Dropping The Balz

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Regarding Barack Obama as a “pragmatist” makes about as much sense as describing Ronald Reagan as a socialist, and yet, amazingly, that’s just what Washington Post senior political writer Dan Balz has done in a long, top of the front page, just below the banner article today under the mindboggling headline, “Testing The Promise Of Pragmatism.”

There is probably no term in the lexicon of politics that is more misused, misunderstood, and mangled than “pragmatism” (except perhaps “populism”), but the deep nature of its philosophic meaning as articulated by such noted American philosophers as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey need not concern us here. I’m tempted to say “I knew those philosophers, and Barack Obama is no pragmatist.” But even under the superficial everyday bastardization of the concept — which can pretty much be summed up as “whatever works,” Obama is still no pragmatist.

Balz’s piece begins:

A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama pinpointed one of the biggest challenges he would face as president. Could he restore confidence in government, even as he was proposing the biggest federal intervention in the domestic economy in a generation?

At the time, Obama said he did not think his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism ushered in by President Ronald Reagan toward top-down government and social engineering by Washington.

“What we don’t know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government; they’re more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government,” he said on that day in December 2008.

As Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday, that question remains one of the most politically charged of his presidency — and central to the politics of this election year — and will hinge on how Americans judge Obama and his policies.

If Balz really thinks that “one of the most politically charged” questions of Obama’s presidency is whether his administration “is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government,” that it is “more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government,” then I have no interest in his answer or for that matter in anything else he has to say.

The only people who could look at Obama’s health care bill and still quote with a straight face his declaration that he doesn’t care whether government is big or small, that what he wants is “a smart effective government,” are the same sorts of people who are always found praising the Emperor’s new clothes.

ADDENDUM [22 January]

There is, however, one sense in which it is perfectly true that Obama is not simply a pragmatist but in fact the quintessential pragmatist, and that is the sense brilliantly analyzed by Peter Berkowitz, who defines pragmatism as

a theoretical approach popular among law professors and political theorists that overtly reduces questions of principle to questions of what works, and then covertly transforms these into questions of what works to advance progressive goals.