Michael Calvin McGee, a renowned ideological critic, postulated that an “ideograph is an ordinary term found in political discourse” that “is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal”.
[5] McGee encourages the study of ideographs (such as “liberty” and “freedom”) to help identify the ideological position of a society.
At the time of the American War of Independence (1775–1783), freedom meant breaking away from the tyrannical rule of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Depending on one's ideological orientation, the ideograph of freedom represents many things, which is why it can be so powerfully used by politicians.
In 1997, Janis Edwards and Carol Winkler expanded the idea of the ideograph to include visual images as well as written words.
[6] They argue images can act as “a Visual reference point that forms the basis of arguments about a variety of themes and subjects” that are used by both “elites and non-elites” alike.