1. Converse (Cont.):
   
   Ideology is fundamentally the knowledge
   of what-goes-with-what.
   
   In contemporary American politics the knowledge that a
   politician opposes raising the minimum wage makes it
   virtually certain that the politician favors a balanced
   budget, opposes unfunded federal mandates to the states,
   opposes universal health care, favors ending the entitlement
   status of welfare, opposes affirmative action, and so on.
   
   In short, a conservative and almost certainly a Republican.
   
   
2. Converse called this bundling of issues constraint –
   the ability, based on one or two issue positions, to predict other
   (seemingly unrelated) issue positions.
   
   
3. The Problem of Logic
   
   In our current political system one party - the Republicans -
   favors tight regulation of private personal behavior (abortion,
   homosexual rights, assisted suicide, etc.) and low regulation of
   the economy; while the opposite party - the Democrats - favor
   little if any regulation of private personal behavior and much
   greater regulation of economic behavior.
   
   There is no logically consistent philosophy that underlies these issues.
   
   To make matters even more incoherent, the issue of gun control
   does not fit comfortably into the category of an "economic"
   issue or a "social" issue. Viewed as a "social" issue, gun
   control has the two parties on the wrong sides - the
   Republicans oppose further regulation, the Democrats
   want more regulation.
   
   
4. How do such disparate policy positions get bound together?
   How could such an incoherent system persist?
   
   
5. Logic in its strict deductive form is not necessary -
   belief, passionate belief, is the necessary ingredient.
   
   Converse: "What is important is that the elites familiar
   with the total shapes of these belief systems have experienced
   them as logically constrained clusters of ideas, within
   which one part necessarily follows from another"
   
   Madison: "as long as the connection subsists between his
   reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will
   have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will
   be objects to which the latter will attach themselves."
   
   Hoffer: "the facts on which the true believer bases his
   conclusions must not be derived from his experience or
   observation but from holy writ .... it is startling to realize
   how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.
   What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable
   unbeliefs."
   
   
6. For political elites, constraint and intensity of belief
   (passion) are two sides of the same coin.
   
   

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