"-Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, 'I don't believe in The Beatles, I just believe in me."'
- Matthew Broderick as Ferris Buehler
Elections are full of the much maligned -ism. Every possibility if -ism is explored for each candidate. If a candidate is white, then his or her potential racism is made an issue. If the candidate is black then the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/10/AR2006111001387.html">racism of the public is central</a>. If the candidate is female then the country is too sexist to elect her. If the candidate is male he may be too much a sexist to effectively govern a half female country. There is so much ado about the -ism that one might agree with Ferris and want to be rid of them all, as if that were possible.
The truth of the -ism is that they are simple ideological constructions people erect in order that other people can understand a complicated idea. Could Joseph McCarthy have rallied the country to almost tear itself apart over the state run program to forcibly reallocate property and remove rights of owners for said property for the United States? Not likely. But he could rally people against communism. At the most basic level and -ism is simple shorthand.
The issue with the -ism comes when they are used to define people as opposed to ideas. Once you label a person a communist, that is what they become. That communist is no longer a person and become just a classification. This can come in handy when we deal with scores of new people every day, but it is also an inherent weakness in our thought processes that conspires to damage our good judgement. As an example of such a failure it is not widely appreciated how many Russians died defending their homeland in World War II <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties">(about 10.7 million)</a>. They were communists and not even American communists. By virtue of that fact they were far less meaningful to learn about in history class.
-Isms make ideas easier to digest. But we must remember that some indigestion is good. It tells us what ideas are actually are worth eating.
