Making Sense of Political Ideology: The Power of Language in Democracy (review)

In Making Sense of Political Ideology, Bernard Brock, Mark Huglen, James Klumpp, and Sharon Howell observe that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, governance in the United States lacks the depth and direction needed to adequately manage the important political issues of our time. The authors attribute this threat of “political gridlock” to a growing separation between political policies and a coherent ideological framework that provides a historical context through which policymakers and citizens can understand and respond to changing social and political conditions (1–2). They argue that a revitalization of four political positions—reactionary, conservative, liberal, and radical—can free U.S. politics from the dangers of political gridlock by reconnecting political language and action to the stabilizing and legitimizing functions of political ideology.

The authors provide a rationale for the ways in which political ideology can contribute to political communication and center their project around three key terms: ideology, political philosophy, and political motive or frame (38). According to the authors, ideology provides consistency for political actions and assures that these “actions and their rationale are not isolated but woven into a broader fabric of understanding, anticipation, and value” (40). Similarly, political philosophy assumes that underlying values and beliefs generate consistency in political behavior. The authors assert that both political ideology and political philosophy function to create coherence in discourse surrounding political action. Influenced by the work of Kenneth Burke, the authors view this discourse “as structured in motivational frameworks” (45). Understanding political discourse in terms of political motivation, the authors argue that democracy can only exist when communicative exchange among citizens taps into fundamental values and beliefs that create shared meaning and help citizens make judgments about political actions. For these authors, the revitalization of political positions can help political discourse reconnect to an ideological framework.

Political positions have historically served as touchstones within political debates. Political positions organize debates in that each position—reactionary, conservative, liberal, and radical—represents a different attitude toward political policy. However, the authors argue, patterns of political reversals on specific issues throughout history make understanding political positions in terms of specific policy problematic. For example, in regard to the role of the federal government in American politics, left and right reversals throughout history leave political positions devoid of their ability to serve as a stabilizing force within political life. In order to ground political positions within an ideological framework, the authors offer what they call a “functional approach” (75). This approach grounds each of the four political positions in terms of its relationship to political structure and political change within (or outside of) that structure. According to Brock, Huglen, Klumpp, and Howell, not only can the functional approach to political positions help account for various issues within political policy debates, but the relationship that each position has to the other also helps to provide stability within political debates over time.

Along with their functional approach to defining political positions, the authors provide rhetorical strategies that help link political positions to a deeper ideological framework. Once again building on the work of Kenneth Burke, the authors map the language of the four political positions onto the pentad, arguing that political actors, defining situations from different political positions, will each shape their attitudes toward political structure and change through a different element of the pentad. For example, positions on the political extremes (reactionary and radical) reject the structure of present policy and are motivated differently because of their opposing attitudes toward change. According to the authors, because reactionaries reject the structure and the progressive drift of policy, they argue from purpose as they attempt to solve political problems by bringing policy back to an earlier political moment. Radicals, on the other hand, reject political structure but accept political change, grounding radical discourse in Burke’s notion of agency. For the authors, using...