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In case you hadn't noticed, the Sotomayor hearings were broadcast this last week from somewhere in LookingGlassLand-a place where an all-white committee of Senators questioned a Latina nominee for hours on end, and the all-white-male Republican contingent spent the largest chunk of its time cross-questioning her on whether she was a racist, and if not, how could she prove it to them?
Of course there were problems with this approach. Such as the complete lack of judicial record supporting their accusations. And that's precisely what gave the proceedings their utterly surreal character, leaving us only to wonder if it was more Lewis Carroll or George Orwell. If MSNBC were half as savvy as they think they are, this is the question they'd be asking folks to call in and vote on. But, of course, they've got Pat Buchanan doing commentary for them. So what are the chances of that?
Yes, everyone with half a brain or more knows that it's utterly surreal. But what's lacking, generally is the vocabulary to say anything more precise than that. And that's symptomatic of a very big problem indeed. In fact, at bottom it's the same problem we saw in Sotomayor herself, as she repeatedly told the world that she had no judicial philosophy. (In fact, philosophy gave her hives, and might possibly even send her into anaphylactic shock!) No philosophy for her, nohow.
Pardon me for not believing a word of it, even if Sotomayor herself actually did.
What's the connection here? Simple: At its most basic, ideology means nothing more than how you slice up the world-or at least the human part of it. Who are the players? And what are their relationships? Kings over subjects-with virtually nothing owed by Kings, except to God? Lords over vassals-with a system of mutual, though vastly unequal obligations? Slaveowners and slaves-with slavowners alone defining the limits of absolute power over those who have none? Or citizens with constitutionally-recognized rights and equal protection for all? These are the big-picture examples of how political ideology is political ontology (the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of existence). And it's quite literally impossible to function without one, conscious or not, whether you know it or not.
The right has a very well-developed multi-billion dollar machine in place to constantly articulate its ideology, and apply it to any situations that happen to emerge. The fact that its ideology is almost always contradictory and incoherent is entirely irrelevant. They're busy cranking it out at mass industrial production levels, and if you're busy pointing out contradictions at cottage industry levels, then you're not cranking out your own ideology, and you're definitely not doing it at mass industrial levels. (Or, to put it another way, for the past 40 years, the right has been involved in a Gramscian culture war/war of position, and the left has been AWOL.)
Actually, the Democratic establishment has come up with it's own ideology-the "we don't have an ideology" ideology. Which leaves the rest of us tearing our hair out, screaming "Why the hell not?" Because not having an ideology of your own essentially means accepting the other guys ideology, their way of cutting up the world, and then trying to get your goals achieved playing their game by their rules with their set of cards-which, of course, they have diligently marked back during the Nixon Administration. In fact, it doesn't matter if you're playing 11-dimensional chess. If you let the other guy define everything, the game is hari-kari (see, "Lather," Jefferson Airplane),
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