I’ve had a similar interaction several times recently. It goes something like this:

Me: I’m interested in how radical ideas become possible.

Them: Oh, you mean like how there weren’t enough votes to pass the public option?

Me: No, that’s a policy. And anyway, that’s not even the radical policy. We all know that was single payer.

Them: Oh, so you mean single payer?

Me: Nope, still a policy. An idea is broad, a concept, something that gets manifest in policy.

Them: Ah, like equality? Or fairness?

Me: No (now with a hint of frustration in my voice but trying to hide it), that’s a value.

Them: I’m confused.

At which point in the discussion, I try to breakdown roughly my understanding of the difference between values, ideas and policies — which may seem academic, but frankly, it helps when as a field we at least all know we mean roughly the same thing when we use the same words, but also for a progressive infrastructure that is acutely focused on policies but deeply lacking in transformative ideas, the tendency to conflate the two simply masks this profound problem.

Just as it was easier to explain to my kid the body parts of humans by pointing to the body parts of a stuffed cat, let’s use the Right wing as an example.

The Right believes in segregation, that we are not all equal and those who are inferior (morally, economically, racially, spiritually) can and should rightfully be separated from those who are superior (and those who are superior because of God-given or hard-earned talents and not because of flaws in any “system”). In their value system, it is unjust to force those who are naturally superior to co-mingle with those who are inferior. Segregation, while maybe not explicit, is implicitly a Right wing value.

Because of their values, Right-wing conservatives want social, political and economic structures to allow for — or, in fact, encourage — segregation rather than mandating integration and pluralism. Therefore, they spread the idea that freedom is about the choice to be separate, that (borrowing a page from liberal rights rhetoric) anything less infringes on individual expression. The idea here, albeit a highly misleading one, is that segregation is freedom and choice (where as integration is forced, imposed, against our will).

The policies, then, are things like school vouchers or charter schools, specific public or private practices that implement the idea of “freedom of choice” in social, economic and political institutions and promote the value of segregation throughout society. It’s easy here to get confused, since school vouchers are “an idea” for how to concretize “freedom of choice” in the school setting. But really, these are policies — concrete expressions of an idea that can actually be implemented to engrain that idea more and more deeply in our universe.

Now a progressive example.

Americans believe that all human life has value. It’s why we oppose holocausts and genocides, why we criminalize murder. [We sometimes make exceptions for when you do something heinously wrong (i.e., capital punishment) but part of the reason we're still debating the legality of capital punishment (and should be doing so even more vigorously) is because it conflicts with this deeply held, American value.]

And if we value human life, we value preserving it. That’s why we care for sick people in hospitals, even if they don’t have health insurance. Caring equally for all human life is a core value.

Valuing human life equally doesn’t necessarily translate into the idea of universal health care. The idea becomes attached to or associated with the value (or one or more values) as part of its popularization. Arguably, it is only in the last century that valuing human life was remotely associated with health care. Before, it might have meant access to jobs or the vote — that is, when the value was even ascendent (vs. during slavery, internment camps, etc.). But beginning in the early 1930s and moving forward, an idea was spread by progressives that if we value all human life, it is our collective role (vis-a-vis government) to ensure quality health care for each and every one of us. That idea, which has risen and fallen over the decades, with the rise and fall of the core value itself, leading to Medicaid and Medicare but also rollbacks on immigrant services in the 1990s, is being again tapped to advance health care reform today.

How we do it, how we concretize the idea of our collective duty to provide quality care for all, those are policies. Whether single payer, public option, regulation of private insurance, the marketplace structure… these are policy options. True, some play to certain ideas more than others. Single payer is most true to the idea I’ve laid out here, while the marketplace concept apes the private sector and reinforces the center-Right idea that the best way to provide any service to the public is through private markets. It’s worth noting that you could hold that idea and still share the value of human life. That’s why I think these distinctions are so important. Left, right and center, we often argue over policies as though we disagree about core values — and sometimes, we do. But certainly the left-center breakdown over health care reform (which is really strangling us right now) is about ideas not values. I truly believe that the centrists in Congress value all human life (maybe not quite as much as their own, but still…) but we have disagreements about the ideas those values point us toward, the ideas that should shape not only our health care system but our larger society (which, observers correctly point out, however we implement health care reform will certainly do).

I think that by focusing our political arguments narrowly on policies, or grandly on values, we’re often missing the crux of the contention, the ideas that we believe are the best expression of often-shared values but, in choosing one set of ideas versus another, point in very different practical directions.

The definition of the word “ideology” is the study of ideas. I think we need more ideologues and not just policy wonks.