Most of what we now call "ideology" isn't even ideology. I don't know how people who don't understand the basic heritage of most of the ideas they hear even listen to anything. Most of the points of disagreement between two competing ideologies aren't that significant in the end analysis. They are at least small in number, and should be understandable well by proponents and opponents alike. But run on the track of narrative, and they gain a lot of power.
But I view the idea that this is a reflection of anything approaching actual "power" to be questionable. It's holding a mirror up to people and asking them to approve. There's no "gain" from it, outside of areas where we're attempting to measure opinion. Now, it does get people elected. But look how well that is going.
I miss people like Wm. F. Buckley and Christopher Hitchens, who would acknowledge their biases and even explain the reasons behind them. There is a PBS "Independent Lens", "Best Enemies" that seems to identify the exact point at which the present era began - the 1968 "debates" between Buckley and Gore Vidal. ABC "won" ratings with it and it's been downhill ever since.
In the same vein a definition for 'power': "The degree to which outcomes can be influenced into a desirable state."
The ability to build and dissolve legitimacy absolutely is power. The ability to build consensus and through that consensus change outcomes absolutely is power.
I thank you for those definitions, though - that's some cogitatin' for me to be done there. They're kind of value-free definitions. Can't tell if that is bad or good.
I'm describing how I perceive that the world - power - and information demonstrably work today.
It's been nearly impossible to make statements like "both candidates have historically low voter confidence", "neither candidate this debate spoke honestly or at length about their policy positions", etc without being called - in a denigrading way - a "Clinton supporter" or a "Trump supporter", as though they were curse words.
I've alienated many of my friends by posting nonpartisan policymaking documents, news that isn't from their favorite self-righteous outlets, and realpolitik explanations of the context of various ongoing policy questions (proxy war aspect of Syria, containment and historical aspect of Korean Peninsula, containment aspect of TPP/South China Sea, economic and political warfare in Venezuela, food security wrt Haiti, etc, etc).
My understanding is that as the technology to convince people of ideology increases in its capability, competing applications of that technology by power centers will achieve ever-increasing divisions.
That is to say the ideological spectrum, and current division, isn't a representation of a natural social occurrence as much as it is a proliferation of technologies by information agencies and corporations. Tens of billions of dollars a year are spent in America trying to influence opinions, and this effort has been succeeding.
A race to the intellectual bottom.