One of the most fascinating things about political ideology is the following juxtaposition:
1. An ideology typically makes complete sense to the person holding the ideology--that is, it is internally coherent.
2. Different people have all sorts of different ideologies; thus, there is external incoherence.
To put it another way, one person might strongly believe in A & B, while somebody else equally strongly feels that A & not-B go together. The logic of ideology is not fully determined by what goes into it.
I remember thinking about this several years ago regarding positions on legalized gambling (casinos, state lotteries, and the like). Some commentators were iberal and pro-gambling (people should be allowed to gamble if they want, without fundamentalist bible thumpers telling them what to do), some were conservative and pro-gambling (people should be allowed to gamble if they want, without do-gooder liberals telling them what to do), and similarly on the other side. And I recall reading passionate arguments from various of these perspectives.
On aggregate, I suspect there's a slight correlation between being a liberal or Democrat and supporting gambling (it's a traditional morals issue, after all, William F. Bennett notwithstanding), but the correlation is surely weak if there at all, and it doesn't stop all four of the above positions from making internal sense.
I thought about the issue again more recently when reading this discussion by Dennis Mangan (I found his site via a link from Seth's blog) of the fascinating story of a businessman who built a minaret next to his shoe warehouse in Bussigny, Switzerland. From the news article:
In November, Switzerland voted to ban the construction of new minarets, the towerlike structures that adorn mosques. A week or so later, in an apparent act of defiance, a new minaret unexpectedly sprang up here.
But the new minaret is not attached to a mosque; this small town near Geneva doesn't even have one. And it's not the work of a local Muslim outraged by Switzerland's controversial vote to ban the structures, which often are used to launch the call to prayer.
Instead, Bussigny's minaret is attached to the warehouse of a shoe store called Pomp It Up, which is part of a Swiss chain. It was erected by the chain's owner, Guillaume Morand, who fashioned it out of plastic and wood and attached it to a chimney. The new minaret, nearly 20 feet high and illuminated at night, is clearly visible from the main highway connecting Lausanne and Geneva.
"The referendum was a scandal," Mr. Morand said recently at his cavernous warehouse, near pallets piled high with shoe boxes as pop music played on an old stereo system. "I was ashamed to be Swiss. I don't have the power to do much, but I wanted to give a message of peace to Muslims."
Now, by the time I'd gotten to this item, I'd read a bunch of Magnan's blog and I had a sense of where he's coming from--he's conservative, is skeptical of government, has strong views on racial issues--and I was expecting his reaction to the minaret to be something like: Hey, those silly Europeans--they want Americans to be politically correct but then they go around suppressing free speech in their own country by banning minarets, something that would never fly in a free country like America. Good job by that plucky businessman to succeed with free enterprise where government failed; this shows how capitalism solves problems that governments create. This man with a shoe-store chain is a productive member of society, unlike the chattering classes who want to tell the rest of us what to do. I'm more inclined to trust a guy who's built up a chain of stores--someone who faces the judgment of the marketplace every day--than some bureaucrat who cashes government checks. Etc.
Reading on, I was surprised to see that Mangan had the exact opposite reaction, siding against the shoe store owner:
This seems to me [Mangan] an example of capitalism at its worst. Capitalists and businessmen seek profits above all else - which is fine, that's their specialty. In this case, Morand has no loyalties beyond profits; he's willing to sell out his country just so he and his business and his liberal ideology can thrive. His disdain for his fellow Swiss is palpable.
Capitalism in the US is really no different. Big business wants nothing other than profits, and if it takes mass immigration, legal or illegal, suborning the constitution, paying bribes, kowtowing to "diversity", and lobbying for subsidies, they're all for it.
Here, Mangan's not quite being consistent--at one point, he says that Monand "has no loyalties beyond profits" but then later in the same sentence he identifies "liberal ideology" as a motivation. His commenters have a similar problem, oscillating between identifying the store owner as being a cynical manipulator who just wants to sell shoes to politically-liberal Swiss consumers, or else being a P.C. fool who is sacrificing his own profits for the sake of ideology.
My point here, though, is not to get into a debate about the motivation of some Swiss sneaker-store owner who I've never met (and never heard of until today) but just to point out how an action can be framed in such different ways (Plucky Entrepreneur Defies Government Ban, or Naive Political Activist Plays With Fire, or Selfish Big Businessman Bites the Society that Feeds Him). And each of these stories is potentially coherent. Imagine, for example, how people might feel about a store owner in the U.S. flying a huge Confederate flag in violation of some state law.
When people consider political ideologies, I think there is a tendency to extrapolate from the ideologies' internal coherence to assume an external coherence.
At this point, I suspect some readers will want to say that I'm missing the point, that ideology is actually two-dimensional (perhaps categorized in terms of social and economic issues, as in this image from Red State, Blue State), and that Mangan fits into a particular quadrant (the so-called "paleoconservatives," perhaps). But I don't think so. As Delia Baldassarri and I found, in a statistical sense, people are remarkably unconstrained in their political views--that is, it's hard to predict how someone will feel on issue A, given their views on issues B, C, and D. Including a second dimension will add some predictive power, I'm sure, but it doesn't change my key point here, which is that different people can have internally consistent sets of views that, in aggregate, can't be put into a coherent framework of agreement or opposition.
P.S. The linked Wall Street Journal article has a boring drawing of a generic minaret and a photo of Morand next to his minaret but, for some reason I can't understand, they didn't run a photo showing the minaret in the same frame as the "Pomp it Up" shoe warehouse. That would've been much more grabby, no?
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Excellent observation. Related is the fact that people in an ideology construct opposition ideologies into which they fit those who disagree with them.
I think that it is a bit deeper than this.
We already know multiples of reasoning can lead to the same conclusion. That is, there is NOT a 1:1 relationship between reasoning and conclusions.
And so, the problem is that in this age we look at conclusions and outcomes, rather than processes and mechanisms. So, this stuff looks inconsistent, when it is actally quite consistent. If you know WHY someone holds their position on issues B, C & D, you will know WHY they hold their position on A.
Who is this useful for? Well, those who are looking to convince know how to appeal to that person. And those looking to convince can tailor the argument to the audience.
Who is this less useful for? Those who want to predict conclusions.
> To put it another way, one person might strongly believe in A & B, while somebody else equally strongly feels that A & not-B go together. The logic of ideology is not fully determined by what goes into it.
Surely not even the most idealistic don't ascribe full determinism to their beliefs? And even if some do, surely that doesn't mean *we* should ascribe full determinism to the beliefs of others?
I know that the Jaynes/Cox/probability-as-logic view on Bayes might be slightly out of fashion but wouldn't you say life would be simpler if we just called a belief a belief?
"Now, by the time I'd gotten to this item, I'd read a bunch of Magnan's blog and I had a sense of where he's coming from--he's conservative, is skeptical of government, has strong views on racial issues--and I was expecting his reaction to the minaret to be something like: Hey, those silly Europeans--they want Americans to be politically correct but then they go around suppressing free speech in their own country by banning minarets, something that would never fly in a free country like America."
No. Mangan is a paleoconservative. Paleoconservatives are not free market, free speech libertarians. And this is a completely predictable position for a paleoconservative on this issue. A paleoconservative is sympathetic towards government power when the government acts to keep out perceived alien people and influences.
The extreme form of this, of course, being Fascism. Just as Communism is the extreme form of socialism. Paleoconservatives often surbordinate freedoms to nationalist preferences, just as socialists often subordinate freedoms to preferences for social equality.
Your view is not far from David Nolan's Chart. Take a look at it..
As an "expert" on American politics, you might want to spend some more time getting inside the heads of paleocons like Mangan.
It's true that paleocons generally believe in small government, but when that nationalism contradicts libertarianism, nationalism generally wins in the paleocon mind.
An analogy to liberalism: liberals believe in the right to make choices in your personal life, right? So surely they believe in the freedom to hire and associate only with people of whichever race you prefer? WRONG! They have other values that are more deeply held. Same thing with paleocons and economic freedom.
Allan: An ideology is a cluster of beliefs, not a single belief. My point is that Mangan views his cluster of beliefs as making sense; he's not just presenting them as independent statements that he happens to believe in.
Jason, Coldequation: I think youall are being too confident the consistency of these beliefs. I'm assuming that Mangan is American, not Swiss. And many conservative Americans ("paleo" and others) are skeptical of European governments and their regulatory ways. I could well imagine Mangan or someone with similar beliefs as viewing the Swiss minaret ban as a feeble symbolic gesture etc. I'm not saying that Mangan shouldn't have his particular view on the Swiss story or that it's inconsistent with his other attitudes; rather, I'm saying that I think he could've equally strongly had the opposite attitude and that this also would've been consistent with his worldview.
I didn't say that these beliefs are consistent - just that paleos are pretty consistent in the way they resolve the contradictions between nationalism and the belief in small government/free enterprise.
It would be true that a paleo could hold both positions on the minaret issue with equal consistency if all contradictory beliefs were held with equal intensity, but they're not. It's like the three laws of robotics - the nth one overrides the n+1th one. In this case, nationalism is n and belief in small government and free enterprise are n+1. It's possible to take things to an extreme where this analogy breaks down - few liberals would favor mandatory interracial marriage and few paleocons would want to deport Bobby Jindal. But it generally holds.
Again I point to the analogy of the contradiction between the simultaneous liberal belief in personal freedom and the belief in non-discrimination. You could say that liberals would be equally consistent by opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it weakened freedom of association, but if you know any actual liberals you know that the idea of one of them opposing the Civil Rights Act is absurd. Same thing with paleocons and the contradiction between nationalism and small government conservatism. If you know these guys you know nationalism wins virtually every time.
Both liberals and conservatives hold simultaneous contradictory beliefs, but if you know them you know how they will resolve the contradictions. They are consistent enough to be predictable. If you think paleocons (or whatever) are worth understanding, I suggest you read them until you're not surprised by their reactions to events anymore.
"I could well imagine Mangan or someone with similar beliefs as viewing the Swiss minaret ban as a feeble symbolic gesture etc."
I'm pretty sure that Mangan and most paleocons do believe that the minaret ban was, in fact, a feeble symbolic gesture. But it's better than, say, Swiss politicians coming out and saying "Switzerland is a nation of immigrants", or "Switzerland is a Muslim country", which is what many of the globalist (socialist or libertarian) contingent would prefer.
I don't really see immigration restrictions as inconsistent with small-government libertarianism anyway-
1. Most sane libertarians (non-anarchists) believe in the government's authority to protect property owners from trespassers. It's not a big leap to extend that to the authority of the government to protect citizens from trespassers on national soil.
2. Most sane libertarians recognize the government's authority to organize a military to defend the nation's people against foreign invaders. Illegal immigrants are foreign invaders, even if they're not technically part of an organized army.
That said, the minaret ban is indeed a feeble symbolic gesture that resulted from an unworkable compromise ("let them come here, but they must become Swiss") based on an incorrect assumption (that this is possible). This might be because of disagreement between factions in Switzerland, or a disconnect between policymakers and public opinion, or for some other reason, but it's clearly not achieving anything either way.
Coldequation, Mike: Thanks for the clarification. I believe that Mangan's attitude on the shoe store minaret is coherent with his other attitudes in a way that makes sense in the context of his ideology; my point that is others (perhaps not 100% "paleoconservative," depending on the definition) could well have similar views as Mangan on many other issues (as reflected in his blog) but very strongly take the opposite view on this one, taking ths side of the plucky businessman against the silly Swiss government. It makes sense to me when you write that immigration restriction is a core view of Mangan; that would explain how he feels so strongly about this news story that he was able to simultaneously attribute "no loyalties beyond profits" and "liberal ideology" to the shoe store owner. These are two concepts that in another context he might very well place in opposition.
P.S. I am not trying to present conservative ideologies as less (or more) coherent than liberal ideologies. My blog entry was about ideologies in general; I only used Mangan's as an example that I'd happen to run across recently.
I don't expect everyone to love science, but the strong aversion to the subject I see in many people is troubling. What happens when this person has to make a health decision? Can they look past the pseudoscience in advertising and make good choices as consumers? Can they fully participate in questions about policy regarding science and technology such as stem cell research, environmental issues, genetic testing or engineering?