Bad Pragmatism pt. 3: Common Sense Principles for a Crappier World

(Weekend News Digest will be delayed – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I know your attention is probably better devoted to some good, popular diaries which have made the rec list today: One Pissed Off Liberal’s jeremiad against the crooks, for instance, or Nightprowlkitty’s harrowing story of detention.  This is simply a short reflection upon the recent history of bad pragmatism, the political trend which decks itself out in colors of “realism” and “pragmatism” (while attempting to present a moral face to the world) but is in fact just plain wrong.

This diary will only confront three rhetorical principles of bad pragmatism: “bipartisanship,” “teacher accountability/ test them every year” and “fiscal prudence.”  More will be forthcoming.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Let’s review, for those of you who missed Part 1 and Part 2.  “Bad pragmatism” is when you are asked to subscribe to a political initiative, and this political initiative is promoted as being all solid and “realistic” and “dealing with the world as it is,” yet what you are being asked to do is basically the wrong thing.  

OK so why is bad pragmatism the wrong thing to do?  Answer: It’s the wrong thing not because, or not merely because, it violates some sacred principle we all happen to hold dear to our hearts.  Let’s get that out of the way at the beginning.  This is not a plea for essentialism or idealism.  My attack on “bad pragmatism” is based on pragmatic grounds.  Bad pragmatism doesn’t work – it doesn’t create a better world, and it doesn’t, in the long run, benefit those who employ it to political “advantage.”  Bad pragmatism is, in short, expedient but not effective.

I suppose some of my idea of political “advantage” here is covered by Matthew 16:26:

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

But bad pragmatism doesn’t stop with the fact that being a bad pragmatist makes you less of a human being.  There really are some cumulative effects of bad pragmatism, some of which we’re seeing now.  A large part of this is due to the fact that bad pragmatism has become business as usual under the sign of neoliberalism, a social order based upon the parasitic domination of capital as it dismantles the planet’s life-giving biospheres and, eventually, as it dismantles itself.  Yeah, let’s pursue financial profit on a dead planet.  We’re all good pragmatists here, doing what’s practical and sensible, yet things in general are going to pot.  You can see this in basic trends gone bad.  Financial bubbles will all eventually pop, in the same way that Ponzi schemes all eventually leave their investors with worthless IOUs.  We’re seeing the housing bubble pop right now.  When equity was increasing, it made sense to buy real estate; now you have people walking away from homes they own because equity is dropping so fast there’s no point in making the payments.

I have to imagine that one primary appeal of bad pragmatism is that of competition.  There are winners and losers in the world, and those with the gold make the rules.  But, for the majority, and especially for the losers, is that any sort of guide to happiness in this life?  In a competitive system in which there are lots of losers for every winner, is competing really “pragmatic”?  It staggers the imagination to think of the losers of this society, those who competed for good jobs and the good life but didn’t quite make it, as “pragmatists.”

At any rate, for this diary, part three in a series, I will take a glancing look at the rhetoric of bad pragmatism.  So what do I mean by rhetoric?  Well, political language is typically used to persuade people, and so here I want to identify some common words of political language which are associated with bad pragmatism.  In each case, I wish to identify a) the APPEAL of each word in question and b) the BAD CONSEQUENCES of popular assent to the policies enacted with endorsement of each word.

In general, then, I wish to paint a picture of the road to Hell, paved with good intentions, without missing the color of each pavement-stone as we travel down said road to our collective doom.  But remember, folks, this is CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM.  It is meant to make your struggles to elect the perfect Democrat less uncertain.

At any rate, this diary will only discuss three examples of the rhetoric of bad pragmatism: more will be forthcoming later.

1.  “Bipartisanship”

I suppose the appeal of bipartisanship is that there needs to be some compromise and collaboration, reaching even between Democrats and Republicans, for there to be effective policy-making in a Congress whose individual members do not agree on everything.  Of course, what counts for effective policy-making in Congress is invariably bad policy-making.  Glenn Greenwald describes this to a T in a recent item in his blog.

In almost every case, the proposals that are enacted are ones favored by the White House and supported by all GOP lawmakers, and then Democrats split and enough of them join with Republicans to ensure that the GOP gets what it wants. That’s “bipartisanhip” in Washington:

In short, “bipartisanship” is when a few Democrats join nearly all of the Republicans in backing Republican initiatives which are almost always bad.

2.  “Teacher Accountability”/ “Test them every year”

This was the impetus for the No Child Left Behind Act.  The idea is that teachers are to blame for “bad teaching,” and we the taxpayers are to “hold them accountable” by testing them every year.  Seems simple, right?  Now perhaps there are bad teachers in the public schools, but it’s not clear at all that any new piece of legislation was or is necessary to deal with them.  Wouldn’t public humiliation and boycott, supplemented by the disapproval of qualified administrators, suffice to deal with said bad teachers?  No, the bad pragmatism that motivates the No Child Left Behind Act is the pragmatism of “test them every year” (keeping in mind the points Bush scored on Gore in their 2000 Presidential debate).  NCLB makes all teachers “accountable” to test scores, when in fact the tests themselves measure the socioeconomic status and education level of the parents of the students being tested.

The defensive tactic typically employed by teachers and administrators to meet mandates of “teacher accountability” is to mandate teaching to the test, a tactic which insures that “education” will be about the test.  In real life, however, insofar as there’s an issue with public schooling, that issue is relevance – if school is wanting, this is because it doesn’t hold a candle to “real life.”  Thus real pragmatists such as John Dewey recommend that school should be like an apprenticeship in real life, with its economic compulsion held in abeyance, and with an intellectual element added.  NCLB, on the other hand, just makes public schooling even more irrelevant.  Who really needs an education in test-taking, anyway?  It nevertheless was voted in with a bipartisan consensus.  (Congressional vote) (Senate vote)

3.  “Fiscal Prudence”

In the 1990s, and as late as Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, the watchword of the Democratic Party was “fiscal prudence” – this was an attempt to score points on the Republican Party for its tendency to overspend on “defense,” and perhaps also a borrowing from Ross Perot’s 1992 Presidential campaign, which wanted to pay back the debt.  THe patrons of “fiscal prudence” get to claim the high ground in the political battle of ideas — whereas the Republicans once called the Democrats a bunch of “tax-and-spend liberals,” the “spend” contingent in Congress is now firmly in the Republican Party, as the Clinton surplus turned into the Bush deficit.  The website cited above grants it a couple of irrelevances: “Fiscal discipline keeps interest rates low and investment rates high.”  No, the Fed keeps interest rates low (or high), and investment rates depend upon whether or not there is any profit to be made, and where.

The philosophy of “fiscal prudence” needs to be viewed in light of the real-life history of dollar hegemony.  (If you want the full treatment as to how this came about, from World War I to the present moment, please read Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism.  Hudson, by the way, worked for Kucinich’s campaign, so he’s not a Republican.)  Let’s take a look at the Henry Liu synopsis, shall we?  Liu says:

World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world’s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world’s central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.

Thus for the past three decades or so the United States government has had a blank check to print whatever dollars it wants, and use them to buy whatever it wants from the rest of the world, which must then accept these dollars to cover their butts in the currency markets.  We should have taken advantage of this situation!  The Democratic Party could have used the advantages of dollar hegemony to get the government to buy something it needed, such as better education, health care, mass transit, alternative energy, or welfare.  Instead, it insisted upon “fiscal prudence,” for the sake of an “advantage” in the war of ideas.  The advantages of dollar hegemony, then, became the province of Republican discretion, and the money all went to “defense” spending.  (And that’s how we “won” the war in Iraq, right?)

*****

(to be continued)