Few ideologies are granitic. Are any?

Marxian socialism billed itself as anti-capitalist all the way through its transit of memes, starting out in the Communist Manifesto advocating policies that we all live by, today; boasting, of course, of the ultimate stateless society, but accepting the necessity of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” which proved to be what it sounded like, totalitarian tyranny; but that could not sustain a complex consumer economy, so forms of heavy dirigisme and even mercantilism were fallen back upon, leading to the practice of “state capitalism” that can be called “state socialism” and even “market socialism,” none of which look like in practice the theory as propounded previously. So Marxians end up being post-Marxians or neo-Marxists or what-have-you, and Gramsci and the Frankfurters cooked up a “cultural” variant using the politics of division and cultural group warfare, to establish a socialist state.

And, post-Jon Stewart (the most influential political figure of our time on this issue), progressives began defending transfer state dirigisme as “socialism” rather than defend it (as was previously done) “democratic.”

In every step of the above are lies and evasions.

But the arc of any ideological transit changes what the ideology “is.”

Nationalism starts out anti-imperialist, but sometimes morphs into some variant of imperialism (the U.S. and Nazi Germany, for example). When a person calls himself a nationalist, are they embracing the anti-empire or the pro-/neo-empire position? Figure that one out, because most self-proclaimed nationalists do not seem to know.

And with nationalism, it’s kind of interesting: in a globalist context, with cosmopolitans trying to set up a world government through vast treaty entanglements, nationalism can serve as a buffer, a more-local defense of sovereignty to usurpations by large bodies, whether they be China, the U.N., or … the U.S. foreign policy establishment, all of which have imperialist flavors.

On this side of nationalism, there is federalism — the foundation for the American “experiment” — and other forms of anti-imperialism and anti-nationalism.

And since everyone in politics makes allegiances, you will often find nationalists making alliances with this imperialist or that, that federalist and this.

Which means that using any of these terms as a set focus of opprobrium is problematic.

I have it easier, though: I am on the far side away from socialism, so whichever form it takes, I’m against it. And I’m against all imperialisms, too.

Though I try not to let that crows out my understanding of the play of empires in the past, and their role in setting up modernity.

Think dialectically, I think Chris Matthew Sciabarra might say.