Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Pragmatic Progressive

While I like to consider my personal values to be primarily independent of politics, I sometimes identify with the values of compassion, equality, and idealism that I think of as civilized but others may dismiss as "Liberal". After all, the real dangers of such an identity are evident in the more common adjectives that often accompany that word. Adjectives like "fuzzy-thinking" or "unrealistic".

It is my hope that the phrase "pragmatic progressive" will remind me to hold on to the idealism and compassion implied by the "progressive" label, but be willing to examine things like unintended consequences (thus the "pragmatic" modifier).

Another phrase that sounded nice, at first, was "compassionate conservative". I suspect the idea behind that coinage was to combat the reservation most Americans still had about conservatives: the image of the corrupt, insensitive, selfish establishment figure who ruthlessly exploits whatever resources are available for personal gain. That moniker has served its purpose, that is to say that some folk were willing to believe that a political figure could be both compassionate and conservative. But the people aspiring to that moniker, by their seeming insistence on being corrupt, insensitive, selfish establishment types, have devalued it and put it in danger of becoming a symbol of hypocrisy.

Actually, most Americans could be considered "pragmatic progressives". I think that's what I'll try to be.