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If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days,
"ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted
logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the
blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the
slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.

But privileging pragmatism over ideology, while perhaps understandable
in the wake of the Bush years, misses the point. For one thing, as Glenn
Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead
decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting
conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests.

Principle is often pragmatism's guardian.
Particularly at times of crisis, when a polity succumbs to collective
madness or delusion, it is only the obstinate ideologues who refuse to
go along. Expediency may be a virtue in virtuous times, but it's a vice
in vicious ones.

There's another problem with the fetishization of the pragmatic, which
is the brute fact that, at some level, ideology is inescapable. Obama
may have told Steve Kroft that he's solely interested in "what works,"
but what constitutes "working" is not self-evident and, indeed, is
impossible to detach from some worldview and set of principles. Alan
Greenspan, of all people, made this point deftly while testifying before
Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee. Waxman asked Greenspan, "Do
you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish
you had not made?" To which Greenspan responded, "Well, remember that
what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal
with reality. Everyone has one. You have to--to exist, you need an
ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not."

What's Missing From Lind's Analysis

First of all, Lind fails disastrously to comprehend the role of race.  Chris has written about this before, and I'll be writing about this tomorrow again, but there's a clear correlation between racial homogeneity and support for the welfare state.  It was neither accidental nor peripheral that the New Deal was a form of massive affirmative action for the white working class, much of it on its way to becoming part of the largest middle class ever known.  By keeping agricultural workers and domestics outside the realm of coverage for Social Security and minimum wage protections, the New Deal effectively created the black underclass as a separate entity, while whites in very similar circumstances at the time (1935) went on to decades of steadily increasing incomes and various forms of government assistance.

Indeed, the New Deal system repeatedly proved incapable of dealing with rightwing demonization.  In addition to kowtowing to Southern racism, they were driven from power by McCarthyism in the early 50s, and Johnson initiated full-scale war in Vietnam precisely because he thought a repeat was inevitable if he were to withdraw instead.

Furthermore, the system of national industrial development and landuse developed during this period directly served to undermine the New Deal system.  As described in The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America , the Cold War era saw a massive disinvestment in the Rustbelt, as military production shifted dramatically outward, to the West Coast, Sunbelt and East Coast.  This was reinforced by the Interstate freeway system, at the same time that urban cores were disinvested in, while segregated suburbs were heavily subsidized. Amazingly, it was as if the entire New Deal establishment was utterly blind to how it was committing economic/demographic suicide.

This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to get them back on track.

Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.

Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.

The exact opposite is true of Obama.  He is the first Democratic President of what promises to be a new Democratic era-unless he blows it, which he very well could do if he fails to deliver some of the very needed change that the nation has been clamoring for.  He was elected specifically on the premise of a need for change, and specifically in opposition to the politics of George W. Bush.  So everything he does to accommodate, ala Blair or Eisenhower, is an undermining of his mandate.

Why does he do it? The reasons are no doubt multiple and complex.  But one over-riding factor is that he has come of age politically during a period dominated by conservatives waging hegemonic warfare, while progressives have not even woken up to what is happening.  And one result of that is that Obama accepts as given the way that conservatives have framed a great many issues.  Locked into their ideological framework, he then tries to do some warm-and-fuzzy things within the confines of that framework.  But their framework necessarily limits those warm-and-fuzzy things to mere gestures at best, if not deceptive packaging for genuinely evil policies.

My point here is simple:  One does not have to buy into Obama's worldview at all to see some truth in him having progressive instincts.  What's lacking is a progressive intellect--or even just an independent critical one.  Instincts are important, of course.  But they're not enough.  Especially when you're talking abuot the President of the United States. We already learned that with George W. Bush.