On Ideology: A Reply

Dale Ritchie's vision of the role of ideology in politics deserves a response

"Stethoscope" by jdlasica is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

By Kevin J. Rogers

In his three-part series published in these pages, Dale Ritchie kindly shared some of the insights he gained through his experience as an officer of an independent party. Having served as the national vice-chair and operations manager of the same party before Dale’s term as national chair, I learned many of the same lessons as I ran headlong into the same challenges and roadblocks he so comprehensively covered. The challenges are all too real, and if anything, the situation has gotten even worse as the third decade of the new century has dawned.

My strategy for addressing those challenges as a matter of party politics and electoral dynamics differs dramatically from Dale’s; in fact, it could fairly be called the polar opposite. But I’ll make my argument on that subject in another piece. Today, I want to instead address one fundamental issue Dale raised: the nature of political ideology and its role in our democracy.

Moderate vs. Centrist vs. Independent

It’s easy enough to place political partisans somewhere in the correct territory on the electoral graph. If someone self-identifies as a Democrat, as a general matter they’re on the left; as a Republican, they’re on the right. The case of independents is a bit trickier, but on an ideological basis, most people lean toward one or the other of the established poles. In fact, registered independents vote as consistently for one party or the other, depending on the voter’s ideology, as registered party members, and almost all self-identified independents lean toward one or the other of the major parties. The ones who don’t tend to be checked out of politics entirely.

Which makes the idea of a vast swath of nonpartisan, nonideological independents something of a myth. For one thing, despite consistent expressions of a desire for a third party, most independents share more than enough of the worldview of one or the other major party to vote their way when the time comes, even as they resist being drawn into the growing, and increasingly personal, hyper-partisan interparty fight.