Biden the Pragmatist
“INCONSISTENCY” is a term you hear a lot these days from critics of US President Joe Biden. They fault him for changing his mind on policy issues, as though having second thoughts about one’s plans is a sign of lacking a moral backbone.
More recently, Biden has been criticised by left-wing allies for using an executive order to temporarily close the United States border, despite longstanding guarantees that anyone who steps onto US soil has the right to ask for protection in America.
Biden’s announcement was a stunning reversal for a president who had blasted his predecessor in office for using a similar executive order to end asylum for refugees. “Echo of Trump as Biden acts on the border” read a headline in the print edition of The New York Times.
And then there was the recent reversal by the president in allowing Ukraine to use US weapons to strike targets just inside Russian territory.
These episodes call to mind a line from the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes.
When some of his detractors accused him of being inconsistent, and complained that the opinions he expressed tended to change over the years, Keynes responded: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
It’s called pragmatism – thinking of or dealing with problems in a practical way, rather than by employing abstract principles.
Pragmatism was regarded as America’s unique philosophical brand, which separated Americans from their European cousins whose political-ideological warfare impeded the search for national consensus and led to civil and continental wars.
By contrast, Americans were known to be pragmatic people who seek to resolve political problems in a practical way. Common Sense was, after all, the title of a book by one of the nation’s founding fathers, Thomas Paine. If the idea doesn’t work, abandon it and embrace a new one, even if that means challenging ideological purity.
Hence against the backdrop of the Great Depression in the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) proposed that Americans needed to reassess the laissez-faire principles that had guided their economic policies until then and allow the federal government to play a bigger role in the economy, including through regulation and wealth distribution.
Similarly, during the years of growing economic stagnation in the 1970s, which saw rising inflation and unemployment, another US president, Ronald Reagan, challenged what had by then become the economic orthodoxy and called for reducing the federal government’s role in the economy and unleashing the forces of the free market through deregulation and low taxation.
From that perspective, despite the differences in their policies, both FDR and Reagan applied an empiricist approach, recognising when the US needed to change direction in order to save and strengthen its economy.
After spending years in Washington advancing the interests of American businesses and promoting free trade as a senator and then vice-president, Biden seems now to be adopting his own version of an “America First” agenda, recognising the need to reassess the benefits versus the costs of globalisation.
And his reversal over the asylum issue comes against the backdrop of record levels of illegal crossing on the southern border, while the change vis-a-vis Ukraine reflects the concern that Russia could win the day without more US aid to Ukraine.
The pragmatic president that he is, Biden is trying new approaches that he hopes would work.
