Pragmatist Hope

Pragmatist Hope

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth by Robert B. Westbrook, and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Edited by Eduardo Mendieta

Think back to a time when the Clinton administration’s “triangulation” and free-trade policies looked to many on the left like the primary threat to a humane approach to political economy, when controversy about presidential lying had to do with adultery and not a ghastly war, and when political insurgents looked to a candidate other than Ralph Nader to carry the banner of a progressive politics. That candidate was Bill Bradley, whose only success in the 2000 primaries was to lure voters with postgraduate degrees away from Al Gore. But unlike earlier “new politics” efforts, notably Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 race, the failed Bradley campaign disappeared without leaving a trace on American politics.

One feature of Bradley’s run that is of genuine historical significance is what its failure reveals about the relationship between progressive intellectuals and practical politics at the turn of this century. In the period leading up to his campaign, Bradley gathered around him a kitchen cabinet of academics inspired by the American pragmatist tradition, including Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Benjamin Barber, and historian Robert Westbrook, whose 1991 magisterial John Dewey and American Democracy restored Dewey’s democratic theory to the center of contemporary intellectual life. The presence of such people in the Bradley campaign recalled the role their predecessors had played in American politics a hundred years before. Just as Dewey and his followers occupied the radical wing of the Progressive movement, challenging the elitist inclinations of their allies, so too their successors in the Bradley camp seemed to define a left-leaning fringe of Clintonian neoliberalism.

What distinguished the Bradley think tank from the pragmatist-Progressives of the early twentieth century was its isolation from the very people it sought to rally to an alternative democratic politics. The fault was not with the Bradleyites. Settlement houses, progressive schools, social-gospel churches, and cross-class advocacy groups once provided an extraordinary infrastructure for Progressive politics. Today’s pragmatists have almost nothing comparable to support their political and intellectual activity. No wonder the...