Mark Phillips: The American Question

On the left the dominant analysis of ideology emphasizes consciousness and pedagogy.

Consciousness: ideology is deliberate. It's something which is manipulated in a planned and willful way by people who know it to be false. Ideology and propaganda are identical or nearly identical things.

Pedagogy: the way to counter ideology is via education. Educate the ideologized. That is, act consciously on their consciousness.

All of which begs the question, what is it that makes ideology effective?

Ask a "leftist" about this -- really push for an answer, because the most usual response will be to try to evade the question. The answer, more grudging or less grudging depending on the individual, is very often that ideology succeeds because the majority of the people are irrational and easily manipulated. A revealing answer which pulls back the veil on the endemic elitism of the intellectual left. It's the ugly old problematic of leaders and children which the right wing is absolutely correct to decry.

The remarkable thing is that people on the left persist in thinking this way, despite the inescapable obviousness of the fact that it doesn't work.

Ideology succeeds because it works unconsciously, triggering and manipulating responses which are personal yet broadly shared. It performs this work first and foremost inside the brains of the ideologues who later transmit it to the rest of us in a more or less refined state. There's no conspiracy here. Neo-Cons really thought it would be a simple matter to reorganize the Middle East by occupying Iraq. Really. Just as Walt Rostow really believed that the American genocide in Vietnam was a noble crusade in defense of freedom. Really.

This should be a cause for great optimism among activists for peace and social justice. Why? Because the unconscious effects are contradictory and overdetermined, meaning in practice that they can go either way. Why do they so often go to the Right? Because the Right organizes to push them in that direction. Could they be made to go to the Left? Of course! If only "the left" would put up the struggle.

So that we arrive a second time at the dominant practice on the left, the pedagogical model which should probably be seen as one facet of the spontaneous ideology of the university milieux from which ideologues of the left often emerge. To be effective we need to replace the pedagogical model with a new kind of struggle over the effects of ideological narratives.