Arguing About What an Ideology Really Means Is the Misdirection

A great deal of serious intellectual effort goes into questions of this shape. What exactly was Nazism, as a system of thought? Hannah Arendt wrote hundreds of pages on it. What did Marx actually mean by socialism, as opposed to what his followers built? What is the Übermensch, precisely, and did Nietzsche mean it the way his worst readers took it? What does original sin mean, and which of the dozen theological readings is the right one? Does the Quran sanction marriage to minors, or is that a misreading of one verse?

Every one of these is a real question with a real literature. Intelligent people have spent careers on each. And I want to argue that, taken together, they are a magic trick: the details of an ideology are where the audience is told to look, and the struggle for power is the hand that is moving while they look.

What the Debates Have in Common

Notice the structure. Each of these arguments is about the content of a body of ideas: what the doctrine really says, what its founder really meant, which interpretation is authentic. The implicit premise is that if we settled the content, we would understand the thing.

We would not. Nazism was not a set of propositions that a sufficiently careful reader could evaluate; it was a machine for putting a small group in control of a large one, and the propositions were whatever that machine needed on a given day. Soviet socialism was not an attempt to implement Marx that went wrong at chapter three; it was a minority taking and holding power, using a vocabulary that happened to be lying around. The doctrine of original sin has done many things in two thousand years, and the constant across all of them is not its theological content but the fact that a clergy administered the remedy.

In every case the ideology is the paint. The structure underneath is the same structure: a minority controls a majority and needs a story that makes the arrangement look like something else.

Why the Details Are So Absorbing

If the details do not matter, why does everyone argue about them?

Partly because they are genuinely interesting, and interesting things attract attention regardless of importance. Partly because arguing about a text is something educated people know how to do; arguing about the distribution of power is uncomfortable and has no footnotes.

But mostly because the argument about details is safe for the people in power. A population that spends its evenings disputing whether the Quran permits a thing, or what Marx really intended, or whether Nietzsche was proto-fascist, is a population that is not asking who controls the water, the money, the army and the courts, and how they came to control it. The debate is endless by design: texts underdetermine their readings, founders are dead, and every generation can reopen the question. Endless debates about content are the perfect occupation for a majority you would like to keep busy.

The people in power do not usually arrange this deliberately. They do not need to. A system that rewards the interpreters of the doctrine, in every doctrine, will produce an interpretive class, and that class will produce debate, and the debate will fill the space where the political question would otherwise be.

The Test

Here is how you can tell that the content is not the thing.

Take any ideology and ask: if its adherents were suddenly persuaded of a different reading of the founding text, would the distribution of power change? If the Marxist party concluded tomorrow that Marx meant something milder, would the party dissolve itself? If the theologians settled original sin one way rather than another, would the church hand back its property?

Of course not. The reading would be adjusted and the institution would continue. That is the proof that the institution does not rest on the reading. The reading rests on the institution. Whichever interpretation keeps the structure standing is the one that becomes orthodox, and the process of becoming orthodox is a political process dressed as a scholarly one.

Conversely, when the distribution of power actually shifts, the doctrinal debate becomes irrelevant overnight. Nobody argues about the correct interpretation of the divine right of kings any more. Not because the argument was won, but because there are no kings whose divinity is worth debating.

What to Argue About Instead

I am not saying the study of ideas is worthless; I have written elsewhere that ideologies shrink over history and that this shrinkage is itself informative. Understanding what people believed is part of understanding what they did.

But understanding what they believed is not the same as understanding why things happened, and the misdirection consists in treating the first as if it were the second. The productive questions are structural. Who decides? Who can remove them? What does it cost the decided-for to object? How is information moved between the two groups? These questions have answers that do not depend on which text you read, and the answers predict behaviour far better than any exegesis.

The real struggle, under every ideology that has ever been named, is between the many and the few who run them. Every hour spent on what the ideology really means is an hour in which that struggle is not being fought. I have come to suspect that this is not a side effect of the debates. It is what they are for.