Pragmatic (adjective): solving problems in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist now, rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas or rules.
The battle for the Democratic presidential nomination is dominating the news cycle, and two of the three clear frontrunners in polls, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, draw their support from the resurgent left of the party. Sanders in particular describes himself as a democratic socialist and a threat to the establishment. The third favorite, Joe Biden, presents himself not as the representative of the conservative wing, but as a pragmatic, centrist reformer (FAIR.org, 7/17/19).
Across corporate media, the choice is being portrayed as between progressive idealism and a more credible pragmatism—not left vs. right, but left vs. realistic: “Should Democrats Be Going Big or Getting Real?” asked the Associated Press (7/31/19), while the LA Times (7/31/19) defined the choice as between those who “call for big, ambitious policies” and those with a “more centrist, pragmatic approach.”
Pundits and analysts have expressed profound skepticism of the progressive platform, which includes universal healthcare, public funding of higher education, a “Green New Deal” to combat climate change and higher taxes on the wealthy. They urge voters to choose more moderate (i.e. pro-corporate) candidates, who, they claim, stand a far greater chance of unseating Donald Trump in 2020 (FAIR.org, 7/2/19).
Despite this, the left of the party has continued to gain momentum, with many voters drawn to the argument that bold progressive programs are not only a realistic response to the serious problems the nation faces, but also a solid strategy for winning elections by appealing to non-voters as well as the many swing voters who have conservative social views but lean left on economic policy (FAIR.org, 6/20/17).
From skepticism to hostility
Washington Post‘s David Von Drehle (8/2/19) writes that “reality is not going to bend to a new shape come 2021 just because a President Sanders shouts at it.”
In the face of increasing public rejection of their definition of “pragmatism,” corporate media have moved from skepticism to outright hostility. Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle (8/2/19) savaged Warren, claiming it is embarrassingly “self-evident” that her “idealistic” plans are way “out of the mainstream,” and instead America needs a healthy “dose of pragmatism” from someone like healthcare entrepreneur-turned politician John Delaney, who will stop this Medicare for All nonsense.
Similarly, a New York Times headline (7/30/19) asserted that “Ahead of Debates, Pennsylvania Democrats Want Candidates to Stress Pragmatism.” The story, by reporter Trip Gabriel, described supposed runaway grassroots “excitement” for Joe Biden, even among strong progressives, who “for pragmatism, would choose him.” It also presented Sanders’ support at virtually zero—based on “a straw poll at the Newtown [Pennsylvania] picnic”—suggesting that even Pete Buttigieg is seven times as popular.
This narrative of Sanders’ limited appeal was undercut by the Times itself (8/2/19) just three days later, when it produced an interactive map of the US, showing Sanders had far and away the most campaign donations across the US, including in the two counties the Times’ Gabriel visited for the article. Sanders’ edge in supporters was so overwhelming that the Times had to produce a second map, showing the top recipient of donations in every congressional district aside from the Vermont senator.
In the Washington Examiner (7/10/19), Maddie Solomon warned that the “left-wing elites’” charge towards socialism will alienate the vast “moderate” political center of America, so Democrats must be “pragmatic” to beat Trump and choose the “respected” candidate who is “high in the polls”: Joe Biden.
According to CNN‘s Jeff Zeleny (2/18/19), “Klobuchar is testing the balance between pragmatism and purity, while resisting the urge to pander to the party’s progressive wing.”
Meanwhile, in the Washington Monthly (7/30/19), David Burke pitched Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar as “most electable candidate,” as she is “grounded in reality” and favors “pragmatic legislation”—in other words, she “has been careful not to tack too far to the left.” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny (2/18/19) likewise lauded Klobuchar for her courageous pragmatism, which, according to his glowing portrait, means “resisting the urge to pander to the party’s progressive wing” by strongly opposing Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and free public college tuition.
When Democratic politicians respond to the will of their constituents by endorsing progressive policies, it’s often presented as “pandering,” or even “appeasement” (e.g., New York Times, 6/29/19; Associated Press, 5/23/19; Vanity Fair, 4/5/19)—a word most often used in connection to European collaboration with the genocidal regime of Adolf Hitler. In contrast, talk of “appeasing” so-called moderates or even big donors is extremely rare in the media, subtly highlighting whom they think Democrats should represent.
USA Today editorial page editor Bill Sternberg (7/29/19) warns Democrats not to “indulge the left,” channeling the wisdom of right-wing candidates like Delaney, who offers “real solutions, not impossible promises,” and “policies that make sense, that you can pay for and that you can get done.” Sternberg sums up the message of the “moderates”:
If the party keeps lurching to the left, rehashing old battles and alienating working-class voters, President Donald Trump will be putting his hand on the Bible again in January 2021.
How pragmatic are the pragmatists?
National Review‘s Rich Lowry (5/17/19) asks, “What if Donald Trump hasn’t driven Democrats insane, sending them into a spiral of self-defeating radicalism, but instead made them shockingly pragmatic?”
While the National Review (5/17/19) might tell us that the “common sense play” for the Democrats is to “nominate a non-socialist,” a “pragmatist” like Biden or someone with a “similarly relatively moderate profile” to appeal to Obama-to-Trump voters, voters are right to question the sacred logic that moving to the right is a winning tactic.
Thirty-two of 33 polls show Sanders defeating Trump in a general election, often in landslides, with Warren beating the current president in most projections too. Medicare for All is supported by the vast majority of Americans, including most Republican voters, while up to 60% of the country wants to see college tuition made free. Two-thirds of the population favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. Large majorities of Republicans support Warren’s wealth tax proposals, and the public is behind a Green New Deal.
It could be argued that the progressive agenda would be a huge vote winner, not just from Trump voters, but also picking up non-voters. Turnout in US elections is consistently low compared to other developed countries, and in 2016 almost as many adults did not vote as chose the Democrats and Republicans combined. Non-voters are chiefly from lower-income backgrounds, and would be the primary beneficiaries of democratic socialist or progressive reforms. Thus a leftward turn could boost the Democratic base, and undermine Trump’s support from the white working class media are so keen on profiling (FAIR.org, 3/30/18, 11/13/18).
The consistent media advice that Democrats should “pragmatically” move to the right, and embrace what were mainstream Republican positions a few years ago, is something FAIR has tracked for decades. (See Extra!, 9/92, 1–2/95, 6/04, 7–8/06, 1–2/07; FAIR.org, 11/7/08, 3/16/10.) And when this advice does not work, history is retroactively re-written to fit it.
In 2006, the New York Times (3/12/06) claimed that the Democrats lost the 2000 election because Al Gore “unmoored himself” from Bill Clinton’s centrist politics to run as a “populist scourge of Big Oil and Big Healthcare,” and therefore “drastically underperformed.” Yet while he was running, media were presenting him as a thoroughly “pragmatic” politician (Economist, 8/10/00). Indeed, the Times itself reported that Gore’s “centrist agenda” (8/15/00) was so conservative that his support from the Democratic base was wilting (8/17/00, 9/9/00).
In reality, Bill Clinton moved his party to the right, as the media approvingly reported at the time. “The Democratic platform,” noted the Christian Science Monitor (7/17/92) “is not Mondale/Dukakis liberal, but Clinton moderate,” applauding the Clinton/Gore team’s pragmatic commitment to “cutting entitlement programs” and “compromising” with Republicans. Meanwhile, the New York Times (1/27/94) discussed how Clinton’s “pragmatic,” “centrist agenda” was distinctly conservative. But by 2008, the explanation as to why the Democrats collapsed in the 1994 midterms was due to its nonexistent radical and unpopular leftist platform (e.g., LA Times, 11/5/08; Wall Street Journal, 11/5/08; Washington Post, 11/5/08).
And going further back, both Mondale and Dukakis’ losing presidential bids pushed the Democrats to the right as well. In real time, the New York Times (5/8/88) had praised Dukakis’ “pragmatic, centrist approach.” When Mondale ran, similarly, the Times (7/22/84) depicted his 1984 campaign as “a shift from liberal positions of 1976 and 1980,” noting the only mention of “liberalism” in his platform was to denigrate it. But as FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 9/92) noted, “When the ‘pragmatists’ lose badly with their centrist approach, they are repainted after the fact as radicals, so the strategy of tilting to the right can be tried again and again.”
A moderate class war
And that is the trick; Democrats are pragmatic when they win and too left-wing when they lose. Corporate media, funded by the same sources that donate to “pragmatic” politicians, present a rightward shift not as a political decision to ignore working Americans in order to favor the wealthy, but as a sensible reaction based on facts, in contrast to their ideologically driven opponents.
Of course, pragmatists are every bit as ideologically motivated as progressives, communists or the most craven white nationalists. However, corporate media hide their pro-business positions behind a veneer of pragmatism, presenting their ideas as common sense: Millions of Americans should naturally vote against their own interests, because those who ask for more risk having everything taken away from them.
Judging by the polls, and multiple studies showing the public is sick of rampant inequality, the truly pragmatic thing to do this election cycle, the way to appeal to the actual political center, may be an all-out class war against Donald Trump. But don’t expect a media owned by millionaires and billionaires to be on board with this.
Its a damn shame that we’re not going to have the opportunity to disprove this unsound, non-factual reasoning about moderation, centrism, and pragmatism… since Joe Biden will be successfully foisted on us as the Dem nominee, so that we can get “2016 The Remix: Election 2020”, and 4 more years of Drumpf.
There is a parallel universe out there somewhere, where the Democrats nominate an actual Democrat for POTUS (crazy, I know!), turn-out young voters, and sweep the GOP out of both the White House and the Senate in 2020. I envy the residents of that universe.
That universe occured in 1972 with George McGovern vs. Nixon. 18 year-olds had recently been given the right to vote and they were supposed to change the country with their liberal turnout. Worst Democratic loss ever. It may be hard to hear, but the vast majority of the voters are pretty happy with most things in the country. We need to do some things better, but a wrecking ball candidate will scare ALL the middle 10-20% to Trump.
That 72 Generation you speak of are the same people who gave us THIS economy! I would rather fight a good fight and loose Honorably, then to hold my nose yet one more time and at best, get more of the same! That 1972 year was less then 30 years after ww2. 72 is nearly 50 years from us now. Reaganomics got us here, Progressives will get us out!
The problem with this narrative is that it is not really supported by the facts. “Wrecking ball candidates” (i.e. actual leftists/Democrats) performed very well in 2018 mid-terms, and many of the popular progressive policy ideas enjoy popular support. Genuine independents/swing voters are mostly a myth, and candidates like Biden represent the worst of both worlds: Republicans still aren’t voting for a Democrat no matter how much they blabber about centrism, moderation, pragmatism, or cooperation, and actual Dems/liberals aren’t going to be motivated to turn out for yet another pro-corporate, pro-military, anti-immigrant establishment stooge.
It’s so bizarre to read how people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are considered too conservative by a minority of the Democratic Party when about half the country considers them to be evil communists. It is useless to campaign on scary industry-wrecking programs that will never pass Congress anyway. If a Democratic Congress did pass such legislation, President Biden would sign it. Biden is 10 degrees to the right of Sanders and Warren, but 50% of the country polled think he’s just right. Trump is 180 degrees to the right. Nothing will get better without getting him out of office and Biden so far is best at that.
What’s bizarre is your entire cant.
Again, ANY Democrat is too liberal for any conservative to cast a vote for, so why pick a Democrat who can’t at least motivate the Democratic base and mobilize liberal-minded non-voters? We saw how a bland establishment Democrat burdened with the baggage of 3 decades-worth of Democrat’s political blooper-reel (1994 crime bill, Iraq invasion, etc) fares against Trump in today’s political climate, so why on Earth would we want to roll out Hillary Clinton 2.0: Joe Biden and hope for different/better results?
The “lesser of two evils” argument only worked when the lesser-evil produced better results.. but when it stops working, maybe its time to try a GOOD candidate instead of a less-evil one.
That is not necessarily true. Sanders appeals to Republicans and Independents, who largely despise Establishment Democrats like Obama, Biden and Clinton (either one). Someone with integrity and who has been on the side of workers and marginalized communities for 40 years might do very well against someone who is the precise opposite. This article makes the valid point as reinforced by some of the comments here that Americans have been manipulated by the constant drumbeat of “pragmatism” into believing that the best presidential candidate is one who is politically expedient and is able to serve the donor class. if they aren’t quite sure
And then you have alternative (but not progressive) media that sows confusion by calling fakers ‘progressives’. Dave Cullen rightly makes fun of a confab of Democratic Socialists of America but then says something like “What do you expect? They are socialists!” But he doesn’t qualify his statement. That’s not honest reporting. That dishonest reporting by someone with an agenda. And his ‘alternative’ label must be qualified as ‘alternative, as in more, not different’.
Then you have James O’Keefe reporting (in an excellent report) on Google whistleblower, Zach Vorhies’s revelations (revealing that contrary to Google’s assertions, the company is not a platform – neutral – but a powerful political machine or, in other words, a private sector publisher with an agenda) in which he calls Google’s censorship agenda ‘progressive’. He doesn’t qualify his remark to make it clear that that’s just Google’s assertion. Does he want to redefine the word ‘progressive’ to mean ‘not progressive’? Well done James. I thought you were smart.
O’Keefe and “excellent” are oxymorons. You are half-way there!
Bernie is a faker Alan. He’s not progressive and I’m alarmed to see the corporate-inspired and -led Green New Deal get sold by Bernie and those, like yourself, trying to sell that faker.
So, in short, “sheepdogging”. As Rob Urie astutely put it, “the Democrat’s aversion to left political programs is more probably stated as deference to existing power. This is the central impediment to democratic action within the Democratic Party. The Democrat’s fear isn’t of losing elections, but of winning them with a mandate to upend the existing order.” (CounterPunch, 8/9/19). Just insert “corporate media’s aversion” and the quote applies to the media sources cited by MacLeod. The larger point here is the one made by Thorstein Veblen in a great short article he wrote for The Dial in 1919, the title of which says it all: “Bolshevism is a Menace–to Whom?”
I’m late to the party, but here are my two cents, as a non-American: we’ve had a very similar thing happening in France, and it ended with the election of Macron, a former minister in a socialist governement who’s about as socialist as Jordan Belfort.
Socialism, class struggle and radical changes were deemed taboo by mainstream medias. Meanwhile, Macron and his gang imposed the use of the word “progressisme” (You can all figure out what it means in english) as an empty albeit powerful keyword that makes them look like the good guys, and make everyone who opposes them evil (I mean, who would oppose progress?).
In the end, the “progressisme” they’ve sold us is an economical program coming from the center right, and some empty posturing about the environment or women’s rights. Meanwhile, cops are maiming and wounding thousands of yellow vests (popular class protesters) and courts are handing insane sentences for ridiculous offenses to protesters.