The second presentation in the series called "Simply Politics". Political Ideologies - Left-Centre-Right is suitable for History and International Relations from Year 9 to university level. It contains the following: ideology, liberal, conservatives, socialist, fascists, ecologists and religious perspectives. Examples of countries, political ideas and ideologies.

1. POLITICS
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
WORLD AFFAIRS
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
LEFT-CENTRE-RIGHT

2. IDEOLOGY, TRUTH AND POWER
• Any short or single-sentence definition of ideology is likely to
stimulate more questions than it answers. Nevertheless, it provides a
useful and necessary starting point. In this book, ideology is
understood as the following:
• An ideology is a more or less coherent set of ideas that provides the basis
for organized political action, whether this is intended to preserve, modify or
overthrow the existing system of power.
• All ideologies therefore (a) offer an account of the existing order,
usually in the form of a ‘world-view’, (b) advance a model of a desired
future, a vision of the ‘good society’, and (c) explain how political
change can and should be brought about – how to get from (a) to (b).

4. LIBERALS PERSPECTIVES ON IDEOLOGY
• Liberals, particularly during the Cold War period, have viewed
ideology as an officially sanctioned belief system that claims a
monopoly of truth, often through a spurious claim to be scientific.
• Ideology is therefore inherently repressive, even totalitarian; its prime
examples are communism and fascism.

5. EXAMPLES OF LIBERAL IDEOLOGIES
• National liberal parties
exist today, for instance
in Austria, where the
ideology is one of the
three traditional
ideological strains in
the country, and
Romania, where it is at
the base of the oldest
and second-largest
political party of the
country.

6. CONSERVATIVES PERSPECTIVES ON IDEOLOGY
• Conservatives have traditionally regarded ideology as a manifestation
of the arrogance of rationalism.
• Ideologies are elaborate systems of thought that are dangerous or
unreliable because, being abstracted from reality, they establish
principles and goals that lead to repression or are simply
unachievable.
• In this light, socialism and liberalism are clearly ideological.

7. CONSERVATIVES COUNTRIES
• Austria
• Somalia
• South Korea
• United Kingdom
• Colombia
• Turkey
• Singapore
• Australia
• Israel
• United States

8. SOCIALISTS PERSPECTIVES ON IDEOLOGY
• Socialists, following Marx, have seen ideology as a body of ideas that
conceal the contradictions of class society, thereby promoting false
consciousness and political passivity amongst subordinate classes.
Liberalism is the classic ruling-class ideology.
• Later Marxists adopted a neutral concept of ideology, regarding it as
the distinctive ideas of any social class, including the working class.

9. SOCIALISTS COUNTRIES

10. FASCISTS PERSPECTIVES ON IDEOLOGY
• Fascists are often dismissive of ideology as an over-systematic, dry
and intellectualized form of political understanding that is based on
mere reason rather than passion and the will. The Nazis preferred to
portray their own ideas as a Weltanschauung or ‘world view’, not as a
systematic philosophy.

11. FASCISTS COUNTRIES
• As of October 2014, there are no
countries that are considered
fascist according to generally
accepted definitions of fascism.
There are several countries with
significant, active fascist or neo-
fascist movements and with some
representation in national politics.
Countries with fascist elements
and ideologies present in their
governments include Syria,
Bulgaria, Armenia, Venezuela,
Bolivia, France, Denmark, Greece,
Spain, Ukraine, the Netherlands
and Hungary.

12. ECOLOGISTS PERSPECTIVES ON IDEOLOGY
• Ecologists have tended to regard all conventional political doctrines
as part of a super-ideology of industrialism. Ideology is thus tainted
by its association with arrogant humanism and growth orientated
economics – liberalism and socialism being its most obvious
examples.

13. ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE COUNTRIES
• Iceland
• Switzerland
• Costa Rica
• Sweden
• Luxembourg
• Germany
• Cuba
• Colombia
• Singapore
• France

14. RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES ON IDEOLOGY
• Religious fundamentalists have treated key religious texts as
ideology, on the grounds that, by expressing the revealed word of
God, they provide a programme for comprehensive social
reconstruction.
• Secular ideologies are therefore rejected because they are not
founded on religious principles and so lack moral substance.

15. RELIGIOUS COUNTRIES
• Among the 65 countries
surveyed by Gallup
International, Thailand led
the list of the most religious
nations with 94 percent of
the population considering
itself to be religious.
Armenia, Bangladesh,
Georgia and Morocco
followed Thailand in the
ranking.

16. CATEGORIZE POLITICAL IDEAS AND IDEOLOGIES
• Many attempts have been made to categorize political ideas and
ideologies, and to relate them to one another.
• The most familiar and firmly established method of doing this is the
left–right political spectrum.
• This is a linear spectrum that locates political beliefs at some point
between two extremes, the far left and the far right.
• Terms such as ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ are widely used to sum up a
person's political beliefs or position, and groups of people are
referred to collectively as ‘the left’, ‘the right’ and indeed ‘the centre’.
• There is also broad agreement about where different ideas and
ideologies are located along this spectrum.

18. POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
• Political ideologies are in fact highly complex collections of beliefs,
values and doctrines, which any kind of spectrum is forced to
oversimplify. Attempts have nevertheless been made to develop more
sophisticated political spectrums that embody two or more
dimensions.
• The linear spectrum, for example, has sometimes been criticized
because the ideologies at its extremes, communism and fascism,
exhibit similarities. In particular, communist and fascist regimes have
both developed repressive, authoritarian forms of political rule, which
some have described as ‘totalitarian’.
• As a result, an alternative political spectrum might be horseshoe-
shaped, indicating that the extreme points on the left and the right
tend to converge, distinguishing both from the ‘democratic’ beliefs of
liberalism, socialism and conservatism.