Ideological Tourism
Americans used to be famous in Europe for having very short vacations. If American vacationers ever traveled to Europe, it was by way of package tours that crammed something on the order of six capital cities in seven days, or something similarly breakneck. Travelers got up in a new hotel in a different city every day, got on a local chartered tour bus, and were carted past the city’s best tourist sites before being dumped on a sidewalk with plenty of souvenir shops, probably sponsored in partnership with the tour bus operator.
Everyone got on the same bus in the morning and knew where the itinerary would take them. Tourists could take the requisite sets of photos of all the top sites and say they’d visited them all in person. Everyone got to know each other fairly well as they shared the relaxing ride, and they soon had friends around them for protection against pickpockets and other potential dangers at well-trammeled tourist traps. The whole affair was semi-affordable and efficient. It provided the strength, comfort, and moral support one can expect from a friendly group of fellow travelers. The impromptu family spent several days together experiencing all the memorable European treasures in climate controlled comfort.
This seems to be the way our politics works now. While the internet might have allowed for greater diversity of thought, all the main routes through our politics are plied by hoards of like-minded individuals who all agree on the same sets of ideas, no matter how little those ideas would seem to depend on one another. We might call these clumps of shared ideas “ideologies,” except that the concept seems too superficial for a label as presumptuous as “ideology.”
Maybe our politics has always worked this way for most people most of the time, since very few normal voters are or can be directly involved in our national politics. It’s just easier to combine several concepts together for convenience and efficiency.
It resembles ideological package tours. Thus, if you’re on the Trump Political Tour, you expect to get up every morning with your ideological fellow travelers, share breakfast together, and ride the bus together as you travel past the top five tourist sites. Enjoy your traditional breakfast of sausage and eggs, then get on the bus. Out the window to your right, you can admire the monuments to the Pro-Life cause, Gun Rights, and later we’ll stop at a museum documenting the horrors of unrestricted immigration.
At the other hotel around the corner, those on the Biden Political Tour enjoy a common breakfast of fine cheeses, tasteful pastries, fresh fruits and vegetables, and a satisfying cup of herbal tea. These passengers climb onto their own bus to admire the classical architectural sites out the window to your left: Campus Protests, Deindustrialization to save the planet, Family Planning Rights, and the world famous Monument to Physical Identity, with all its glorious features.
The thing is, whichever tour you’re booked on, you aren’t supposed to miss the bus or get off it prematurely. You’re supposed to stick with it to see all the included sights—and not to get lost. You can have photos of your travel made along the way, so you can show your fellows back home that you did what was expected, that you didn’t stray or get suspiciously side-tracked. You stocked up on the right overpriced trinkets and souvenirs to bring home, maybe as gifts for those who haven’t yet been able to make the trip. Also, because you traveled in a supportive group, you didn’t get hoodwinked by hucksters and conniving thieves eager to prey on a clutch of distracted tourists, gaping in stunned admiration at all the sensory splendor.
All the different components belong together in each tour somehow, even if only by convention. It makes life easier, as such things do, because although we have big brains, thinking costs us too much energy. Having to reconstruct our political philosophies regularly would take too long. Indecision doesn’t come cheap. If we imagine our primitive forebears struggling to survive in the wild, it makes more sense for them to reach collective conclusions and avoid reflecting as much as possible. They made decisions together as a tribe, as a primitive form of a common tour bus.
It’s more about sticking with the group than it is about studying the details of all the ideological component parts. It’s not about examining their failings or weaknesses. It’s about the comfort of the familiar. That the shared experience runs according to plan in air-conditioned comfort merely signals that things are on the right track.
And why shouldn’t it be? It’s only a vacation trip, after all.
Probably most won’t see this, but I’m listening to Peter Robinson talk about his speech written for Reagan, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” We had some proud times as a country.
Here’s a link; it’s really worth your time:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-charles-c-w-cooke-podcast/id1647660323?i=1000654294636
A historical perspective on campus protests then and now: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/genuine-antiwar-activism-vs-violent-extremism/?_gl=1