[MD] Spin word of the day: pragmatist

[Jos Laycock]

Hi Marsha

We've had "pragmatists" in power for a while, New Labour took a huge stride 
to the right to gain popular support and the Tories have taken a huge stride 
to the left in response. Now indistinguishable in terms of mission statement 
or purpose, but is this a bad thing?

Of old, we had political parties who formed policies around their own 
guiding doctrines as though there was a clear idea of what sort of society 
it was that we wanted to end up with, this being especially true of the old 
left. Now the long game appears to have been virtually disregareded in 
favour of allowing what may come in the expectation that "good" pragmatic 
decisisions will lead to a "better" society on their own.......

Before, we argued that the end could justify the means, now with this 
a-political pragmatism we say that the best quality means will (hopefully) 
make the best quality ends

Trouble with this a-political politics is that it also leads to rampant 
populism as the easy (and false) way to assess short term whether a decision 
was (or will be) a good one is by judging public opinion, in the end the 
tabloid press becomes disproportionately powerful. For all my yank bashing 
you guys have at least had (up to now) healthy polorised debate, here we 
tend to just row over the minutae of implementation and pay no attention to 
main issues. When the strategy has already been determined "pragmatically" 
what's the point arguing about it along party political lines?

Reminds me a bit of Pirsig's descriptions of the rise of intellectualism and 
its subjugation of cultural moralities. If the entirety of our political 
system was just a manifestation of clashing cultural moralities, the MOQ 
might regard Pragmatism as the politics of the intellectual level? But we 
can still have low quality intellectual ideas and if these replace entirely 
what went before, where are the balances, who is guiding the overall 
direction, and can we really rely on DQ alone to lead us blindly down the 
right path?


Jos



>From: Squonkonguitar at aol.com
>Reply-To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>Subject: Re: [MD] Spin word of the day: pragmatist
>Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 12:00:10 EST
>
>Greetings,
>
>I'm always interested in the new word of the  day.  The newest
>political alphabet soup has choked up the word  'pragmatist'.  The
>newly elected congress members are being described  not as
>conservative or moderate democrats, but as pragmatists.    I've heard
>Robert Gates described as a pragmatist.   I've heard  the word too
>many times in the last 36 hours to be just a  coincidence.
>
>Marsha
>
>Mark 9-11-06: Hello Marsha.
>Introducing pragmatism in this context implies the opponent does not  
>support
>pragmatism.
>This further implies the opponent is wasteful in terms of that which is not
>useful.
>The message may be that a War in Iraq is not useful.
>
>I should like to note something which has been concerning me during the US
>mid-term elections: The Democrats may push to extricate US forces from Iraq 
>at
>precisely the moment Iraq is about to collapse into all out civil war.
>We could be about to witness a disaster.
>I hope those with influence involve the UN as soon as possible.
>Love,
>Mark
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