The consensus forming in anticipation of Barack Obama’s ascendancy is that, with apologies to Code Pink, pragmatism is the new black. The president-elect himself has encouraged this vogue, both explicitly in his rhetoric and implicitly in his recent cabinet appointments. It remains to be seen whether a substantive departure from doctrinaire liberalism will follow, but in the meantime we suffer from an annoying side effect: Suddenly every third person is walking around pronouncing himself a pragmatist and sneering smugly at “ideology,” as if the distinction were something more than empty rhetoric.
The trouble with the new wave of pragmatists is that they do not recognize, or else they refuse to acknowledge, their own ideological underpinnings. This is not entirely their fault. Try as they might to escape the old ideological categories they decry, they face an insurmountable obstacle: It’s impossible to eschew ideology in order to “just do what works,” because any understanding of “what works” depends on the antecedent questions of what our policy goals should be and which instrumental policies are most likely to succeed in the world — both of which are heavily ideological questions.
Despite everything the One True Obama and his disciples have done for the theme of “unity” lately, politics still requires choosing among competing value claims that deeply divide society. On abortion, do we value the woman’s right to choose, or the fetus’s right to life? On taxation, do we favor material equality as an end in itself, or do we uphold a stronger version of property rights based on moral entitlement to one’s earnings? And what about gay marriage? Such disagreements are not only about the practical results of policies, but about which values and goals our policies should be aiming at in the first place. They stem from a fundamental clash of opposing moral visions, which no amount of pragmatist sorcery can dispel.
And even within the overlapping consensus of society’s basic values, pragmatism provides no refuge from ideology. People are describable as liberal or conservative not only because of the disparate values they hold but because they are predisposed to believe that the world works in a different ways — and that certain instrumental policies are therefore more or less likely to succeed. Consider practical economics, for example, where conservatives generally think that free markets lead to greater prosperity and well-being on the whole, while liberals see a greater role for regulation, taxation, and redistribution. There is a gaggle of empirical data on both sides of such disputes, but reasonable minds can and do differ on how to interpret it.
Some pragmatists go so far as to claim that we should dispense with our predispositions altogether and give every question and controversy a fresh hearing on all the available evidence. But concerns of efficiency and analogical consistency make this blank-slate approach practically impossible. This is evidenced by, among other things, the many vociferous “pragmatists” who exhibit clear inclinations that lead them reliably in one ideological direction or another. This explains why the supposedly pragmatic candidate Obama could be so readily identified on the basis of his voting record as one of the most liberal members of the Senate. And it explains why it is so easy to assign conventional labels to so many intellectual prima donnas who claim their thinking is too unique and original to be defined.
The point is that ideological principles crystallize not only on the basis of fundamental values, but also on recurring practical judgments as to social cause and effect. It’s possible to deny your policy predispositions by calling yourself a pragmatist, but that’s probably an obfuscation.
The recent debate over foreign policy is one of the most frequent victims of the vacuous cant of the pragmatists. Obama is not going to be rigidly ideological in his approach to the Middle East, they say. He is going to be practical, in sharp distinction to the hated George W. Bush.
But the characterization of Bush’s foreign policy as ideological over practical, idealist over realist, has always been a gross oversimplification based on a false dichotomy. In fact, realism and idealism inevitably blend together in some degree, in every political endeavor. The Bush strategy at its most ambitious was to advance liberalization, human rights, and democracy in the Middle East — not only because those were valuable objectives for their own sake, but because (it was thought) they were the most effective way to remove the preconditions of terrorism in the region, which would best serve American interests in the long run. This was based in part on a practical judgment that the old “realist” policies of stability were being made unrealistic by the course of world events, as demonstrated so painfully on 9/11.
Now, whatever you think of the practical viability of President Bush’s approach to the Middle East, it is hard to see how the pragmatic/ideological distinction is helpful. Bush’s critics are not somehow “more practical” than the president, but merely reflect different policy goals and different practical hypotheses regarding likely policy outcomes. Many argue that Bush’s priorities are wrong or that Obama’s policies are more likely to be effective, but this is a dispute about proper means and ends within the realm of ideology — not a clash of ideology versus pragmatism.
To the extent that it performs any conceptual function at all, pragmatism seems to boil down to the more mundane concepts of flexibility, open-mindedness, and deliberation. A “pragmatist” might be said to be someone who, though inevitably laden with policy prejudices, is willing to put them aside and adapt to new situations as needed. But if this is all that pragmatism means, everybody would self-describe as a pragmatist. Nobody thinks failed policies should be continued when circumstances demand a change. But there will inevitably be disputes as to when policies have truly failed and when circumstances really demand a change, and those disputes will inevitably break down along ideological lines. Pragmatism cannot provide any neutral way to resolve our disagreements, because it cannot magically transform people into objective, dispassionate, non-ideological truth-seekers.
It is of course still possible to criticize someone for being too rigid and unreflective in his positions, but those charges are quite serious enough on their own without muddying the waters by plopping in the vague and misleading concept of pragmatism.
When people praise a policy or a politician as “pragmatic,” they’re often simply praising themselves for being open-minded. They are projecting a false pretense of objectivity, premised on the conceit that they are utterly free of ideology while their opponents are mired in prejudice. In fact, a so-called pragmatist’s support for a policy indicates only two things: that he agrees with the policy’s goal, and that he believes the policy is likely to achieve the goal in an efficient way. But these are precisely the controversies at the core of every old ideological dispute: Which goals should we strive for? And what is the best way to achieve these goals? Pragmatism as a catch phrase does not displace those ideological questions, but does a great deal to obscure them. It is, to borrow from Kant, a vain delusion and a chimerical vision of mankind. Which, on second thought, might explain its popularity in the age of Hope and Change.
— Anthony Dick is a student at Stanford Law School and a former associate editor at National Review.
