Anthony Dick, writing for National Review Online, argues that pragmatism is in style these days, following the election of Barack Obama.  But he also says that some of those claiming to be pragmatic do so by simply ignoring the ideological viewpoints they already have and claim to have thrown them out completely.

I think it’s a good article, and I agree with some of its points, but it misses others.

One of the points it gets right is that no matter how pragmatic you consider yourself, you’re always going to have something you believe in:

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.

You have to be able to argue for something.  You can’t claim to be without complete ideological bias, because that’s just impossible.  Whether it’s through religious upbringing, societal assimilation, or your own research, eventually you will come to a set of beliefs.  Any pragmatist claiming that they are 100% absent of ideology is just deluding themselves.

Of course, that’s not the same as being able to listen to the other arguments for or against something and deciding whether or not they make more common sense than your predispositions.  Dick touches on this as well (emph. mine):

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.

There’s where I disagree.  There are plenty of people who are quite willing to go along with a failed policy because of any number of reasons, whether it’s stubbornness, blind faith, or because they’re simply an ideologue who will stick to a position no matter what.  In all of these situations, you will have people who will never budge.

Just ask John McCain.  One of his biggest arguments for his foreign policy cred this election is that he was a warrior against what he saw as the failed policy of Donald Rumsfeld.  Indeed, for a long time, the administration didn’t really feel the need to go against their failed policy.  Then they finally tried something else out, and what do you know, it worked.  But only after sticking with their guns for way too long.

Liberals, meanwhile, tend to often stick to a notion of fairness that often harms more than it helps.  One of the reasons cited for why we’re in the economic mess we are is Democratic policies that forced lenders to give money to those who’d never be able to pay them back.  Then, when the loans came due, the bottom fell out.

It is also seen a lot within the blogosphere where you will have many blog authors defend a party, or politician, or policy no matter what.  To these people, it doesn’t matter if their person is wrong on something, they’re always right.  Go to Firedoglake, for example, and tell me a lot of the people there are pragmatic.  They’re not; they’re ideologues.  They’re the kind of people who are livid right now because Obama has picked a number of centrists or people who are more centrist for top positions in his cabinet.  We’ve written on this issue here at Poligazette many a time.

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.

The trouble is that this article seem to view pragmatism from the lens of someone looking at a bunch of liberals saying they’re pragmatic because Obama does.  But there are plenty of pragmatic conservatives out there.  John McCain, for one, and there are plenty of other politicians out there.  Some of them write for this blog and other blogs.  And there are a number of pragmatists who considered themselves as such before Obama ever came on the scene.

Perhaps pragmatism is the wrong word to use, but “people who hold a range of viewpoints but are quite willing to consider the other side of the coin before making up their mind” is a mouthful, and I’m not sure if there’s a more proper word to describe that.  If there is, I haven’t learned it yet.  So feel free to help me add to my lexicon.