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For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.

Any type of political ideology is going to have a lot of different variants of it.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.

Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.

Our culture is more shaped by the arts and humanities than it often is by politics.