Ideology is always relatively domestic in nature
"Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion." -John Amos Comenius
In the eternal quest to organize information, humans sometimes forget that culture must absolutely play a part in how particular customs, as well as shared concepts, develop. A person will speak of fascism - any political ideology will do - and they will try to distill the ideology down into generalized aspects of which to watch out for during the course of a lifetime.
And, to a certain degree of course, these distillations still do represent that which they are meant and supposed to still describe and illustrate. They are, however, a much more crude portrait than what they attempt to descirbe - like observing the shadow of that which one is tasked to describe more vividly and in greater detail.
This is because - while the distillation is what can be found when the bearings of custom, culture, history, and the constant building and melding of them all is boiled away - that which brings those base fundamentals to life is absolutely the ideology after it has been processed or - in many ways - filtered through the society and culture of the polity, state or nation.
Political ideology - again, all ideolog - is domestic in nature; while it appears often as a mass movement, this larger volition has its origins at very local levels. Because the perceptions of our greater society, its history and the knowledge we collectively already understand ourselves to have often affect how we process and understand new information, any newly introduced concept or ideology - historically old or new - would be filtered through the society of its introduction with their understanding and perception significant factors contributing to the spectrum of perception and comprehension of the concept or ideology, what we might call - for lack of a better bit of language - the organic communalization of ideology.
Fascism is, again, an easy ideology to use for purposes of this work, because not only does it have clearly defined, “original” models, but also various newer forms that sprout up and show themselves here and there - always with some appeal to appraise those original models and to, obviously, observe differences. Hence, as was stated near the start, the distillation of fascism into steps, a guide or anatomy, or any other means works and is positive in that it illustrates what core symptoms to look for in one’s own nation as a citizen.
It - fascism - is not the only political ideology that bears this out fairly plainly too, however. One might simply sketch out core similarities between monarchies and between democracies and find general distillations that could, if read and understood, create a rough understanding of the ideology - but you could not readily see the concepts as plainly as one read them.
And that is because in reality - the real, existing world - the definitions are accurate, but the concepts become cloaked in the bearings of the culture and history of which they have been adopted into. The fascist symptoms are all there - as the many books detail - but they actually must reference a domestic fascism from somewhere, and from some time, to create the symptomatic understanding; without the reference, the symptom might go unnoticed in the greater community by the average member of society.
We can take another example to prove the point. Monarchy. Monarchy in the textbook is essentially the same idea across the entire world where it has either existed or still exists. Someone - or a family of some esteem - becomes vested with the power of the region, state or nation by the people of the greater community that they might protect them and do right by them in return for perks of the position - amongst other things.
Yet to see how monarchy practically exists and functions - and has existed in places as far ranging as England, Scotland, Ireland, Russia, Spain, France, the Holy Romand Empire, Denmark, and Poland - is to consider how elastic ideological constructs must inherently be; they must reflect the culture of which they exist within, and so the definition grows to be able to include different mutations of an idea.
The English - eventually British - monarchy, as depraved, unhinged and insidious as it appears from posterity, was often considered lightyears less brutal than, say, the Czar’s regime in Russia - known for its relative misogyny and autocratic tendencies even 400 years ago. The Spanish Monarchy of the Habsburgs and then Bourbons ran Spain far differently than those leaders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - yet both must also be considered monarchies at various points all the same.
Religion too, is no different; both Christianity and Buddhism will be the next examples.
The former religion began in the Levant region - around the same and similar areas as Judaism and Islam roughly. When it was then adopted in Europe, it was fed through the prism of each different culture of people - and while the Catholic Church attempted to dominate the canon of the religion, it was not to be.
Christianity split first into Catholic and Orthodox Christianities - all the while, fighting off smaller sects, popping up here and there across the regions whose people interpreted the very same words and texts in entirely different, culturally unique manners - before the Protestant Reformation allowed, in earnest, for Christianity to fracture far beyond repair.
Today and historically, there are as many different sects of Christianity around the world as a person could dream up; wherever one finds a form of Christianity, however, one finds the construct dyed with the hue of the culture that has at some point adopted the religion itself.
This also explains why a religion like Buddhism - renowned for its nonviolent teachings and preachings by many practitioners across the world - can have sects in Burma that approve and commit genocide. Historically too - like Christianity - Buddhism could embrace violence to further theocratic ends, such as those various - essentially kingdoms - ruled by the Dalai Lama for so many centuries.
But, returning to the United States, it too has but a form of its own most beloved intellectual construct: Democracy. It is not a form of the idea, however, that would likely have been recognizable to, say, certain cities and states of Ancient Greece - nor to certain city-states of what we now call the Italian Penninsula some fifteen to sixteen centuries later; it is though, a form all the same.
In fact, the democracy of the United States appears very different even from the democracies of other modern democracies. It does not have certain characteristics of nations like France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Brazil, or others, and yet, all can certainly be considered democracies all the same. Distilled down, they all possess enough of the necessary qualities - yet how those qualities exist and appear within the ideology is culturally and historically specific.
In the final analysis, it is the culture which bears the ideology that must be understood as considerably as the distillation of the ideology that is sought to be comprehended. The symptoms and their definitions in reference to historical examples are great - there can be no doubt or question of this. Yet in the societal vacuum, they are often more difficult - good, bad or otherwise neutral - to actively recognize than their public and collective manifestations.
Democracy is that which the society which believes in it breathes into it. As is fascism, as is Christianity, Islam, Monarchy, etc., etc. So long as the society in question can reconcile circumstances, concepts, ideas and procedures with what they understand to be acceptable and rationalizable within their culture, anything can truly be anything. A democracy can be when only older, property-owning white men can vote. It can have no women voters, and few minority voters too. Or it can theoretically be the opposite. We are the only judges of our own qualifications.
As author and Political Philosopher Gary Wills has noted, "If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery." This is important to understand. In the United States, such a notion seems inconceivable - yet those citizens and leaders of the United States of just 200 years ago were able to rationalize this very contradiction as democracy all the same.
The values and prejudices of a people ting the very constructs which they develop and utilize to govern and organize themselves. Slavery and subjugation can fit into the national mythos and paradigm - or it cannot. Social sympathies or vitriol can be worked into otherwise objective ideologies, causing them to appear inherently contradictory in nature - i.e. the European Christian Crusades with the nonviolent teachings of Christ, or slavery in the United States.
Yet - as it concerns the quote from Gary Wills - what might one living in America today call such a place of contradiction and hypocrisy - no matter the topic? It would surely not qualify as a democracy for the vast majority of the population - but it would for some. Surely then, that question has as many answers as you like - as there are different cultures and people upon the face of the planet, and as many as individual and collective perception might bear and endlessly consider.
Each concept is that which the individual and the collective agrees that it is. Each ideology across each and every part of the world is filtered through the very society in which it inhabits, and this can only make for as diverse a global, intellectual conception of each and every ideology - political, religious, philosophical or otherwise - as the mind can fathom; oh, what joy and horror!