Is President Elect Barack Obama a quintessential pragmatist? There’s some debate about that and whether pragmatism means being at conflict with ideology. In his second Guest Voice post Calgary-based writer Scott Payne argues that it may not be as clear-cut as many think.
Obama’s Ideology and Pragmatism: More Common Law Than We Might Think
By Scott Payne
There has been a great deal of talk and debate about the virtues of politics borne of pragmatism versus ideology following Chris Hayes’ piece on Obama’s pragmatism in The Nation. Many have noted that Obama’s pragmatic approach to politics only make sense following what are often seen as the highly ideological years of the Bush administration.
But in all of this talk, it seems that a pragmatic disposition and ideological convictions are always placed in tension, as if the decision facing Obama and other politicians is either a commitment to first principles of ideology or a willingness to compromise on solutions that “work”. The situation isn’t nearly so polemic as all that, nor so seemingly black and white, I would argue.
The very notion of sternly pragmatic and ideological camps in itself smacks of gross over-simplification.
While it might be true that there are some politicians who fall neatly into one category or the other, the truth of the matter seems a great deal more nuanced than the distinction would lead one to believe. Decision-making and issues of motivation are rarely so particularly striped as to be wholly ideologically driven or purely focused on what works. Rather, most individuals are driven by a combination of core values that inform their basic view of the world and a recognition of the complex dynamics at play in that world requiring a certain flexibility on those things that do not present themselves as inviolable truths.
Those politicians who adhere to a basic ideology do not, therefore, close themselves off to seeing the nuances of any given situation. A willingness to explore possible alternatives that do not, strictly speaking, conform to the vision laid out by such ideology, but still, roughly speaking, fall within acceptable parameters of the ideology’s ontology is, more often than not, the modus operandi exhibited by such “ideologues”.
Those inhabiting opposition positions to such “ideologues” often fail to recognize the subtlety of thought demonstrated because the nature of their opposition happens to fall on an issue for which their happens to be no room for common ground. Such opposition can have a tendency to stain the entirety of the relationship, lending it the feeling of intractability when, in fact, there is a good deal of potential agreement on any number of other issues.
On the other side of the street, pragmatic politicians often play their core principles pretty close to their chests so as to maximize their ability to find workable solutions with the greatest number of potential interlocutors. This is not to say that pragmatists don’t have basic issues on which they are unwilling to bend or contort, but such issues tend not to feature prominently in the machinations of their politics. Even in the case where negotiations focus on a pragmatists core value, he or she may attempt to find a circumnavigational route through related, but different waters in order to avoid the break down of discussion. Such a picture can often lead to the belief that pragmatists are essentially fancied up moral relativists for whom first principles are a foreign and, indeed, unnecessary consideration. Of course, coming to such a conclusions is generally more a case of snap judgment and convenient political posturing than a true understanding of a pragmatists view of the world.
All of which is to say that true blue, died in the wool ideologues and pragmatists who don’t tip their toes into one another’s waters are a much rarer breed than we generally acknowledge. Most people’s politics operate on a number of different spectra, with inflections tending towards one end over another, but rarely to mutual exclusivity.
So while it might be true that President-Elect Barack Obama’s personal flavor tends to lean towards pragmatists, that doesn’t mean that ideology plays no role in his political execution. Neither ideology nor pragmatism are four letter words, in either form or function.
Scott Payne is a part-time blogger and aspiring pundit hailing from the Canadian city of Calgary, Alberta. With an eight year history in political activism and the not-for-profit sector, Scott has come to the conclusion that political and social analysis that does not at least attempt to take into account a variety of perspectives is doomed to limited success and partial failure. As such, Scott is committed to the goal of fashioning a socio-political discourse that is as representative of the many views operating in society as possible. Yes, Scott is a dreamer; he blogs regularly at The Politics of Scrabble.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.