Ideology v. Pragmatism, Again
Jonah Goldberg
The Corner
As I noted last month during all the inauguration hype, Barack Obama is determined to cast himself as a pragmatist and anyone who disagrees with him an ideologue. In his Philadelphia speech in January, he lumped "ideology" alongside, small thinking, prejudice and bigotry as things Americans must declare independence from. This is a very old liberal argument going straight back through Kennedy and FDR to Woodrow Wilson. It is also a profoundly dishonest framing of debate because it assumes that liberals are reality based and empirical while conservatives are hidebound dogmatists and ideologues. Somehow being pro-choice is empirical, but being pro-life is dangerously ideological. Supporting the nationalization of the banks is pragmatic. Opposing such measures stems from a feverish loyalty to discredited ideas.
But most of all, it is an attempt to preempt good faith disagreement by declaring it out of bounds and illegitimate before the conversation even starts. When Barack Obama spoke of "bad habits" in Washington it was easy to take him to mean that it's a bad habit to disagree with him.
Obama last night:
<<< One thing that I think is important is to recognize that, because all these — all these items that you listed are hard, that people have to break out of some of the ideological rigidity and gridlock that we've been carrying around for too long. And let me give you a prime example.
When it comes to how we approach the issue of fiscal responsibility, again, it's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.
Having said that, I think there are a lot of Republicans who are sincere in recognizing that, unless we deal with entitlements in a serious way, the problems we have with this year's deficit and next year's deficit pale in comparison to what we're going to be seeing 10 or 15 years or 20 years down the road.
Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem. I think there are areas like education where some in my party have been too resistant to reform and have argued only money makes a difference.
And there have been others on the Republican side or the conservative side who said, "No matter how much money you spend, nothing makes a difference, so let's just blow up the public school systems."
And I think that both sides are going to have to acknowledge we're going to need more money for new science labs, to pay teachers more effectively, but we're also going to need more reform, which means that we've got to train teachers more effectively, bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively, that we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, that we should have high standards.
So my whole goal over the next four years is to make sure that, whatever arguments are persuasive and backed up by evidence and facts and proof that they can work, that we are pulling people together around that kind of pragmatic agenda.
And I think that there was an opportunity to do this with this recovery package, because, as I said, although there are some politicians who are arguing that we don't need a stimulus, there are very few economists who are making that argument.
I mean, you've got economists who were advising [Sen.] John McCain [2008 Republican presidential candidate], economists who were advisers to George Bush, one and two, all suggesting that we actually needed a serious recovery package.
And so when I hear people just saying, "Ah, we don't need to do anything," "This is a spending bill, not a stimulus bill," without acknowledging that, by definition, part of any stimulus package would include spending — that's the point — then what I get a sense of is, is that there's some ideological blockage there that needs to be cleared up. >>>
Now let me be clear. I have no problem with Obama having an ideology. There is nothing wrong with ideology, if by ideology you mean a checklist of principles. "Does it expand freedom?" is an ideological question. So is, "Will this protect a woman's right to choose?" "Will this help the middle class?" "Will this redistribute wealth?" "Will this end torture?": and so on. These are all ideological questions, and whatever your orientation to such questions might be, there's nothing wrong with the fact that they are ideological. Heck, the very idea that it's the job of the government to "grow" the economy* is a surprisingly recent and thoroughly ideological assumption.
Now, there are bad forms of ideology, mind-distorting forms of ideology. But that's not what is at work here. And yet, Obama is trying to cast disagreement with his policy preferences as stemming from the bad kind of ideology, even before he hears the arguments. That's his right. It may even be smart tactics. But it isn't a particularly small-d democratic approach to politics and it most certainly doesn't stem from an non-ideological world view.
* And "grow" is not a transitive verb dagnabbit!
Update: Okay, okay, it can be a transitive verb. But the economy is neither a beard nor a corn crop.
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