If there was any doubt that pragmatism is among America's weightier contributions to the world of political culture, we can thank Donald Trump for dispatching it.
Most of our "isms" are not others' isms: our communism was a brushfire, quickly extinguished; our socialism is an ideologically inexpressible mess; our liberalism is even messier; and American conservatism has come to mean, precisely, the opposite of authentic conservatism. But creeping backward through American history, from the Great Society to the New Deal to the age of William James to makeshift industrialization to early 19th-century reform movements, we have always caressed pragmatism — that unique American philosophy of, simply put, whatever works.
Today, demonstrating the potency of this rather elegant philosophical simplicity is none other than Donald Trump, far less a philosopher king than, at best, a philosophical punk. But pragmatic to the core he is. He is willing to say or do anything — and he has — to achieve success, notoriety, celebrity, and the gaping adoration of certain partisan herds, as well as non-partisan hordes, which only underscores his electric pragmatism.
In competing for this land's highest office, Trump the Republican has publicly pissed on cherished Republican ideals, so to speak, such as lacerating Social Security and Medicare (which, because of the Republican bases's superannuation, makes perfect sense on Trump's part). He harbors no consistency whatsoever on foreign policy; one day Vladimir Putin is welcome to Syria, the next Trump is "bombing the shit" out of it with U.S. airpower. And, Mr. Trump has discovered, if outrageous rhetoric works, then double-downed outrageousness is bound to work twice as well.
Such are the contours of American pragmatism in its rawest form: whatever works. In its demagogic virility and authoritarian personality and almost frighteningly mass-movement irruptions, some, including myself, have characterized Trump's vigorous pragmatism as little more than fascism. Yet here we return to the uniqueness of American pragmatism and our national rejection of others' standard-issue isms. Or, rather, Cornell University scholar-of-fascism Isabel Hull returns us to the subject. In an email exchange with Vice.com, she charmingly observes that Donald Trump "is not principled enough to be a Fascist."
True enough. Fascist leaders are unflinching in their philosophical devotions, which The Donald treats like little crackers. He hasn't a central weltanschauung or philosophical care in the world, for he is utterly unprincipled. In that sense, Trump is necessarily no philosophical pragmatist, and one doubts he has delved into the brilliantly principled though pragmatically oriented mind of a William James.
Nevertheless, a pragmatist Trump is, in that he's the dark side of pragmatism: whatever works, without fussy foundations of human decency. And in a peculiar way, Trump is exposing many among the hardest-core ideological right — his partisan followers — as pragmatism-lovers themselves. It's a prodigious contradiction that squares itself, when you think about. We — including our unprincipled fascists — are, as Mitt Romney would put it, a severely pragmatic people.