Pig Herder

Liberals have lately been heard trumpeting the notion that conservatives are unpragmatic, and that they live in a magical world of idealism and faith. The flip side of this idea is that liberals occupy the "reality based community"; they soldier on gallantly, taking stock of the real world and acting accordingly.

A closer look will show that reality has yet to interrupt the liberals' fantasy, at least on this score. In noting that in the narrow 51-49 vote to open ANWR to oil exploration the nay votes were nearly unanimously Democrats, Deacon (of Powerline blog), in a new piece at the Daily Standard, observes that Republicans have become the pragmatists.

The real point is that humans should not gain an advantage through the exploitation of nature. It was this doctrinaire position that Senate Democrats attempted to uphold when they voted with near unanimity against developing ANWR.

THE DEMOCRATIC POSITION on exploiting the environment is not unrelated to other positions the party has taken. During the Clinton years, for example, the prevailing view seemed to be that military force should be shunned except where (as in Haiti and Kosovo) its use would not advance any direct U.S. interest, and thus would not undermine our national purity. This aversion to gaining a public advantage at the expense of ideological purity can also be detected in the Social Security debate--thou shalt not benefit from the fact that the stock market works; the debate over public education--thou shalt not benefit from the fact that private schools work; and the debate over faith-based initiatives--thou shalt not benefit from the fact that charitable religious organizations work.

The common theme here is anti-pragmatism. A workable definition of political pragmatism could be this: Public policy decisions should be made based on a weighing of concrete costs and benefits taking into account all interests, but with the interests of Americans outweighing the interests of non-Americans and the interests of living humans outweighing those of buried humans and animals. (Let's leave aside the question of the interests of the unborn.) Ideology can, and inevitably will, inform the way one performs this calculation. However, it is anti-pragmatic to allow ideology to replace or trump the calculation.