A sense of identity has been lost, of common cause and belonging. What we, as liberals, are being asked to accept, is what is called pragmatism irrespective of any other value.
There is a tendency, adopted from Republicans, of disliking what they call “pessimism”, of what liberals might call acknowledging the problems confronting us and not only vowing, but actually doing, better. Optimism grounded in an idea that any disease, any fault, any depredation can be summarily cured. Cured by a religious faith, hope and belief, that despite what we were before, we can be better than we are. Bt that hope, that betterness, has to be grounded not only in a vow or a desire, but a practice of different approaches, of different values, of not accepting what always has been, but what could be.
What value optimism, without these things, this vow, this indomitable conviction to start today? What use, exceptionalism without substance and change grounded in “not today”?
To Republicans, pragmatism is all. To neoliberal, faux-Keynsian economists, pragmatism is also a holy value, but this is often reframed as incrementalism. It has gotten a bad name, this incrementalism. Justifiably so. What is incrementalism, the idea that things might get better in a world we can scarcely imagine, next to our deaths and the gradual death of the whole world?
Republicans are, we have been told, the devil.
But if Republicans are the devil, the people who use progressive rhetoric and turn tail and enact polices the Republicans might adore, are the deep blue sea.