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Good article. In the 1950s or 1960s conservatives needed more ideological rigor. A widespread attitude in those days was to go along with the prevailing liberalism of the day, and the National Review conservatives were right in pointing out more of the dangers and fallacies of liberal assumptions than the Eisenhower or Rockefeller Republicans of that day did. But now we have a far more ideological politics, and it's wise to step back every now and then from the fray and examine the slogans and prepackaged ideologies of the day in a more dispassionate and disinterested light.

Forty years ago people were more willing to accept a consensus handed down from political, media, and intellectual leaders, and needed to question it more, to ask whether our goals were the right ones and our means appropriate to achieve them. Today, what's handed down to us already quite partisan and polarized, so if we want to think independently and deeply, we have to call intellectual party lines into question.

Where I might take issue is on just whether "ideological" is quite the right word in every case. Some people are passionately ideological today, but on the whole the political scene is less dominated by ideologies and political religions than it once was. Truly deep gulfs like those between fascism and democracy or communism and liberalism aren't a factor on the political scene now. It maybe that in some of the cases where he uses the word "ideological" one might better use "partisan," or "factional," or "polarized," or "tribalist, or "militant." A lot of the venom in our political life has to do with overcoming the old passionate conflicts between socialism and capitalism but retaining the polarizing rhetoric that developed in previous decades. So we bring to ordinary partisan conflicts the passions of cold war.

The struggle between the West and militant Islamicism may be the exception. In this we see a return to Cold War attitudes: a militant position with respect to foreign affairs and a liberal-conservative consensus on things like budget deficits. Convinced that what really matters is the big ideological conflict with the foreign foe, the adminstration is less concerned with spending and the size of government, but this agreement doesn't affect the strong political passions and dissention expressed in the media and on the Internet.