Is ideology- as opposed to philosophy- a form of mental illness?

Two interesting articles, it seems to me, provide a cogent counterpoint to conservative kvetching about John McCain's pragmatism.

Another pro-McCain blog, Born Again Redneck, is the source of the first. The author cites the argument of Dr. Lyle Rossiter, already discussed below, that liberalism is essentially a form of mental illness. But The Redneck, to his credit, takes the point a step further, arguing that all ideology, by definition, is in effect a neurotic defense mechanism designed to filter reality through a pre-chosen matrix defining what is arbitrarily permitted or not permitted to be true.

Ideology is ossified philosophy; it's what happens when social compassion becomes socialism, or economic freedom becomes capitalism. Beware of "isms," The Redneck seems sensibly to argue; when values cease to be ethical standpoints from which to observe and react to reality, and become neurotic defense mechanisms through which we determine what reality should or should not be permitted to be, they cease to be the very definition of intellectual and moral sanity and become its very opposite.

The Redneck, it should be said, does conclude that the ideologues of the Left are just a bit more nutty than those of the Right, if only because the lib... er, progressive filter requires the systematic and dogmatic acceptance of so many palpable lies.

The other article- by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek- simply makes the point that to the extent that it has any real contact with reality and political sanity at all, ideology is a function of context- and that the context of ideological conservatism is the 1970's and '80's. It was quite good at solving the problems America faced in the era of Saturday Night Fever and St. Elsewhere; today, when Americans pay comparatively little in income taxes, tax cuts, for example, seem a panacea for all our problems only to those stuck on yesterday.

Zakaria overstates his case. It is true that eight years of leftist reportage have, for example, obscured the degree to which military action has deterred terrorism (Khadaffi, let it be recalled, explained his abandonment of that particular road by simply saying, "I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid"); that's a different matter from a necessity existing for the abandonment of reality in favor of the dream world portrayed by reality in the MSM. The remedy for the deception of the American people by the MSM is better information, more effectively presented, by the forces of reason and reality, not surrender to an illusory state of affairs the ideologues of the Left in the media routinely peddles as today's news. Moreover, he misses the point that if conservatism is stuck in the '70's and '80's, liberalism- or "progressivism," as its adherents (apparently embarassed by their ideological heritage) prefer- is nothing more or less, finally. than the warmed over Leftist ideology of 1968, the year in which its advocates seem permanently stuck. Disproporionately taxing the rich and having the government pay for the meeting of every social need while refusing to take threats to our national security or the responsibilities inherent in our unsought and unavoidable status as the world's uberpower seriously is no more a realistic prescription for the contemporary woes of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century than an eternal and petrified codification to the effective response Ronald Reagan once gave to the time-specific consequences of the post-Carter years.

One thing, in any case, seems clear: in politics, unlike theology or even philosophy, we deal less in eternal truths about unchanging and everlasting reality than in the application of timeless truths to an ever-changing reality. The failure of the Left to understand this distinction is one of the things which make the policies of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton archaic and unsatisfactory responses to the challenges America faces today. And the determination of the Republican Right to ignore contemporary social and political reality and advocate a Reaganism that is less a philosophy than a reality-distorting neurosis better suited to the problems of twenty or thirty years ago renders it, finally, no more productive of the kind of solutions the timely prescriptions of Ronald Wilson Reagan provided back then.

What conservatism and liberalism alike need is flexible and realistic thinkers able to integrate changeless philosophy into the matrix of contemporary reality. The Republican Party- if only by accident- has found a nominee who fits precisely that description in John McCain.

The struggle of the rigid Right to deal with McCain as the prospective nominee is finally nothing more or less than its struggle to find a conservatism that is an actual response to contemporary reality, rather than a neurotic coping mechanism from days gone by.

HT: Real Clear Politics

Comments

Joubert said…
Well, Mr Waters, you make my post sound a lot more respectable and intellectual than it was. :)

I was just taking a dig at the conservative "purists" for whom McCain is not anti-gay, anti-abortion or anti-Mexican enough.