The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas by Jonah Goldberg

theory of pragmatism, James immediately latched onto it, popularized it, and made it his own. (Poor Peirce simply wasn’t up to the task of safeguarding the term and eventually changed the name ofhis own philosophy to “pragmaticism.”) James saw himself—again, like Nietzsche—as sorting out what to do in the aftermath of “God’s Funeral” 18 but rather than a somber wake complete with dirges, James preferred something a bit more like the moving party of a New Orleans jazz funeral.
    Indeed, there was something admirably jazzlike to pragmatism in its early days. The whole idea was to lighten up, to not take philosophy too seriously. Instead of looking for eternal truths we should concentrate on what works. Ideas were true if they were successful, or in his famous phrase, if they had “cash value.” Instead of an “iron block universe” we should think of a universe with the “lid off.” 19 He spoke of “possibilities” and the ability to make the world what you want. He took the hammer and tongs of European philosophical combat and made them into constructive tools for building a better society. “[D]emocracy,” wrote James, “is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture.” 20 What Americans needed to do was find a healthy expression for the “sick shudder of frustrated religious demand.” 21
    The Moral Equivalent of Liberalism
    One of James’s greatest contributions to progressivism was the idea of the “moral equivalent of war.” This has had real cash value for liberals over the last one hundred years. “Martial virtues,” James wrote, “must be the enduring cement” of American society: “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built.” What James wanted was a way to figure out how to have war without war, to mobilize and galvanize people to drop their petty concerns and interests as if they were threatened by an outside foe. In other words, pragmatists care about what works, and war works. It works at getting people to shut up and listen, to follow orders, to make sacrifices and work together. More importantly, war legitimizes vast expansions of the state. Now if only we good and decent people can figure out a way to scare, enrage, or otherwise work up the people the way war does, we could really make something out of this country!
    Like most people who’ve read James, I have a soft spot for the guy. He really was trying to work his way through the bloom’n’ buzzin’ confusion of the universe. And he was a decent enough fellow. The problem is that James was working in an environment where others were all too eager to redeem the cash value of his ideas for less sunny purposes. In Europe James’s will to believe joined forces with Nietzsche’s will to power and produced the ideas that led to Italian fascism.
    Before that, a whole generation—the first generation—of American progressive intellectuals went to Europe, particularly Germany, to study. Thanks in large part to the growing fascination with Bismarck’s “top-down socialism”—“a catalytic of American progressive thought,” in historian Eric Goldman’s words—they returned with an attitude that was far more philosophically serious than James’s loosy-goosey, laugh-clown-laugh approach. A young Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck’s Prussia was the most “admirable system,… the most studied and most nearly perfected” in the world. Indeed, some nine thousand Americans had studied in Germany by the end of the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the first six officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top