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Do you, honestly, think ideology doesn't speak through you? Never?
I don't know if his threshold is at the same level as mine, but I don't think being ideologically captured is all that common. A normal person with an ideology will have their moments of cognitive dissonance and scrambling to come up with an excuse, but someone who is being spoken through by an ideology will say things like "imagine the backlash against Muslims, if ISIS set off a nuke in a major metropolis", or will refuse to publish a study because their political opponents might "weaponize the results". Or if you want an example from the other side, reportedly Ron Paul's reaction to 9/11 was "oh no, now we're gonna have big government!".
In any case the scary thing about the discussed scenario has nothing to do with any particular ideology, ideologies are just an example of how people already outsource their thinking. The point is that with AI this is going to reach a whole new dimension. It will go beyond "we've all read the same book(s)" or "we all attended the same church", it will be people literally refusing to engage their brain and outsourcing all their reasoning to AI. Be my guest if you want to focus on petty tribal squabbles, but the idea is just as terrifying to me no matter who this power is wielded by.
To be honest, I don't see the distinction you've drawn between "will have their moments of cognitive dissonance and scrambling to come up with an excuse" and your following examples. Certainly I can imagine those people having moments of cognitive dissonance and scrambling to come up with excuses for their priorities.
Your prophesized AI future is certainly unseemly. However, I'm more often disgusted by the extent to which we already are slaves to genetic propagation and social patterns. Not often enough to make me nihilistic about life in general, but enough to look towards the future rather than embrace the past.
The distinction is that cognitive dissonance and making up excuses is mostly just biding time. The reaction recognizes that it ran into something that cannot be explained by a given ideology, but isn't, just yet, ready to admit it. I think this is 100% valid, and people shouldn't just change their mind in a moment of doubt. On the other hand, the reaction I'm contrasting it to basically sees the inability to explain the facts as irrelevant. If facts contradict the theory, so much worse for the facts.
For all their faults, there is still an element of spontaneity in genes and social patterns. With the dystopia I'm seeing, we're talking about wholesale engineering, which is what freaks me out.
Are you worried that engineering will lock it in? From what I know, genes and societies can stay the same for millenia until sufficiently disturbed. In light of that, I'm not that much terrified by the longevity of AI dystopia.
It's not really about the lock-in, in theory the engineer could start changing things about on a whim, and that would be just as, if not more, terrifying. It's more about being bound to someone else's will without even realizing it. I much prefer being forced to follow natural forces like genes and natural selection, or ones that no one really understands or is unable to manipulate on the scale we're talking about, like societal pressure.
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