Ideology

The way you think, what you think – about society, ethics, politics, justice,about poverty and wealth, about education and the health and welfare systems, about crime and punishment, about human rights, race, religion and ethnicity, unemployment and the minimum wage, about immigration and asylum seekers, sexuality and gender, the environment, the ecosystem and global warming, about war and revolution, about terrorists and freedom fighters – is a matter of language. You make up your mind about these and a host of other questions in and through the words you and others use to describe them. Politicians know this, of course, not least because the politician’s job is almost exclusively concerned with talking (and to a lesser extent writing) – in parliament, on TV and radio (if she gets the chance), on the streets and in election campaigns, in her weekly ‘surgery’, on the telephone, tweeting, on the internet and in blogs, in newspapers, in committees and other meetings. The politician’s job is to talk, to manipulate language in order to influence the way others think about and see the world. Her job is all about ‘ideology’: ideology, the way that people think about their world, is produced and altered in and through language. Language changes, and even creates the social and political world in which we live. Ideology in that sense is language. Some readers might even feel that our decision to speak of the politician here as female is itself an instance of ideology – for example, as ‘politically correct’ language. To have called her a ‘him’ could likewise, of course, be called ‘ideological’ (gender-biased, patriarchal, sexist or misogynist just in its assumptions that politicians are, by default, men).