Interesting piece.
I think fanatic over reliance in any political ideology has become impractical and often absurd, because most dominant ideologies are not even internally consistent nowadays. What is Conservatism? A cobbled-together political mandate with dubious free-market roots and a melting pot for all sorts of reactionaries. The Conservative agenda is a collection of often ideologically divergent elements taken up for the sake of expediency. How can one talk of ideological purity when none of the ideological branches can even define themselves coherently for what they are??
Same thing with Liberalism. It’s merely a perversion of the language, forcing true Liberalism to be prefixed by “Classic”.
I don’t think the solution is to give up taxonomic boundaries, but rather to challenge wanna-be relevant ideologies to make lucid sense in non-contradictory terms. When everything turns gray though, it can be an even more dangerous state of affairs. Someone always will pop up as the self-proclaimed “truest” Pragmatist, shifting the scale of gray in all sorts of directions.
You could have voted for Carter (hope not!), then Reagan,.. then Clinton, then Gore, then Bush,… that doesn’t necessarily make you a pragmatist, but merely a non hyper partisan. Some things are absolute though, and we often tend to take them for granted. You do believe, don’t you, that in under any circumstances, you should not be denied the right to vote, be it for Hillary, Obama, or McCain?? Such rights cannot and should not just fly along with the winds…
Even pragmatism needs some politico-ideological foundations, minimalistic as they may be.
