Ideology always comes back

Is there such a thing as non-ideological politics? The “advanced democracies of the developed world”—a resonant phrase—might regard themselves as non-ideological in the sense that they are not like the Soviet Union was, or like North Korea and Iran are today: governed by a great, over-arching idea about how the ultimate social and economic felicity of the people is to be achieved.

Ideological systems are coercive. They cannot tolerate individual liberty and diversity because these threaten to derail the grand project, which needs everyone to march in the same direction to the same drum. They are usually future-focused; realisation of the ideal state of affairs is what everyone works towards, subordinating the present to the goal. North Korea might be a little different; it would appear to be trying to persuade its people that it occupies that paradisical future already.

An ideology is a theory about the right economic, social and political structure of a society. A classic example of an ideology in this sense is Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought, under which I once bemusedly lived. It has a view about history and the problems bequeathed by it; it has the right solutions to those problems; it stipulates the behaviour required of everyone to achieve those solutions; and it promises a rosy state of affairs as the goal of the effort.

It might seem that “the advanced democracies” are emphatically non-ideological in this sense. But are they? Is it not rather that the ideology is just more diffuse and less distinctly articulated, at least as a central party line? The “market” still occupies the position once held by a deity; attachment to civil liberties and the rule of law is premised on ideas and ideals about what a society should be like to approximate the utopian; and above all, there is the cherished concept of democracy itself. To be attached to these as principles is to have an ideology, of a kind one feels defensible.

It used to be the case that politics in the United Kingdom was a tug of war between genuinely different ideological conceptions. “Left” and “right” denoted positions on the economy as the instrument by which relations between people in society are to be adjusted. Behind the contest hovered what seemed to be the dilemma identified by Isaiah Berlin as permanently irresolvable: the tension between liberty and equality.

The collapse of command-economy experiments more or less everywhere—they demonstrated an inverse relationship between equality on the one hand, and wealth and (often) personal liberty on the other—appeared to give UK political tussles a different complexion altogether, over the question of who can manage the centre ground best.

This is indeed largely the case, so far as the major parties are concerned. As manifestos are prepared for the coming election, the chief differences are about marginal rates of tax. To give the appearance of real differences of principle, the weary and battered education system will probably have yet more reforms promised it. Old anxieties and reassurances about the National Health Service will be aired, and that huge and marvellous entity will get its usual merciless kicking from sections of the press looking for a one-in-10,000 aberration to pick on.

But it is in putatively non-ideological circumstances such as these that more explicitly ideological politics appears on the outskirts, and begins to encroach on that consensus, mainly by latching on to discontent and anxiety about single issues. Nationalist movements, anti- immigration sentiment, xenophobia, resentments prompted by widening disparities between rich and poor, are tinder for such developments.

Such tinder abounds in the UK at present. One result is that it pushes the major parties into more extreme positions in those areas. The UK Independence Party exploits fears about immigration and “rule from Brussels,” and the Conservative Party promises a referendum on membership of the European Union. Scottish nationalism threatens to take Scotland out of the UK union, whereupon legislative proposals are made that promise to take England out of it.

This is not ideology but expediency—or perhaps, it is the ideology of expediency. But as with ideology proper, it distorts everything around the goal of its central thrust in order to achieve that goal.

Churchill, the 50th anniversary of whose death is commemorated this year, said two things about democracy, one that everyone knows and one that few know. The latter is this: the strongest argument against democracy, he said, is two minutes of conversation with the average voter. Alas, he had a point. In such conversations lies the origin of ideologies. Democracy is a system that requires thoughtful, dispassionate, well-informed and well-intentioned electorates, or in other words utopian conditions; hence Churchill’s better-known remark: “democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.”