In reviewing The Promise of Parties, I noted that Muirhead had contributed meaningfully to the project of providing better normative theorertical grounding for political parties. In reviewing Political Ideologies and Political Parties, Muirhead begins to do the same for ideologically organized parties.

Muirhead notes an ambiguity in my showing concern for the outsized influence of ideologues while at the same time respecting their often divisive work. This is no accident. Muirhead is right to criticize the commonplace view “that today’s ideological partisans are simply betraying the public by imposing ideologies on a public that is centrist and pragmatic.” For one, so-called moderates are not necessarily centrist nor pragmatic as much as ideologically inconsistent. More importantly, however, there is little reason to believe that some convex combination of polarized elites is somehow more right or just than any position at the poles. Ideologues may not be right, but they are at least trying.

This sets up another ambiguity, between “the task of political theory, for many, … to get at the right or true ideology, to ascertain the most reasonable conception of justice” and its task to describe normatively desirable institutions of governance. We have and must have normative views on good public policy itself as well as normative views on the procedures of policymaking, irrespective of the goodness of their product. But these questions are in tension with one another.

The answer to the procedural question usually involves a lot of democracy. But the menu of democratic institutions is long. Some will empower ideologues more than others. Some will empower compromise. It is hard not to judge these procedures by their outcomes. If one thinks certain rights are important, one might sneak them in to the very definition of democracy. If one thinks certain freedoms are important, one might limit the power of democracy to infringe on them.

And in the abstract, why not? We do think certain rights and certain freedoms are important. A just society is not merely a democratic one, but one with many values, and reason is not neutral on which of those values is best. Ideologues can be champions of those values.

But only if those ideologues are thoughtful.

In reviewing Promise, I argued that we want ideologues who are also partisans. Here I think we want ideologues who are also political theorists. Muirhead observes that I show that ideologies are not coherent philosophies but compromise coalitions, and they are. But they are compromise coalitions crafted by people who are at least attracted to the idea of coherent philosophies.

The veneer of philosophy is not enough, of course. Recent scholarship on ideology in the mass public suggests that progressivism and conservatism provide many voters with little more than a social identity. And that is not going to change. But the best way into politics for the normative work on the substantive questions has to be through ideology. And the normative work on the procedural questions perhaps should account for that.