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?