* Jason Blakely, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2024).
IDEOLOGIES are not simply the crazed beliefs of your political foes. They are cultural traditions; they are world-making maps; they are liquid, narrative and ethically magnetic visions. While sharing some similarities with religions they also belong to our disenchanted and modern age. (p.10)
That is Jason Blakely’s account of the metaphors he uses to analyse ideologies. The remainder of my review, more an introduction to a good account of ideologies, is an unpacking of Blakely’s argument.
We live, Blakely observes, in an era in which the nature and presence of ideology is deeply contested. We find it difficult to navigate our way through ideological controversies which have become almost feral in their intensity, and socially divisive in their outcomes. Paradoxically, despite a polarising social media environment, many of us are not terribly clear about our own ideological commitment(s). Indeed, we are often inclined, in our less reflective moments, to assume that our views are simply ‘common sense’, while we regard the political and social views of many of our fellow citizens as intellectually obtuse if not morally reprehensible.
So how do we find our way through this confusion? What is an ideology? What are our prevailing ideologies? How do they relate to one another? How might we assess them? While easy answers to these questions are not available, in Lost in Ideology Jason Blakely provides a guide for the ideologically perplexed. The author has taken on the task of providing a guide to our ideological confusion that is both generous in spirit (in his account of the major ideologies) and intellectually clear (in his account of their emergence over the past few centuries).
Except for fascism in the United States, I will not go into Blakely’s discussion of specific ideologies. I will focus, rather, on the framework that he develops to analyse the nature of ideology. In the story he tells about ideologies he pays particular attention to their character as cultural projects which emerge from within human language and history. Ideologies are sense-making narratives that help people orient themselves to their life in the world. In his Introduction, Blakely explains the nature of ideologies and the images he uses to explore them. His methodology as a political philosopher is interpretive, and his mentor here is Charles Taylor. He writes:
This book begins from the deceptively simple claim that part of our problem is that we have forgotten that politics is cultural. Instead, we have conferred a natural or even quasi-scientific status on our preferred vision of society. We are lost in ideology because our particular map (cartography) is mistaken for brutely given nature (geography). … Ideologies are akin to a map that carpets over the surrounding land point by point. (p.2)
For Blakely, ideologies can be both distorting and helpful for navigating and interpreting social reality. They are stories about the significance or meaning of social and political life. They are not simply discovered within nature as a scientific and intellectual account of reality. Ideologies are a form of human meaning-making that take the shape of stories that must be listened to and interpreted on their own terms. The process of understanding ideologies requires an ethic of engaging thoughtfully with the world, characters, language, and plot through which an ideology finds expression.
While placing a strong emphasis on the metaphor of maps for his account of ideologies, Blakely acknowledges that this metaphor has its limits. A map is a frozen picture of the world, and to fail to recognise this is to miss certain critical characteristics of ideologies. They are not frozen and ahistorical. As cultural products, ideologies are liquid, always changing and to use another image capable of hybridising and melding with elements of quite different ideologies. Ideologies can mix and blend and take multiple forms.
There is another element of ideologies that emerges as we encounter them over time, and which is at odds with the frozen character of a mere map. Ideologies are not just descriptions of the world out there. They have the potential to reposition and reshape the political and social landscape they claim simply to be describing. Ideologies, Blakely reminds us, have the power to remake worlds.
Ideological maps therefore can conjure forth and help build social reality. This is because ideological meanings and symbols can be embodied in practices, institutions, laws economies, regimes and forms of self. (pp. 6-7)
The map makes the world and then the reality appears to correspond with the map. This happens for several reasons. Ideologies are not outside of the world, they are organising it as the material reality we live in. Then there is the normative character of ideologies.
Ideology always proposes some vision of the good society with our life at its service. When one is attracted to an ideology there is an intense ethical magnetism to it. (p.7)
Here we get to an issue where I would register if not a mild dissent, then a suggested an amendment to Blakely’s account. Ideologies, Blakely emphasises, exist in historical time in a disenchanted world. Because we are aware of, or reflective about, their historical emergence, they lose their taken-for-granted and unquestioned character. If we take their historical emergence and reformation seriously, we should look for the possibility that the sacredness which is undercut by them does not prevent them, as part of the historical process, from taking on the aura of the sacred.
This migration becomes recognisable when we find ourselves confronting institutions and forms of behaviour, ideologically justified, which make claims on us that cannot be questioned. The normative and the ethically magnetic character of ideologies easily attracts the aura of the sacred.
We cannot escape from ideology by the claim that we are non-ideological or ideology -free. In taking this stance, we remain within the dominant ideologies, but without awareness. Ideologies as visions of the good society and human existence always go beyond the factual and pose or presuppose basic questions of meaning and significance.
So much by way of Blakely’s introduction to ideology. When we turn to Blakely’s survey of ideologies, his method is to begin with a specific ideology, giving an account of its strengths and appeal. He then moves to the questions that can be raised as a starting point for exploring how it is modified, how it takes on hybrid and liquid form. The first two chapters, Part I of his mapping, entitled ‘Strange Roots: Early America’, start with liberalism in the various forms they have developed in the United States. He does this, he says, “… not because it is universal but because all cultural investigation must start from some location. My hope is, however, to move outwards towards a more global vision.” (p. 10)
In unpacking the various forms of liberalism, starting with Locke and moving on to utilitarianism and J.S. Mill, Blakely lays the basis for consideration of liberalism’s modifications and development in both civic republicanism and white supremacy. The cultural, political and economic influence of the US over the past two centuries makes this a justified choice for a starting point.
In the middle chapters, Part II, ‘Polarizations: The Left and the Right’, Blakely explores the polarisation of the ideologies that we normally assess using left and right as the reference points for our framework. The ideologies he covers in this section include progressive liberalism, right libertarianism, conservatism in multiple traditions, fascism, socialism, and communism. His discussion focuses on key themes, while acknowledging the sheer diversity of these ideologies.
The final chapters in Part III, which Blakely entitles ‘Liquifying Ideology: Beyond Left and Right’, he explores a range of ideologies that scramble those ideas that we have emerging from the left-right schema. These include nationalism, multiculturalism, feminism, and ecological commitments. What is particularly useful here is that he draws attention to the way perceived weaknesses in each of the multiple strands of ideology that fall within each of these themes leads toward hybridisation with other ideologies.
To illustrate Blakely’s approach to presenting ideologies, I have chosen his discussion of fascism, particularly as it is manifested in the United States. Fascism, he notes, is proving difficult to pin down by those analysing it, since it has mutated – picking up themes from other ideological traditions. This hybridisation in the United States has seen fascism become intermixed with right libertarian and conservative cultures. In unpicking what is going on here, we need to understand ideology as a matrix of meanings and not a hardened package. The United States has been home of a wide range of fascist movements. The most recent of these is, of course, Make America Great Again (MAGA)
There has been a good deal of debate about whether this American movement galvanised by Trump meets all the criteria necessary to label it as a full-blown fascist movement. The debate about whether MAGA is or isn’t fascist, Blakely suggests, is misplaced. As a movement it needs to be assessed on its own terms. As such, it will display some central characteristics of fascism, but will be modified in interesting and important ways by its American context.
The MAGA narrative … echoes the fascist map, including the story of a nation (ethnically defined) catastrophically weakened and defiled by a familiar cast of foes … MAGA also presented Trump as the sole true leader of the nation who was granted privileged voice, unilateral authority and licence to violate traditional morality and norms in order to face the emergency. (p. 93)
The process of hybridisation in fascism is demonstrated by the fact that Trump reinforced free market policies and the right libertarian status quo, slashed market regulations, and lowered the corporate tax rate. He did not adopt the various styles of the military; indeed, he frequently mocked them, and presented himself in the cultural mode of the business class mixed with celebrity. The persona of a CEO, rather than military officer, was his preferred mode of presentation as an authority figure. It was in this mode that autocratic and dictatorial patterns took shape in his governing style. The other hybridisation that is of real significance in MAGA is the injection of fascist motifs into Christianity, rendering Christ into a pagan hero. The attraction of this to specific groups of Christians is extremely revealing, bringing with it echoes of the disturbing emergence of German Christianity under Hitler.
In his Conclusion to the book, Jason Blakely provides a framework for arguing about and critiquing ideologies that enables us to move beyond relativism. He offers us the possibility of undertaking both external and internal critiques of ideology, given that a cultural or interpretive approach such as that taken in this book is always critical in nature.
Criticism of an external character can be applied to ideologies. The first relates to the natural sciences, and how ideologies measure up with the best accounts that science provide us for determining reality. The second element of cultural and interpretive critique eliminates ideological options that are unable to affirm and recognise their own cultural and historical nature. An ideology … must be able to self-narrate as an interpretive and worldmaking project. Any ideology unable to justify itself in these terms – because it makes a wild and illegitimate grab at ‘pure’ science, naturalism, or self-evident reason – is negated. (p. 168)
An internal critique of ideology can do damage to it on its own terms, or within its own framework of analysis. Such dilemmas and tensions arise from achieving greater clarity about an ideology as a map of the world. This raises the prospect of an ideology being shown to be inadequate, or even incoherent, on its own terms. The best internal critiques may arise from those committed to an ideology, but who are also capable of recognising and identifying those tensions.
Just as importantly, Blakely is interested in how an open-ended controversy about ideologies can bring into the discussion fundamental questions about our vision of society and the nature of our humanity. While there are indications of his own commitments in his account of the main themes of ideology, it is in this account of his method for weighing up ideologies that his ideological commitments are perhaps clearest.
He declares that, “This entire inquiry has contained a tacit affirmation of human beings above and beyond any one ideology” (p174). Blakely’s interpretive approach could be taken up by both theologians and humanist philosophers. But it is not compatible with fundamentalism of any stripe, because his critical interpretive approach is at odds with the ahistorical certainty of the fundamentalist.
Students of political theory and of social change are not the only ones who will benefit from Jason Blakley’s well written book. Journalists and political commentators will benefit from it as well, not least because it provides them with the intellectual tools for understanding not only the ideologies in the world they are reporting on, but their own ideological commitments.
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© Douglas Hynd is Adjunct Research Fellow at the Australian Centre of Christianity and Culture, a longstanding Ekklesia associate, and an active Anabaptist. He is heavily involved in refugee support and advocacy. His columns can be found here.