Ideology is the ultimate aphrodisiac?

A story in three acts: Richad Posner bashes ideology—

For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene—provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than on conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past.

Reihan brings conservatism into it—

At its best, I think conservatism is Posnerism — a skeptical but mildly meliorist approach that draws on insights from market liberalism, inherited tradition, etc. As the gap between conservatism and Posnerism has grown, conservatism has been the worse for it.

Henry Kissinger slaps them both on the back of the head, Three Stooges style—

When they proclaim the end of ideology, it's like an old man proclaiming the end of sex. Because he doesn't feel it anymore, he thinks it has disappeared.

The man who scrubs ideology out of politics hobbles his ability to argue for or against anything. Pragmatic measures move us toward one goal or another, but we have to settle on the goal first. Do we want freedom (whose freedom?), virtue (which virtue?), happiness, stability, liquor...?

I can anticipate one counterargument: People have desires, and, given that politics is pretty bad at convincing people to change their desires ("You flapper girls don't really want to get junked on gin, do you?"), it should content itself with satisfying them, within the limits of prudence, fairness, justice, etc. Citizens want what they want, and the state has to play the hand it's been dealt.

The rebuttal to that rebuttal is that people don't just want what they want. Lots of desires are inauthentic: advertising creates desires that are, in important ways, false and can be (should be?) ignored or transcended. Bleeding-heart pathos creates a feeling of humanistic goodwill that's equally false. (Translation of that last sentence: Is there really much of a difference between a hit of crack and a picture of a kitten? Both create happiness, and both kinds of happiness are cheap and should be rejected. Politicians usually present pictures of poor people or oppressed victims of foreign regimes rather than kittens, but the difference is cosmetic.)

Most ideologies designate some kind of "safe space" where men can trust their desires. Utilitarians say "My moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions are kinda screwy, but I can always tell what makes me happy." Libertarians say "People talk a lot of nonsense; the only way to find out what they really think is to watch where they put their money." Liberals say "Religion, consumption, employment, and politics are awash in false consciousness and hegemonic manipulation, but I know I can trust my emotions." (Rainer Werner Fassbinder made weepy melodramas in order to disprove that last one—the fact that you shed real tears at the preposterously melodramatic climax of All That Heaven Allows shows that your feelings are deeply unreliable.) In each case, the trust in desire is misplaced.

There's no way to tell trustworthy desires from untrustworthy ones—you'll never really know whether you want that hot new thing because you want it or because you've been told to want it. The only way out of this quagmire is to ignore what people want (or say they want) and focus on what they should want, which puts us back in the realm of philosophical and theological debate, which means I still have a job. So it all works out in the end.