The Right’s Pragmatism Is Just Another Ideology in Disguise

Ideology, the consensus to the right of centre has it, is something like Max Weber’s ethic of conviction: a misplaced adherence to abstract principles grounded in something between pride and vanity. The principle in defiance of better knowledge. Opposed to this, for Weber, stands the ethic of responsibility. Here, necessity takes precedence over desirability. Hands get dirty. One becomes a hero of ideological retreat.

Ideology has become the political slur of the right against the left, the reproach the sober pragmatists hurl at the vain dreamers. But is an ideology-free view of politics and society possible or even desirable? A value-free view of the world is scarcely conceivable.

Behind the illusion of a technocratic politics beyond ideology often lies little more than the ideology of a naturalised reality. Mere being is transformed into an imperative ought, and politics becomes a collection of platitudes. Ideological neutrality has itself become an ideology.

Just do it

With Marx, one could say that people make their own ideology, but they make it under ideas and concepts that already exist, given and transmitted from the past. Whoever abandons thinking altogether does not emancipate themselves from the ideas that surround them; they submit fully to what is given and become a mouthpiece of the social order that produced them.

Ideology-free politics essentially disguises itself as pragmatism, denying itself as an ideology. It is the attempt to see the world without a point of view, the impossible ambition of complete objectivity and positionlessness. How is the pragmatic gaze supposed to set priorities or resolve trade-offs? How does one decide pragmatically when interests compete? What is pragmatism meant to achieve, and for whom? What remains are a handful of indicators that must either be raised or lowered. And we have largely forgotten why.

For the new heroes of the ideological retreat, the matter is clear. You have to get on with it and tackle the problems. Some cart has to be set in motion, so that it can then drive. Indifference towards the why, the where to, and the for whom leads to a fixation on what is perceived as natural, conceals the constructed character of conditions, and turns us into prisoners of the present. David Cameron’s famous declaration that he does not do “isms” exposes the conservative desire to return to moral and intellectual immaturity. There shall be no discourse on morality, values, or competing interests. What remains is the train to nowhere — an efficient nihilism.

Other matters are arbitrarily branded as ideology: bike lanes, minimum wages, wind turbines — all manifestations of dreamy vanity. What then counts as ideology-free are motorways, which simply have to be built; the ever-growing number of SUVs, because that is just how it is; and rising inequality, about which nothing can be done anyway.

The illusion to which the post-ideologist succumbs is that of solutionism: the idea that political problems merely require technocratic solutions. Genuinely political problems, however, cannot simply be solved, because at their core they are conflicts of interests and values which — if one intends to deal with them peacefully — must be managed rather than resolved. Whoever speaks only of solutions when it comes to political problems is trying to deceive.

What we must instead understand is that ideology is something like the necessary lens, the unavoidable perspective through which we approach reality. Ideology critique is therefore not the technocratic politics that ignores its own premises, but work on the lens itself — the questioning of goals and perspectives.

The ideology of reality

The French philosopher Roland Barthes described ideology as “turning history into nature; it turns the reality of the world into its ideal image.” It makes the given circumstances appear as the only possible — or the only correct — ones. The world as it is becomes the only world that can and should be.

Theodor Adorno spoke of the ideology of reality: the lens that transfigures what is into the only thing that could possibly be. He writes: “The existing order as such—that it is so and cannot be otherwise—has itself become ideology.” The suppression of thought, of the possibility of change, of history and progress, is the true ideological obfuscation of our time. Instead, Adorno argues, the utopian yet sober demand that “something is missing” — Bertolt Brecht’s phrase — must guide political imagination.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek adds that ideology functions spontaneously. It is not the result of rational deliberation but simply the spontaneous prejudice towards the world. The power structures of that world cannot be overcome by such spontaneous consciousness. Žižek emphasises that ideology therefore works best when one does not believe in it, allowing it to colonise one’s worldview all the more effectively.

Emancipation from ideology cannot consist in ignoring one’s field of vision. It must instead be the rational emancipation from the spontaneous image of reality, an emancipation that overcomes power structures and the apparent continuity of the merely given. With Barthes, one could say: emancipation in thought is to transform what counts as nature into history — to bring the ideally possible into reality, to make what is appear alterable.

Since something has to take the place of such a vision, today’s conservatives string together folk wisdom and clichés to construct something resembling a philosophical foundation for their material politics. Football metaphors and supposed common sense fill the now-necessary retreat into empty phrases. This is no ethic of responsibility, but the elevation of instinctive prejudice into rationality. In place of the ideology of inevitable reality, we need an ideology of what ought to be. The sober utopia of “something is missing” must free us from the infantilising condition of ideologylessness.