A political ideology is a set of ethical principles, beliefs, doctrines, traditions, or symbols held by a social movement, institution, class, or a sizeable amount of people that explains how society should function and provides a political and cultural blueprint for a particular social order. In this paper, I will be focusing on four different types of political ideologies. Those four political ideologies are Liberalism, Conservatism, Marxism, and Neo-Conservatism.
Beginning with Liberalism, the way I drew my drawing is to correlate it to private property. John Locke, in the Two Treatises of Government, defended the idea that men are naturally free and equal, as opposed to the claim that God made everyone naturally subservient to a king (or the person at the head of a monarchy). He asserted that individuals have rights, including the right to life, liberty, and property, that are based on principles that are independent of any given society. However, my drawing focuses on the right to property. Locke stated,
“As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labor does, as it were, inclose it from the common. . .God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labor, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labor. He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.” (Locke 16901980, 21).
Locke was implying that every man owns himself and his labor. He also claims that every individual has the right to private ownership of the property he has worked so hard to improve. To describe my drawing, it’s simple. The king comes to a common person, and before the king is allowed to say anything, the commoner states, “You can’t have my property. Leave now!”, then the king says, “Hmm...I hate that Locke guy”. The reason I drew this political cartoon this way was to array how Locke was influential, and most of his books were extraordinarily controversial. He was not liked by the monarch, even though he believed that a constitutional monarchy was the best type of government. He urged that their power should be severely curtailed. He argued that the monarchy had constitutional obligations to ensure that its citizens were treated fairly and equally. That’s like telling Jeff Bezos he can only spend a million dollars per year when he probably spends a million dollars every other day. The point is that the kings and queens had a huge amount of power, but Locke wanted their power to be controlled under constitutional obligations. The monarchy wasn’t ready to hear that, so it made Locke’s papers about government controversial. He was also so influential, that many believe his philosophies and political theories were ascendancies of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson purloined Locke’s ideas. These were never Jefferson's ideas (he never claimed they were his either), but rather the convictions of the American people. Jefferson implied that all of the ideas he included in the United States Declaration of Independence were the people's views (Class discussion, 2022).