A few weeks ago, Judge Posner had a great post on “The Future of Conservatism.” He wrote:
For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene—provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than on conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past.
Then a couple days ago, Professor Dorf had an equally interesting post called “Pragmatism and the Reciprocity of Means and Ends,” in which he wrote:
[O]ur leading contemporary legal pragmatist, Richard Posner, sometimes invokes [Oliver Wendell] Holmes[, Jr.] as an exemplar of the more prosaic notion of pragmatism as simply a rejection of core principles in favor of “muddling through” (in Charles Lindblom’s phrase). That also appears to be the notion of pragmatism favored by Justice Stephen Breyer. Both espouse pragmatism as a kind of post-ideological moderation. And of course, the pragmatist du jour is the President-elect [Barack Obama], who has been described as “ruthlessly pragmatic.”
If you’ve read this blog a while, you will probably have figured out that I, too, should be counted with Holmes, Posner, Breyer, and Obama as a post-ideological pragmatist. And if you are curious about what exactly that means, I can recommend both of the posts linked above for further reading. Enjoy.