Ideology
Ideology is used by many different schools of philosophy to refer to a lot of different things. Not necessarily entirely different, but rather, there is a large semantic space and different philosophers draw different circles around different parts of that semantic space when they define ideology. I am not going to assert that one complex definition of ideology is correct, but I will define ideology in the way that I am using it.
An ideology is a system of ideas which shapes the way that you view and understand the world; and influences the actions that you believe are effective or possible to take in the world. Ideology is the system by which you understand what is possible, how the world works, and how it should work at the most zoomed out level.
Political ideologies bring with them ideas of how the world should be—drawn from their own understandings of how the world works at a big, abstract level, which work together to justify the desired outcome.
Fascist ideology believes in Fascism because of a Fascist system of ideas which work together to conclude that Fascism is what's best for the world. Fascism is not just Nazis and Mussolini, but the system of ideas which creates and justifies Nazis and Mussolini. The Strongman Leader, the power of violence, the valorizing of military strength, that strength is derived from what Fascism believes to be "unity." A "unity" of the increasingly homogeneous population following one ideology, one leader, one State. The Ethnic Nation-State. There are many ideas that are a part of the system of ideas which compose the ideology that we call Fascism.
Liberalism is another ideology. A worldview focused on individual liberty, markets, civil processes, and the power of the individual. Liberal systems of ideas include ideas like Great Man Theory, where historic change is driven by specific exceptional individuals.
Anarchism is an ideology. A worldview focused on hierarchy as the central problem in society, and the ways people wield power over one another.
Ideologies can overlap, synthesizing into particular distinct systems of ideas that work together and are held by the same individuals. Anarcho-Communism synthesizes the ideas in Anarchism with Marxist ideas. Revisionist Zionism synthesizes the ideas in Fascism with the ideas in Zionism. Slavoj Žižek purports that in addition to ideologies affecting us consciously, they also affect us unconsciously. There are pervasive systems of ideas in society that we internalize and don't even realize are shaping the ways we see and understand the world.
Pathology
Recently, I saw someone draw a binary between ideology and pathology. The claim that Fascism is not pathological but ideological. The comparison they drew was to "Abuse" as also being ideological, and ergo not pathological. Pathology itself, however, is ideological. What we pathologize or normalize is ideological. How we treat disease is ideological. That is to say, our understandings of what is and is not a disease comes from a system of ideas. The ways we decide what to diagnose as illness versus intent is itself a system of ideas. There are political ideologies, and there are medical ideologies: Folk Medicine, Western Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine. The labeling of certain medical ideologies as Evidence-Based Medicine versus Mainstream Medicine is also driven by ideology. Pathology and ideology are not a binary.
Anti-Fascism, as an ideology, treats Fascism in a pathological manner. That is to say, we treat Fascism like a disease. The very system of ideas that comprises Fascist ideology is a disease. In fact, we treat it as an infectious disease. Not a mental illness held by individuals, but a virus that infects an entire society and spreads from cell to cell. When someone has become a fascist, it is not that they are mentally ill, it is that they have become infected by the Fascism virus. As a cell in society, they have been transformed into an agent who produces more Fascism: The way that a cell infected by COVID-19 begins to produce more COVID-19—The way that a carrier of COVID-19 will infect those around them if not quarantined.
This is why Anti-Fascists prescribe deplatforming as how we deal with Fascism. Liberal ideology tells us that we must defeat Fascism, the system of ideas, in the free marketplace of ideas, through reasoned debate and public forums that prove Fascism wrong. Anti-Fascist ideology tells us that allowing the virus into the room is just going to infect people in the room.
Anti-Fascists quarantine Fascism, the disease, by removing it from all public forums and forcing it to only fester in their own private spaces: toxic image boards and other walled gardens. Then, Anti-Fascists extinguish Fascism by destroying those quarantined forums. We pressure companies to refuse to host or provide services to Stormfront, 8chan, and KiwiFarms. We force them out of spaces where they can infect new hosts, we force them into their own little spaces, then we shut down those spaces. Then, we inoculate society against Fascism. We spread Anti-Fascist ideology. We educate about the dangers of Fascism. We teach people about the rhetorical tactics Fascists use to manipulate people.
Treating Fascism as a pathology is a critical component of Anti-Fascist ideology.
Incarceration
Carceral Logic is an ideology. It is the system of ideas which justifies mass incarceration as a viable solution to societal problems, or even the only solution. Ruth Wilson Gilmore's book Golden Gulag is one of the best descriptions of the ideology of mass incarceration, even if it does not actually use the phrase "carceral logic."
A core component of the carceral ideology, the system of ideas that justifies prisons, is the notion that there are people who are intrinsically bad, intrinsically criminals, and everyone else is an innocent, and the innocents must be protected from the criminals. The ideology of incarceration forgoes the possibility of transformation. They are fundamentally incompatible. Even if they call their incarceration a "rehabilitation center" there is no true belief in the capacity for rehabilitation. No opportunity for rehabilitation is created. There is only the belief in Crime. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, the ideology of incarceration is not concerned with harm it is concerned with crime. Only some types of harmful actions have been deemed to be crimes. The ideology of incarceration sees Crime as a pathology, but not that the criminals are mentally ill and deserve therapy and resources; but that society has been infected with Crime. That Crime, something which is created and defined by the carceral state, is itself an infectious disease; and the treatment is Order, Police, Mass Incarceration. Those infected cells, the Criminals, must be quarantined in prisons, or even extinguished, removed from society by ways of deportation or execution.
As Žižek says, we internalize the ideologies of our societies. Even if we vocally purport to subscribe to an Anarchist ideology, or even a Prison Abolitionist ideology, we have all been raised in and internalized the Incarceration Ideology. We must unlearn these ideas in order to fully embrace Prison Abolition. Many people, however, instead create new synthesis ideologies. There are many people who seem to subscribe to a hybrid ideology best described as Anarcho-Incarcerationism. That all who wield power over another are criminals, and must be removed from society, so that the Innocents will be free from oppression. They conflate oppressive hierarchies with all forms of doing harm. All harm is criminalized, and all harm is treated by way of removal from society. They might even only designate a subset of harmful people as criminals, such as rapists, and deem only them to be beyond transformation. This is still only a modification to the ideology of incarceration. Remember, the ideology of incarceration is not concerned with harm, it is concerned with crime. They have merely shrunk the scope of crime, they have not eliminated the idea.
Even if they have discarded the idea of forcibly containing the criminals in prisons, they have retained the idea that there are criminals and innocents, and that there is no possibility of transformation.
One must wonder what such an Anarchist utopia would look like? How do any communities cohere and support one each other? Where would people go? If abusers are equivalent to fascists, then there is no possibility for transformation. We have forgone the possibility of transformation in this worldview.
What is troubling is that, if there is no possibility of individual transformation, then there is no possibility of societal transformation. If Abuse is not a symptom of patriarchy, but a permanent irreparable state driven by holding a poisonous ideology—and if people who hold problematic ideologies are likewise irreparable—then we are completely out of luck for having any hope of positive change in society. 74,223,975 people voted for Donald Trump in 2020. 29% of adults in the United States voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. That was 46.85% of voters. 29% of adults, that year, in this country, believed in ideologies of power and control. Believed in genocide. Believed in Fascism. If 29% of adults in the United States are irredeemable with no possibility of transformation; if the only solution to problematic people is to remove them from society entirely, then positive change in society as a whole is impossible. 74 million people is greater than the entire population of France. In fact, it's not far from the population of Germany. If our Anarchist or Socialist utopia is predicated upon enacting great violence upon a third of the population who we consider to be incapable of transformation, necessitating total removal from society, then that society will fail. It will necessarily fail. Violence is a tool to protect the revolution, but a core idea in the Fascist system of ideas is belief in the virtue of using incredible power and violence to eliminate a large chunk of the population to attain unity among the people.
Without incarceration or transformation, what is left other than mass-execution? You cannot exile one third of the population and retain a defensible post-capitalist utopic society. They will not stay out. If you try to contain them to one region, that will become incarceration. Belief in the transformation of society requires belief in the transformation of ideologies held by individuals living in society. We have to believe that transforming the systems of our world into something better will transform a significant chunk of the people who voted for Donald Trump. We have to believe they can be liberated from false consciousness.
Our ideology must believe in transformation to make room for change. We cannot build hope for change without belief in transformation.
Transformation
Transformative Justice is a core idea in the ideology of Prison Abolition. There is no Prison Abolition without a belief in transformation. The purpose of Transformative Justice is to create viable alternatives to incarceration. The essay anthology Instead of Prisons—according to Angela Davis—is one of the foundational documents of Prison Abolition. Chapter eight—New Responses to Crimes with Victims—is focused entirely on possibilities of transformative justice (albeit before we had the term). Much of these essays focus on how we might transform and rehabilitate people who sexually abuse family members. Projects like Sex Offenders Anonymous are discussed.
Transformative Justice as a term was coined by Canadian prison abolitionist Ruth Morris. In her 2000 manifesto Stories of Transformative Justice, sex offenders and familial abuse are very much a crucial component of who transformative justice is aiming to transform. She does not say "we need to abolish prisons, everyone is capable of transformation, except for The Abusers."
It has always been the focus of Transformative Justice to transform those who commit harm against other people. To transform society, and treat the systemic problems which lead to the prevalence of severely harmful behaviors. The transformation is of society, to create a world that does not have prisons and has no need for prisons. A society where people are kept in their communities instead of forcibly removed.
As the Transformative Justice movement has been taken up by Black feminists, who have further developed and expanded it, it has grown to be a core component of the Prison Abolition ideology. And never, at any point, have there been exclusions made for criminals or vaguely-defined Abusers. We do not only abolish prisons for the people who never did anything wrong.
There is no Prison Abolition without Transformative Justice. There is no Transformative Justice without Prison Abolition. There is no transformation with incarceration. There is no incarceration that leads to transformation. The ideology of incarceration is incompatible with Prison Abolition. The ideology of incarceration is incompatible with positive transformation of society. Transformative Justice is how we sustain our prison-free world and prevent the virus of Fascism from infecting us.
I am not saying that mass-rehabilitation of individual fascists should be the focus of movements, simply because it is not resource efficient. I am an Anti-Fascist. I believe those infected with Fascism must be de-platformed and prevented from infecting others. But I do believe in rehabilitation of people who enact interpersonal harm. I do believe in rehabilitation of "Abusers." I do not believe that "I can control another person" is such a poisonous, toxic, or infectious idea that one who has ever held it is terminally dangerous and cannot be transformed. I believe in the ability to create processes which mend, heal, and change people. "I own and am entitled to control my wife and children" as an idea is a symptom of the ideology called Patriarchy. It is not—in and of itself—an ideology on the level of Fascism.
And I believe that if we transform society, to remove the Patriarchal systems that tell husbands they own their wives and fathers they own their daughters, then we will also see abuse decrease drastically. Never completely, but drastically. I believe we live in systems which drive people to hurt each other, but that people can learn, and change. I believe in repair. I believe we can change those systems. This is the ideology of Prison Abolition and Transformative Justice.
This is an ideology which creates the possibility for hope and transformation. Liberation requires transformation.
Ideology and Pathology are not a mutually exclusive binary. Incarceration and Transformation are a mutually exclusive binary. The ideology of incarceration is incompatible with our liberation. Dismantle the prison in your mind.