We Are Not All Marxists

In continuing in the same vein as my post yesterday on the sad state of political language, I turn to a post by the otherwise great Charles C.W. Cooke from NRO on the egregious Ezra Klein, the same Ezra Klein who doesn't understand the Constitution because it "was written more than 100 years ago."  Cooke goes on the attack here:

In his peculiar reaction to Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, peppily titled “Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction,” Ezra Klein writes:

It is Ryan’s unusual ideology, and not the specific state of our finances, that justifies this budget. Ryan’s view is that the federal government is strangling our community,

People of Ezra Klein’s bent have an unfortunate habit of behaving as if the current state of affairs — however new or transient — represents the inviolable tradition of the country, and that the actual traditions of the country constitute a radical plot to overthrow the establishment. For all of American history there was no Obamacare, and it hasn’t even kicked in yet; now, to get rid of it is “social engineering.” The HHS mandate is less than a year old; to oppose it is to wish to drag women back to the Dark Ages. Strong communities and limited government is the American way; but Paul Ryan’s defense of this makes him a radical. It’s preposterous, and it brings to mind that hackneyed but true observation that to control the past is to control the future. Progressives have learned the hard way that if they want Americans to buy what they are selling, they have to make it seem as if their plans are consistent with America’s ideal. And so the new becomes the old, and the old becomes the new. Move Tocqueville to the fiction section, Ezra.

Good stuff.  But the language problem shows up in this assessment:

Tellingly, Klein refers to “Ryan’s unusual ideology.” Unusual? Does Klein mean to suggest that not spending trillions that we don’t have is “unusual”? Does he mean that how America has worked for most of its history — and pretty well, thank you — is “unusual” now that it’s 2013? That notions of community doing things that government should not are “unusual”? I wonder. And what should we make of that “ideology” word? This dismissal is particularly telling, not because Ryan isn’t ideological — he is — but because so is Ezra Klein. So is everyone. Anyone who privileges one value over another (liberty over security, or growth over redistribution, for example) is an ideologue. Anybody who believes in any individual right whatsoever is an ideologue. Anyone who believes in any form of equality is an ideologue. Klein’s reaction betrays an arrogant, rotten worldview — widely shared among his ilk. Are we really expected to buy that doing the opposite of Ryan’s plan isn’t “ideological”? That there’s no ideology behind the status quo? That there’s nothing but reason behind what Klein and his acolytes wish would happen? That Klein’s desired path for America is based on pure analysis?

If we believe Paul Ryan when he says that his politics are based on God and nature, reason and revelation as it was for the Founders, then calling that political philosophy an "ideology" drains all meaning from those words.

Richard Reeb had a great essay on this topic that I read some years back, and his meditation on the word "ideology," along with the equally egregious terms "values" and "culture," deserves notice:

[Ideology] too is a contribution of German thought [like the terms culture and values], particularly Karl Marx, who understood ideology as the rationalization of the ruling class for its dominance. He is famous for describing politics as nothing more than the organized oppression of one class by another. The real force in human life, he argued, was control of the means of production. With the Communist revolution, supposedly no one would control production and the state could be reduced to mere administration with no more politics.

[...]

Whenever someone influenced by the alleged insights of Marxism seeks to discredit an opposing viewpoint, he will call it an ideology. The object may be similar to Marx’s, viz., that the opposing view rationalizes a class interest, or that the viewpoint is unrealistic or at variance with the facts. 

Ideology is surely not with difficulties, but it is often applied unfairly to political philosophies which are not only not rationalizations, unrealistic or at variance with the facts, but which are grounded in human nature. The best known to us is found in the Declaration of Independence.

Reeb's argument on how liberals like to throw around the term ideology to discredit their political foes seems prescient when compared to what Klein wrote about Paul Ryan.  But the larger picture is as Reeb says:  the truths proclaimed in the Declaration about the foundation of political life in the highest sense is not an ideology at all.  In its essence, it is the absolute antithesis of ideology in that those truths are grounded in a permanent human nature that is self evident for those creatures who are capable of reason.

Simply pointing out the trite observation that we are all ideological undercuts the entire foundation of the conservative argument.