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Recently, a number of pieces have appeared in various media outlets in reaction to Barack Obama’s cabinet nominations. David Sanger, writing for the New York Times, reacted to the nominees by saying that Obama is “surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.” Robert Burns, writing for the Associated Press reports that “Obama’s choices signal a more pragmatic, less ideological approach to asserting American leadership in the world.” The Washington Post praised Obama for being “pragmatic in choosing pragmatists“, specifically praising the selection of Robert Gates, who is “a problem solver rather than an ideologue.” The USA Today reported that Obama’s economic team was lauded as “pragmatists who understand how to use the levers of government in the financial sector” who favour “Practicality over ideology. Geithner is seen as a problem-solver [whose] strength is listening carefully to what the problem is, and then deciding on a pragmatic basis what ought to be done about it.”

The consensus regarding Obama’s confirmed and prospective cabinet picks so far seems to be that Obama is surrounding himself with pragmatists as opposed to ideologues. In everyday usage, pragmatism refers to the ability at finding a way to make things work. Clearly, we wouldn’t want to live in a state run by impractical people. However, in political philosophy, pragmatism takes on a different meaning than the one used in everyday parlance. Perhaps the most notable proponent of the political form of pragmatism in American history is Richard Nixon’s Secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who advocated and practiced realpolitik. Its central tenets are that politics should be run by practical considerations (i.e., that one’s actions should be determined by what is most beneficial or least detrimental to their self-interest), rather than by ideological notions, and that decisions should be based on power, rather than principles, morals and other forms of naïve idealistic nonsense. Political pragmatism is hardly a recent phenomenon: Machiavelli wrote The Prince, which espoused a pragmatic world view where the ends justify the means, in 1513.

A Noah’s ark of flat earth advocates

Among the Obama cabinet nominations and potential nominations that have received the label of pragmatic we count: Joe Biden as vice-president, Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, Timothy Geithner as secretary of treasury, Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council, Robert Gates as secretary of defense, and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Robert Rubin has also been retained as an economic adviser. It is interesting to note that these supposedly non-ideological pragmatists are advocates of neoliberal economics, some of them playing key roles in the deregulation of the Clinton era. Rahm Emanuel is an ardent hardliner on the Israelo-Palestinian conflict: he was instrumental in preventing Jimmy Carter from speaking at the democratic convention because Carter had spoken critically of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates, and Hillary Clinton are fairly hawkish and agree with the ideology that the US has the right of military intervention in sovereign nations, as expressed by their support for the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. It is fairly striking that adherence to the doctrine of neoliberal ideology and military interventionism does not prevent members of the Obama cabinet from receiving the label of pragmatists, as opposed to being labeled ideologues.

It is an interesting thought experiment to consider the punditocracy’s reaction following the hypothetical announcement that a well known antiwar activist who is also an outspoken critic of neoliberal economics, let’s say Naomi Klein or Edward S. Herman, had been appointed to the cabinet: would the reaction have been to maintain that the nomination wasn’t ideological and that it was a purely pragmatic choice? Of course not, such a nomination would elicit a predictable chorus of condemnation over such a blatantly ideological choice. The lesson to be drawn here is that support for neoliberal economics, the Iraq war, and military interventionism are not considered ideological, but the position of pragmatic individuals with a firm grip on reality. In contrast, those actively opposing these beliefs are, at best, starry eyed idealists, “a Noah’s Ark of flat earth advocates” as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman once put it, on a quixotic quest to prevent the earth from turning.

What makes one position pragmatic and the other ideological is essentially that one falls in line with prevailing doctrine while the other does not. This creates a very peculiar practical definition of realism, in which the word realism means seeing the world through the same prism as the pragmatists and pundits. It also has the benefit of being invisible to the true believers: their ideology isn’t ideology, it’s just the way things are, the natural order of things so to speak and therefore appears as ideologically neutral as the laws of physics. Not only does this make one line of thought seem pragmatic and the opposition, ideological, it suggests that one option is logical and based on a realistic conception of reality, whereas the other is based on delusion, wishful thinking, and other fanciful notions. Simply put, we are to believe that while the pragmatists are firmly based in reality, the dissenters are not. Defined this way, pragmatism becomes a deterrent to ideologies inimical to power by proposing a narrow world view in which there is no viable alternative but the views espoused by pragmatists. As a consequence of these problems, defining pragmatism in opposition to ideology often leads pragmatists to a belief in their inerrancy even as their language betrays a total disconnect with reality. For instance, there is nothing realistic in Lawrence Summers’ argument against environmental regulation when he said, back in 1991: “There are no limits on the planet’s capacity for absorption likely to hold us back in the foreseeable future. The danger of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else is non-existent. The idea that the world is heading into the abyss is profoundly wrong. The idea that we should place limits on growth because of natural limitations is a serious error…”

Perfectly logical, but totally insane

In 1991, while he was vice-president at the World Bank, Lawrence Summers wrote an internal memo arguing that the World Bank should encourage moving dirty industries to less developed countries because it is where harmful pollution would be the least costly and would also be where wages were lowest. In his words, “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Summers lamented that countries in Africa were vastly under-polluted and that a substance which increases the risk of prostate cancer wouldn’t elicit as much concern in countries where the mortality rate under the age of five is 200 per thousand. When the memo was leaked to the public, Jose Lutzenberger, Brazil’s secretary of the environment at the time, wrote a letter to Summers in which he said: “Your reasoning is perfectly logical, but totally insane.” Lutzenbeger would soon be fired from his position, while Summers kept his post at the World Bank and would go on to serve as secretary of the treasury under Clinton.

In a purely technical sense, Lawrence Summers’s proposal was quite pragmatic, if we take the realpolitik definition of pragmatism where it is defined as decision making based on self-interest without regards to principles, ethics, or the consequences of our actions on others. This incident serves to illustrate the limits of political pragmatism: that many so-called pragmatic answers only make sense within an extremely narrow view of the world. The pragmatists are behaving logically, but their ideological premises are fundamentally flawed and can even create its own feedback by selecting which measures receive attention from a vast array of data. For instance, a neoliberal economist might focus on macroeconomic measures such as GDP growth, to the detriment of measures of distribution of wealth. Because it embraces working within the confines of prevailing doctrine, pragmatism will also adopt doctrinal constraints that limit the thinkable, which in turn limits the feasible: it may not be possible to do certain things within a given context. For instance, civil liberties are impossible within the context of a police state. Does it mean that the citizens of a police state should abandon their starry eyed dreams of civil liberties, and go the pragmatic route, because, aw shucks, it’s just not possible to have civil liberties? No, in fact, in this case, pragmatic working within the constraints of a police state leads to perpetuation of tyranny. The point is to get rid of the police state which makes civil liberties impossible, not accommodating it.

What’s so pragmatic about pragmatism?

The reductionist thinking of political pragmatism, uncaring about all but its narrow objectives, along with its pretence of infallibility may explain why it has garnered such an abysmal track record, exacting a terrible toll in devastation and human suffering. For instance, the biofuel solution to combat global warming contributed to the food riots that occurred in several countries this year. It might be something if pragmatism was successful within its own narrow parameters, but it all too often fails even at that. For instance, while the Vietnam pragmatists stayed the course because of concerns about the effect withdrawal on military credibility, the US left the war in Vietnam with a military in tatters, with soldiers abusing drugs, refusing to fight, going AWOL or deserting outright, not to mention the occasional fragging of officers by soldiers. Spectacular economic collapses occurred wherever neoliberal doctrine was implemented: Russia under Yeltsin, Chile under Pinochet, Argentina more recently, etc. Even when political pragmatism does achieve its own narrow goals, it often comes at the cost of narrowed options, making ideals seem ever more out of reach. It is a perfect recipe for perpetual retreat, continually settling for less and less until complete disillusion, cynicism, and dejection set in. Be pragmatic: demand your ideals.