I have a theory, but you have an ideology!

Americans across the political spectrum do not recognize their own country anymore. Instead, they often experience themselves as strangers or outsiders to their own land. At the same time there is wide recognition that the old certainties and institutions of liberal democracy are growing shaky. Perhaps even a change of regime is afoot. This lecture begins from the premise that much of the disorientation and disarray of our present moment is ideological in nature. Yet Americans fail to realize this fact because they have assigned ideology as something that only afflicts their opponents.

To escape this ideological vertigo, we need not only to understand the ways in which we all have ideologies, but also learn to view the world through the eyes of our political adversaries. This lecture offers a basic conception of ideology and explains how it might be used to help both experts and ordinary citizens begin to reorient in politics.