America's Ideologies
Coined in 1796 by the French philosopher Antoine Louis
Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy
(1754-1836), the word "ideology" was not in the lexicon of people who
lived North America prior to 1776 and the writing of the Declaration of
Independence. Doubtless indigenous
peoples, Africans, and Europeans of various complexions possessed abstract cultural and social ideas that pertain to what
"ideology" signifies ----freedom, tyranny, law, thief, justice, corruption, morality, domination, equality, patriotism, happiness,
sovereignty, right, legality, and so forth. Concepts exist prior to our abusing
them, or locking them up in cages of language.
Otherwise, we would be unable to speak about political economy and
unfinished political histories. Destutt deTracy's Enlightenment neologism, replete
with its emphasis on sensations, is crucial for discovering what it means to be
an American, although the robust tradition of condemning or trivializing intellectual commerce prevails
in the United States of America in 2017.
We are less than anxious to have American citizens dwell on knowledge of
ideology. Contemporary education in the USA is "p-----whipped" by the
hegemony of testing. We are not
hospitable to liberated thinking.
Our inhospitality has serious consequences. For example, most American voters had a superficial grasp of how
ideology functions in segregating a Democracy from a Republic in the November
2016 elections. That factoid , the trumping of cold reason by hot emotion and
the "legal tyranny" of the Electoral College secured the Presidency
for a wode male. Ignorance of ideology matters. We wouldn't be
corrupting the young in America were we to do a better job of teaching them
about the soil on which they walk or the ground where ideologies grow.
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The
real dirt about how ideologies come into being in the USA is not highly publicized. Few Americans know jack about the science of
ideas that the aristocrat Destutt de Tracy constructed. Strict construction, however, does not authorize our confusing what he had in mind with simple, history-impoverished
political theories. When we ask,
"What does it mean to be an American?", I would suggest we have to
ask quite embarrassing questions of histories. How do we, who are not direct descendents
of indigenous peoples, live blissfully
in territory that by virtue of jus naturale (natural law) belongs to
them? How do we justify our
criminality?
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When
we revisit the hidden dimensions of
the American Revolution, the dirty
laundry of genocide and enslavement begins to pile up. Read the British humor in Nicholas Guyatt's Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial
Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016) and the remarkable scholarship
in Robert G. Parkinson's The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation
in the American Revolution (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). What is becoming known better and better now
is that through the colonial newspapers and broadsides and other printed
materials, not only was the case being made for the rights of those people who
resented blind loyalty to the British
Crown, but the case was made for them to be independent in a very specious
way. To confirm their special
independence that contradicted the
beautiful words written in the
second draft of the Declaration of Independence, meant that they had to
diminish and reduce to derogation other peoples, particularly so-called Native Americans and Africans. They had to
insist that those two populations did not and would not ever deserve to be fully invested in the
enterprise of liberation from what was called the tyranny of the king.
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Indeed,
using various arguments, especially those from what was known as natural
history at the time, the founding mothers and fathers of the USA set those
two populations completely outside the pale. This is very important in
terms of what Americans do need to
know in the 21st century about the
origins of America's odd ideologies ; about
how we practice them in the ambiance of the America democratic experiment,
post-capitalism, and intense globalization; about patriotic insanity as the
ship of state drifts from democracy to fascism.
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Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February 5, 2017
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