On the virtues of pragmatism

It was the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Bernie Sanders had just finished his speech. A reporter asked a young lady what she thought.

The young lady complained that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was disrespectful to Sanders for “making him go last.”

The reporter gently informed her that traditionally, the last person to speak on a given night is the featured speaker, and that was actually paying him the most respect.

The young lady just looked at the reporter: “Well I don’t know about that,” she said incredulously.

I think about this a lot as I encounter the most passionate of Bernie supporters. She was engaged it politics, passionate about her candidate willing to travel to the convention. All of that is tremendously commendable.

At the same time, she assumed a thing (wrongly), saw things through an extremely tinted lens, and closed her mind to “learning” from anyone who challenged those assumptions, even if those assumptions were wrong.

These two sides of that conversation seem to be involved in a lot of my parlance with Bernie supporters, particularly the most adamant of them. That kind of obdurate passion has its good side, but it also can kill any of your commendable goals.