The End of Political Pragmatism

The title of this article may seem hyperbolic, but in an era of some of the most divisive politics in US history I’m not sure that pragmatism is something on a lot of our minds. Pragmatism is simply defined as operating under actions that are pragmatic or practical, but I don’t think this definition is precise enough when talking about political pragmatism. Instead we need to talk about ethics, more specifically normative ethics. Within normative ethics there are essentially three major frameworks: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. To elaborate on these, virtue ethics describes a framework where you operate within a societal set of virtues, or morally good traits.. Basically virtue ethics is more based on the character that you instill rather than based on your actions. Deontology, which is also referred to as duty ethics, describes an ethical framework based on the obligation you complied and the moral judgement used. Consequentialism is the framework which bases the ethical judgement solely on the consequences of the actions. A branch of consequentialism is called utilitarianism, which creates a structure based on the utility value of an action to determine it’s ethicality. Pragmatism is another normative framework, but in reality it’s a mix of these three. Basically pragmatism takes an approach that every action need to be analyzed individually, and that the actions focus on society rather than an individual, it is relative based on other actions, and that the moral judgement is based solely on the context of the time and location of the situation.

Now that pragmatism is more well defined for this context, let’s talk about the death of it relative to US politics. If we look back to Bill Clinton’s administration, pragmatism was probably at it’s height in the modern era of politics. Congress had a Republican super majority, with a Democratic president. There were many issues that both sides had extreme disagreements on, yet we had a thriving economy, and a lot of progressive progress was made. I think the biggest attribution for both of these comes from the overall amount of political pragmatism from both Bill Clinton, and a Congress led by Speaker Newt Gingrich. Both sat down and discussed issues, and each issue had it’s own merit. Partisanship wasn’t that big of an issue when both sides of the aisle achieved progress from their relative view points. This willingness to compromise, when judged pragmatically, allowed everyone involved to be ethical.

After this era though, the usage of political pragmatism started to decline. During the George W. Bush’s presidency he had a Congress that was the same as his party, so this need to compromise was a lot less, so pragmatism wasn’t needed as often. Moving forward though, I think the major decline started after the 2010 elections with the Tea Party movement. This was the nail in the coffin to political pragmatism. This movement was moving forward with a message of obstructing the other side. This divisiveness came from a movement of conflicting virtue ethics. Both sides painted each other with character attacks, and a lot abandoned the act of looking at their actions and the issues as individual events relative to society. Most bills that make it through Congress seem to have unnecessary riders attached to them to try to progress unrelated causes. Congress should be able to pass a Zika bill to help those affected and hopefully prevent the spread of the virus, but every single bill to come through so far has had a rider attached with some sort of partisan language.

Since 2010, it has only gotten worse. Gerrymandering has allowed for many Congressional districts to be extremely uncompetitive, meaning a significant portion of Congress can keep their jobs without worrying about their political actions. The things that seem to bring down politicians now are entirely based on their characters, or from a virtue ethics standpoint. This has only gotten worse in this Presidential election thus far. On the left there was a battle between two candidates, one a champion of pragmatism, the other a ideologue who ran a campaign of character attacks. On the right there was a battle between seventeen candidates, all basing their ethics on one of the three frameworks discussed above, but a common theme was that they wouldn’t work with the remnants of the Obama administration, and wouldn’t compromise.

Here’s my plea to you. Bring back pragmatism. Use it with your vote. Look at all of the issues and figure out which candidate will do the best to improve society. Look at which candidate will be pragmatic too. Revolutionary change doesn’t happen without violence, but net change does happen with pragmatism. I urge you to fight for pragmatism, whether you agree with every issue or not.

If you’re not registered to vote, do so here: https://vote.usa.gov/. All I ask is that you go out research and vote.