless task of making social distinctions, or class closure.

You may not have time nor inclination to follow this in analyses of liberalism, either Rousseau's or American liberalism, though Luckily we have weekly examples in the Observer cartoons which recycle the same old ideas again and again, even though cliff edges turn into dark holes, Brexit is sometimes represented as an ogre, sometimes just indicated off-stage, Britain is represented as Britannia, a lion or as Boris Johnson.