Ideology and morality

About a week ago, Donald Trump advised people to "study the late Senator Joseph McCarthy."  It turns out that I have been thinking about Joe McCarthy, although not quite for the reasons Trump says we should.  I was looking at an essay by Daniel Bell, originally published in 1953 and reprinted in The End of Ideology (1960).  In it, he said "the tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society.  ... It has been one of the glories of the United States that politics has always been a pragmatic give-and-take rather than a series of wars-to-the-death."  The second sentence reflects a conventional view of American politics, but on reflection it doesn't seem convincing.  Of course, there has been a lot of pragmatic give and take, but compared to other countries Americans seem to have had a tendency to invest issues with "moral color and high emotional charge."  For example, alcohol had been widely used in American society for centuries, but was completely banned in 1920.  I don't think anything like this happened elsewhere--there was a strong temperance movement in Britain, but it never came close to achieving prohibition, even thought that would just have taken an ordinary act of parliament, while in the United States it required a constitutional amendment.  A lot of people must have felt very strongly to devote that much effort to the cause and not to be satisfied with anything less than complete prohibition. 

This example shows a problem with Bell's first sentence.  An issue can have moral and emotional charge without being part of an ideology:  that is, "an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality" (quoting Bell again, this time "The End of Ideology in the West").  Prohibition wasn't an ideology like socialism--it was a position on one issue.  I happened to run across a 1974 article by Samuel Huntington which made this distinction, observing that "highly systematized ideologies . . . have been notably absent from the American scene.  But it is a mistake to move from this truth to the assumption that political ideals have played a less important role in the United States than in Europe. . . . American politics has been characterized by less sophisticated political theory and more intense political beliefs than most other societies."

Bell concluded his essay on McCarthy by suggesting that the conflict would pass pretty quickly.  He was right about that.  In contrast, for at least the last decade the United States has been repeating the same conflicts, like those over immigration and health care, without coming closer to a resolution.   I wonder if what has made recent conflicts so enduring is that the traditional "moral color" of American politics has come to be combined with ideology.