Week 1: Ideologies and extremes

This is the first post on the unit blog for Extremism and Political Radicalism.

Our main topic in the first week was ideology was the main topic of the lecture. As you will have seen, it's a complicated concept with a lot of different, and partly overlapping, interpretations. I think the key features of ideology are:

1. An ideology is a system of ideas - a constellation of interlocking beliefs. "Marriage is a good thing" plus "People should pay less tax" doesn't make an ideology. "Marriage is a good thing" plus "We should bring back grammar schools" plus "The country is changing too quickly" is an ideology - a set of interconnected ideas with a central theme, in this case the theme of how much better things were in the old days.
2. An ideology explains how things are. Ideologies aren't just a set of linked ideas. If you believe that politics, education and TV have all changed a lot in the last decade, that's not necessarily an ideological belief; it may just be an observation. An ideological belief relates different ideas back to an idea about how the world is: politics, education and TV have all changed because of increasing commercialisation / the growing influence of PC liberals / etc. Because ideologies offer to explain the world, they are vulnerable to being disproved - think of the image of getting "mugged by reality".
3. An ideology is associated with material and/or political interests. For Marxists, the ideology of the ruling class expresses the dominance of that class in the medium of ideas. Not everyone will agree with this analysis - but, even from a non-Marxist point of view, ideology is always about who is in power and who ought to be in power, who has too much power (e.g. "PC liberals") and who doesn't have enough (e.g. "ordinary decent people").
4. Ideologies seem natural. Or rather, they seem natural to the people who hold them - they seem like common sense ("well, of course we need to cut the deficit - that's obvious!") And, just like common sense, everyone has an ideology that they subscribe to: there is no 'unideological' standpoint.

As you can see, politics is all about ideology. From Joseph Stalin to Ed Miliband to David Cameron to Adolf Hitler, every politician has an ideology; they use it to communicate with their supporters, to out-manoeuvre their opponents and (not least) to get things done. There's no alternative to ideology: 'common sense' is as ideological as any political belief.

We also saw that being left-wing and right-wing involves having views on a range of different issues, some of which (e.g. racism or gender equality) have nothing to do with the economic issues that Marx wrote about - even though Marx is still a reference-point for the extreme left. This idea of a range of beliefs, running from left to right, brings us to the idea of the political spectrum. Any political system - Britain, Scotland, the EU, the USA - has a political spectrum, running from the 'extreme' left to the 'extreme' right. The spectrum consists of the range of ideologies which can be admitted into respectable politics, the range of ideas which can be treated as 'common sense'. And what counts as an unacceptably extreme ideology is subject to change, from country to country and from time to time.

To be continued...