The Ash Twins Blog

Pragmatism is debated in the public sphere. This is the first time I’ve seen anything written on the topic in mass media in 8 years of reading news.

Daniel Larson at the American Conservative:

Think of it another way: a man of political principles is concerned with using both the right means for the right ends and is willing to let experience inform his assumptions, while the ideologue is indifferent to the means used and willfully ignorant of experience that challenges his assumptions. Any opposition between pragmatism and ideology also seems to me to be misleading from the beginning because what passes for “pragmatism” in government represents adherence to a particular reigning ideology. There might conceivably be some genuine empirically-oriented, sane pragmatism that does not fit this definition, but this is not the pragmatism the political class invokes and it is not the one we are discussing. When a given politician announces his interest in “what works,” we might reasonably interpret this as a statement that he does not intend to overturn established consensus and accepts the constraints and assumptions of the reigning ideology, which broadly speaking means state capitalism at home and hegemonism abroad.