A syllogism dominated research on ideological reasoning as our own research got under way. Its major premise – ideological reasoning centered on abstract categorization and deductive inference; its minor premise – mass publics were neither able nor motivated to handle abstraction or deduction, at any rate so far as politics was concerned. And from these two premises, the familiar conclusion – that ordinary Americans were innocent of ideology – followed naturally, it seemed inevitably.

This chapter reports a different view of ideological reasoning. It is a view that is deliberately less cognitive, less cerebral. Political thought is not just thought: It excites and expresses people's gut feelings, their anxieties and their aspirations, their likes and their dislikes. And when attention is paid to the affective as well as the cognitive character of political thinking, we want to suggest, it will become clear that more of the mass public can respond to ideological reasoning than is customarily supposed.