Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
Your construction of a "general consensus" IS the ideology, a very specific one.

As for ordinary people, most of them are clearly either conservative or liberal, just passive in their engagement. The people whose voting behavior can be said to be "in the middle" are very few in the United States, and this behavior is typically the refuge of the "innocent and confused."
I'm sorry but I completely disagree.

Talk to most people, especially outside the US, and they have a very hazy notion of any political ideology. Having an ideology is something of a privilege, it requires having the leisure time and/or the education to develop one.

In general, most people want a few things, like enough money to support themselves and their families, to feel safe in their own homes and on their own streets, for their children to have more opportunities than their parents and - most of all - to be left alone to live their own lives.

Ideologues exploit these basic wants and needs to push a systematised agenda. For example, opponents to universal healthcare in the US exploit the fear that rising taxes will prevent people from bettering their own lives and the lives of their children. The fact that such tactics are utterly transparent to you or I is a reflection of our privileged intellectual status.

One of the reasons everybody in the UK is obsessed with Brexit is that it cuts completely across political lines and classes. You might say that it represents a general ideological struggle within the consensus about how we want to be governed. This is, however, an utter aberration in UK politics and should not be taken as in any way indicative of how things are generally.