PARTY COHERENCE?

Shor confuses what he calls ideological coherence with political platform and political loyalty. 

Or maybe the concept of a platform itself is out of date.

The fact that someone might favor both pro life and higher taxes does not render these two positions inherently ideologically inconsistent.

Simply because we have only two main parties does not make them ideologically inconsistent but rather party inconsistent. 

Maybe they are Democratic platform inconsistent, but a platform's ideological coherence makes little sense without a structuring of planks in relation to all others according to platform-wide principles that are reasonable of not commonsensical. 

That would be a thumbnail sentence saying what a description of an ideologically coherent party platform would or might look like. 

Ideological coherence cannot mean merely something agreed by consensus only among party elites at the top. A platform is something seen, not unseen, in plain view for the stooges in the campaign, for voters, to review.