Why Do Our Ideologies Divide Us?: A Conversation with Political Scientist Jason Blakely

Those who deny they're influenced by ideology are often the most susceptible to ideological capture

Aaron Ross Powell recently sat down with Jason Blakely, a political science professor at Pepperdine University and author of the new book, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life, to discuss what ideology is and why it is inescapable. The following Q&A has been adapted from their conversation on Aaron’s ReImagining Liberty podcast.

Aaron Ross Powell: Jason, as someone who’s got a new book on ideology, what is ideology? Is it a personal philosophy, or a religious faith, or a political perspective? Are all of these forms of, or are they importantly distinct from, ideology?

Jason Blakely: It’s complicated. An ideology may encompass a metaphysical or religious picture, but there are also dissimilarities between ideologies and comprehensive philosophical or religious outlooks.

In an everyday context, the word may be intended, or received, as an insult—as a way to say that a person has a crazed political outlook or something to that effect. In reality, we all have an ideology—and, in fact, ideology is not synonymous with distorted or false political beliefs.

A more refined view sees ideologies as cultural maps formed within a particular sociopolitical context. They are map-like in that they orient you, politically; they help you determine what steps to take in your political engagement. But, perhaps unlike our traditional paper maps, they have a world-making feature, as opposed to merely describing or representing the world. Society itself, of course, is the artifact of various rival ideologies. That’s one of the reasons why it doesn’t make sense to suggest you can be ideology-free—if you just say, “I don't have an ideology,” you still inhabit a world constructed and continually adjusted by the various ideologies active in society. Which means that, for you and for everyone else, ideology is in a really important sense inescapable.

Powell: Why do we see such vigorous resistance to the idea that we are ideological beings? Each political-philosophical tradition sees itself as the reality-based community, the one that sees how things really are. There is this obsession, across the entirety of the political spectrum, with professing to be non-ideological. Why do so many insist on deflecting the notion that we are all ideological?

Blakely: People try to avoid using the term “ideology” to describe their own political beliefs because they are convinced that this term is synonymous with false or distorted ideas. Due to the prestige of the natural sciences in our civilization, they also prefer to characterize their own politics as merely empirical, data-driven, or in some other way undeniable as a set of claims. If you accept, instead, that every ideology is but one interpretation in rivalry with other interpretations, and that ideology itself is a type of interpretation in rivalry with other ones, it introduces a lower degree of certainty in one’s absolute ability to understand the human situation.

But when thinking about ideology as a kind of map, it’s important to understand that we’re not dealing with a straightforward landmark or physical place—which are uncomplicated by comparison. For example, there’s not much controversy about where the Rocky Mountains are located or that Kansas City is mostly in Missouri. When it comes to ideology, however, we are arguing about something that we can make the world more or less like. That’s because ideologies aren’t just descriptions of the political lay of the land but also contain embedded visions for how society should be. That’s what I was saying earlier about these maps having a world-making as opposed to merely a world-representing aspect to them. Ideology blends the descriptive with the prescriptive and enactive.

“Take folks like Patrick Deneen or Adrian Vermeule—sometimes it’s really hard to determine whether what animates them, underneath it all, is a set of affirmative tenets about a Catholic social vision, or if instead what’s behind it all is a hatred of liberalism and liberals. After all, it’s entirely possible that their positive views are layered on top of an underlying distaste for the liberal order, rather than the other way around.” — Jason Blakely

Powell: What’s with the “stickiness” of ideology? Staying with the map analogy for a second, if I use Apple Maps and it gives me a wrong turn, or it takes a lot longer than Google Maps, I’m not terribly invested in it. I can easily make a change. When it comes to ideological maps, it’s significantly harder, significantly rarer, for a person to get to a place where they discard one and adopt another. How come?

Blakely: I think it’s because ideologies are comprehensive frameworks, and can involve and include our ethical, political, and even religious convictions, which means they are anchored into our view of the world in a far deeper way than whatever tenuous and transactional commitment we might have to some particular road map or device or single piece of technology. I haven’t used the term “sticky,” myself, but it is very congenial to how I understand ideology. An ideology’s stickiness comes from the fact that, as human beings, we share a basic predicament: As Aristotle argued, we’re meaning-making animals seeking to order the goods in our lives in a way that is best for ourselves and for society.

The long and short of it is that every ideological map has been written in the ink of human blood. People die over these maps. They kill over them. And that’s because the stakes around ideology are extremely high. They have to do with what vision of society we will push for and, at times, even die for. A person’s ideological commitments are therefore not vulnerable to easy disconfirmation; they’re not easily discardable or interchangeable, because they burrow deep and come to occupy core beliefs about ourselves and society.

Powell: In that case, I think we need to get a little clearer on just what exactly the difference is between an ideology and a religious faith. Something you see a lot of today is people accusing their ideological rivals of holding to their ideologies as if they were religious—like when someone says Marxism is a secular religion, or progressive identitarians are indistinguishable from religious fundamentalists, or Randian Objectivism is a religion. So what exactly distinguishes ideology and religion?

Blakely: In the modern age, an ideology can absolutely be a substitute religion. For example, varieties of nationalism can look and feel and operate a lot like fundamentalist religion—with founding texts and hallowed figures and all the rest of it. But that’s only one aspect of religion. The broader debate about whether a secular worldview can amount to, or can be sufficiently similar to, a religious faith has been a fascinating one for a long time now.

In the book I also discuss how ideologies are uniquely creatures of a secular epoch, while religions are far older. What I mean is ideologies, even when having these religious aspects, are mobilized in what adherents recognize as a kind of immanent historical time. This is what the philosopher Charles Taylor famously referred to as the “immanent frame,” or time as conceived after the natural science revolution as homogeneous and sequential. By contrast, the world religions make a claim to emerge directly out of a realm of spiritual and sacred action. Religions are not only older but also much broader than modern ideology and can be combined and fused with all the major ideological traditions in all sorts of ways. This can be difficult to see because sometimes a religion gets swallowed up by an ideological tradition such that it appears that the only way to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew is to support politics x, y, or z. But, of course, each of these three Abrahamic faiths have been through many more eras and political configurations than what is on offer on the current ideological menu.

“If you only listen to voices within your own cultural or intellectual tradition, especially when it comes to explaining what outside voices are thinking and saying, then at best you won't get the most accurate versions of them, and at worst you’ll get significantly distorted versions of them.” — Jason Blakely

Powell: We’ve been talking about ideology as a comprehensive set of affirmative or positive beliefs. But how much of ideology takes a distinctly negative posture? These days, negative partisanship—such as when a person isn’t so much committed to a set of positive ideas of their own but just really dislikes that other group over there—is a powerful force in our politics. To what extent does negative partisanship power our ideologies?

Blakely: I think it’s definitely true that some ideologies begin in, or significantly rely on, oppositionalism. When we say that some are reactionary in nature, that’s part of it. So, for example, take folks like Patrick Deneen or Adrian Vermeule—sometimes it’s really hard to determine whether what animates them, underneath it all, is a set of positive or affirmative tenets about a Catholic social vision, or if instead what’s behind it all is a hatred of liberalism and liberals. After all, it’s entirely possible that their positive views are layered on top of an underlying distaste for the liberal order, rather than the other way around.

In my book, I have a chapter on fascism and Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who I think is crucial to the articulation of oppositionalism as fundamental to politics. He infamously held that all politics is about the friend/enemy distinction, and of course half of that dynamic is the “enemy” component, which means in his theory of ideology the enemy bit gets to have a significant role in shaping one’s political-philosophical commitments. But, also, the idea of “enemy” is important in how Schmitt analyzed things. It’s not “intellectual sparring partner” or “debate opponent” or anything that can allow for an exchange of ideas or a peaceful resolution—it’s “enemy,” a word that very much feeds into his fascistic model of ideological warfare in that the way you deal with enemies is you defeat them with force.

Powell: Today, our ability to constructively debate and discuss matters of public interest and morality appears to be very low. I’ll give one reason for why I think this is, a reason based in something we’ve already covered, and then maybe you can follow up with another one.

Go back to what we were saying about peoples’ propensity to view themselves as members of a reality-based community. This, ultimately, distorts things in that it fails to bring to light the person’s ethical commitments, or the ethical assumptions that go into their ideological outlook, because they have self-servingly equated their thinking with just what objective reality is.

---

The Perils of Right-Wing Economic Populism: A Conversation with Economist Ryan Bourne

---

Here’s an example: A progressive might point to something in the market that looks to them to be unjust, like when a pizza place opts not to deliver pizzas to a particular neighborhood or area, or when members of certain racial groups get more attention paid to them by store security than others. A libertarian might say, “Well, we can tell an economic story about why this is,” and the economic story is that statistics say a delivery driver getting mugged is likelier in certain areas, or certain demographics or age groups shoplift with greater frequency, or whatever the details might be. So this economic story, which details the incentives that exist that are driving the security policies, appears to those who tell it to be just what reality is. But, interestingly, it hides certain ethical commitments that are hovering below the surface. The progressive can acknowledge that teenage boys shoplift more frequently than elderly ladies, but they can point to the existence of other moral considerations that are also important—moral considerations that can be just as real, or just as reality-shaping, as what the market-incentives interlocutor was offering. The progressive can make the case that harassing people just because they’re members of a certain group that is statistically more likely to shoplift, even if it reduces shoplifting, is not morally desirable. The gains a storeowner makes comes at the moral cost of society signaling to members of certain groups that they will be surveilled more routinely and more regularly perceived to be threats. Maybe the progressive is wrong that this factor should override other ones, but my point is that their opponent, the one telling the economic story, was assuming that a form of racial profiling was uncomplicatedly endorsed by reality, when it was actually a deliberate choice to give little value to the downsides of allowing racial profiling in our practices. Instead of an honest debate about which of our ethical commitments and values should get to be reflected in our public rules and norms, we get silly glosses like “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Blakely: That’s a great point. Another reason Americans are so bad at debating ideology, at least right now, is because few of us are multilingual in other people’s ideologies. We’re so near each other in many respects, from our geography to the spaces we occupy online, but we’re so ideologically far that we’ve lost an ethnographic sense for the concepts and languages of others.

For constructive ideological debate to be possible, one has to be able to ascertain basic things about the other person’s self-understanding. So critics of “wokeism” will often miss the mark because they don’t proceed from a solid understanding of progressive politics in the first place. Without the ability to do what some philosophers call “immanent critique,” or to show what tensions may exist internally within an ideological framework, all we’re doing is saying: “I prefer my commitments more than yours.” But you can’t do internal critiques without knowing the rival ideology well, without being able to speak its native tongue.

Powell: I’ve come to refer to this as the “Quillette Effect,” which is when people claim to understand what, say, critical race theory or postmodernism is, but their understanding has come exclusively via articles from Quillette or listening to Jordan Peterson talk about these things.

Blakely: If you only listen to voices within your own cultural or intellectual tradition, especially when it comes to explaining what outside voices are thinking and saying, then at best you won't get the most accurate versions of them, and at worst you’ll get significantly distorted versions of them.

I do think a huge problem is the epistemic silos we build for ourselves and inhabit. Part of the reason we’re siloed goes back to what we’ve been talking about: we take our map of reality to just constitute common sense, and when our map tries to convey what rival maps, rival ideologies, are all about, it can get them drastically wrong while making you think it’s the only tradition that is really getting them right. The problem is that nothing enters into your field of interpretation that can challenge the mischaracterization, or to even alert you to the possibility that it’s a mischaracterization in the first place.

Think, for example, about the progressive lawn sign that reads: “In this house we believe in science.” This is a sign that has rightly come in for criticism in the last several years, not because there’s anything bad about science or wanting to associate yourself with a science-based outlook, but because of its implicit suggestion that “science” is just a stand-in for reality or “the truth,” so that progressive liberals are just those people who think clearly, rationally, and commonsensically, and everyone else rejects science, prefers irrationality, and so on. But of course it’s never really as simple as Group A has a scientific ideology and Group B does not. Ideology always exceeds or goes beyond science to make a claim to a vision of a good society.

“When thinking about ideology as a kind of map, it’s important to understand that we’re not dealing with a straightforward landmark or physical place; we are arguing about something that we can make the world more or less like. That’s because ideologies aren’t just descriptions of the political lay of the land but also contain embedded visions for how society should be. That’s what I was saying about these maps having a world-making as opposed to merely a word-representing aspect to them. Ideology blends the descriptive with the prescriptive and enactive.” — Jason Blakely

It’s the same with prominent manifestations of the anti-progressive position. Take, again, the “facts don’t care about your feelings” sentiment, which is a bumper-sticker way of capturing the idea that to be anti-progressive, or to be a social conservative of a particular kind, is to be beholden to facts and reality, whereas to be progressive is to deny reality, facts, the way the world is, and to instead prioritize subjective feelings that are objectively false.

Many go through their lives thinking their ideological maps are just uncomplicated read-outs of what reality just is. “My map has this street on it, and look, there’s the street right there!” But, as we’ve noted, this is not how ideological maps work. Ideologies are not collections of straightforward representations of reality. They are world-making.

Powell: Are there limits to that, though? I think it makes a lot of sense, if you’re going to be super critical of Marxists, to put effort into reading about Marxism from quality sources. Or if you’re going to reject libertarianism, you should first read what libertarians actually say, what experts about the tradition have said, as opposed to just how libertarianism is presented at Slate or Salon or other venues that operate with a low view of the position in the first place. But does that mean I also have an obligation to read Libs of TikTok, or to read the various writings of a Nazi, in order to understand their full worldview? Or is it enough to know that Libs of TikTok wants people like me excluded from the public sphere, or that a Nazi wants me dead?

Blakely: I think, when confronting the Nazi or racist, if we know these people, if they’re our neighbors, if they’re part of our society, or, God forbid, part of our family, how are we ever going to get them out of the thrall of their ideologies—which, as we noted earlier, are really sticky things? The only way is by working through what they find magnetic in it—to peel back at it through immanent critique and through offering a better story. You have to give people something to transition into. The idea that the only thing left for certain kinds of people is just warring against them sounds like Carl Schmitt.

Powell: Thank you for talking to me. Your book, Lost in Ideology, which I highly recommend, is quite short. It’s insightful while not requiring an extraordinary commitment on the part of the reader. Anyone who enjoyed this topic can pick it up and gain a lot from it.

This interview has been adapted from a prior conversation on Aaron Ross Powell's ReImagining Liberty podcast. Please consider subscribing to Aaron’s newsletter.