Okay. I'm very non-ideological on education ... it's just a question of 'what works'. If forcing everyone to go to a government school gave us a highly-educated (in the true sense) population, I would at least consider it. And I'm strongly in favor of making teaching a very well paid profession, so that when you graduate with your degree in engineering, you don't make your choice of job -- teaching or engineering -- based on financial rewards, because they both pay the same. And I'm not against unions on principle, as perhaps I've said. More than once I've given the example of the West Coast longshoremen, who the Communist Party led in a hard-fought strike in 1934 -- a General Strike in San Francisco -- establishing a strong union, and turning that job from casual labor into a profession. Anyway, maybe one or the other of us should start a thread specifically on education. Oh yes ... on Diane Ravitch. I used to like her ...or maybe I should say I liked what she was thirty years ago... but she seems to have made a total flip-flop in her views. So I do read her to learn about the deficiencies of Charter Schools, see seems now to be completely uncritical of the Left. And when you become uncritical of your own side, your value as a political thinker plummets. Although I may have missed something because I seem to get a dozen emails from her blog every day and don't have time to read them all.
I believe that all political parties -- all mass parties, the ones capable of getting into government, not necessarily the little sects -- are in fact based on the perceived material interests of their supporters. That is, their supporters vote for the party based on their belief (which may be wrong) that this party in power will result in a better situation for them, the supporters. The supporters may or may not have something we could call an "ideology": a set of beliefs about how the world works which are abstracted from day to day events. This is especially true of American political parties -- some European parties, in particular the Communists, were an exception: for many decades the Communist Parties in France and Italy, although certainly based around an ideology (as interpreted by the leaders of the USSR), were also the mass parties of the industrial working classes of their countries. But even here, at least some of their support was despite, not because, of their ideology. There were good Catholic dockers and steelworkers who voted Communist because they liked the domestic program of that party, not because they wanted to make their countries into the equivalent of the Soviet Union. A political ideology is more or less the equivalent of the basic laws of physics, but applied to society (and informed by history, which is the -- imperfect -- record of society as it was in the past, the closest thing we get to an experimental laboratory). Ordinary people could not articulate an elaborate ideology -- they don't read von Mises or Burke or Rawls or Marx -- but they do usually have a set of 'beliefs': everyone should stand on their own two feet, we owe loyalty to our country, life is unfair and society should intervene to make it more fair, everyone should be equal (or have equal opportunities), greed is bad, etc. In fact, it makes more sense to see liberalism (or progressivism, or whatever they call it now) and conservatism as dispositions -- on top of these dispositions elements of ideology sit, and sometimes contradictory elements occupy the same person's mind. The danger of 'having' an ideology is that you forget it's a simplification of reality, and cannot be rigidly applied in its simple form to all situations. Just as Newton's Laws of Motion break down at very high velocities, and assumptions about cause and effect no longer apply at the sub-atomic level, so our political beliefs may not apply in their simple form in extreme situations. This is why conservatives will be in favor of closing down pro-fascist newspapers at certain times, and Leftists will oppose extending the vote to women at others. There's a lot more to discuss in your post, but I want to keep my response uncharacteristically short. (For one thing, I think the term "racism", as I said, is, if not explored, more of a distractor and muddler than a clarifier. In one sense, everyone is a "racist". Also: to note that the fact that a person, or even a whole organization, was racist in the past, is not to show that they are racist now (however we're using the term 'racist')). People can change. My favorite example of this is one Thomas Tarrants. An example to us all.
Why don't you drop all this crap and just focus on the securing of individual human rights, as this nation committed to in our founding and framing? ANTI-SEMITES GONNA ANTI-SEMITE: Plame Falsely Accuses Jew of Leaking CIA Identity: Anti-Semitic candidate recycles debunked smears, wrongly accuses Scooter Libby.
