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Pragmocracy Now

Pragmatism is theoretically pacifist yet politically ruthless Wikimedia Commons

In the hours after President Joe Biden suspended his reelection campaign on July 21, both fans and critics of Vice President Kamala Harris rushed to characterize her as a Biden-style pragmatist. Vox’s Christian Paz called Harris a “pragmatic thinker,” whose lack of firm beliefs likely lost her the nod in 2020. For Paz, Harris’s pragmatism is the reason why she can appear somewhat to the left of the president on the genocide in Gaza, attempting to find “ways to speak to young progressives and voters critical of Israel’s approach while still representing the president.” Speculating on who Harris might tap as her running mate, Ben Mathis-Lilley wrote in Slatethat choosing one of three white governors—Andy Beshear of red state Kentucky, or either Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer of swing states Pennsylvania and Michigan—would shore up Harris’s image as a “pragmatic, unifying candidate,” which “will likely be job one for her campaign.” Even the anonymous scolds over at The Economist, arguing in support of a mini-primary at the Democratic National Convention, noted that “Democrats have too often succumbed to pragmatism and deference, both of which [favor] Ms. Harris.”

Nobody disputes that results matter. But the argument that real leaders look past ideology to accomplish concrete goals is often used to sell much more complicated proposals, and it’s especially common in debates about foreign policy. In September 2007, for example, the Senate was debating a national defense spending package that had been vetoed once already by President George W. Bush. After the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, American companies threatened to freeze the financial assets of U.S. ally Nouri al-Maliki’s government, something Bush had hoped to avert. Senator Joe Biden, who criticized the veto—less Bush’s position than the resulting delays—took the floor to support the revived bill, claiming:

One thing about us Americans is, we have ultimately led the world as a consequence of two traits we possess, in my opinion, that exceed that of any other country. It is not just our military power; it is our idealism coupled with our pragmatism. It gets down to a very pragmatic question: If you don’t like Biden et al.’s political solution, what is yours?

Biden, who was actively campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time, was anxious to try out his plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines (formulated with Leslie H. Gelb, the late high-ranking official best known for overseeing the Pentagon Papers). Against the reckless zeal that had turned retaliation for 9/11 into outright invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden invoked “pragmatism” as the thinking-man’s justification for putting boots on the ground. For Biden, to be pragmatic is to act now and dream later. We already agree on the difference between right and wrong, he seemed to be saying: diplomatically negotiated peace is good and forever war is bad. No further questions. This is the same binary moral logic Biden would later use during his presidency, one that will be remembered for its deadly foreign policy. In Gaza and Ukraine, the administration’s confused, self-contradictory decisions are direct outcomes of Biden’s particular brand of pragmatism, which will remain influential in Democratic politics long after he leaves office.

Where does this strand of pragmatism come from? The American philosophers who articulated and popularized the term, like William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, are not the likely culprits. One simple reason: they were all committed pacifists. They believed pragmatism would help liberals convince the world that dialogue solves more problems than guns do. Biden, on the other hand, talks this way whenever he wants to put a shine on U.S. ideological and material support for foreign wars. While Biden has had staff advising him since the beginning of his political career, they cannot have ladled his pragmatism out of the murky stew of international relations intelligence either, as research shows that James and co. have only begun to be read seriously by the academic and academic-adjacent IR policy set in the last twenty years.

It’s more likely that Biden and Harris have internalized the meaning of the word used by the Supreme Court, one recently articulated by retired justice Stephen Breyer in his book Reading the Constitution: Why I Choose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.Breyer quotes Epictetus in his telling epigraph: “Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it.” For Breyer, a Clinton nominee, pragmatism is the clarion call of liberal justices, an imperative to base one’s rulings on the most up-to-date examples of the application of the law from the lower courts. The hope, for Breyer, is that the Constitution will then remain a living document, sensitive to the changing needs of a changing people, and not the scripture it is read as by Clarence Thomas and the originalists. Like Obama and Clinton before him, Biden, too, acts as though he makes decisions in good faith according to the latest information that is available to him alone—inevitabilities of a complicated reality which only he can see.

When Biden went all-in with Benjamin Netanyahu after the Hamas massacre on October 7, many Americans supported Israel, too quickly drawing an almost readymade conclusion about who was right and wrong (Hamas, if not Palestine) in the conflict. They listened to the administration’s talking points, slightly modified from the war on terror playbook, to make a (false, ahistorical) moral case to send money and arms. But even when federal agencies themselves identified and quickly explained away evidence of the government’s hypocrisy—as in a recent State Department report which found that Israel’s use of American-made weapons was illegal according to international law but nevertheless gave Biden the green light to keep sending them bombs—the Democratic base did not seem to blink.

Many believed in the righteousness of the Israeli cause—or believed Biden’s longtime commitment to it—so strongly that some degree of illegal activity was palatable so long as their government was standing on what they viewed as the right side of history. Liability-obsessed university presidents largely adopted Biden’s rhetorical strategy, either flat out lying or being weirdly secretive about their evidence of outside agitators to ground a (false, ahistorical) moral argument for inviting police onto their campuses. It’s well known that these collaborations have resulted in the use of excessive force on peaceful protesters. And yet the typical liberal, rightly concerned for the safety of Jewish and Muslim students but opposed to police brutality doesn’t know what to think about this. He throws his hands up: “It’s all too complicated! I’m just listening to the experts!,” he seems to think. In a political culture stunted by post-truth anti-intellectualism, many on the left have trouble voicing skepticism of expert opinion for fear of sounding like just like right-wing contrarians. I think we must press the case.

As I understand it, the central facet of the judicial pragmatism Biden has adapted for politics is the use of the body of common law—that is, decisions made by other judges. While common law adds up to an archive that SCOTUS can reference at will, there is no analogous basis for the executive branch. The president has no responsibility to acknowledge fleeting, often contradictory policies, never mind reactivate them for present purposes. Executive privilege is not only a legal tool to keep sensitive intelligence secret but also a powerful rhetorical device that is exploited on a daily basis. 

When Bush announced his intention to pocket veto the original 2008 defense spending bill, an administration statement erroneously claimed that allowing American companies to hold up Iraqi money would stall efforts that “everyone agrees [are] critically important to bringing our troops home”—never mind how said troops got there—”at a crucial juncture in that Nation’s reconstruction efforts and undermine the foreign policy and commercial interests of the United States.”

Breyer cites 2019’s Jam v. International Finance Corp., which required SCOTUS to examine the International Organizations Immunities Act granting nongovernmental groups like the United Nations “the same immunity from suit . . . as is enjoyed by foreign governments.” When that law was passed in 1945, Breyer notes, foreign governments still had near-total immunity; but by the late seventies, Congress had carved out an exception for those engaged in commercial activities in the United States (like working with contractors). When the court ruled 8-1 in favor of the petitioners—a group of Indian fishermen and farmers seeking damages from a U.S.-based international development bank which funded the power plant that polluted the wetland where they made their living—Breyer alone dissented, not because he disagreed with the majority but because he thought their logic was insufficiently pragmatic. “[The] Immunities Act grants to the president the authority to ‘withhold,’ to ‘condition,’ or to ‘limit’ any of the act’s immunities in ‘light of the functions performed by any such international organization,” Breyer writes, lamenting that the majority’s interpretation would tie the president’s hands.

Given the opportunity, Breyer likely would have supported both Bush’s overseas nation-building efforts and Biden’s so-called political solution. It’s clear why his philosophy would be attractive to both men; if you’re looking to steamroll your political opponents, Breyer’s pragmatism essentially asks for emergency powers while leapfrogging public discussion of the particulars of the emergency. This philosophy has a history that is distinct in origin and trajectory from the traditional school of American pragmatic thought. 

In his 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” William James argues that the thrill of battle is baked into the modern psyche. While James naively thought the war-for-war’s sake days Homer described in the Iliad were over, he also saw that no force united people toward a common goal like incitement by their leaders against a common enemy. This made him wonder:

But who can be sure that other aspects of one’s countrymay not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in anyideal respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever?

James thought we could redirect the ineluctable mob mentality of groups to better ends. In the essay he argues for a broad public service program (not unlike an expanded version of today’s AmeriCorps) that would retain the old sense of patriotism without nationalism’s blood-tax.

This is pragmatic ethics at its best. Once we realize that our desire for a peaceful, communal life comes with unintended psychological byproducts, like the widely held belief in the glory of a righteous war, we see the work of replacing those beliefs with alternatives that better satisfy the core desire as a moral imperative.

And yet pragmatism, which comes from the ancient Greek noun pragma, or “deed,” is not a philosophy in the traditional sense. Unlike stoicism, which prioritizes virtue, or existentialism, which prioritizes freedom, pragmatism has no static values. The fact that James, Dewey, and Rorty were all liberal democrats is probably not a coincidence but there’s nothing about pragmatism that prescribes left-wing politics per se. Whereas James wears his liberal cap to ask, “What will put an end to war?” he then switches to his pragmatic cap to say, “Here’s what will replace it in our hearts.”

Oxford Brookes University philosopher Molly Cochran notes that in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the “zenith of American pragmatism” overlapped with the formalization of international relations as an academic discipline. Up to then—and despite writing widely on war, democracy, and American imperialism—James and Dewey were largely unread by English political scientists like Alfred Zimmern, principal architect of the League of Nations, and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Labour M.P. Norman Angell. Instead, political scientists were busy laying the groundwork for the realist school of international relations in which, as Cochran explains, “We are told that the statesman shapes policy in line with the national interest, knows the facts of existing conditions, and pays special attention to power and its alignments . . . [attaching] moral value only to responsible action that pragmatically adapts policy to circumstances.”

That’s something like what Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to have had in mind when he made one of the first explicit mentions of pragmatism by a sitting president. In 1954, Eisenhower gave a speech on the role of higher education in attaining lasting peace to the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities. Responding to critics who were “so ignorant of what we are trying to do in the world that our efforts to help are translated into efforts to dominate,” the defensive commander-in-chief argued for a secondary, functional role for morality in international relations: 

[How] are we going to have long-term peace without morality? [By] all means let us make the pragmatic approach, meeting the temporary and short-term problem: let us be strong, but don’t let us be strong only in tanks, guns, and planes and ships. There is no lasting peace there. The most they can do is to protect you in what you have for the moment.

Notice that “bombs” don’t make the list. As Eisenhower argued the previous year in the now-famous “Atoms for Peace” speech given to the United Nations General Assembly, the United States would not stop growing its nuclear stockpile. Despite appearances, he stressed to the non-nuclear majority that the vaporization of the human race was “not the true expression of the purpose and the hopes of the United States.” The hope, rather, was that the bomb would only be put, “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.” In other words, for the United States and its allies to continue ramping up as a way to both contain the nuclearization and territorial expansion of the Soviet Union and deter all other violent threats around the globe. One mechanism to ensure that deterrence would be the International Atomic Energy Agency, to which nuclear nations would contribute an agreed-upon amount of fissile material and submit themselves to voluntary regulation. The other mechanism was fear.

There are two important points here: First, Eisenhower’s moral argument may look similar to James’s but in fact proceeds from a gross inversion of James’s basic principles. To accept that a bomb is a tool of peace, not a tool of war, is to lose all grasp of what bombs do and what peace means. In the lingo of IR, Eisenhower’s pragmatism was a clever cover for his realism, his morality intentionally left undefined.  

Second, Eisenhower pursued the “Atoms for Peace” doctrine to both foreign and domestic ends. The later speech quoted above is an example of its domestic use. Higher education mattered to Eisenhower, though less for its ability to enlighten than to help refine and spread his pseudo-pragmatic realism early on in his presidency. Cold War fears remained strong at home, and Eisenhower needed some good news to share. Keen to portray the end of the Korean War in 1953 as a victory for his presidency—and not the result of the surprise death of Stalin, whose support had sustained the fighting power of North Korea and China—Eisenhower was positioning himself to educators as an impassioned negotiator, a soldier who knew the alternative to mediation. For decades both parties took a similar line. As late as 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall fell, the Democratic party platform criticized the Reagan administration’s unclear Soviet posture, but without a compelling alternative of their own, they suggested shifting into cruise control. Through “peaceful competition,” Democrats argued for “a steady and pragmatic approach that neither tolerates Soviet aggression and repression nor fuels Soviet paranoia,” that is, containment.

Now two pragmatisms are in play. First is the original, philosophical pragmatism that James and Dewey defined. This is the view that the actions we take and the beliefs we hold both affect our ability to achieve our goals. We already know that we should change how we act when our goals aren’t being met; pragmatism offers a way to change our beliefs to match. Then there is the political pragmatism that dates back to at least Eisenhower, which has more in common with the realist school of international relations. Democrats and Republicans alike invoke it to argue that they’re setting their beliefs aside completely to focus on results alone. The important distinction is that traditional pragmatism is a reorientation of the relationship between thought and deed, whereas the political version is a rejection of that relationship. Still, these pragmatisms sound similar enough that one could argue that politicians just have an easier time vacating their beliefs than philosophers do. But if Cochran is right that IR scholars, some of whom worked in or advised the government, were not reading the pragmatists, then the question remains: How did politicians stumble into this notion of preemptive vindication?

Justice Felix Frankfurter, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and confirmed in 1939, believed that the role of the judicial branch is to understand the practical purposes of written statute. Breyer quotes from Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, in which Frankfurter writes that “laws are not abstract propositions. They are expressions of policy arising out of specific situations and addressed to the attainment of particular ends.” Breyer’s own book is a testament to a career spent upholding this long tradition. All that time wasn’t squandered writing solo dissents to prove academic points about executive privilege, as he did in Jam. Breyer has lost more substantial fights too, though not for a lack of trying. He dissented to both FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., which failed to give regulators more control over cigarettes, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc v. Bruen, which failed to mandate gun licenses in New York. And there have been some modest gains. Zadvydas v. Davis struck down the norm of indefinite imprisonment for immigrant children, for one. 

Breyer notes that purpose-minded judges typically consider three things: common law, judicial pragmatism, and the hypothetical “reasonable legislator.” Again, the body of common law is a big fat file of other judges’ rulings, but to practicecommon law requires respecting the specific facts of each case and pursuing the additional questions that they may raise. Breyer rejects the idea that a pragmatic judge is one who does “whatever one thinks is good as a policy matter.” Instead, they should have a valid hypothesis about how their ruling would clarify or obfuscate existing laws, help or hurt people, reform or restrict social institutions, promote or trample moral principles. The fiction of the reasonable legislator, who Breyer imagines is the well-intentioned author of a law, is a thought experiment on par with the artist’s muse or the god of prayer, a nonentity treated as real by someone prepared to act at its perfect discretion.

When Bill Clinton nominated Breyer, then serving as a chief on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to the nation’s highest court, Clinton spoke highly of Breyer’s ability to build a consensus. Clinton said he could “get people of diverse views to work together for justice’s sake.” Maybe because Clinton and his UK counterpart Tony Blair had made it hip to be moderate, the reputation stuck for years. In May 2008 when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked the top contender for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama, which of the current justices he admired most, Breyer was the first that came to mind.

No figure in American politics is more closely associated with political pragmatism than Obama. Before taking his seat in the Senate, Obama lectured at the University of Chicago’s law school, where he designed and taught a course called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” Legal scholars who have studied Professor Obama’s syllabus claim that by focusing on political action instead of the courts, Obama honed his brand of “critical race pragmatism,” which sought to hitch certain African Americans’ concerns to the concerns of establishment Democrats in a joint struggle for social and economic justice. Some would see this as a smart solidarity play while others, like the late desegregationist activist and lawyer Derrick Bell, were more cynical. To Bell, Obama’s message made social justice seem like a coincidence, “another unique moment when the fervent hopes of blacks coincide with the needs of white and other non-whites.” But pragmatism would prove too useful an idea when articulating his approach to law and politics for Obama to ignore. Eventually his sympathy for Breyer’s perspective would help calcify in the party’s view a false dichotomy between idealism and pragmatism, thought and deed that flatters the vanities and stokes the anxieties of liberal America today, especially when looking to imperial interests abroad.

Between the two major wars to which the United States is an interested party, the invasions of Ukraine by Russia and Gaza by Israel, the latter is likely to remain the foreign policy focus of the 2024 election cycle. Bearing many of the recognized characteristics of genocide, the siege has now killed over 39,000 people by conservative estimates (one study suggests the number could be closer to 186,000), two-thirds of whom are women and children. College students protesting university investment in Israel have been met with disproportionately violent police response, most notably at Columbia University, the City College of New York, and the University of California at Los Angeles, where hundreds were arrested.

In April, Biden signed a $95 billion foreign aid package that included $26 billion for Israel against just $1 billion for Palestine. Unlike Biden, former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump changes his mind on Israel constantly. As president, he recognized Jerusalem as its official capital and supported Netanyahu’s broad agenda; as a candidate, he says that the war has gone on too long and that on his watch October 7 would have never happened in the first place.

Some analysts hoped Israel’s invasion of Rafah, a small city with over a million sheltering civilians, would curb Biden’s appetite. The only apparent results were a pause on the shipment of certain two thousand-pound bombs by the White House and half-hearted suggestions from Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, that Israel hold a snap election to oust Netanyahu. Kamala Harris faces a significant challenge in explaining the administration’s thinking, and whether her own approach will be different. After her decision not to preside over Netanyahu’s visit to Congress in July, commentators speculated the snub would mark a shift in policy, in line with reports that Harris has greater sympathy for the Palestinians than Biden and had led calls for conditional ceasefire talks. This isn’t saying much. Harris may not share Biden’s fifty-year history of support for Israel, but her solid hardliner record suggests that her current posturing may be evidence of a coordinated administration rounding out its message with different voters. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters attempted to block Netanyahu’s motorcade on its path to Independence Avenue and released crickets and maggots throughout the Watergate Hotel where his delegation was staying.

All told, there is no serious indication that Democrats’ long-term view on the region has changed. Since Clinton facilitated the Oslo Accords in 1993, that view essentially consists of a two-state solution in which Israel remains militarily superior. In the party’s official 2020 platform, there is a telling contradiction between the stance on the Middle East in general, in which “it’s past time . . . to rebalance our tools, engagement, and relationships in the Middle East away from military intervention—leading with pragmatic diplomacy,” and on Israel in particular, to which the “commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself, and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is ironclad.” Does that mean that the validity of moral claims depends on the countries in which they are made? In 2021, after the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan that effectively left the door open to the Taliban, General Kenneth McKenzie was proud of the United States’ ability to let bygones be bygones: “We had gone from cooperating on security with a longtime partner and ally to initiating a pragmatic relationship of necessity with a longtime enemy.”

McKenzie’s rosy spin on the debacle reminded me of a point Rorty makes in his essay “Trotsky and The Wild Orchids.” Rorty, who Cochran credits with attracting fresh interest in pragmatism from IR scholars, claims:

It is one thing to say, falsely, that there is nothing to choose between us and the Nazis. It is another thing to say, correctly, that there is no neutral, common ground to which a philosophical Nazi and I can repair to argue out our differences. That Nazi and I will always strike each other as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles.

This feels both correct and dissatisfying. Of course wars have sides (and neutral bystanders), but the conflict between democracy and fascism cannot be resolved by reasoned debate. Neither we nor the Nazis pretended otherwise in the 1940s. No doubt Rorty understands James’s view that bad ideas can only be replaced by good ideas when the end-goal has been agreed upon. But here he points us toward the right kind of problem only to remind us of the truism that where perspectives diverge too greatly dialogue is impossible. Rorty’s fervent patriotism often got in the way of his philosophy; he often slips into a view that could be mistaken for moral relativism rather than grappling with the complicity of his government in antidemocratic projects abroad.

McKenzie all but admits that when it comes to the Taliban there iscommon ground, namely some ominous and undefined state of “necessity.” So ignore whatever vain hopes the administration may express that the Taliban would support the liberation of women and girls and adopt other allegedly core democratic values. In Afghanistan and Iraq then, as in Gaza and Ukraine now, there’s never been an earnest American attempt at peace unless a condition of that peace is U.S. military presence. As James writes, “’Peace’ in military mouths today is a synonym for ‘war expected.’” Cochran argues that philosophical pragmatists could guide international relations toward genuine peace. At least, they would do a better job than the realists, who have embraced the war-mentality James warned against and gained influence throughout the defense industrial complex. If the everyday use of the idea in other policy areas, from the “Biden Cancer Moonshot” to climate inaction, is any indication of its prospects outside of IR, however, then for now political pragmatism changes nothing.   

That’s why when even the Associated Press’s chief White House correspondent Zeke Miller framed the 2024 race (before Harris’s ascent) as a contest between Biden’s “pragmatism over Trumpian pugilism,” it was unclear what he meant. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Steven A. Cook defended the administration against criticisms that there was no clear Middle East policy, claiming Biden’s “ruthless pragmatism” enabled the president to make a sophisticated set of as-yet-to-be-explained calculations that dictate his approach to Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Israel alike. In both cases the writers seem to have a clearer idea of the positions Biden is nottaking than the ones he is. Cook’s thinking resembles Breyer’s, who recommends that a judge think about how a ruling could effect “related legal rules, practices, habits, institutions, as well as certain moral principles and practices, including . . . how those affected by the decision will react.” Just as Cook gives Biden too much analytical credit, Breyer makes the gavel too heavy for any mortal to wield.

Biden sounded like his former boss when he nominated Breyer’s successor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Court. “I’ve admired these traits of pragmatism, historical perspective, wisdom, character in the jurists nominated by Republican presidents as well as Democratic presidents,” Biden said. This is Breyer’s legacy: a stream of pragmatic thought that runs from the judicial into the political domain. His pragmatism is so open to alternative points of view, so awed by the complexity of the issues at hand, so fair in its considerations that the meaning of good and evil collapse under the overwhelming pressure of the demands of the present.

The history and trajectory of pragmatism is more complicated than that view suggests. From the Supreme Court to the White House, pragmatists project an image of intellectual heroics. Judicial pragmatism asks an awful lot of jurists and has delivered little, but in better hands it may be effective one day. Politicians on the other hand probably just like saying the word “pragmatic” because it sounds serious—more sophisticated than “practical” and more considerate than their deeper instinct, which is, as Epictetus advised, to act without explaining themselves. Just because two government branches share a language does not mean they share responsibilities. The president doesn’t even have to pretend to follow the facts. The debate ends with the rhetorical question: If you don’t like my plan, what is yours?