Politics and Ideology 101
There can be no politics without an ideology however rudimentary or elementary. Ideology, or a coherent set of ideas, drives politics even in its most simplified form. Inclass, you are taught that even the denial of ideology is an ideological stance often masking collusion and complicity with the status quo.
However when you constantly short change others, you are likely to end up short changing yourself. In the absence of issue-driven politics, the populace lapse into apathy, frustration and indignation which fuel communal violence, criminality and a widespread hostility to politics and politicians. When the former president of Senegal after two-terms of fourteen years attempted another term in office, the entire country rose as one single unified voice to send him packing. Nothing has been heard from the deluded old man ever since. The political graveyard is indeed filled with the bones of indispensable men, as Charles de Gaulle famously observed.
Lula’s main regret was that he could not secure another term in office to finish what he started before the conservative faction of the political elite took their country back. In what is regarded as a modern miracle of social engineering, the former shoe-maker and dedicated socialist lifted more than forty million of his compatriots from the trough of poverty. The only other feat to rival this in modern times is the relentless poverty alleviation scheme of Chinese state capitalism.
It is this ideological oscillation or what Karl Polanyi has described as the Double Movement that has characterized political developments in liberal democracies since the Second World War. It is a dialectical tug of war in which forces for the marketization of the economy find their vision stoutly opposed by those who seek to rein in the market forces in order to protect the populace against the vagaries of the market.
These are nations yet to coalesce around an existential ideal and with political elites so fractious that getting them to agree on anything is a virtually impossible task. In such circumstances much depends on rigorous pacting before some substantial elite consensus about power-sharing can be arrived at.
Six years after and five years into governance, the coalition is still holding, but the ideological vacuum that first surfaced after the coalition’s greatest triumph has now returned to haunt it. Pundits have always predicted that this was the surest route to political paralysis among contending possibilities.
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