Defending Ideology

By Kleinheider Posted on November 30, 2008 at 9:12 pm

In the wake of President George W. Bush:

But what’s more striking still is the elevation of managerial competence to the highest possible qualification for political office. Obviously, after eight years of nepotistic croynism, competence does look like a breath of fresh air. And I can understand, as well, the automatic suspicion of “ideology” (a word that has a very precise meaning in much political theory, thus making it a bit difficult for me to use it the way it is used in ordinary political commentary….but I’ll try…) after eight years of delusional neoconservative true believers. But politics cannot, finally, be reduced merely to technical management and administration. Means must be deployed in the service of particular ends, and the choice of those ends can never be specified purely by managerialism. In the midst of a serious crisis, some ends are beyond dispute: get the economy back on track. But what does that actually mean? What does a well-functioning economy look like? Only a political - only what mainstream commentators call an ideological - vision can actually answer that question. Is a healthy economy measured entirely by corporate profits? The people in charge of “righting” the economy must have answers to these questions before they can put their much-ballyhooed seriousness and competence to work - and our collective obsession with technocratic skill obscures the answers to these questions. Indeed, it prevents us from even asking these questions.

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Tags: Ideology, managerialism, technocracy