Posted on 03/14/2019 5:27:06 PM PDT by huckfillary
I don’t understand the idea that ideology is a bad thing. Notice the contradiction here? “Ideas are a bad thing.” That itself is an idea.
Democrats, some party insiders say, are going over a cliff. They’re going all-out socialist. Even Communist. One of their leading figures wants to tear down every single building in America and build new ones, conforming to environmentalist standards. Most of her colleagues in the Establishment either agree, or are reluctant to be seen disagreeing.
Is ideology to blame for this madness? No way. It’s not ideology that’s to blame. Ideology simply means the presence of IDEAS. It’s the content and quality of the ideas that matters.
America’s founders were ideologues. They were radical for their time. In fact, they are radical for today. They held the idea that the only proper function of a government was to protect liberty. To uphold the rights of the individual. The rights of the individual, they insisted, were to the PURSUIT of happiness. There was, according to these radicals, no right to free housing, free medical care, free cell phones, free college, free graduate school, and all the rest. They took it for granted that forcing one man to pay for the livelihood of another was not only NOT a right, but a form of slavery for the man forced to pay for it. They would be horrified by the policies of Republicans today, to say nothing of the up-and-coming socialistic Communists now on the mainstream of the left.
President Trump is not an ideologue. Although he’d be even less popular if he was, he’d be more effective if he was. Fortunately, most of his attitudes and emotions are based on the right ideas — lower taxes, less regulation, a strong defense where America is the good guy and people like ISIS are self-evidently evil, who need to be destroyed. President Trump’s attitudes are the precise opposite not just of the up-and-coming socialist Democrats, but of the “old fashioned” Democrats as well. Lucky for America we have a President whose attitudes are based on the right ideas, for the most part.
A society without ideas is like an individual without ideas. It’s mindless. It cannot survive for long without ideas. At least on the left, they’re full of ideas. Their ideas are insane. Their ideas are dedicated to the destruction of liberty, prosperity, individual rights, capitalism and even the rule of law. They don’t care. Yet don’t blame their irrational ideas on ideology itself.
Your emotions, attitudes, feelings and actions are ultimately based on ideas you hold, at least subconsciously. If America is to survive, at some point we have to rededicate ourselves to the ideas of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the Bill of Rights. Some Americans are doing this, but not enough to save us from the tyrants coming to dominate the left. We could be a single election or two away from tyranny.
Our survival as a free and rational civilization depends on ideas. So we better embrace the right ones.
Because it can make you so narrow-minded you can see through a keyhole at 100 yards
Our nation is founded on nothing BUT ideals, as best as can be articulated on a piece of paper.
Thats what the Federalist Papers were all about.
Intelligent men explaining their positions for the common man to read and understand.
Which should tell us something.
If the high ideals of our founders were articulated in print and voice, and enough people understood what was being said with the (sometimes) lofty, and often run on sentenced communique's, then the public schools have succeeded in dumbing the population down way below the average intelligence of 1700's Americans.
Think about that.
It’s a good thing if and only if it’s the correct ideology. Otherwise, of course, it’s evil heresy.
John 8:32: Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
All claims that ideology is bad really mean “I don’t like your ideology.”
The question of this thread has been a long time coming.
On second thought after reading a little of the article, this sounds like an anti-Trump piece and if so is a low IQ idea.
Show me someone without ideologies and I’ll show you a mental invalid.
Stop everything
I think I hear the President
The Pied Piper of the TV screen
Is gonna make it simple
And he’s got it all mapped out
And illustrated with cartoons
Too hard for clever folks to understand
They’re more used to words like:
Ideology
They’re not talkin’ ‘bout right and left
They’re talkin’ ‘bout
Right and wrong, do you know the difference
Right and wrong, do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see
So what ya think
You like the Yankees or the Mets this year
And what about this latest war of words
And what about the Commies
I saw the news last night
All illustrated with cartoons
So when they come with that opinion poll
They better not use words like
Ideology
Or try to tell me ‘bout the issues
Ideology
Whose side are you on
We’re talkin’ ‘bout
Right and wrong, do you know the difference
Right and wrong, do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see
Where are we?
Right and wrong, do you know the difference
Right and wrong, do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see
Joe Jackson - Right and Wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QTMojHyJ5E
The best way to think about ideology includes the acknowledgment that some ideas are better than others.
Another thing to remember is plenty of people don’t like Trump, and others don’t understand him.
But the higher IQ common man is able to see what Trump is about.
FR should consider a “report obtuse” option in addition to “report abuse.” Ideology is not the same as just having ideas. There are two general definitions. One is philosophical. The one people use to refers to doctrine. That is, people often subscribe to a set of ideas, an ideology, which is the process of indoctrination. That happens mostly as a result of people being I’ll equipped to think for themselves, lack of critical thinking.
BAD ideology is a bad thing.
Russell Kirk:
“Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.
“Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
“The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
“In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude....
https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/
I thought the title of the article was about ideology
A rigid ideology can be restrictive not only to one’s life but the lives of those on whom they wish to force some adherents of their belief system
Ideals are a completely different matter
Has this guy been living under a rock for the last decade?
It's not ideas that's the problem. It's the systemic punishment by all the arms of government and established institutions of America of opposing ideas that is the problem.
It's using the IRS to defund conservative watchdog and Tea Party groups; it's using the FBI to spy on opposition campaigns; it's the nation's intelligence community listening into and revealing opposition private citizens' communications; it's quasi-utility telecom-enabled social media companies that block opposing ideas; it's justice departments that prosecute people for having opposing ideas; it's mass-market media trying to stop minority media ideas from being heard; it's government-mandated education departments that force agenda-driven ideas on children; it's all this that is such a Bad Thing.
-PJ
‘Rigid’ ideologies is your term. Not all are ideologies are rigid. In terms of use today, ideology is what the other guy suffers from.
BTW, ideology is a synonym for ideals.
Yeah, and I fight that every day.
Precisely. Kirk is my go-to reference but sadly most people just make up stuff to justify their own ideas rather than learning from the fathers of the conservative movement who teach us that it is a way of thinking, not a checklist.
Blind adherence to ideology is dangerous and dumb. The biggest waste of time in the world it two people arguing over who is more conservative.
Ideology is like an oral contract. Not worth the paper it’s printed on. Which is exactly why the written law fails.
As soon as an ideological idea, or a law, is created, there begins an endless pursuit of loopholes, errors, misinterpretations, etc.
The founding fathers had several important axioms that they tried to follow. The first of these was do disagree with the philosophical idea that people are either “inherently good” or “inherently bad”. Instead the adopted the axiom that people are “inherently weak”, so a system of governance must account for this.
It does this with balancing of competing interests, and such balances fill the US constitution. The balance of federalism and anti-federalism; the balances of the three branches of government; the balance between large and small states; the balance of public and private interests; etc.
They could not balance the law of heaven with the law written by man, so with respect to The Creator, they declared the constitution and written laws to be exclusively the creation of men. So they could be changed by men without offending heaven.
And they made especially certain that while men could create laws, they were unable to change the natural laws found in the Bill of Rights.
So if America truly has an ideology, it is what is written in our Bill of Rights. Everything else is transient.
Ideology simply means the presence of IDEAS …Not according to any dictionary I have come across. The word is inextricably linked with rigid political systems, and political/economic ones in particular. Listed among its synonyms are “doctrine”, “dogma”, “credo” and suchlike.
America’s founders were ideologues …They were the opposite.
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