Ideologies can entrench without any deliberate design by their inventors

Evidence

Examples can be found in nearly every area of policy and politics. In contrast to President Roosevelt’s strategic posture toward entrenching Social Security, there is no reason to believe that the designers of Medicare were plotting entrenchment, yet the program appears just as deeply entrenched as a result of more or less the same set of political dynamics. Or consider the home mortgage interest deduction, which created—apparently quite by accident—a constituency of homeowners and mortgage lenders that is deeply committed to, and formidably capable of, preserving their entitlement. Along the same lines, the casual, short-sighted decision of Congress to exempt existing coal-fired plants from the stringent regulations of the 1970 Clean Air Act gave rise to a powerful interest group that served as a major impediment to subsequent antipollution and climate change measures. Legal scholars have documented how rules of corporate law relating to ownership structure have become entrenched through a political-economic feedback cycle in which existing rules and arrangements increase the wealth and political power of corporate stakeholders who have an interest in maintaining or enhancing these rules and arrangements. Regulatory regimes governing corporate ownership structure and telecommunications have become increasingly difficult to modify as influential stakeholder groups become more deeply invested in, and better able to defend, existing arrangements. … Relatively localized examples like these could be multiplied countlessly, but inadvertent, functional entrenchment also operates on a broader scale. For instance, the political economy of modern capitalism probably involves a similar “rich get richer” dynamic, in which economic winners wield their newly acquired wealth and power to preserve and augment institutions that allow them to become ever more wealthy and politically influential. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 494

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core mechanism relevant to the reader’s question about rationalizing ideology stickiness: inadvertent functional entrenchment via feedback constituencies, parallel to earlier chapters on deliberate entrenchment — the distinction between strategic design and organic locking-in. — connects to: Hegemony lets ideologies operate without any locatable authority. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 103; Adaptive culture often arises without individual designers even noticing. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 138; Ideologies without enemies acquire them when their programs prove hard to fulfill (+6 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: comparing deliberately-entrenched programs (Social Security) with accidentally-entrenched ones (Medicare, coal plant grandfathering) to isolate what actually drives durability — intent vs. constituency feedback.

Broader Connections

• Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them #expands (0.80)
• Ideologies are crafted as political weapons, not theories #complicates (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 433
• Ideologies without enemies acquire them when their programs prove hard to fulfill #expands (0.75)
• Refuting ideas does not destroy the social forces behind them #corroborates (0.74) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1563
• Ideologies connect to subjects through contingent, breakable articulations rather than necessity #expands (0.72)
• Ideology works by taking certain frames for granted so alternatives stay unthinkable #expands (0.72)
• Ideologies achieve effects by inflecting existing attitudes, not by domination or false consciousness. #expands (0.72)