The scholarly debate would be incomprehensible, boring and even pretentious. The point is, lacking the intellectual skills gained by a good education, defending our ideology, like appreciating literature, involves little argument for its underlying rationale. It boils down to cheering for our team and booing the rivals. Less anathema to reason itself, ideology opposes that particular kind of scientific reasoning that we rely on for survival in the upper echelons of our society. The bottom line is that it is obnoxiously and overpoweringly elitist.
Cultural relativity can soften the bite, a bit.
A better understanding of the circumstances in which different people choose ideologies, are forced to choose ideologies, persist in defending them, live by them, and die by them, can evoke our sympathy or our pity. There are rationales other than those of elite intellectualism. We can even find something to admire in them. Intellectualism can then find a place among many alternative ideologies. This brings us back to square one, however, in that there is, again, nothing to argue about.