About: This Blog

Pragmatic Liberalism is an “ism” blog employing feedback  from the real world instead of rigid dogma!

An “ism-ite,”, to my mind is someone who wears a pair of glasses colored or filtered by their “ism’s” concept of the world, be it Conservatism, neo-Conservatism, Libertarianism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Nihilisim or any of a slew of other “isms.” A Pragmatic Liberal wears Progressive or Liberal glasses in establishing his or her political goals, but instead of being tied to “ismatic” dogmas, are forever checking out their concepts of “what should be” with feedback from the real world about “what is.” Feedback by definition is information about where we are as compared to where we think we ought to be in our goal-seeking activities. Those whose views are only or mostly conditioned by their “ism’s” dogma, unclouded by reality, are called ideologues. Pragmatic Liberals then, by definition are not ideologues and are often repelled by them. An example of an ideologically driven fight that ignored all feedback was in the uncompromising fight over raising the debt ceiling by Tea Party advocates in Congress. Those ideologues, primarily from the Right wing of the Conservative Republican Party, never took off their ideological glasses to even consider feedback about the need for compromise, and sought to hold hostage enacting the debt ceiling legislation to their hatred of the Affordable Health Care Act, a battle already fought and lost. They did this despite real world assurances, by pragmatists from both main parties, that they would fail and would weaken the Republican Party’s chances in next year’s Congressional elections.