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Aristotle's Politics: ideological or analytical?

Aristotle obviously thinks he is engaged in an inquiry which will have universally valid conclusions rather than a time-specific analysis of what it means to be a gentleman in Classical Greece. The question is whether Aristotle has a false-consciousness about societal issues, or worse yet, does he engage in conscious ideology?

Traits of 'ideology': there is no real thing that is 'ideology': whenever you hear the word used, you need to figure out how the person is defining it: here, it means a system of thought that is both theoretical and practical about how society/government should be run that gets it most basic biases from assumptions

Appeals to "nature," specifically "human nature" to justify claims

these are almost always assumptions, often question-begging

Claims that what is in the interest of those in power is in the interest of all

self-justification and rationalization clothed in 'reason' and 'facts' and 'objectiveness'

Traits of 'analysis':

Appeals to reason as sole best arbiter of true and false claims
Attempts to identify and examine basic assumptions
Making honesty about all aspects of the enterprise a conscious constant project

Traits of 'false consciousness':

failure to see or admit or entertain important aspects of one's own culture, society, or economic system
mostly not blameworthy failure, except via negligence

Aristotle has importantly problematic beliefs, among which important ones are that he:

Thinks slaves are those who are naturally inferior
Thinks women are inferior

perhaps not in the same way as slaves: does he say they are or should be natural slaves?

Thinks trade is unnatural wealth acquisition

Those three items seem to be ideological to us (he uses appeals to human nature for the first two: not sure about third): we believe we know better.

In the case of women, it seems clear that Aristotle's problem is not merely ideological but has roots in false-consciousness. He does not devote any real thought to the issue, notes consequences of his arguments for and about women, and does not engage in work that we think he obviously should to tidy up those arguments rationally in obviously consistent ways. He takes women's position in society and his estimate of their abilities for granted.

In the case of slavery, Aristotle does not justify the actual slavery that existed in Greece at the time. Slavery in Greece at the time was happenstance: it was not the case that the people were examined and found wanting in rational ability and so became slaves to those who knew, judged, and acted better.
He does not try to distinguish much between actual slavery that occurred all around him and the theoretical 'natural slavery' he approves of.
He says that there are people who would be better off being under someone else's rule, and that is his justification of slavery and the claim that some people are 'natural slaves': they would be better off.
Surely it is true that there are people who would not only be better off if they were not solely in charge of their lives, but are incapable of surviving if they were fully autonomous. Calling it slavery is counter-productive and offensive, because slavery seems to always imply exploitation/ownership/work for others' benefit: it is simply the case that some people need a lot of help while others are able to help.
Thus Aristotle's theory of slavery should have radically questioned the actual slavery of the time and also should have reformulated itself in other terms. It did not.

So Aristotle failed in important ways.
What does that mean about how we should approach him?
He is obviously historically very important in the history of ideas at the very least, and any historian of the human endeavour would need to take him into account, just as one needs to take all sorts of good and bad people into account, as whole human actors with good and bad aspects.
Perhaps we can also approach him as a case of a flawed (i.e. normal) human thinker, as an opportunity to figure out how and where and why he went wrong as well as how and where he went right.
If we were to condemn him and jettison him entirely, how far must we go? What are the logical limits to our effort to demote him?
Ideas do not really have owners: they have inventors at best. Perhaps they merely have people who first stated them? or who stated them from positions that made those people heard?
So perhaps calling these ideas 'Aristotelian' is less about a great man and more about one person's having had a role to play in their development, or perhaps merely about having a convenient way to package and refer to them?

One thing about the ideas in Aristotle: the good ones are extremely powerful, and what I think of as progress in the human world has involved ever greater extensions of these ideas to more and more people more and more consistently. If we are to blame Aristotle for giving the horrible slave-owners of western history a justification and roots for their ideology, we should also credit him with simultaneously giving us justification and the intellectual means by which to root those slavers out of business. We are nowhere near done with that yet.