My friend Kevin Holtsberry writes:

As I am sure you are aware, this issue has been a part of the history of conservatism in America. Russell Kirk of course eschewed all ideology as being by definition not conservative; conservatism as anti-ideology. For Kirk ideology was “armed doctrine” and was not compatible with flexible and organic thought and response. Others seem comfortable using the term as you have; a sort of intellectual guide to issues and ideas. Men like Whitaker Chambers and James Burnham certainly seemed to me to have an ideological approach. Interestingly, Chambers and Burnham seemed quite pragmatic when it came to actual electoral politics (both supported Nixon I believe). It was only in constructing their world view that they used ideology. WFB seemed to have a less obviously structured approach to things. He was a communicator, by and large, not a thinker. Guiding a movement and giving it voice is a different job then laying out the philosophical underpinnings. For WFB certain things were settled, the argument was about how best to achieve shared goals. Is his Christian libertarian/fusionist stance an ideology?
It seems to me you can be a heavily biased partisan in politics and still be a thoughtful intellectual and or scholar. One is generally a zero some game contest where the lesser of two evils is frequently in play. The other is an area where things like humility, careful study, history, first principles, and logic play important roles.
What Knippenberg seems to be getting at seems to be the tendency of liberals to cloak themselves in the cloak of unbiased thinking and open-minds when they are in fact rigid ideologues and partisans. Is Dionne really to be taken seriously as a thinker/intellectual?
Of course being a neo-con warmonger you just can’t let go of your Marxist past and your “conservatism” is just a ruse for the Trojan Horse destruction of conservatism by the neo-Jacobin agenda. Your defense of ideology is to be expected.

Me: A few quick points.

One, it’s entirely possible I misread Knippenberg.

Two, yes, I was aware that Kirk and others opposed ideology. Kirk loved to quote H. Stuart Hughes’ admonition that “conservatism is the negation of ideology.” Longtime readers of my column will recall that I used to believe this entirely. They might not know that I don’t necessarily anymore. But that’s an argument for another day.

Three, I agree entirely with the objection that liberals claim to have no ideology when in fact they have robust ideologies, often in the worst meaning of the word, precisely because they don’t recognize they have one. When you know you have an ideology, you also can tell when its utility diminishes and you can take the glasses off (after all, Conservatism, rightly understood, is only a partial philosophy of life). When your ideology behaves like contact-lenses you don’t even know you have on, it’s very difficult to break out of your worldview. This was a central point to my endless debate with my contact-lens-wearing friend Jonathan Chait.

Last, as I’ve said many times, I actually think people are too hard on Dionne because they rely solely on his columns which seem to be deliberately geered toward partisan ends. His books, or at least some of them, are often quite good. Ideological, yes, but thoughtful nonetheless.