What is going on?

Broadly speaking, I would define ideologies as the stories that we use to describe what people “should do” and “should not do.” People develop, adopt, and remix these stories as they wrestle with the buffet table of resources and constraints they have in life. It is really hard to take a step back and see the ideologies we use in life because these ideologies are the building blocks of what we consider to be reality. To question how we make sense of reality is to risk feeling like a person trapped in a limbo of being in between “the Matrix” and “The Real World.”

Race, for example, is an ideology. As Fields and Fields point out in the book Racecraft, proponents and critics of diversity rhetoric are just as likely to assume and reinforce the story that humans can be divided into groups with inborn differences that are similar to the ways that describe the subcategories of dogs. If you question the baseline assumption that racial groups are like breeds of humans, you should expect puzzled looks and responses like “it is obviously true that races exist.”

I am genuinely wondering what you believe are the most common and popular ideologies among folks in the US? What are the stories that most people use, without conscious and critical reflection, to describe what they think people should and should not do?

I would probably say we have a combination of critical multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and HR managerialism for a big chunk of people. Among another big chunk, I would say it's a combo of prosperity gospel tied to western individualism (instead of christianity), cultural nationalism that is often phrased as populism, and good old fashioned charismatic authority. In the last election, Harris was the stand-in for the former and Trump was a stand-in for the latter. I remember joking with my wife that the election seemed to be between a civil rights attorney serving as a HR manager for the country vs. the leader of a family-based corporation that loves prosperity gospel mega stars and believes that the world's problems would be solved if we just let them take the wheel and ask questions later. Viewed from that perspective, it gets a little easier to make sense of why some people surprised us with their voting choices and rationales for those choices.

What do you all think?