Althouse and Obama: hope dies hard
Yesterday blogger Ann Althouse, who voted for Obama, declared that he’s lost her.
Although Althouse’s post was very brief, I applaud her for having the courage to change her mind and to go public with it. I hope that the Althouse change is indicative of a huge number of other people undergoing a similar change.
In some ways Althouse may be quite characteristic of people whose support for Obama was never really strong in the first place; she was really more against McCain than for Obama. Althouse’s post on why she turned on McCain during the election was much longer than her recent one about Obama. But it was a mirror image of it in the four reasons she states at the end.
For McCain, Althouse offered:
1. He did not understand economics, the most important issue.
2. He lost the ability to make the experience argument.
3. He never defined himself as a principled conservative.
4. Erratic and incoherent, he lacked sufficient mental capacity.
And for Obama, as of yesterday:
1. He did not understand economics, the most important issue.
2. He [never had] the ability to make the experience argument.
3. He never defined himself as a principled [liberal].
4. Erratic and incoherent, he lack[s] sufficient [courage].
Although the symmetry is cute, I don’t quite agree. I think Obama understands economics at least somewhat; he just has a different goal and agenda than he led us to believe. And the “experience argument” argued against voting for him in the first place; it’s hardly new. Obama is only “erratic and incoherent” if one thinks he is trying to fix the economy and defend and save capitalism; I don’t think he is. And courage? He’s got plenty—to push his agenda through no matter what, and to meddle in Israel’s and Honduras’s affairs while holding back against the tyrants of Iran.
Today Althouse writes this longer post, in which she states:
And I cling to the belief that Obama has the ability to save us from the destructive path Congress has chosen for itself. But will he use it?
How much of an ideologue is he anyway? We’ve come this far, and still we don’t really know. Is he, at heart, the committed leftist his staunchest opponents say he is? I know Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying ”” over and over ”” that Obama is intentionally destroying the economy (so that nothing will be left for us but socialism).
I still think Obama is a pragmatist. I also think he’s mainly interested in attaining personal glory. If that’s right, the prospect of his own defeat in 2012 should shock him into standing up to the bunch of Democrats who ”” I hope and I hope he sees ”” will be crushed in 2010.
So: hope and change. Come on, Obama. We need some now.
I used to agree with exactly what Althouse is saying here—that Obama the narcissist would trump Obama the ideologue (how’s that for a choice of what to hope for?). However, as recent readers of this blog know, in the last month or two I’ve jumped the shark and ended up thinking that Obama is deeply committed to his agenda, and willing to sacrifice members of Congress and even his own second term in order to implement it.
Far from Congress enacting its own agenda which is more to the Left than Obama’s, I think they are at the very least in agreement, or that it’s Obama who’s more to the Left than Congress. He delegates the details to the Pelosi/Reid Congress because he knows those two are on much the same far Left page as he, and it also gives him the ability to say “It’s not me; it’s Congress!” Theoretically, this affords him some deniability if he should ever need to activate it.
neo: It’s a foolish deniability for the President to say, “Congress ate my homework.”
Foolish. But look how many people seem to swallow it—so far.
I believe Obama is an ideologue and very interested in personal glory.
As I say, I think Obama is playing in his own personal movie and this is where his eyes become steely slits and he shows everyone what he’s made of. He gets to have his ideology and his glory too.
huxley: the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s a matter of which takes priority.
Foolish. But look how many people it’s working for.
He has not used that excuse — yet. In fact Obama doubled-down on the stimulus bill recently, saying “There is nothing that we would have done differently.”
In her Obama list she forgot to mention that he seems to
lack even a nodding acquaintance with the concept of truth and honesty.
Ike thought that it was so important for the President to tell the truth that if it were necessary to lie, he always got a surrogate to do it. Cynics may say, “so what”? Well, at least when Ike spoke to the people personally we knew he spoke honestly. We no longer have that luxury.
Off topic: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090721/ap_on_re_us/us_palin_ethics_complaint
That does it. I’m fed up with Palin’s horrible ethics. Toss her out on her bum!
exellent write up
sorry i dropped a letter.
i glanced over a heading and nearly spit.
GREAT history was made recently…
Moon landing skeptic punched by Aldrin
prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2009/07/moon-landing-skeptic-punched-by-aldrin.html
WAY 2 GO BUZZ!!!!!!
Baklava, on an admittedly quick reading, I don’t see this as a big deal.
The Left has deluged Palin with ethics complaints – most already dismissed, some still pending – in a bare-faced attempt to torpedo her political aspirations. It would be difficult to try to raise contributions to fight politically-motivated accusations without invoking one’s status as a public official, since that is the context in which the accusations arose.
So my zeroth order take is that this is no biggie; at most a few hundred milliKerry (whom the IRS is still chasing for $800 K in connection with his campaign from five years ago.
Occam, I was being sarcastic. Get it now ? 😉
Sorry, I’m a bit thick today. I was wondering if I’d missed some grievous sin on Palin’s part!
Last I read, 18 ethics complaints against Palin had been investigated: she was cleared of all of those 18 ethics complaints.
With Huxley all the way here. Dr. Sanity has him nailed–the ego-centric narcissistic ideologue. The question many doubters had prior to the election was: Charlatan or Buffoon? Unfortunately the ans is obviously–BOTH. The upside of the Charlatan bit was that such a person is at least in tough with reality and can be bargained with. Buffonish ideologues are beyond reason. In Obama’s case ihe is doubly dangerous as he has the skills of a Charlatan but the knowledge deficit of a buffoon. He is, as the British are wont to say, “too clever by half.” But vainglorious ideologue that he is, he is impervious to reality or reason–hence his drive to accomplish/implement his world-view–both to establish is glory and to “get over” on the the public
before they realize the consequences. Having successfully hyped the natives, he’s got to strike before opposition builds. (I would have said “before reality intrudes, but that presupposes he knows what reality indeed is)
This man is one of the most dangerous people ever to achieve any kind of national power. He has “vision” powered by his ideology, but no “wisdom” born of experience or expertise. A very dangerous combination…made even more dangerous by the fact of his race–which renders him impervious to most criticisms in the same way that men are seen as “picking” on most women politicians when they criticize them. Obama got away with it with Hills only because race trumps gender on the PC Victim Totem Pole in which an attacking female Hillery seemed only “shrill.” It will take, I fear, an intelligent AND glib white Male with a wife “of color” (doesn’t matter which hue) or a female of color to bell this political “cat.”
huxley: Obama has not had to use that excuse—yet. Many others have done it for him.
Which brings me to my other point. We are seeing in Obama and the way both he and the MSM have been able to easily and successfully play the race card to slime opposition criticism the beginning of what, I believe, are to be a successively long line of “minority” candidates put up by the Donkey party for President. Next will be a female–Hills–then a Latino/Latina. Next an Asian like the previous Democrat Gov of Wash. All will present an easy racial shield behind which the opposition may be successfully slimed.
Unless and until the Republicans can find candidates verbally dexterous enough and willing to give as good as they get–and have the psychic backbone and self-assuredness not to quail/melt before charges of racism–the Republicans are in for a long slog indeed.
expat says:
July 20th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
huxley, Baklava,
Some people have defective BS detectors. Althouse appears to be one of those.
Expat put her finger succinctly on Althouse for me. I came to that conclusion some time ago, but it took expat and others in another of Neo’s threads to articulate it precisely for me. Alhouse has no credibility for me. She’s essentially a lightweight wrapped in pretty words.
This might be nitpicky but I take exception with part Neo’s characterization of Obama. I fail to see any courage — not in any of his domestic initiatives nor in his foreign policy initiatives nor in his personal behavior. As most everyone in here knows, being courageous is speaking and behaving with personal honesty, integrity, and conviction among other things. An adult also knows it’s not easy to do that in many contexts, and that it might be particularly challenging in national political contexts. But courageous leaders manage to show it at least occasionally. Obama seems empty of personal honesty, integrity, and conviction to me. Putting his name and the prestige of the presidency to a (failed) rushed stimulus package and being steadfast in his nationalized medical package are hardly demonstrations of courage. And being knavish in foreign policy cancels it too. Nope his center is not courage / conviction.
I’ve said it before: Obama is a bad guy.
He’s a complete sonofabitch; he always was. He sure suckered in the chicks and the feminized guys, though….
Good to hear Althouse’s commentary, I knew I was onto something that involved more than my own suspections!
When the chips were down Althouse (and McArdle, Brooks, Noonan, Buckley…) voted tribe instead of reason. They think the sort of person Obama is is the right sort of person to be, but they don’t realise that their judgment is not based on intelligence, but tribal signifiers.
As for Obama, I’m guessing that narcissist will trump ideologue, but it’s unlikely to do us any good.
One of the most infuriating realities that the Left of the Left wish were not happening is the issue of Islamofascism, if they did not have to contend with the enemies of democracy then they could get about with their domestic agendas.
The modern Left has abandoned it’s classic principle of standing firm against these enemies because we’ve invaded Panama in the past, because we facilitated the genocide in the East Timor, because we never should have been in Vietnam — and therefore the infelicitous mistake is made, “We can not do good because we’re don bad” — or maybe it’s “We can not do good because some on the Right might get credit for it”.
Talk about provincialism!!!! I loathe these scumbags!
It’s like a war frigate in the momentum of ram speed when it should be wheeling a hard right. (Or a light right if you want to make an analogy out of it)
This is a serious question: Why does anyone care what Ann Althouse thinks?
Neo, I don’t think you “jumped the shark” when you decided to risk accusations of choosing Reynolds as your milliner by revealing to us your fears about Mr. Obama.
Althouse,
What took her so long? For an educated woman, she sure is slow reading the signs. She must’ve had a real personal vendetta against Mccain and Conservatives to wait this long. I wonder how it’ll take a certified lunatic like Sullivan to realize he’s been had. lol
“And for Obama, as of yesterday:
“1. He did not understand economics, the most important issue.”
Yo, Althouse! HE’S A MARXIST!
Yeesh.
“I think Obama understands economics at least somewhat; he just has a different goal and agenda than he led us to believe.”
I would rephrase this. Neither McCain nor Obama understands economics. McCain acknowledges that fact. Obama does not. Instead, he clings to his essentially Marxist dogma, untainted by any meaningful real world experience in the private sector. But I agree that he tried to prevent people from realizing that last year.
Neo,
I don’t quite understand how Obama can avoid responsibility if he puts his name on a bill passed by Congress. Especially if he was out in front leading the charge for that bill.
That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try. I just don’t think he could get away with it.
Wasn’t there a time when a Democrat said “The buck stops here?” Whatever happened to those Democrats?
Althouse, whom I have not read for a right good while, gets no plaudits from me for having the “courage” to change her mind and go public with it. Like most of us, I have made bad choices and bad decisions in life, but I never thought of myself as courageous when I realized a mistake or made an apology or righted an error. We are cloaking decency in hyperbole when we ascribe courage to a simple act of righting a wrong.
As to Obonga, he is a True Believer. He’s reached the pinnacle, by hook, crook, and affirm action, and we are to feel the sting of his lash. Again, Again. And Again.
The prospect of a civil uprising grows gradually and daily.
It drives me crazy that Americans, and maybe the entire world, are still arguing about who Barack Obama is and what does he really want.
It’s dificult for me to work up any admiration for Ann Althouse’s admission that Obama has lost her. She got Obama wrong, completely wrong, and it is obvious now. She has to admit that or stop blogging.
Her explanation for why she voted for Obama in the first place was, as others have pointed out, simply a rationalization for sticking with her Tribe as opposed to acknowledging what was in front of her and thinking for herself.
virgil xenophon, you’ve got O nailed exactly. He’s a narcissist and ideologue, and narcissism trumps everything. He wants to manifest his ideology by changing America, not because he loves his country and wants what he thinks is best for it, but for his own personal glory and legacy. You’re right about why he’s dangerous, too.
More and more, people are beginning to get it. If he’s not voted out in 2012, Americans will indeed wake up one day and see that they’ve lost their country.
oh bother: I see Althouse as an example of an intelligent person who’s not a radical Leftist and yet voted for Obama, and has recanted (at least, to a certain extent). And although her reasons may be unique to herself, I am interested in all such stories as examples of political change. As I’ve said many times, I don’t question my friends much on the subject of Obama at this point (too potentially volatile, and too volatile in the past) and so Althouse’s story (and those of other online writers) is one of the few I have access to.
JohnC: Depends on the definition of “courage.” Perhaps it might be better to say Obama has balls, and/or chutzpah.
Althouse has not acknowledged how shallow her original thinking was.
She persists, like Van Dyk last Friday, that the real problem is that Obama has given Congress too much power to set the agenda. She continues to hope that the real Obama will wake up and set things right.
Good luck on that.
I’m still a big enough fan of the narcissist/semi-pragmatist theory of Obama that I consider it possible that Obama the Ideologue will wake up soon and realize he needs to return to stealth mode to keep hope alive for his grand plans to please his New Left mentors, Frank Davis and Bill Ayers.
I don’t see how anybody could put “McCain” and “Conservative” in the same lifeboat. I’m not picking a fight, but be reasonable.
McCain was about McCain. He’s a DC Republican, which is not in the same county, much less on the same street, as conservative.
Having said that, back on topic:
The Won fully expects to not get a second term.
His agenda is to bring down the system. As the revolutionary, his job is to usher in the Revolution.
That governance stuff? That’s for other people.
He’d be a nationwide laughing stock already were it not for the facts that the collectively speaking (no pun intended. Much) Democrat leadership has the ethical quotient of a rapist’s box of condoms and the intelligence of a cracked mud brick, the remaining DC Republicans are more worried about being reelected than what is happening to the country, and the entire media monolith of the nation is invested in The First Black Dude to be president.
We’re living a Far Side comic, and Fifi isn’t going to save the day this time around.
I think Althouse voted for Obama for the same reason many other women did.
He’s a tall, handsome, exotic stud.
@davidt — you’ve got to be kidding.
He’s tall, yes. His looks are average, at best. Exotic? In whose imagination???
And stud? I hope, for his sake that Michelle sees him as a stud, but I truly can’t imagine him as one.
He struck me as a morally weak whiny wimp the first time I saw/heard him speak.
Since he is now our president, I hope that I am wrong. But even if I am, he is still not a handsome, exotic stud.
I should have said, “They think he is a tall, handsome, exotic stud.”
“willing to sacrifice members of Congress and even his own second term in order to implement it. ”
No, Like Althouse I do not believe this to be remotely true. I believe that he would do anything and everything to keep his second term.
Unlike her I agree with your final conclusion but for a different reason – I do not think Obama has it in him to realize what it may cost him. As has been said by him and many others it wasn’t wise to bet against him. He got this far – arguably the most powerful single person on the planet – by nothing more than that. A myriad of bad choices, a string of failed projects, and pretty much everything he touched went to ruin yet It got him promoted each time.
No reason for him to think this time it will happen differently. Indeed I’m not so sure I would bet against him either – who or what do the Republicans have to run against him? McCain and his ilk would loose time and time again, Palin is probably dead as far as a national candidate (lots of life left as something like an RNC chairman), and the rest of the people who would actually run a campaign against him are afraid of the beating they will get from the media (see Palin – mission accomplished as far as many are concerned).
In order for him to loose the other side has to decide to start playing. Right now they are “strategizing” and seem to be stuck in that mode forever. I do not believe he truly won the last election for the same reason any more than I feel a forfeit is an actual win in a sport (they are better described as “not Loosing”). The Republicans are straight on a course to forfeit again and no third party looks to be going for anything more than playing around either.
strcpy Says:
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:31 am
…
In order for him to loose the other side has to decide to start playing.
That’s it, in a nutshell.
I’d get so upset at the carping about Palin being a
“drag on the ticket” when she appeared to be the only one actually running, most of the time.
McCain cgot off a couple of nice shots early on (the Moses “BEHOLD, HIS MIGHTY HAND!” response to Obama’s earlier Berlin speech about “when the oceans stopped rising”), but then seemed afraid to call out Obama about anything after that.
Whoever the Republican candidate is this time, if he (or she) goes into battle prepared and willing to actually fight, the chances are damned good.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
–
strcpy Says:
“McCain and his ilk would loose time and time again, Palin is probably dead as far as a national candidate”
Actually, McCain-Palin were winning, running ahead of Obama-Biden in the polls, until the financial crisis hit. But for that crisis, many commentators (Pat Buchanan for one) have asserted that they believed the McCain-Palin ticket was going to continue ahead and win the election.
Nevertheless, I agree Palin’s decision to resign and not complete her term raises doubts about her. And McCain has had his shot, is probably too old to run in 2012, and (saying this as a McCain supporter in 2008) would probably be best advised to not make another attempt.
Donna,
I think davidt has a point, though it may not apply in your case. One of my former students, now 24 years old, stated quite explicitly that she voted for BHO because she “wanted to have his babies”. She went on to say that she meant this literally… she was very sexually attracted to him. How many other under 30’s were thinking the same way. Many of the male students expressed the idea that “he’s a cool dude”.
Sad that people like Althouse voted him into office.
I can only hope that more will come to their senses by 2010/2012.
Maybe the damages can be repaired.
Its the American people that are broken Barrack HUSSEIN Obambi is just the symptom
Its the American people that are broken Barrack HUSSEIN Obambi is just the symptom
and pragmatism, communism, socialism, fascism, progressivism, liberalism, all are the desease called collectivism.
You really should use spellcheck ‘Art’ because apart from your atrocious grammar your spelling and punctuation are horrific too. Interestingly you list all the problems facing Americans apart from ‘Pragmatism’ which they seem to lack entirely and which would dispel a lot of the other problems if they were intelligent enough to practice it.
The lady admitted a mistake since this cat is obviously going down flames. What a surprise.
If Obumstead was wildly popular and his policies were saving the economy, creating jobs and some form of leadership suddenly appeared out of nowhere I doubt she would have admitted this mistake.
In doing so she appears to be clinging onto any credibility she may have left.
What more do I need to know?
That I am a hell of a lot smarter than an overeducated professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.
Neo,
(Sorry ofr the length). On the one hand, I find it difficult to understand how educated (and therefore supposedly insightful) people failed to see this before the 2008 election. I don’t think of myself as that smart, but the evidence was only invisible if one chose to be blind to it.
I am reminded of a citation in Bernard Goldberg’s book “Arrogance” in which he cites a study showing that people rated physicians who wore white lab coats as more competent that physicians who wore blue lab coats. He goes on to explain that lacking any ability to judge medical competency, we grab for any evidence at hand, even if that evidence is superficial.
I think that this is, in part what was afoot lin the last election. So many people were so unimpressed with G. W, Bush (largely because of the press bias against him) that they voted for the anti-Bush; an apparently suave well spoken orator with a sonorous baritone voice who seemed to be the respectable intellectual college professor they all desired as the hood ornament for our country (i.e., the white lab coat). But it also demonstrates how superficial individuals can be, that they are enamored of style over substance; drive a Mercedes and live in a McMansion and one is deemed successful, forget about the fact that one might be in hock up to their earlobes to perpetuate that facade.
I don’t think that Obama demonstrates courage or ever did; I agree with JohnC above. Al Capone was willing to beat people to death with a baseball bat, but that doesn’t indicate courage. To carry the stereotype further, the stereotypical mobster went to church and communion and perpetuated a respectable frront, all the while decimating his opponents in the most ruthless way.
Herein lies the parallel to Obama. He projects a respectable front but engages in thuggery behind the scenes. The facade is beginning to crack, but I would bet that what eventually causes his downfall will be nothing that we currently see happening. Just as Capone was never indicted for the crimes he committed (but for income tax evasion), I fully expect Obama to implode from something that unexpectedly comes at his administration from left field. Forced to make rapid decisions, and with no guiding principle, he will make precisely the wrong decision at precisely the wrong time. We can only hope that this happens in this first term so there wont. be a second.
Pragmatism is communism dip.
its was utterly pragmatic to remove the dysgenic races, no?
it was utterly pragmatic to make work camps, no?
wouldnt it be pragmatic to hasten the collective by exterminating those of the old culture?
hey, isnt it pragmatic to centralize the schools for indoctrination. after all, bella dodd a pragmatist, was head of the cpusa AND the teachers union (and later changed sides admitting the stuff she did).
and stop pulling a huxely on me… ok.. i type how i type, i speak as i speak and i will not let a twerp with a brain the size of a lepton, tell me how to.
if you want a debate, i will debate you.
neo can officiate, and we can go back and forth.
but i am tired of ad hominem bs.
hey idiot, you should use spell check on ‘spellcheck’. no?
let he who hath no sin cast the first stone, or shut thy pie hole.
by the way…
i am not worried…
cause when the crap hits the fan, pragmatist will have to rely on people like this to protect him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT4XO3Hjp7M
give me a break already..
or are you tag team two member to huxley?
NEO,
Off topic news flash. I can’t find it anywhere but Mike Gallagher said it was a FoxNews flash but not being covered anywhere else.
∅bama
metsummoned the CBO director Douglas Ellsman (spelling) to the White House to have a chat.Separation of powers???
This is HUGE – It needs to be reported by the legacy press!
i would suggest you grow up and read some more.
Chapter Eight of Murphey’s book Liberalism in Contemporary America
dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/book3/b3chap8.htm
odern liberalism has focused on the value of social change. To this end, it has stressed the impermanence of values and institutions. On issues of method, such as those that are involved in “civil liberties” and confrontational techniques, it has taken positions that facilitate change rather than impede it. It would not be off the mark to say that the emphasis on change has been as central to modern liberalism as the emphasis on stability has been to traditionalist conservatism.
The relationship of this focus to liberalism’s tactical situation is apparent. Liberal thought has not relished the existing culture — has, in fact, been deeply alienated from it — and has been anxious to move to something else.
For most liberal thought, that “something else” has been, as we have seen, one form or another of socialism. Although this has not been nearly so true for the other components of the liberal coalition (such as the South, organized labor, the big city political machines, and the ethnic minorities) as it has been for the intellectual culture, most of those other components have at least wanted an active program calling for social and legislative changes.
At the same time that liberalism has emphasized change, it has intuitively kept in mind its need for dissimulation. During most of modern liberalism’s history, liberals have avoided directly advocating socialism. What has been needed, instead, has been a philosophical formulation that would focus on change as a process rather than as a conflict between well-defined alternative systems.
This explains why “pragmatism,” American liberalism’s most distinctive version of relativism, has been so popular within liberal thought. By denying theory and insisting that only the short-term and the concrete count, pragmatism has been consistent with the reluctance to reveal long-term aspirations.
care to comment on the dissimulation that hides the end goals of modern liberalism by using commuist prgmatism?
Eric Goldman was commendably candid in his book Rendezvous With Destiny about liberalism’s tactical use of relativism as a “social acid.” He said that liberals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found it necessary to attack the “steel chain of ideas” by which the American public was bound to classical liberalism. Goldman summarized this aspect of liberalism in the final sentence of his chapter called “Dissolving the Steel Chain of Ideas.” He said that “between the depression of 1873 and the beginning of World War I, and especially during the early 1900s, these thinkers developed ideological acids capable of dissolving every link in conservatism’s steel chain of ideas.”2
“the alliance between pragmatism and liberalism was a fortuitous one, called forth by a particular historic situation… Pragmatism constituted, in essence, [a] sacred act of intellectual spoliation.” Speaking from a liberal perspective, he said that “it was as a dissolvent of untenable dogmas and misapplied certitudes that pragmatism served the liberal cause” (emphasis added). (It is worth noticing that he was not himself enthused about the relativism. He observed that pragmatism “revealed its fundamental inadequacy” in the late 1930s when it became necessary to articulate definite convictions to oppose the totalitarian systems. But we should notice, too, that there has been no repudiation of relativism by liberals in general. It has been used extensively in liberal ideology during the four decades since World War II.)3
We should not let it confuse us that Bestor’s article uses the word “pragmatism” instead of “relativism.” Pragmatism is nothing but the name given to the relativism that was put forward under that label by such thinkers as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Relativism without the label has continued to be used by liberalism as a “social acid” despite the reputed demise of pragmatism as such. When in the late 1960s we were told so often that “middle class values are just ‘artificial structurings,'” we were being presented with a relativistic undercutting, even though nothing was said about pragmatism. In the 1970s we heard a similar argument, this time from feminists, that “the role assignments of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are just artificial acculturations, with no inherent justification.” Again, relativism was being used to dissolve people’s attachment to existing norms. In both instances, it was quite successful. The relativistic undercutting has sufficient plausibility that most people, lacking a philosophical understanding of the values they hold, have no defense against it.
——-
“Pragmatism,” as such, is almost impossible to define, since, as F. C. S. Schiller said, there have been “as many pragmatisms as there were pragmatists.” The entry by H. S. Thayer in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces the origin of pragmatism to the “Metaphysical Club” conducted at Cambridge in the 1870s by, among others, William James and Charles Peirce. Thayer says that James credited Peirce with having coined the name.
Readers who would like an introduction to the technical philosophical dimensions of pragmatism will do well to read Thayer’s entry and the one preceding it by Gertrude Ezorsky on the “Pragmatic Theory of Truth.” Dewey best expressed the technical aspects in his book Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
Our concern here will be with the application of pragmatism to social philosophy. This will center of John Dewey’s version of pragmatism, since it was Dewey who used it to become perhaps the leading philosopher of liberalism. Peirce and James played no similar role
———
It is no secret, of course, that John Dewey was also a socialist. The focus on experiment, on looking to social consequences, on judging ideas by their usefulness for social change, was ideal for an ideology that wanted to stress method, process and change while at the same time making its own criteria of social value the largely unarticulated measure for judging validity.
As a social philosophy, there was little that was new or profound about Dewey’s pragmatism. His popularity as a social philosopher was due to his ideas’ usefulness to liberalism. The same homage that was extended to Dewey as a philosopher was afforded to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for having applied relativism to law. Both men’s positions must be understood in the context of liberalism’s tactical needs at that time.
Even though “pragmatism” as a movement under that name may have died, references to the need to “be pragmatic” continued to be useful to liberalism after World War II. As we will see in the chapter on “the process of politicization,” liberal thinking has seen virtually all human problems as appropriate subjects for governmental solution, preferably at the national level. The most direct way to address a problem was to establish an agency and to arm it with a few billion dollars. Whenever a conservative would object, he was implored to “forget that nonsense; be pragmatic.” Direct action through government seemed much more immediate, “practical” and “compassionate” than to wait for people to work out their own problems or for the market to address them.
In this connection, it is worth noting that pragmatism is closely tied to at least three separate aspects of the modern mentality. It reflects the politicization that I have just mentioned. It relates, too, to the use of the state as a “direct action” tool, which is something that the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset considered in his book The Revolt of the Masses to be a major part of the primitive psychology of “the mass man.” And it reflects the type of “rationalism” that has appealed to intellectuals of the Left, who have not thought in terms of simply using reason to create frameworks for otherwise unplanned human interaction.
A word of warning is in order, however. Many practical-minded people in American life have prided themselves on their “pragmatic” willingness to “solve problems.” When a politician or a businessman calls himself “pragmatic,” he usually means nothing more by it than that he is practical. He does not understand himself to be part of Dewey’s movement, and he would certainly deny that he has any Fabian intentions. There is no particular ideological significance to the word “pragmatic” when it is used in that manner, other than that such a man’s lack of general convictions will tend to make him a tool of whatever is fashionable during his lifetime (and in recent decades that has usually been “liberal”).
your turn… since dewey turned out to be reveals as a communist spy. now heralded as the father of modern education.
your turn to refute.
under neos new rule, i call troll.
I found the story
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/22/president-obama-uses-magnetism-political-capital-push-health-care/
excerpt:
It’s very unusual for the CBO director, who is appointed by the majority party to serve as the official numbers cruncher, to go to the White House, and Elmendorf’s visit raised questions about whether he was being pressured to revise his dire analysis.
A White House spokesman said that Elmendorf was invited to be one of the participants at the meeting because he, like the president, is serious about bringing down costs.
“If someone thinks it’s inappropriate for the president to meet with the CBO director, that’s unfortunate,” White House spokesman Reid Cherlin told FOX News.”
Nothing to see here ….
for you prag
neoneocon.com/2009/07/17/policy-on-back-and-forth-fighting-in-the-comments-section/
Cut it out, Prag. We really do not want scurrillous BS on this blog. You are casting yourself as an ill-mannered lout.
I would support Neo’s banning you if you can’t/won’t clean up.
To Pragmatist,
you are too young to know the history, i tried to put it up, put up links, etc.
you are not going to tell someone what pragmatism is when they knew about it and all its dissumulations and games since he was a child.
that is NOT what pragmatism means…
an American movement in philosophy founded by C. S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief
to know about dewey you have to read the venona transcripts.
In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency broke a half century of silence by releasing translations of Soviet cables decrypted back in the 1940s by the Venona Project. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union, including those chronicled in NOVA’s “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies.”
To see the complete set of Venona documents released so far, go to the NSA’s Venona Documents page at http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/venona_docs.html
Out of this milieu in 1919 came New York City’s New School for Social Research, dedicated to teaching manifestations of socialism in all academic disciplines. Among its founders were historian Charles Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, and philosopher John Dewey, all active and avowed socialists.
and dewey became the father of modern education, building on what bella dodd and others started.
how bout learning some history?
Meanwhile, in the prestigious Ivy League, Harvard set the trend in motion and went farther than most universities toward full embrace of socialism as revealed truth. Given the nature of Marxian materialism, economics was not surprisingly the discipline in which socialism was particularly prominent in the 1920s and 1930s. Harvard was, in fact, the launching pad for Keynesian economics in the United States.
John Maynard Keynes’s doctrines have filled many books. The relevant points can be stated as (1) the Depression was caused by people saving too much and not spending enough on consumption items to keep factory workers fully employed; (2) private business (capitalism) was unable in the modern world to sustain full employment at good wages; (3) therefore the government had to assume the role formerly occupied by private business and fund economic activity and research in order to restore full employment via running Federal deficits, the first such outside of war times; (4) government should raise taxes high enough to redistribute private wealth from the rich to the poor, via government transfer payments (the welfare state); (5) government departments should regulate all phases of economic activity, because academically trained administrators were smarter and better equipped to manage business than businessmen, who exploited workers for their own profit.
Harvard’s economics department has sheltered some prominent socialists and avowed communists. One of the more notorious was Harry Dexter White, a Rooseveltian New Dealer. Being a professor at Harvard opened the doors to major Federal appointments. White was closely involved in establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and was a friend of John Maynard Keynes, whose socialistic economics doctrines he taught at Harvard.
There was just one small fly in the ointment. After his death, the FBI in 1950 positively identified him via the Venona project as a Soviet spy operating under the code name ‘Jurist.’ This confirmed testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers that White had been involved in the Communist party underground in the 1930s and had been an active Soviet spy during World War II.
so the head of our federal reserve was a keneysian who was a soviet…
Lauchlin Currie, another Harvard economics teacher of Keynesianism, was appointed from the Harvard faculty to staff position in the 1930s New Deal at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board. It was Currie who drafted the 1935 Banking Act which brought the Federal Reserve Board more directly under President Franklin Roosevelt’s control.
After World War II, Currie was also identified by Elizabeth Bently and Whittaker Chambers as a Soviet agent. Rather than face trial here, he sought refuge in Columbia, beyond U.S. repatriational jurisdiction.
Yet another of the thirteen Harvard faculty members who spied for the Soviets was Alger Hiss. While at the State Department, he delivered confidential information to his Soviet handlers, as Whittaker Chambers testified and KGB files verified after the end of the Cold war.
Other prominent, or notorious, socialists who taught at Harvard or graduated from that institution were Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann (who later saw the error of his ways), Roger N. Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Stuart Chase (who coined the term New Deal and urged President Roosevelt to run rough-shod over the Constitution in order to abolish private property); Graham Wallas (British socialist leader who coined the term Great Society, later borrowed by President Lyndon Johnson); Bertrand Russell (a dean of world socialism); and Harold Laski (Harvard faculty member and close friend of socialist Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later professor of economics at London School of Economics, which was dedicated to the teaching of socialism). John Reed, a Harvard graduate (1910) wrote for Max Eastman’s “The Masses” and, after the 1917 revolution, went to Soviet Russia, became a Bolshevik convert, wrote “Ten Days That Shook The World,” died in Russia, and was declared a hero of the Soviet Union.
In the decades between the two world wars, it was considered respectable for an educated, liberal person to be a socialistic adherent of the policies of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, a Fabian socialist, or a follower of John Maynard Keynes’s economic doctrines. These are the liberals who, like Nelson Rockefeller, are nominal Republicans or Democrats, but in fact are true-blue socialists. People of that persuasion in the inter-war decades abhorred a communist party leader like Earl Browder or Joseph Stalin, or National Socialist Fuhrer Adolph Hitler. Yet all of these people were reading from the same socialistic texts and pursuing the same ends, even if by somewhat different means.
During the Cold War, Harvard’s swing all the way to the socialist left was documented by The New York Times on May 16, 1960, when it reported that “1,359 Harvard faculty members and officers urged [President] Eisenhower, at the eve of the abortive Summit Conference, to agree to stop testing nuclear weapons even without inspection or control.” The Times article goes on to note that this was exactly the position advocated by the Kremlin in its worldwide propaganda campaign intended to disarm the United States.
By the end of World War II, “Lux et Veritas” (light and truth) had been effectively snuffed out at Yale, as William F. Buckley, Jr. documented in detail in his 1951 “God and Man at Yale.” Faculty, textbooks, and course materials had been thoroughly permeated by socialism.
maybe this is why obama went to harvard?
pragmatist, you are a waste of time and space. if you want to explain why they are unnconnected then do so… if not then shut your mouth, as your not contributing one iota of anything other than attempting to poison a blog.
Freaking fabulous!!!!
Rush is SPEADING UP ∅bama’s speech in order to illustrate a point.
∅bama sounds ridiculous and going at breakneck speed to pass these bills is ILLUSTRATING a fabulous point.
A caller said he can’t understand Obama when Rush speeds him up.
Rush then said – ok then we’ll speed him up EVEN MORE so that you can understand him.
I chuckled out loud.
You guys have to ignore each other starting now. Both. There is no choosing.
One of my former students, now 24 years old, stated quite explicitly that she voted for BHO because she “wanted to have his babies”. She went on to say that she meant this literally… she was very sexually attracted to him.
Stop. Do not post stuff like this. It just makes me question the wisdom of the 19th amendment, which I periodically have doubts about anyway.
I don’t get it. So women are sexually attracted to Obama — how does that equate to voting for him? Back in the day, I’d have loved a romp with Kim Basinger, but I never would have wanted her as President. For one thing, she’d have needed to conserve her energy. /g
I see that a lot of people are still unsure whether Obama is “fish or fowl,” is he–the Messiah, the “Won” and fount of all that is “Hope” and “Change,” well meaning, but inexperienced and out of his depth, a great President, ill-served by stupid minions, a marvelous speaker but a clueless blowhard, just a ham-handed blunderer, or a hard left ideologue, consciously taking advantage of every circumstance and taking every step he can to “smash the capitalist system”?
Obviously, from my posts here, I favor the last hypothesis–the one our historical experience makes most Americans think least likely, or give credence to–as being closest to the truth.
His maternal grandparents, who essentially raised him, were, from the glimpses that Obama has given in his writings, left in viewpoint, his mother even more so, and his African biological father was a Muslim from the predominantly Muslim Luo tribe of Kenya–no friend to the West, democracy or unbelievers-—and a committed Socialist/Statist to boot. Obama spent part of his first years in elementary school through age 10 in Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia, as part of the Muslim family of his step-father, Lolo Soetoro, his mother’s second husband; according to Obama’s writings and other reports, Obama–now named Barry Soetoro–was registered in school as an Indonesian and a Muslim, went to the Mosque with his step-father, attended mandatory Islamic religious instruction in school, was serious about his religion, and even took extra instruction in reciting the Qur’an after school.
According to Obama’s autobiographical writings and other sources, his mentor from around age 10 to 17 was Frank Marshall Davis–according to news reports, an “angry black man”, and an apparently active member of the Communist Party and much else inimical as well. Obama talked of hanging with Marxists and discussing revolution long into the night at Columbia, he likely met Marxist and unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayers at Columbia–were they were both friends with leftist and anti—Semitic professor Edward Said, Obama wrote of all the good times he and Michelle spent with his good friend “ex-PLO Operative” Rashid Khalidi and his wife Mona, and Obama spent many years working with Bill Ayers on the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago, where together they channeled upwards of $110 million dollars to radical, far left organizations and individuals who were supposedly to improve Chicago’s abysmal public school system, and it was Ayers who launched Obama’s political career at a dinner for potential supporters at his house. As a “community organizer” in Chicago, Obama admired, taught and spent four years applying the manipulative, amoral tactics developed by Marxist community organizer Saul Alinsky.
Last but not least, Obama sat for 20 years–count ‘em–in the pews of that former Muslim, the Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright’s Trinity Universal Church of Christ, and listed weekly to the anti-white and anti-Jew, Marxist based grievance- mongering preaching of “Black Liberation Theology.”
Are we seeing a pattern here?
Given Obama’s background and the influences on him, would you expect Obama to be a champion of democracy, capitalism and America and to have high regard for them, or would you expect him to care little for them and, in all likelihood, to be their bitterest enemy?
OB
This woman isn’t attracted to Obama.
I read somewhere about “fast flashy” males, who enthrall the younger females (this was a study that spanned many species from fish to primates) but could not make a dent on the older ones who knew that these flashy creatures wouldn’t stick around. It might be something like that at work, but frankly he just looks ugly to me. The pedantic arrogance doesn’t help.
At any rate, I have yet to vote for a guy because he’s good looking. And being very straight, I voted for Palin and her running mate wasshisname and neither of them did anything for me.
I periodically have doubts about the 19th ammendment myself. So many women I meet are interested in nothing but how attractive they can make themselves/and/or raising their children. Maybe men are also only interested in getting women and beer? Heinlein seemed to think so.
Of course not being admitted to men-only discussions, it’s the women I despair of.
Portia, thanks. I needed that.
Portia: Maybe men are also only interested in getting women and beer?
Some of course. There are a few good men out there.
Self-centered and selfish run in both sexes.
Is it just me? Or do others find that generally the me me me folks are usually more left of center…
Conservatives give more to charity.
Conservatives seem to be in the producing fields more.
Conservatives own their own businesses more often.
Conservatives populate the jails less.
Conservatives do their civic duties of voting and jury duty more.
Conservatives take more personal responsibility and are less dependent.
davidt, Occam’s Beard –
I now have mental images of Obama sparkling in the sunlight, like that slip of a tween “vampire” star that folks are calling a “hunk.”
I don’t know if I’m more disturbed by the folks voting for him because he’s a “hunk”– at least tastes can vary!– or the folks voting for him because he’s eloquent.
I do, however, still think the US would be better off if he’d gone to Hollywood……
Hot Air has a post up about Obama warning Dems on health care that they will ruin his presidency. That seems to be his upmost consideration. It’s all about me, me, me.
I think Obambi’s narcissism will be his downfall . Narcissists are all sweetness and light when they are the center of attention and everything is going right but when things go wrong and especially when, like Obambi, they are not in a position to pass the busk then spectacular breakdown is usually the result.
Foxfier, dunno about Hollywood; I suspect he’s not good-looking enough (I can’t judge guys’ looks, but so my wife informs me). I always thought Obama was born to be a newsreader (“And now, the CBS Evening News, with Barack Obama…” It works, doesn’t it?).
I am happy Althouse changed her mind. Too bad she can’t change her vote. I am sure she had her reasons, whatever they were, as I have my own reasons for why I think she voted for him. She did not have to vote for Obama to vote against McCain. She could have wasted her vote completely by voting for Alfred E. Neuman or something, and not given her only voice to Obama.
I admire her courage – she didn’t have to say anything. Her admitted vote for Obama didn’t change the traffic to her blog. And although it doesn’t matter to her or anyone else (rightly so), my personal view of her has shot back up to where it once was.
“Hot Air has a post up about Obama warning Dems on health care that they will ruin his presidency. That seems to be his upmost consideration. It’s all about me, me, me.”
and that was the point I made way back when – I think he is worried all about his second term and will sell any one and anything down the river to get it. However he truly believes his own rhetoric and will not (and most likely can not) accept anything other than his own view.
People still talk about him seeing many views and weighing them, just those nasty congress critters get in the way. Nope – see the above. People are slowly starting to figure it out, even many of the lefties I know are slowly doing that, they have gone from the Great Listener to “I’m surprised by how little he has done” and now to “Congress made him do it”. They will never dislike him as far as I figure, but they are close to dropping the whole listening and weighing option and go for the “He just knows the best thing and why compromise if you do” – which I can at least agree with in principle. But then that was the main complaint against Bush too and, as I figured, wasn’t really what they were griping about.
He is 10’th out of 12 presidents post WWII in approval rating at this point in his term, his disapproval is sky high, and his solution to save his presidency is mroe of what people do not like. I’m happy that people like Althouse can admit and do finally (mostly) see it, but everything was there to see before hand and she still has more learning to go. Though, as she says she is “clinging” to that hope – I think even she knows that to be a lost cause but is still trying to convince herself. Sadly I doubt this will really drive home any lesson about seeing what you wish to see vs looking at what is.
I go with much of strcpy at 1:31 am. I don’t doubt for a moment that Obama is willing to sacrifice people in Congress, but not his second term.
Obama is a comparatively young man who has never suffered a significant defeat in his life. A magical wind has been at his back the whole time as he marched from triumph to triumph, ultimately becoming the most powerful man in the world.
Why shouldn’t he believe that he can transform America into a Euro-socialist state and win a second term too? It’s just a matter of making decisions and making speeches and looking presidential, isn’t it? Surely Obama can have it all!
We shall see. Healthcare was to be Obama’s signature legislation putting his imprint on America along with presidents like Lincoln and FDR. Obama would succeed where the Clintons failed.
But now the prospects are not looking so good. We are going to learn much about Obama in the next ten days.
The heartening thing is that Hillary obviously thinks Obama’s going to crater, or she wouldn’t have left a secure Senate seat for the insecure position of Secretary of State. This way she can resign on some matter of principle and run against Obama for the nomination in 2012, having a) kept herself in the limelight, while b) distancing herself from the sinking ship.
Baklava, where did you get the “diameter”symbol? I want it too!
use the characters with no spaces
& empty ;
Scrunched together is ∅
append ‘bama’ and you get ∅bama
What’s “empty”? do you mean “zero” numeral? That doesn’t work. I can only copy-past it from character map, like this: é˜. That’s not handy, though.
OK, never mind. Not terribly important.
Tatyana — Baklava really means “empty”.
Type these chars exactly:
&_empty_;
Now delete the underscores:
∅
type these letters without spaces:
& e m p t y ;
all scrunched together you get the symbol that you want. 🙂
&empty.
So?
Or
∅
same thing. I guess it works only for Elite Few…
Hey! How that happened?!? So it only works when you click the “submit” button.
Aha.
Thanks everyone for your patience.
oh yeah…. click submit 🙂
∅bama had zero experience and ∅bama had the wrong solutions
N∅ H∅pe
&empy;hmy, I love learning cute new tricks like this!
Works better if you can spell, I guess…. *l∅l*
I can see the &empty symbol here on my home computer, but on my work computer, I see & empty (without the space). I wonder why?
OK, now that’s weird. The symbol does not appear in my comment above, but I can see it in others’ comments.
Don’t forget the semicolon!
∅
Aha!
Appears that starting w Baklava, I have made an empty contribution to this site.
“Nothing is so terrifying as nothingness.”
☛
☺
I meant to say:
☛ ∅bama
Obama doesn’t know what he is doing, but his banking masters do. Through his policies we’ve seen the government (communist) take over of our major private industries. Today is great, glorious day, in USSA, comrade commissar!