Opinion media is singing from the wrong song sheet on ideology and pragmatism

Commentators need to dig deeper in to the way politicians handle the problems of the day.

‘Greed is good’ era: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan dance at the final state dinner of his presidency at the White House in 1988.

One of the most inspiring aspects of life under lockdown in 2020 was the way in which people who couldn’t be together in person found ways to join each other in song. This phenomenon took many different forms: Italians singing from their balconies; karaoke renditions of What a Wonderful World; high-school choirs and professional orchestras relocated to the digital sphere. No doubt these outbursts of musical solidarity will be one of the nicer things we look back on when the “coronacrisis” is a distant memory, like the oldies look back on We’ll Meet Again and Hitler Has Only Got One Ball.

There was, however, another choir that piped up in midst of the COVID pandemic that demands a little more critical scrutiny. This was the choir of mainstream commentators, who, in the light of the rescue package put together by the Coalition government, declared that “ideology” had been “thrown out of the window” in the name of apolitical pragmatism. Displaying matchless vocal harmony, David Speers, Andrew Probyn, Peter van Onselen and a host of lesser altos and sopranos all settled on this formulation to describe the official response to the crisis and the general air of chumminess that descended on the political caste. And while the political bipartisanship that characterised those early months has now largely broken down (most strikingly over the demonisation/beatification of Dan Andrews), the mainstream distinction between ideology and pragmatism has only grown starker. The last two Quarterly Essays, for example – by Katharine Murphy and Laura Tingle – treat the concepts as virtual antonyms.

No doubt there is a lot to be said for the idea that governments should work with the grain of events. But it is worth asking what political commentators mean when they hold forth on ideology, and why they find it so expedient to distinguish it from pragmatism. For if by this distinction they mean to suggest that there is such a thing as an ideology-free space, then they are using the term in a way that is (for some of us) plainly ideological. Taking ideology in its narrow sense, they are glossing over important questions at precisely the moment they need to be asked.

When such commentators use the word “ideology” they tend to do so pejoratively. To suggest that a politician is being ideological is to accuse him or her of putting ideas before reality, of failing to look plain facts in the face. It is a sign that someone has failed to grasp that politics is the “art of the possible” – informed by Big Ideas, perhaps, but not so big that they get in the road of sensible, “pragmatic” policies. Ideology, in this sense, has little to do with the business of running the country effectively, according to what all savvy insiders agree is right and rational. Ideology is a political indulgence, the opposite of common sense.

But there is another definition of ideology that reverses, or collapses, this distinction. Here, ideology is taken to mean not dogma or doctrine or political extremism, but the received wisdom of a community or era. It is the common sense of that community or era, and it follows that one is never as ideological as when one is operating, or claiming to operate, in the name of (non-ideological) pragmatism. This is what Karl Marx meant when he wrote about ideology, and it is far more conducive to deep analysis, describing as it does the “structure of feeling” in a system set up along certain lines. It refers not to extremes of thought, but to the realities we take for granted.

Of course, the very idea that politics exists on a single left-right spectrum (an idea that derives from the French parliament after the 1789 Revolution, where revolutionaries sat to the President’s left and supporters of the monarchy sat to his right) assumes a political centre ground that is in some sense less extreme than the alternatives. But this is only part of the story. For of course it suits political actors to present themselves and their policies as the embodiment of common sense. Even that arch ideologue Margaret Thatcher insisted there was “no alternative” to policies that were often wilfully destructive of entire communities in 1980s Britain. And while journalists at the time would often question whether that insistence was justifiable, the point is that their attachment to the idea of a non-ideological/pragmatic centre made such positioning possible, while also leaving unasked the question of how and in whose interests the centre came into being in the first place.

Today’s centre is in fact rather hard to define, not least because it is under pressure from fresh varieties of populism that are pulling established political parties in new, sometimes contradictory directions. But up until a few years ago it would have been fair to say that the centre contained elements of both left and right, at least as they have been popularly understood since the 1980s.

A key factor in its emergence was the way in which Labor and other social-democratic parties adopted many of the policies we now associate with neoliberalism, which is to say policies favouring privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and austerity.

Defining themselves against the “greed is good” mentality of the Thatcher-Reagan era, but also against the industrial chaos that had brought that mentality into being, “Third Way” politicians like Paul Keating and Bill Clinton reasserted the state’s responsibility for minimising the harsher effects of the market, while also insisting that public ownership and other forms of state interference in economic matters were inefficient.

As I say, this consensus is now breaking down, but such double liberalism still exerts a powerful influence on many mainstream commentators, all of whom come (by definition) from a knowledge class that has grown in influence as economic globalisation has moved industrial jobs to the “South” and education and cognitive skills have become the main forms of social capital. Indeed, it seems clear that the technocratic attitude often evinced by many press-gallery journalists is itself deeply ideological, in the sense it channels the priorities of a particular and increasingly powerful class. Of course, not all of the press-gallery traffic travels in the same direction, but there is more than enough overlap in terms of emphasis to suggest that the obsession with ‘pragmatism’ is often a proxy for a particular worldview.

Why is this question of ideology important? It’s important because we are currently passing through a momentous stage in history.

Questions of work and how we value it, and of the focus of life more generally, are suddenly, thrillingly, in the mix.

At such a time, the opinion media should be digging down to our basic assumptions and holding them up to the light for inspection, not congratulating politicians for displaying basic competence. But such analysis will not (and cannot) happen so long as commentators continue to think about politics in technocratic terms. The reflexive distinction between ideology and pragmatism is a symptom of such technocratic thinking. Perhaps it’s time to leave the choir.

Richard King is the author of On Offence: The Politics of Indignation.