Ideology in modern politics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Ideology in modern politics - Essay Example Morgenthau (1978) states that collective moral values are not applicable to the actions of a political party and an effort to do so is unrealistic. Realist theory recognises that morality must be filtered through legitimate situations and circumstances occurring within a nation state when attempting to ensure national security and longevity. This has been witnessed in the United States where the collective ideology of liberty and freedom, as mandated by social sentiment, was oppressed by political actors in an effort to depose domestic terrorism from the country after the terrorist attacks in New York’s World Trade Centre. In 2001, the American government launched the Patriot Act which gave political actors more authority to conduct wire-tapping on domestic citizens and engage in observation of citizen activities as a justification for ensuring national security and guaranteeing better safety of patriotic citizens. Circumstances, in this situation, forbade reaching decisions o n how to curb terrorist activities based on fundamental and universal social attitudes related to liberty and freedom. The aforementioned example of the U.S. Patriot Act underpins a sense of nationalism. The United States maintains a strong sense of nationalism and patriotism toward the view that this nation is a hegemonic authority and founded on a significant sense of ethnocentrism. Prior to this recession, in the UK free market-oriented society, if government had provided capital to businesses in this fashion, citizen dissent would likely have been significant.